Ha! I’m out of it for a few days, and a judge actually makes a good ruling. In this case, smacking down some anti-science loons who wanted to offer phony-baloney “science” degrees:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7074797.html
A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit by a creationism think tank and school that attempted to force the state of Texas to allow it to offer master’s degrees in science education.
In 2008, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board rejected the Dallas-based Institute for Creation Research’s application to offer master’s degrees, which taught science from a biblical perspective. The institute’s graduate school sued in 2009, claiming the board violated its constitutional right to free speech and religion.
U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks of Austin found no merit in the institute’s claims and criticized its legal documents as “overly verbose, disjointed, incoherent, maundering and full of irrelevant information.”
ICR trying to offer masters degrees in science would be kinda like the Soviet Communist Party offering theology degrees.
9 Responses to “‘Disjointed, incoherent’”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
The big logic problem with creationism is what exactly happened to the ancient reptiles…you could make a claim the all the land dinosaurs drowned during the flood, but what about the ancient sea reptiles?
Obviously, Mosasaurs and Plesousaurs could be swimming around the summit of Mount Ararat with no problem at all. Even changes in saliniaty of the water wouldn’t affect them, as unlike fish, they breath air from the surface.
Then of course, comes the real problem…where exactly did all that water go at the end of the Biblical Flood?
For that matter, where exactly did all that water come from in the first place?
Years back, I figured out what exactly the total daily rainfall would be be for the sea leval to get up near the summit of Mount Ararat in forty days time
Something just weird with the computer, and that posting just got sent before it could be finished or spell-checked.
Anyway, the total amount of rainfall was measured in a lot of _feet_ per day, rather than inches.
Rather like all of Earth was sitting in a 24/7 shower stall.
One of the more entertaining Flood ideas I’ve heard is that all that water was suspended above the Earth’s atmosphere as a shell, several miles thick. Since that would absorb all the cosmic rays, there’d be far less radiation hitting the surface, and thus the pre-Noah generations wouldn;t get cancer and they’d live a really long time. Then the shell collapsed, and I guess drained into voids in the Earth, and it’s still swilling around down there.
It’s amazing the lengths people will go to to avoid recognition of facts.
Speaking of good rulings, check out what the Supreme Court did this morning 🙂
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sc-dc-0629-court-guns-20100628,0,7159395.story
The “water shell” concept sounds like a offshoot of the “Welteislehre” cosmology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welteislehre
Which the Nazis were fond of.
Saw a show last night on The Science Channel (which would be better titled The Pseudoscience Channel considering how much religion-related crap shows on on it) regarding Sodom and Gomorrah getting toasted by an asteroid even though it was supposed to have hit in the Alps.
Not surprisingly, the originators of this theory have written a book about it,
although neither of them are archeologists or astronomers.
> The Science Channel (which would be better titled The Pseudoscience Channel considering how much religion-related crap shows on on it)
None of the documentary channels really seem to be as advertised. The history Channel is particularly bad.
They may be pseudoscience and bad history, but you keep watching, don’t you?
Not as much as I used to. It seems that about 90% of all the “ancient history” stuff is in fact “bible history,” which is pretty sad considering that the slim portion of biblical stories which have a historical basis are an incredibly tiny faction of actual “ancient history.” So when I turn on such a show and the first words I hear are description of Old Testament stuff, I change the channel to maybe see if something better like Spongebob Squarepants is on.
The two guys with the asteroid/Sodom theory are Mark Hempsell (great name for a marijuana salesman, that) and Alan Bond…if those names sound a bit familiar, these are the guys from Reaction Engines Ltd. with the Skylon transatmospheric passenger plane that has the SABRE jet/rocket engines that produce LOX as it flies through the air at multi-Mach speeds.
I always thought that the idea was very flaky, and this little journey into fringe science certainly hasn’t reassured me about the concept designers being on the up-and-up.