Evolution and atheism

It is commonly charged by some religious people that acceptance of the theory of evolution by natural selection implies acceptance of atheism. Co-discovered by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace and brought to widespread public attention with the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859, this theory immediately gained opposition in Europe, primarily from clergy, with the conflict showcased by the famous debate between Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley in 1860.
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Keeping creationism out of Ohio’s science classes

Recall that the pro-IDC (intelligent design creationism) forces in Kansas received a setback in their Republican primary elections earlier this month. Now there is a chance to repeat that in Ohio.

I wrote earlier about a challenge being mounted to the attempt by Deborah Owens-Fink (one of the most pro-IDC activists in Ohio) to be re-elected to the Ohio Board of Education from Ohio District Seven. It seems as if the pro-science forces have managed to recruit a good candidate to run against her. He is Tom Sawyer, who is a former US congressman. I received the message below from Patricia Princehouse who has been tireless in her attempts at keeping religious ideas out of the science curriculum.

The worst creationist activist on Ohio’s Board of Education is up for re-election (Deborah Owens Fink).

But now she has competition! And with your help, we can win!

We have recruited former congressman Tom Sawyer to run against her. His website is here.

Contributions are urgently needed for Congressman Sawyer’s campaign.

(Credit cards accepted here or send check to address below.)

Fink has pledged to raise lots of money & we have no doubt that creationists across the country will pour tens of thousands of dollars into her campaign. We may not be able to match them, but Sawyer is an experienced politician who can make wise use of what he gets. We need to see he gets as much as possible.

HOW MUCH SHOULD I GIVE?

1) Remember that almost every Ohioan that pays Ohio income tax, can take as a
TAX CREDIT (not just a deduction) up to $50 ($100 married couples filing jointly) in donations to Board of Ed candidates. So, please try to give at least the free $50 that you can get back on your taxes.

2) How much would you give if you could erase the past 4 years of damage to Ohio’s public schools? $100? $1000? $5000? Please seriously consider giving more than you’ve ever given before. You stand poised to prevent worse damage over the next 4 years…

Fink is circulating a fund-raising letter in which she thumbs her nose at science & refers to America’s National Academy of Sciences as a “group of so-called scientists.”

We can protect Ohio from another 4 years of retrograde motion and put someone on the Board who can move Ohio forward toward solving real problems like school funding, literacy, and the achievement gap.

But your help is urgently needed…

www.votetomsawyer.com

I WANT TO DO MORE:

Great! Please spread the word about the web site –in & out of state! (Remember, what happens in Ohio gets exported around the country, so defeating creationism in Ohio benefits the entire country) You can do even more as a volunteer (at home, on the phone, or on the street, even 1 hour of your time can make a difference, especially as we get closer to the election) To volunteer, email Steve Weeks at eul1993@hotmail.com

For info on what Fink has done to science education in Ohio, see here.
For more info on Sawyer, see here.
For more info on other races in Ohio see the HOPE website.
For more info on races nationwide, see here.

To mail donations: Send a check made out to: Vote Tom Sawyer

and mail to:
Martin Spector, Treasurer
4040 Embassy Pkwy, Suite 500, Akron, OH 44333

I was not aware of this provision in Ohio’s tax code that effectively gives you a full refund for up to $50 for contributions to campaigns like this. I have not been able to check this information myself and see what, if any, restrcitions apply and if it applies only to school board elections or other elections as well.

For more information on other School Board elections where the pro-science HOPE (Help Ohio Public Education) organization is supporting candidates, see their website.

It would be nice if Ohio voters take the lead from Kansas voters and also reject IDC-promoting candidates.

POST SCRIPT: Saying what needs to be said

Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s Countdown delivers a blistering commentary on Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush Administration. You can see it here.

The language of science

Good scientists write carefully but not defensively. By carefully, I mean that they strive to be clear and to not over-reach, i.e., reach conclusions beyond what is warranted by the evidence. But they are not overly concerned with whether their words will be taken out of context and misused or subject to other forms of manipulation. It is an unwritten rule of scientific discourse that you do not score cheap debating points. Scientists are expected to respect those who oppose them and deal with the substance of their arguments and not indulge in superficial word games.
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Taking steps to avoid global warming

One of the curious features of the debate over what should be done about global warming is what we should be done about it. I can actually understand the position of those who are skeptical about whether things like the Kyoto treaty will solve the problem. I can understand those who worry that government regulations might not work.

What puzzles me are those people who somehow see the actions taken to reduce the production of greenhouse gases as some sort of affront that has to be opposed.
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Should secularists fight for 100% separation of church and state?

(This week I will be on my long-anticipated drive across the country to San Francisco. During that time, I am reposting some of the very early items from this blog.

Thanks to all those who gave me suggestions on what to see on the way. I now realize that I must have been crazy to think that I could see more than a tiny fraction of the natural sights of this vast and beautiful country, and will have to do many more trips.

I will start posting new items on Monday, August 21, 2006.)

Like most atheists, it really is of no concern to me what other people believe. If you do not believe in a god or heaven and hell in any form, then the question of what other people believe about god is as of little concern to you as questions about which sports teams they root for or what cars they drive.

If you are a follower of a theistic religion, however, you cannot help but feel part of a struggle against evil, and often that evil is personified as Satan, and non-believers or believers of other faiths can be seen as followers of that evil. Organized religions also need members to survive, to keep the institution going. So for members of organized religion, there is often a mandate to try and get other people to also believe, and thus we have revivals and evangelical outreach efforts and proselytizing.

But atheists have no organization to support and keep alive with membership dues. We have no special book or building or tradition to uphold and maintain. You will never find atheists going from door to door spreading the lack of the Word.
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Global warming-9: The demise of Easter Island

Easter Island tends to grip the imagination of people. But the things that people remember most about it (even perhaps the only thing) are the giant stone statues of faces that exist on the island.

Jared Diamond tells the sad story of this island as a warning to us all in a chapter of his book Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed, but an earlier essay by him can be seen here. Thanks to MachinesLikeUs.com for the link.)
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Global warming-7: The current status of the scientific consensus

So what is the scientific consensus about the answers to the key questions concerning global warming?

The British magazine New Scientist gives a review of the state of affairs concerning climate change, along with a handy summary sheet of the main points, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report (thanks to Brian Gray of the Kelvin Smith Library who runs the blog e3 Information Overload for the link) provides more detailed information. Here are some tentative answers to the five key questions I raised in a previous post.

1. Is warming occurring? In other words, are average temperatures rising with time?

Here we have to distinguish between the more recent period (starting in 1861) when we have direct measurements of temperature and the prior periods, for which we have to infer temperatures using proxy measures such as using tree rings or bubbles trapped in ice cores that date back 750,000 years.

For the recent past, the IPCC report says that “The global average surface temperature has increased by 0.6 ± 0.2°C since the late 19th century”.

For the period prior to that, the report says “It is likely that the rate and duration of the warming of the 20th century is larger than any other time during the last 1,000 years. The 1990s are likely to have been the warmest decade of the millennium in the Northern Hemisphere, and 1998 is likely to have been the warmest year.”
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Global warming-6: The public and the paradigm

In the previous post, I discussed how after a paradigm is adopted, scientists tend to communicate only with each other. They are now freed from the need to explain and justify the basic premises of the field to a lay public, and no longer have to make a political case to justify what they are doing. This results in them developing a more technical, insider language and jargon that is opaque to nonscientists, and the technical paper addressed to similarly trained scientists and published in specialized journals becomes the chief means of communication.
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Global warming-5: The emergence of a paradigm

The need to take global warming seriously is not slam-dunk obvious to most people. In my own case, over time I have slowly became convinced that there was an emerging consensus among scientists studying the issue that planetary warming was a serious matter. Like most people, I do not have the time or the expertise to have studied the question in detail, but I have enough respect for the scientific process and the way that scientists make collective judgments as a community that when I see a scientific consensus emerging on anything, I tend to take it seriously. In fact the global warming issue is a great example of seeing, before our very eyes, a transition in science from a pre-paradigmatic state to a paradigmatic state.
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Global warming-4: Is there a scientific consensus on global warming?

Is there a scientific consensus on global warming? Naomi Oreskes from the Department of History and Science Studies Program, University of California at San Diego, thinks so. She published a study in the journal Science (December 3, 2004, volume 306, p. 1686) which argued that the scientific community had arrived at a consensus position on “anthropogenic climate change.” i.e. that global warming was occurring, and that “Human activities . . . are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents . . . that absorb or scatter radiant energy. . . . [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations”.
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