Contrast and compare:

“You got trouble Folks! Right here in River City. Trouble with a Capital T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for pool.”

Sadly, the experience of the talk.origins newsgroup over the last fifteen years has shown that all three environments are pretty fertile grounds for breeding creationists. Engineering and medicine are rich in the application of scientific knowledge, but not in the processes that lead to obtaining that knowledge – the processes of science itself. And neither area spends much time on the disciplines where evolution and deep time are most evident, such as geology or developmental biology.

Folks have hypothesized that engineers are accustomed to thinking about how things are made, and are thus more receptive to viewing the universe and all that’s in it as “made” things. Medical doctors are often the equivalent of automobile mechanics (not to disparage either occupation) in that they mainly deal with diagnosing and repairing malfunctions in physical systems.

Finally, the US Air Force Academy has long been a hotbed of evangelical Christianity. Devout pilots are a pretty well-known phenomenon.

This is, however, an attack on science, sometimes from proclaimed scientists themselves. It seems to be a religious backlash as to past politics or a religious reaction to that which scientists are actually discovering. Albeit, it seems perilous on several fronts. Given that the majority of the public is absolutely mathematically and scientifically illiterate, the public can be convinced of anything. LeBec is just a small but sad sample of what appears on the horizon.

Forgive any spelling and grammar; I did this on the fly.

It’s actually about politics. This governor, as most in the South, knows his political base, and he knows they love to have their lack of education celebrated as wisdom.

Re #5 above. If you take the quotes off the word philosophy then it doesn’t seem so bad. ID is a very suitable subject for a philosophy of science class. It raises some important questions about the nature of science. It just shouldn’t be in biology as an alternative to neo-darwinism. In fact in some flavours of ID are compatible with ND. Darwin avoided saying anything about how life began except a few informal comments in a letter.

From the Edge.org annual question “What is the most dangerous idea?” :

KARL SABBAGH

The human brain and its products are incapable of understanding the truths about the universe

LAWRENCE KRAUSS

The world may fundamentally be inexplicable

STEVEN STROGATZ

The End of Insight

“When the End of Insight comes, the nature of explanation in science will change forever. We’ll be stuck in an age of authoritarianism, except it’ll no longer be coming from politics or religious dogma, but from science itself.â€�

***
Personally, what I think is going on is that science is rubbing up against a fundamental human characteristic – innumeracy. I spend part of my time in a nonscientific endeavor dependent on numeracy. Sniping. Telling the difference between 400 and 800 yards is difficult without “cheats”. Telling the difference between 2.4 km and 3.6 km is impossible for a human. It’s all cheat at that point. You’re reading it from a machine which you must put your total faith in. When we delve into issues in which illions or illionths are the unit of measure, well human common sense fails us.

So how do we communicate the truth to those whose common sense can’t comprehend what we tell them?

Answers??… Anyone?.. Bueller?