Creationism

The Centre for Unintelligent Design

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Last April Keith Gilmour, a School Teacher, spoke at an event organised by the Humanist Society of Scotland for the Edinburgh International Science Festival. The topic was “The Threat of Creeping Creationism in Scottish Schools.”. His approach was as follows: A summary of his school’s RME/RMPS curriculum Then he highlighted some of the unsolicited ID and … Read more

Debating Evolution with the crazies – Hints and Tips

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If, like me, you engage in on-line discussions with theist crazies, then you will know that at some point Evolution will pop up. It is usually unexpected (but not always), for example yesterday when engaged in a debate with an Islamic fanatic about the existence of God (which is usually a claim that is some variation of one of the three famous arguments, the Cosmological, the Teleological, or the Ontological) we suddenly take a left-hand turn and Darwin pops up which then leaves all the non-believers thinking, “WTF, where did that come from?“, and soon we were buried in heaps of anti-evolution quotes.

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NEWS: Celebrate Science coming soon – they have a cool movie

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Celebrate Science is launching later this month to “promote the importance of keeping creationism” out of the classrooms.

The campaign has the support of the National Centre for Science Education and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. There will also be screenings of No Dinosaurs in Heaven a film that “examines the hijacking of science education by religious fundamentalists”.

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Creationism, Holocaust Denial and The ID Crowd

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Guest Post
Creeping Creationism or Galloping Intolerance at the Edinburgh Science Festival?

Creationism, Holocaust Denial and The ID Crowd

by Keith Gilmour

On Wednesday 20th April, I spoke at an event organised, by the Humanist Society of Scotland, for the Edinburgh International Science Festival. The topic was “The Threat of Creeping Creationism in Scottish Schools.” This took place in the University of Edinburgh’s Informatics Forum.

As a secondary school RME/RMPS teacher, I began my contribution with a summary of my school’s RME/RMPS curriculum before going on to highlight some of the unsolicited ID and creationist literature (books, DVDs, etc) that have been sent out to our school. Some had been addressed to the Head Teacher, some to the Science department, and some to my own.

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Response to comments on Science and Creationism

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I’ve received an interesting comment within a posting here about “Irreducible complexity explained“. It deserves a bit of thought and a carefully considered response, so I thought I’d post my reply here, its too long to be just a comment reply, and may be of interest to others.

The commenter basically raises four points, so I propose to consider each in turn.

1) We have to take a lot on trust from academia. The assertion that peer review indicated acceptability and not necessarily accuracy muddies things.

Peer-reviewers simply consider if a submitted papers claim is supported by the data in it, ensure its appropriate for the journal, and that the study has used proper controls to account for other possible explanations. Its only one small part of the overall process.

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Bill Nye Says Nay To Anti-Evolution

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The following article comes from The National Center for Science Education. In it Bill Nye, The Science Guy, has a few words to say about Creationism, here it is … Prompted by Michael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer’s recent column in Science deploring “a pervasive reluctance of teachers to forthrightly explain evolutionary biology,” Popular Mechanics … Read more