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April 25, 2008
Up to Date
It's been a while since I've posted; I've been remiss!
A few things have occupied most of my time, but things seem to be getting back to normal.
We've had some maintenance done on our house, despite this weird weather!
I joined the fray at Hot Air on the side of evolution (against intelligent design) in a debate stemming from Captain Ed's review of Ben Stein's movie Expelled!. You can read the thread (all 24 pages of it) here. My main contributions have come on pages 23 & 24, for what it's worth.
I really appreciate that religion is (unfairly) being excised from America's fabric, but going about and challenging evolution along with discoveries in other fields of science that support evolution (paleontology and anthropology to name but two), is really not going to make any inroads. Their arguments for ID - things like irreducible complexity - are to me, silly, and don't pass muster. You can't prove a negative, as I pointed out (as in 'an eye could not have evolved except through an intelligent desinger'), and hypothetical situations without any evidence or research to back it up is not acceptable as a challenge to evolution.
Some of the arguments, by so called leading ID proponents, are just plain uneducated; they use the existence of short term isotopes as a support for young Earth, yet ignore the fact that Thorium-230 (one of their examples) is an intermediate decay product of long lived U-238 and that nucleotides that have a half life shorter than 80 million years are not found in nature unless they are being produced as an intermediate decay product.
This has consumed my time and I've read up on science that I haven't seen since high school, really. Fascinating stuff. Which brings me to my last bit of news...
I'm finally going back to school to finish my degree!
I've tried taking classes since I moved here, but working full time definitely limited my progress. Mr. Man, however, is a great cheerleader and earlier this week I met with an academic adviser at a local Community College. CC's here are interesting; they're not like the CC's back east, which tend to be more trade school-ish. Although there is some of that here, all of the larger ones have two year transfer programmes into the local universities such as the University of Washington and Pacific Lutheran University, both of which are excellent schools. Summer quarter starts registration in a few weeks, so I'm trying to get my act together and pick some classes and see about placement and CLEP. I'm still not 100% certain what I'll get my degree in; I love History and have always done well in English classes, but I love science too. Right now I'm just trying to pick a few classes that I could potentially use in either case, that sound interesting to me, so I can get my feet wet and hopefully have a better idea of what path to choose. If all works out well, I'll ease into school this summer and be, in essence, a full time student come fall.
Yikes!
Posted by hanyap at April 25, 2008 9:44 AM