Sunday, December 02, 2007
“Good heavens! You’re the culture minister..”
On Radio Ulster’s Sunday Sequence this morning, Will Crawley hosted a discussion [Realplayer file] between Al Hays, an American professor of politics currently working at Queen’s University, Ruth Yeo, the recently appointed Humanist Chaplain at Queen’s University, Times columnist Matthew Parris and the Northern Ireland Culture Minister, the DUP’s Edwin Poots, on the religious views of politicians. Will has blogged a section of the transcript of that discussion where Edwin Poots is, admirably, honest about his religious views - he believes in ArchBishop Ussher’s 17th Century chronology.. as do Lisburn Council.. and Matthew Parris resists, just, the temptation to call NI’s Culture Minister a “nutter”.. Which may help explain the Environment Minister’s official written answer on the age of the Giants’ Causeway.. although it also highlights the concern about what scientific literature will be provided in any Causeway interpretative centre.
That transcript
Edwin Poots: He [Dawkins] wants to indoctrinate everyone with evolution. And whenever people suggest that you can teach something other than evolution, and that there might be others theories about how this earth actually came to be, such as intelligent design, Richard doesn’t want children to have the option of actually hearing those things and making their own minds up. So it’s very interesting that evolutionists are very dictatorial in what they suggest.
William Crawley: Matthew Parris ... you’ve just heard the culture minister in Northern Ireland speak, Matthew. Would a politician in Britain ever use words like that? A minister ingovernment?
Matthew Parris: Absolutely not. No. And I would use the word “nutter”—not of Edwin, obviously. But I do use the word ‘nutter’ of people who think that what informs them religiously entitles them to say that evolution is a form of indoctrination. I mean, there’s absolutely no question where science points, and it can only be some feeling that you’ve got a direct line with revelation with the Almighty that could lead you to stop wanting children to be taught that evolution is the best available explanation of where we are now.
Edwin Poots: Matthew, you’re telling me that cosmic balls of dust gathered and there was an explosion. We’ve had lots of explosions in Northern Ireland and I’ve never seen anything come out of that that was good. And you look at this earth and you tell me that there was a big bang and all of a sudden all tat is good about this earth came out of it?
Matthew Parris: Good heavens! You’re the culture minister and you don’t believe in evolution?
Edwin Poots: Yes, absolutely. And you’re telling me that all of this evolution took place over billions of years, and yet it’s only in the last few thousand years that Man could actually learn to write?
William Crawley: How old is the earth?
Edwin Poots: My view on the earth is that it’s a young earth. My view is 4000 BC.
Somehow I doubt that the Culture Minister is familiar with Francis Bacon’s ‘New Instrument for Rational Thinking’..
One more time then..
“The use of the word ‘theory’ can mislead those not familiar with science..”
Btw.. Where are those Department of Education guidelines?
Pete Baker @ 05:11 PM
what’s the most tragic- a creationist nutter as a minister or a terrorist god father as a minister?
Suddenly I’m not laughing anymore.
Posted by on Dec 02, 2007 @ 10:35 PMA creationist nutter whose party has a history of appearing on platforms with terrorists?
Posted by on Dec 02, 2007 @ 10:45 PMNow you see why some of us ‘outsiders’ are fascinated by NI politcs. It’s like a Coney Island sideshow for peoplewatchers.
Posted by on Dec 02, 2007 @ 11:12 PMas opposed to being an actual bomber (junior minister) or directing terrorism (deputy first minister)?
surely believing in creationism, whilst barking, seems rather cute compared to belief in the armalite and ballot box?
Posted by on Dec 02, 2007 @ 11:14 PMIt took me a while to figure it out, Dewi. It helped a lot when I printed out someone else’s link (page source); then I could see where I was leaving out inverted commas etc.
Posted by on Dec 02, 2007 @ 11:25 PMThis is not hilarious, it’s sad. Radical crazies like Poots are not fit for positions in government, even one like Stormont.
He is also the Minister who said no to an Irish language Act. But if God created Irish speakers…
Posted by on Dec 02, 2007 @ 11:38 PMI concur, if god created irish speakers
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 12:02 AMBill Hicks should have culture minister.
Fundamentalist Christianity - fascinating. These people actually believe that the the world is 12,000 years old. Swear to God. Based on what? I asked them.
“Well we looked at all the people in the Bible and we added ‘em up all the way back to Adam and Eve, their ages: 12,000 years.”
Well how fucking scientific, okay. I didn’t know that you’d gone to so much trouble. That’s good. You believe the world’s 12,000 years old?
“That’s right.”
Okay, I got one word to ask you, a one word question, ready?
“Uh-huh.”
Dinosaurs.
You know the world is 12,000 years old and dinosaurs existed, they existed in that time, you’d think it would have been mentioned in the fucking Bible at some point.
“And lo Jesus and the disciples walked to Nazareth. But the trail was blocked by a giant brontosaurus… with a splinter in his paw. And O the disciples did run a shriekin’: ‘What a big fucking lizard, Lord!’ But Jesus was unafraid and he took the splinter from the brontosaurus’s paw and the big lizard became his friend.
“And Jesus sent him to Scotland where he lived in a loch for O so many years inviting thousands of American tourists to bring their fat fucking families and their fat dollar bills.
“And oh Scotland did praise the Lord. Thank you Lord, thank you Lord. Thank you Lord.”
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 12:42 AMBiblenutter:
Im proud to be a bible beliveing christian and if that makes me a nutter in the eyes of the intelligensia then i stand with the bible.
Please stop trying to cast the views of those who disagree with you as an “intelligensia” or some other kind of conspiracy. The whole question here is whether or not faith in the bible text should extend to the point where people are required to deny observed reality.
The Bible says the powrrs of the world will ridicule the lords followers.
Yes. All religions, including Scientology and other dangerous cults, include built-in mechanisms to prepare followers for the likelihood that their beliefs will be ridiculed.
Edwin poots is a good man
He is entitled to his beliefs, but he’s not allowed to cast them as facts or science. That is what this boils down to.
The BBC is full of liberals and atheists and you cant tell the diffference.
The idea that the BBC is full of liberals is very easily discounted. One of their major newsreaders recently complained about the number of women taking over .. and is Paxman really the epitome of wish-wash ? And they’ve got people like Andrew Neil (former Daily Mail journalist) writing for them. And if it’s full of atheists, how do you explain Songs of Praise and Thora Hird ?
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 12:51 AMBonarLaw:
as opposed to being an actual bomber (junior minister) or directing terrorism (deputy first minister)?
Interesting. Do you think that being in a party which has association with terrorists is more forgiveable than being an actual terrorist ?
The outcome is the same - political cover for killing people.
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 12:53 AMDewi,
You are close with the attempt at the red words thing. looking at your 9:12 post. Can I suggest:
You need “ before and after the web address. You also need </a> after the words you want in red if so this is what you want.Nevin’s suggestion here seems to work. I am not using Microsoft Front Page but it seems to work provided you type it exactly as Nevin instructs.
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 12:54 AMTurgon,
I’ve a question for you. Say, hypothetically, you weren’t exposed to the bible during your upbringing, and you found yourself asking how life came into existence.
What would you have done in order to establish the answer ?
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 01:16 AMOf course the evolutionists need idiots like Poots as straw men to hold up as examples of anyone who disagrees with their hugely flawed and hopelessly unscientific theory.
I’ve said it before a hundred times, I’m not a believer in creationsim, I’m not a believer in Intelligent Design, I hold no brief for loonies who believe that the earth is a mere 4000 years old or indeed that it is flat but I simply ask those who hold so fast to the Theory of Evolution to admit one simple little thing, that there are holes the size of the Grand Canyon in their precious theory and whilst it may be correct they need to admit that it’s not the cut and dried, cast iron, 100% proven answer to the origins of life on this planet that they would have us believe.
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 01:25 AM4000 yrs old? Sure Paisley was only a whipper snapper then !
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 01:54 AMHarry
Name some of the holes. Most ‘holes’ that I’ve heard are the result of people not really understanding the theory.
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 02:26 AMhopelessly unscientific theory?
OK Harry I’ll bite, please tell me how evolution is unscientific.
Quite a weekend for the creationists on slugger, always nice to lance this particular boil every so often.
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 02:28 AMHarry,
Thats why it is called a theory.
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 02:54 AMThere is no doubt that within species (ie Galapagos finches) different traits can evolve over time to better suit the local environment, this is simple common sense and indeed is evidenced by the selective breeding we see in modern agriculture.
However to extrapolate from this intra-species development the claim that the magnificently developed, superbly adapted, multifarious life forms that exist on the planet today simply emerged by random chance over the eons is utter twaddle. It simply defeats logic to say that the perfectly developed cockroach, the beautifully designed elephant or the amazingly versatile chameleon came by their attributes over a period of time utterly by chance and random experimentation among breeders.
To sustain this argument you would have to produce the “failed” species the ones that didn’t quite pull this magnificent random selection bit off. If the lion developed sharp teeth in order to eat meat then you’d have to produce evidence that there was ever a lion which didn’t have very sharp teeth and which died off in order to allow the more developed lion to succeed. No such “failed prototypes” have ever been discovered.
In all fossil records ever unearthed all we have found are species which were brilliantly developed and adapted to their environments at that time (the environments may change and those species die off, like the dinosaurs, but nonetheless while the climate suited them they were perfectly adapted).
Why has this evolution stopped? If we all emerged from the same protoplasm ten billion years ago why did more protoplasm nine billion years ago and eight billion years ago also not emerge and mean that there would be a multitude of species on our planet all at different stages of evolution than the current crop of species. There aren’t, there are only the many perfectly formed developed species of our time span. It’s akin to seeing a society full of new born infants, adolescents, middle aged people and geriatrics and naturally assuming that each age developed into the next but then returning in a hundred years from now and discovering that all the new born babies were still new born, the adolescents still adolescents and the older people still older. In such circumstances one would have to conclude that the evolution theory had some serious deficiencies.
How did the eye evolve? Simple, say the evolutionists, it evolved from light sensitive cells, great, no mention how the light sensitive cells developed, however passing over that, explain why something that was of no earthly use until such time as it was fully developed would continue evolving until it did serve its purpose or at least a moderately useful characteristic.
A case in point; the bat’s radar system, fantastically intricate and so complex that we humans aren’t even entirely sure how it works. This just evolved by pure chance did it? Why? Until the bat could actually make the system work it was a pointless collection of meaningless cells, why would it continue evolving until it became the perfect system it is today?
More to the point since the bat’s radar is so effective why didn’t every species evolve it? Why just the bats and not humans, wouldn’t such a system have been useful to us?
So here’s my apocryphal challenge to the evolutionists. Make yourself master of the universe for ten thousand years, in that time make humans evolve a simple radar system like the bat. You have the power to award resources like food and power to those humans who are successfully evolving the radar, and you can withhold such resources, prevent breeding and starve off any humans who don’t look like they’re evolving radar. You may have access to all of Richard Dawkins’ materials as you set about your task.
Does anyone seriously believe that the human race would have progressed one millimeter in the evolution of a bat-like radar system at the end of this process.
I thought not.
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 03:31 AM‘It simply defeats logic’-Harry Flashman
and a big bearded guy sitting on a cloud judging us all doesn’t?
Harry how do you explain stick insects, who have evolved to look like their surroundings? what about the octopus who can shape themselves into the colour and shape of thier predator? as i said before all this talk of creationism versus evolution gives me a pain in my coccyx !
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 03:41 AMHarry, I agree with your caveat that evolution is an incomplete theory. There are too many variables for a machine as complex as a fly to have been randomly engineered, even allowing for the separate engineering of its component parts (that the eye, for example, is designed once in any species and that the information to make the eye is then stored in a gene and transferred across species with the subsequent modifications to the initial blueprint being the outcome of separate evolutionary processes). Given the amount of species, we should observe some new components being ‘evolved’ in some species if the process was random and ongoing, yet the only changes we have seen are ones that man has created by swapping genes via breeding. So, how do you get from the design of a fly’s eye to the design of a human eye? And how do you link the environmental information gained via the eye to the processor that attaches meaning to the information? It’s mathematical nonsense to claim that these two overwhelmingly complex, interconnected, yet initially wholly separate abilities could arise through random variables, just as it is nonsense to claim that the ability to process the information in the system could evolve sans the ability to process the information in the system - which is what evolutionary theory means by ‘natural selection.’ There is self-inspection in the system. But it goes off in the direction of non-linear dynamics: self-organisation systems, emergent phenomena, strange attractors, informational theory, complexity theory, chaos theory, etc - all of which are in their infancy as sciences but they yet supply the missing (or more accurately, ignored) pieces of the puzzle. There is no need for g-d – yet.
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 04:44 AMPounder,
“When was the last time you saw an Athiest going door to door with science text books any bothering people in their own home?”
Fair comment. My response would be that if there actually were more atheists with science textbooks, there’d be less atheists. :o)
Changing the subject slightly, i think where a lot of people go wrong is that everytime ‘religious philosophy’ gets it right, it’s then called science.
It’s like the UK football team playing England and 9 times out of 10 beating the English football team and then the UK supporters turning around and telling the English team they are useless, good for nothing and never produce any footballers. That is of course because the UK team would pinch all of the good English players ????
The person who first theorised the big bang theory - http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/science/sc0022.html
The person who first theorized the sun was the centre of our solar system -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_CopernicusThe first person to theorise that the universe was created with time, not in time -
http://www.allfreeessays.net/student/Augustine_on_Time.htmlThe person who first theorised the theory of genetics -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_MendelThe ‘young earth’ origins -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism
http://www.aip.org/history/curie/age-of-earth.htmThe person who first theorised an old earth -
http://www.answers.com/topic/georges-cuvier?cat=technology
http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679642886&view=excerptYou could even argue that Darwin himself was a theology degree holder. He described himself as unashamedly Christian while he was pursueing his research although he was later to become agnostic. (And as has said - “In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God."--Charles Darwin").
Further reading :
http://www.ldolphin.org/bumbulis/
The thing is, if every time when ‘religious philosophy’ gets validated by science, you strip it away from religion and put it in the science basket, then of course you are going to end up with a science basket full of coherant proven concepts and a relion basket of incoherant unproven concepts.
If you do that, then i too will go for the science basket, in the same way i’d support the UK football team.
But it’s not so logical to tell the English football team they are crap while idolizing and supporting the UK football team.
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 07:37 AMA case in point; the bat’s radar system, fantastically intricate and so complex that we humans aren’t even entirely sure how it works
You certainly don’t, since in no sense do bats have a ‘radar system’; if you’re looking for an analogue, it would be sonar, but all bats have is sensitive hearing. And there should be a ‘yet’ at the end of the sentence, too - although in truth the only unknown here is how bats produce such directional sound.
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 09:55 AMHarry:
To sustain this argument you would have to produce the “failed” species the ones that didn’t quite pull this magnificent random selection bit off.
Isn’t that pretty straightforward, I’m sure you can name a species which has become extinct ?
Either way, the absence of evidence cannot be used to disprove a theory. Only the presence of evidence contradicting the theory can be used to disprove it. Theories are supposed to try to describe observed phenomena. They make predictions about what has not been observed yet, but there are no requirements that certain things must be observed before the theory can be held to be valid. Needless to say, there haven’t been any discoveries (that I’m aware of) which contradict evolution yet.
Evolution is happening right now. How do you account for the drop in the number of red squirrels, and the increase in the number of grey ones ?
More to the point since the bat’s radar is so effective why didn’t every species evolve it? Why just the bats and not humans, wouldn’t such a system have been useful to us?
You may be aware that bats are a protected species. The radar is useful, but not useful enough that it can fight off the threat of extinction. You might ask yourself why your designer creates things which are doomed to failure at the hands of his other creations.
Dubliner,
I think everyone would agree that the evolutionary theory is incredible. However, it is the only one that we’ve got. There isn’t any evidence backing the theory of a designer, and there are many more holes in the idea of ID than there are in the idea of evolution. Just because you cannot get your head around random selection does not mean that it cannot happen. Sometimes observation requires us to accept things that normally we would consider remarkable. Consider trying to describe the current relationship between our first and deputy first ministers ten years ago.
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 10:05 AMTry this approach, Dewi.
[a href="http://www.northantrim.com"]Causeway Coast[/a] but change the respective brackets to < and >
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 10:30 AM-
[Dewi - slide cursor over hyper-linked text to see an example of ‘titling’ - always preview before you submit]
Posted by on Dec 03, 2007 @ 10:45 AM
