Texas: Creation Science Idiocy Dealt a Blow

In recent years the “Institute for Creation Research” has been whipping up controversy where none needed ever exist. They took the battle creationism vs. science to the poorly educated, telling the average rube that science curriculum was designed to turn everyone atheist. Of course that’s absurd. All sorts of Christian religions are able to simultaneously understand scientific knowledge while still maintaining faith. It hasn’t been, until recently, an either/or proposition. Enter Texas rube-exploiters; those who exploit the general lack of education in order to whip up a political debate that they end up making a living off of.

The Dallas-based Institute for Creation Research’s bid to offer an online master’s degree in science education in Texas sustained what appeared to be a fatal blow Wednesday.
A committee for the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board voted unanimously to deny its application based on the recommendation of the board’s commissioner, Raymund Paredes.

The full board will make a final decision at a meeting today, but as six of its nine members sit on the academic excellence and research committee, the outcome is unlikely to change.

Paredes said ICR didn’t meet the board’s criteria for a science education program because it rejects scientific explanations— specifically evolution — that don’t jibe with the biblical account of the Earth’s creation.

“Religious belief is not science,” he said. “Science and religious belief are surely reconcilable, but they are not the same thing.”

This sanity in a state where not long ago Bill Nye (the Science Guy) nearly caused an insurrection at a school by pointing out the well-known for ages fact that the moon produces no light but reflects that of the sun.

Bill Nye, the harmless children’s edu-tainer known as “The Science Guy,” managed to offend a select group of adults in Waco, Texas at a presentation, when he suggested that the moon does not emit light, but instead reflects the light of the sun.

As even most elementary-school graduates know, the moon reflects the light of the sun but produces no light of its own.

But don’t tell that to the good people of Waco, who were “visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence,” according to the Waco Tribune.

Nye was in town to participate in McLennan Community College’s Distinguished Lecture Series. He gave two lectures on such unfunny and adult topics as global warming, Mars exploration, and energy consumption.

But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.

At this point, several people in the audience stormed out in fury. One woman yelled “We believe in God!” and left with three children, thus ensuring that people across America would read about the incident and conclude that Waco is as nutty as they’d always suspected.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA042408.05B.CREATION.378242d.html

http://dumbtexans.blogspot.com/2008/03/bill-nye-booed-for-saying-moon-reflects.html