Texas wades into evolution debate at textbook hearing

[MyshkinCommaPrince]

17. Huh.

Somewhere along the line, much of our culture seems to have become detached from reality. There is an actual real world out there, which doesn't vary somehow according to what our beliefs or stances may be. Science is not a body of beliefs, to compete with religion for adherents. Science is a process, a methodology, a toolkit for testing the world around us to determine what is real, or at least what actually works. Those facts and figures we learned in the classroom didn't derive their value from tradition or because they were handed to us as received wisdom by some authority figure. The value of the body of scientific knowledge is that it is the information which has been tested via the methods of science and has found to be as valid, as accurately descriptive of the real world, as our tests could make it.

I don't understand why that point is so rarely raised in coverage of the topic of creationism in science classrooms. Science is a process. Creationists can call it whatever they want, but their models to the explain our world have no scientific value until and unless they follow the methods of science. The whole topic should only ever be in science class as an example of why an idea simply isn't scientific. They don't have a competing theory. There is no science there. We become an "international embarrassment" and a "historical embarrassment" if we let morons like this pass off their nonsense as science.

Grumble. Dr. Neil degrasse Tyson has some worthwhile things to say about this. He's much smarter and more level-headed than I am, and he expresses it much better.