I was sent a link to the science curriculum for the Easy Peasy All-In-One Homeschool program. I managed to get through Day 1 of the program, in which a speech is delivered.
I want to teach you something about science. Science is a collection of observations about the world. When something has been observed enough, it becomes scientific law. [That is not true. This person doesn’t understand even basic concepts of science.] That means that scientists say that what they have observed will always be true. [My cat pestered me to feed her this morning. I’ve seen that many times. Therefore, it is a scientific law that my cat is always hungry.] It is stated as fact. But even these “laws” have been broken at times when all of a sudden, something different is observed. [Scientists will actually tell you that all knowledge is provisional and subject to revision in the light of new evidence. I wonder who regards their knowledge as absolute and unchanging?] It was believed that the atom was the smallest thing in the universe. It was called fact. Then someone figured out how to split an atom. [Nope. No one just “figured out” that. It was a huge research program involving many scientists who worked hard to challenge the claim that it couldn’t be done] The point is that science only really tells us what has been observed. [This is a version of science that is purely descriptive — glorified stamp-collecting. It is not how any scientists work.] It doesn’t prove truth. [First week of my introductory biology course, I explain that there are two words you should never use in science: “proof” and “truth”.] It just states what is observed and measured in the world around us. [So science is like a list? Why is this person teaching this crap?] Why am I making sure you understand this? Because who was there to observe the creation of the universe? God alone. [Oh, that’s why. She’s been steeped in the pseudoscience promoted by Answers in Genesis, that the only true things are the things that you can see with your own two eyes] Science can’t prove anything about the creation of the world because it can make no observations about it. [Actually, we do observe many things about the beginning of the universe: cosmic background radiation, the distribution of stars and galaxies, their current movement, etc. If the cat’s food bowl is empty, can I not infer that she ate the food?] It takes what it observes in the world today and makes hypotheses, guesses, about the creation of the world. Until pretty recently most Western scientists were Christians. [Irrelevant. In the past, you were unemployable if you were non-Christian, and in some cases, were condemned to death. The intolerance of Christianity is not an argument for its positive role in science. ] Never let anyone make you feel stupid for believing God created the world. Many scientists that you read about in history believed in a Creator, some of the smartest people that have lived. [This is true. Also irrelevant. Some of the smartest people in the 1970s wore polyester bell bottoms, it doesn’t make fashion true] The Bible contains all truth. [Wait. Didn’t you just condemn science for having a false belief in possessing absolute truth?] You never have to be afraid to believe the truth in the Bible. There may seem to be things that couldn’t possibly be true. Say, we measure stars at being billions of light years away. That means, in order for us to see its light, that light would have had to be traveling for billions of years to reach us. Well, a Christian mathematician and scientist has shown how it could appear that way and still only be less than ten thousand years away. [Who? How?] No one has yet been able to dispute the math he used to show it. [What math?] Here’s an article about it that your parents might be interested in. [You will not be surprised to learn that it is an article on Christian Answers that has no math in it, is not written by a scientist, and that it argues that light was created in transit to earth, giving an appearance of age.] One method science uses to try and observe something’s age is carbon dating. There are some that say carbon dating shows that there are bones that are millions of years old. [Only creationists say that, who know nothing about it. Carbon dating is a technique that has an upper bound of about 50,000 years.] Here are two articles that talk about how carbon dating isn’t accurate. [Again, articles on two creationist sites by non-scientists that argue backwards from a desired conclusion] These are articles for adults. You don’t have to read them. [Both articles are foolish instances of twisted illogic that only an ignorant adult would find interesting. I’ve known children who would see right through them.] The first is much easier to read than the second, but if you or your parents are interested, please go ahead and read them. I just want to show you that there are scientists that believe the earth is young. [Irrelevant. Being a scientist does not confer infallibility. ] I personally know a scientist, a physicist with a PhD, who has studied the topic and believes the earth to be less than 10,000 years old. [Yeah, so? I know some ‘scientists’ like that, too. They’re idiots.] It’s not silly to believe it. It is silly to let someone change your mind with “facts” that aren’t proven true. [Hold that thought.] Remember this: Scientists don’t agree on things! Anytime you hear someone say, “All scientists say that…” It isn’t true. [We actually think that disagreement and testing conflicting hypotheses is a good thing] It’s propaganda to try and get you to believe something. Don’t be afraid to believe the Bible. It will always prove to be true in the end. [
It is silly to let someone change your mind with “facts” that aren’t proven true.] God is Truth and cannot lie! You can trust His Word. [How do you know that? The evidence suggests that the Bible is scientifically unreliable.]
This curriculum consists of 180 superficial, brief, day-by-day descriptions of what to do — it focuses almost entirely on descriptions of anatomy, and on “plants”. Any child subjected to it is going to learn absolutely nothing about science. They don’t get to do any. The ‘teacher’ has cut off any synthesis of ideas by denying that you are allowed to integrate knowledge and test explanations because All Truth Is Biblical. It’s exhaustingly depressing.
That god person seems to be quite a jester, creating things that make every sensible person believe in billions of years only a few thousand years ago.
The fact that you put “plants” in quotes makes me wonder, as a Botanist, what exactly they are calling plants.
iknklast @2:
Can’t be certain, but this may be a reference to the bible not considering plants to be living things.
I still don’t understand why people claim that it is Satan who is the deceiver when apparently God is just as bad.
Linkin’ to sites with adult content, huh?
We are soooooooooooo doomed.
PZ, could you find a more difficult-to-read color for your comments? I only had one, maybe two seizures at the most reading this post. I assume you want all of us to go into full status epilepticus, yes?
Ah, killyosaur, but don’t you see, God is in charge of everything, including Satan, who is just doing God’s work by testing the faith of the weak,… etc. God is only pretending that Satan is a free agent, kind of like he is pretending that the Event Horizon is only 10,000 ly away.*
/snark
*That’s the creationist claim that really gets my back up, more than any other (which is really saying something) – the one about light “only appearing to come from billions of ly away. They try to bend basic physics to suit the claims of some old book (!?)
According to one paper (this one written by actual scientists) the time it takes for a photon to get from the core of our own star to the surface, from whence it radiates to eventually hit our retinas here on Earth, is on the order of 1.7 × 10**5 years. If the creationists are right, therefore, the surface of the Sun should still be pitch black. A simple experiment suggests itself…
“God is truth and cannot lie.”
But God puts photons in place to give the appearance of great age. He also asked Adam and Eve, “Gee, why are you hiding?” when he knew why. He also said to Abraham, “Don’t kill your son, I was just testing you.” Ya, that is a really truthful deity right there.
I like the part where God and the Devil had a “bet” that they would torture Job to see if they could break him of his codependence on God. Of course, God already knew the answer, so why did he do it?
Like other bullies and psychopaths, God obviously did it for the lulz…and as a warning to his other toys to behave, or else.
I cannot possibly fathom how they can hold so many conflicting ideas in their minds without having their brains explode. I just want to pound my head on my desk because it’ll feel so good once I stop.
Remember that all you know about Satan is propaganda from his biggest enemy…
I was just pointing out–for the umpteenth time–to a YEC posting on Panda’s Thump that scientific conclusions are tentative and subject to change in the light of more evidence. he still doesn’t get it. in the thread in question he, as a Canadian, has been trying to tell Americans how US law works, and getting it consistently wrong. He’s a real poster child for YEC dumbitude.
*facepalm*
I homeschooled my kid for several years, but made sure he got a background in real science, history, logic, et cetera. Now he’s graduated high school with a 3.7 gpa, and is a freshman at Hampshire College on a full ride scholarship.
#2: I put “plants” in quotes because the curriculum treats them in the most shallow, useless, and uncomprehending way possible. It’s an insult to botany.
#7: If I suffer, you too shall suffer.
#14: Some of my best students have been homeschooled. If they’ve been taught how to learn, and are well practiced in independently exploring the world of ideas, they’re good. This curriculum is the opposite of that.
Ugh. This isht is also responsible for keeping colonial attitudes and thinking alive and well. Oh, the earth? Eh, just a ball god created, it’s ours to ravage and fuck up in every way, it’s cool, god’s coming back anyway.
It’s more last-Thursday-ism*. God can create a Sun that appears to have been shining for 4 billion years, complete with photons close enough to the surface to come out over the first 170,000 years. Apparently we’re not supposed to think about why God would go to so much trouble to make a planetary system that looks billions of years old set in a universe 3 times its age, but then leave a few ‘clues’ that YECs say disprove evolution or an old Earth. (I assume they have to cop to the clues, because otherwise if there’s no meaningful difference between a 13-odd billion year old universe and one created to look that old, then all the science that says ‘the universe is old, the Earth is old, life on Earth is old’ still makes useful predictions of the modern universe and should still be taught.)
* I remember there’s another word for it. Something to do with bellybuttons, since it came from wondering if Adam and Eve had them, what with them not being gestated and all.
Becca Stareyes @17:
Great. Now I’ll be up all night wondering about that.
———–
And, UGH! I just took a look at the Early American History section. Here is the reading list:
L: The True Story of Christopher Columbus, Brooks; Pilgrim Stories, Pumphrey; The Bird-Woman of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Chandler; Uncle Tom’s Cabin Young Folk’s Edition, Stowe
M: Discoverers and Explorers, Shaw; Letters of a Woman Homesteader, Stewart; This Country of ours, Marshall (selection); Uncle Tom’s Cabin Juvenile Edition, Stowe, Crowe
Anyone notice something major missing? The one mention of Native Americans is a fictionalized account of a woman who helped the USA claim its fucking manifest destiny which, rather than focusing on the people they traveled through, uses it as a vehicle to glorify the explorers. Big surprise.
I confess that I did not go all the way to the bottom.
Though the developers of this course did.
Brother Ogvorbis@18, Why all dem books in dar redings list? Thar’s only one trud book,
LOL.
Were you there?
Were you there when jesus was crucified? Pics or it didn’t happen.
All we have are contradictory and obviously fictionalized accounts of some guy getting nailed to a cross. That weren’t written by eyewitnesses but a generation or two after the fact.
The same could be said of the rest of the bible. We know most of it is fiction and mythology.
The fact is, we weren’t there for the Big Bang or almost all of the last 13.7 billion years. But the data and evidence was and it has survived to this very day.
Artor @ 14
Yeah, my brother and I were both homeschooled and did quite well in college. I went into English, he majored in physics and mathematics, both of us graduated with high GPAs. And then… there’s this stuff. Which makes me very reluctant to admit to being homeschooled.
Wait a sec. Isn’t God supposed to be all-powerful? How is it that an omnipotent God cannot lie?
Memory is quite fuzzy, but I have in fact run across such things. IIRC, one involved essentially the idea that light and matter follow distinct paths to reach their destinations — matter following a highly curved path, and light following a directly radial path. I only skimmed the writeup, and IIRC it was an attempt at an alternative to relativity. It did something along the lines of substituting straight lines for the speed-of-light barrier, so things can only travel in straight lines if they have zero mass or infinite energy. Again IIRC, the “straight lines” referred to were radial lines with Earth at the center, so it was a geocentric model. It “unified” escape velocity, large astronomical distances, and a small-diameter universe.
I’m not a physicist, and didn’t bother to read it carefully anyway, but never underestimate the ability of mathematicians to invent a pathological geometry.
All of which is effort wasted on ICR, since they’re content with a dismissive hand-wave.
Becca Stareyes @17: You’re thinking of omphalism or the Omphalos Hypothesis. Omphalos is the Greek word for navel.
“Well, a Christian mathematician and scientist has shown how it could appear that way and still only be less than ten thousand years away.”
[Who? How?]
In case you’re interested: a guy named Barry Sitterflop.
http://www.wnd.com/2004/07/25852/
Dear Professor Myers —
The cat may not have eaten the food. There are alternative hypotheses. Some of which are disturbing. But as a scientist, you ought consider them.
OK the god made the earth and the stars to appear as if they are really old while only being 10,00 or so years old.
exactly what was the reason for doing that? As a test of faith?
Within the story of god there exists another called Satan who is called the deceiver.
How are we to be able to tell the difference between the deceptions of Satan and God?
If god made the universe to appear to be really old and all of the things we find out about the universe conform to the “illusion” that the earth and the universe are really old then what is the difference between it really being old and it being only a few thousands of earth years old? besides words on a page
to add a quote out of context “trust but verify”
uncle frogy
Projection. Some years ago I was perusing articles about religious subjects in Wikipedia and notice a common assertion along the lines of “most experts agree,” for example, on the historicity of Jesus, Old Testament stories, the Paul narrative and so forth. I found similar assertions about other religions including Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. I wondered how they knew that. Did someone take a survey? If there was a citation, it was almost always a single book by a person with a vested interest in the religion (priest, imam, etc) and supporting the assertion.
So this set me on a bit of research. It didn’t take long to find that indeed experts tend to disagree on almost every topic of these religions from the historicity of significant figures, the details of the narratives associated with them, the accuracy of the origin myths of people, and so on.
As a result of that research I’m fairly sure that the extant versions of the religious texts are based on material that was written and compiled for propaganda purposes, although the propaganda purpose is obscured to us by later propaganda purpose they were put to.
@A Masked Avenger citing the OP:
This sounds vaguely familiar — could it have been from Russell Humphreys?
Well, not a Christian exactly, but…
— George Orwell, 1984
In the 70s I wore denim bell bottoms. They were truth.
@unclefrogy
Actually, there are many good reasons to create a “falsely aged” universe — for one thing, many things in nature are only functional/hospitable to human life when they are old (soil and fossil fuel come to mind). Also, we’d be able to see the stars, which has many uses, e.g. in navigation, but is also aesthetically pleasing. What REALLY bugs me is, why wouldn’t God just create an old universe and then, y’know, wait? It’s not like He’d get bored (the usual view is that He exists outside of time, so He wouldn’t even have to wait).
And why do Fundies insist so much on a Young Earth, when Church Fathers were perfectly indifferent to this issue, as well as a lot of other issues where the Bible didn’t have to be literally true? I mean, Jesus is supposed to be God, and he was telling parables (i.e. stories, just fictional stories) all the time. The Old Testament is a mixture of historical accounts, morality tales, cwazy laws, half-digested greek philosophy (Ecclesiastes) and, yes, satire. It was never intended to be all literal, not even in its time, *especially* not in its time.
This pedagogy is grooming children for their exciting careers as Walmart greeters and tow truck operators (probably not so much tow truck operators)
But if massless things travel in straight lines why do massive objects act as a lens that they bend around? Although from the light’s POV I suppose it is going straight, it’s not its fault that space-time is bent.
There are *many* different and conflicting creationists’ “explanations” for the distant starlight problem that they specifically suffer from. For additional examples see idiots Dr. Jason Lisle (PhD astrophysics) at “Answers in Genesis”, Barry Setterfield, Walter Brown, and numerous others that I will not bother to list here (see Talk.Origins).
http://www.talkorigins.org/
According to Lisle light travels at infinite speed towards the Earth (aren’t we special!) and at C/2 away from the Earth. Thus the two way time is 0 + C/2 and the average is C. Hence the universe is very young. Lisle totally ignores obvious things like the fact that the one way speed of light was actually crudely measured by Roemer back in 1675 and of course Einstein’s E = M*C**2, to list only two glaring problems with his pseudoscientific claims.
https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/distant-starlight-thesis/
According to Australian creationist Setterfield past “measurements” clearly show that speed of light in the geologically recent past was infinite and it has conveniently slowed down exponentially to be the constant it is today. Walter Brown fits Setterfield’s “data” (leaving out inconvenient points and error bars, by the way), starting with infinite in 4040 BCE and claims that the R**2 (R squared is a measure of how well the curve fits the data) is exactly 1.0, even when *none* of the data points fall on the curve! Neither Setterfield nor Brown even understand something as simple as error bars, or apparently even reality.
http://www.fsteiger.com/light.html
To paraphrase Mark Twain: If it is a fact evidence is necessary, but if it is a miracle any excuse will do.
The continual litany of ‘observation’, ‘only observation’ is actually a clever turn. Of course they don’t understand for a moment what makes observation reports justified — but there is a long tradition in philosophy of science that treats observations as entirely separate and independent from “theory”, licensing exactly the kind of ‘open-minded’ skepticism these screeds aim to build in their audience. Observation itself is something we learn to do, and our confidence in it is a product of learning to do it right– producing spontaneous new assertions that are independently supported by other observers and by reliable reasoning. Observational practice in science gets vetted and tested far more thoroughly and precisely than the casual stuff we do every day.
zetopan @35:
Not really.
For this, I think all you need is two-way constant speed. The generalized Lorentz transformations would, I think, make calculations horrendous, but doable.
@Rob Grigjanis, I’ll try to look at those later, but at first blush, I’m pretty sure that those would break gravity.
wzrd1 @38: It would certainly break general relativity and quantum field theories with SR built in (like the standard model).
Rob Grigjanis @37:
“Not really”
I examined your linked reference and point taken, I stand corrected.
“For this, I think all you need is two-way constant speed.”
I suspect that we are most likely not quite addressing the same point. See more below.
wzrd1 @38:
“I’m pretty sure that those would break gravity.”
It breaks much more than that (as if breaking gravity is not enough). Electromagnetism would go into the trash heap as well, since it also depends on C.
By E = M*C**2 I was referring to the amount of energy a “piece” of non-moving mass contains. An infinite value for C would mean just that a single proton converted to energy would result in an infinite amount of energy. Nuclear reactions in any star viewed from the Earth would cause a very different universe with infinite energy occurring from the fusing of two hydrogen atoms, where a small amount of their total mass is converted into energy. This would be different for stars moving towards and away from the Earth, yet we can be sure that stars extremely distant from Earth are undergoing the exact same fusion processes as our local sun by examining their spectra.
Since the speed of light is defined to be 1/SQRT(u0 * E0), where u0 (Mu zero) is the magnetic permeability and E0 (Epsilon zero) is the electric permittivity of free space, any variation in the speed of light requires a variation in either u0 or E0, or both. Since u0 is exactly computable, that only leaves variations in E0. However, lets ignore that latter distinction and continue to point out that both inductance and capacitance depend on u0 and E0, respectively. And that means that electric circuits utilizing those components would behave very differently for relative velocities to and from the Earth (i.e. radio communications with planetary satellites, as well as their on board electronics). But we can be sure that both u0 and E0 are constant since we can reliably communicate and control very remote satellites, no matter what their velocity is relative to the Earth.
Furthermore, Lisle’s idiot claim requires that the same region of space has two simultaneously different values of u0, or E0, or both, depending on the direction of the radiation relative to the Earth. This makes space anistropic, with the Earth at its center. So it really boils down to geocentrism, in a universe that does not in any way match the one that we actually inhabit. Lisle is totally banking on the profound level of scientific illiteracy of his target audience.
zetopan @40:
Right, and that is the good old value of C we all know and love, which is the average speed of light around a closed path.
There is no infinite value for the average speed around a closed path. The point that Edwards, Zhang (in the same book) and others made is, as far as I can tell, the following:
If the speed of light along a certain direction is C/(1+q), and C/(1-q) in the opposite direction (with q between 0 and 1), the value of q is unobservable, and all observables (like the energy changes of a particle) will be independent of q.
More later if I have time.
@zetopan, rather my point. If one manages to break gravity, one typically breaks everything from weak force throughout the remainder of fundamental physics.
You know, breaks the universe.
As we exist, the idea must be what is broken, not the universe, which seems to be currently operating under nominal conditions. ;)
Yeah, not only isn’t it right, it’s not even wrong.
Correction:
Not only isn’t it not right, it’s not even wrong.
wzrd1 @42:
I have no idea what this sentence means. By “break gravity”, do you mean invalidate general relativity (what I assumed you meant in #38)? How would that “typically” invalidate the standard model of particle physics (SM)? As long as the alternative to GR reduced to special relativity in the weak gravity limit, it wouldn’t have anything to say about the validity of the SM.
Different one-way speeds of light breaks GR and SM for basically the same reason. Both theories rely on the notion of an invariant separation between two spacetime points (in the case of GR, nearby points, where “nearby” depends on the local curvature). But if the speed of light depends on which direction you go along the x-axis, the separation defined by (Δx, Δt) depends on whether you’re going from smaller x to larger x or vice versa.
Breaking a theory is not breaking the universe.
“God is Truth and cannot lie! You can trust His Word.”
Putting aside any inherent skepticism within this statement, and for sake of argument accepting it as fact, the problem remains that God has never spoken to me. While He may never lie, it has been shown time and time again that his Chosen Representatives lie like rugs.
So how do i proceed? The purported Source is silent, and his Prophets are demonstrable charlatans.
And that’s accepting a flawed premise prima facie. Once you go back and deal with the inherent skepticism of the original premise, there is nothing left.
The whole concept is silly.
@44:
Bad wording. “depends on which direction it (light) goes along the x-axis”.