Irony: Ur doin' it rite
Irradiated by LabRat
So, it comes to pass that a Texan legislator wishes to pass a bill that would force Texas to certify graduate degrees in “creation science” from the Institute of Creationism Research.
One might think this would have me hopping mad. Instead, I’m vastly amused. This is why:
HB 2800 does not specifically name ICR; it would allow any institution that meets its criteria to be exempt from the board’s authority. But Berman says ICR was the inspiration for the bill because he feels creationism is as scientific as evolution and should be granted equal weight in the educational community….
….Berman sees the board’s decision to deny ICR certification as a double standard.
“If a school’s teaching all evolution, would that be a balanced education?” he asked. “So it’s the same thing on both ends of the stick.”
Of course, you can’t legislate what “weight” anything is given in the educational community, especially science education, because that’s not how it works. The Institute for Creationism Science believes and teaches that the earth is six thousand years old and everything in geology is the result of either Biblically described catastrophes or Satan’s deceptions; even if you can get someone mulling over Intelligent Design and “irreducible complexity”, the ICR’s version of events is blatant bullshit for anyone even vaguely familiar with the natural sciences. This is why the Discovery Institute exists- they’re specifically trying to distance themselves from this kind of credibility-destroying nonsense even as they press their own nonsense in more respectable clothes.
What you CAN change is the state’s standards for recognizing something as “an education”, which is exactly what Berman is trying to do. And as the other legislators in the article are pointing out with alarm, it will destroy the credibility of the Texas certification of degrees and turn the state into what everyone else can see is a bogus degree mill as other bunco institutions take advantage.
Therefore, Berman the creationist is doing his level best to naturally select a Texas-certified degree right out of existence as something worth more than the paper it’s printed on. Completely un-self-consciously.
I can’t do anything BUT have a good laugh at THAT.
March 24th, 2009 at 12:12 am
“[E]verything in geology is the result of either Biblically described catastrophes or Satan’s deceptions…”
Hmm. Which one is the helium-trapped-in-natural-gas-and-oil-fields? I don’t remember a Biblical catastrophe to cover it.
Can Satan create alpha particles, or make radioisotopes decay faster than normal? Or did he just teleport the helium from the sun to trick us?
March 24th, 2009 at 7:16 am
Satan can do anything. He’s sneaky that way.
March 24th, 2009 at 8:40 am
Actually, I believe natural selection is what happens even if the stupid degree is accredited: no worthwhile employer or higher institution gives a shit, so no student with any sense gets the degree. Regardless of its legal status, that degree is not well adapted to the modern educational environment, and cannot survive even though a lone powerful being wants it to.
(Also, how exactly do you make an entire degree out of “creation science”? That part of the Bible’s only a couple pages. Is it a week to read that, three weeks of “but these rocks are in the wrong stratum-wait, do we even believe in geologic strata?-anyway if rocks had strata this would be wrong” stuff you see on webpages, and you’re a MS of this BS? I mean, if you believe on faith that the answer to every question is “God did it in a supernatural way we can never understand,” what is there to learn or research?)
March 24th, 2009 at 8:41 am
What the morons are deliberately ignoring is that one can already get a graduate-level degree dealing with creationism. It’s called a Th.D and is a perfectly legitimate area of study.
I’m a believing Catholic, yet I still manage to understand that creationism isn’t science, and shouldn’t be treated as such. No matter what pretty language they try to use, advocates of creationism in public education are always reduced to the science vs. religion stance, and that just doesn’t have to be the case. I don’t require a clean intersection of physics and metaphysics to function on either a spiritual or intellectual level.
I wish these folks would give it up and quit making the rest of us look bad.
March 24th, 2009 at 9:28 am
Squid Says:
Satan can do anything. He’s sneaky that way.
So then, Satan is more powerful and smarter than God?
Kewl.
If you buy that nonsense, then either one of the two is true: God is Satan’s bitch … or God put that fossil record in place, and therefor God tells lies to all of us.
March 24th, 2009 at 9:32 am
God can also do anything, only harder.
March 24th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
A certain state U here in the midwest bent to student pressure some years back and started letting students design their own interdisciplinary degrees. They started graduating at about the same time I got a job as Sr. Geoscientist at a largish consulting firm. The only way that their resumes ended up anywhere but the trash was when the balled up wad missed its mark.
When college administrators realized the new degrees weren’t worth the paper they were scribbled on - do you suppose they changed the program?
‘Course not! Instead they tried to pass legislation making some of their cheesy degrees (available, of course, nowhere else) required for a few kinds of state licenses or certifications. Fortunately they were quickly thwarted by existing, well-organized trade and professional groups.
This was almost 10 years ago. They still offer the same pointless ‘have fun and invent your own’ degrees — and the clueless schmucks who buy them are still eminently unemployable.
I suspect that “creation science” degrees will prove to be similarly useful.
For those who want to save the time, expense and needless work associated with earning a real degree these upstanding folks offer a wide range of them — without those dull and pointless classes and tuition fees!
March 26th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
Man, I so want a B.Sc. in Rocket Science. I can finally tell people I’m a Rocket Scientist!
(Scientology is listed under Pseudo-Sciences. A-ha.)