{"id":1174,"date":"2010-07-26T20:37:44","date_gmt":"2010-07-27T00:37:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/?p=1174"},"modified":"2019-10-26T20:38:55","modified_gmt":"2019-10-27T00:38:55","slug":"in-which-i-get-called-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/2010\/07\/26\/in-which-i-get-called-out\/","title":{"rendered":"In Which I Get Called Out"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Last week, technolope<\/a> came over for a quick lunch, which is one of those rare treats when you work from home. We went to Common Grounds<\/a> cafe, an eclectic little restaurant around the corner from my house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The restaurant is run by a small community of Christians<\/a> who in the 60\u2019s \u201cstopped going to church,\u201d and \u201cstarted being the church.\u201d Based on my recent reading<\/a>, they appear to hark back to the very earliest communities of Christians \u2013 valuing things like self sufficiency and living slightly apart from the rest of their civilization. While they live as overt Christians, their evangelism is limited to a note at the bottom of the menu: \u201cWe serve the fruit of the spirit, why not ask?\u201d I\u2019ve never asked, and they\u2019ve never pushed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The restaurant is amazing. The internal architecture and decoration is all handmade from reclaimed lumber. Every table is a different shape and size, and in the winter a large stone fireplace warms the whole room. The food is, mostly, locally grown on the community\u2019s farm in Western Mass. It\u2019s tasty, filling, and mostly vegetarian. It feels like a tiny slice of community in the middle of the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, technolope<\/a> and I had our lunch, and when the time came to pay \u2013 I was making chit-chat with the man behind the register and he looked at my T-shirt. \u201cTeach the controversy, what does that mean?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I realized that I was wearing my \u201cPb -> Au\u201d shirt, which specifically mocks the creationist crowd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Uh oh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I explained that \u201cteach the controversy\u201d is a slogan used by people who want to include biblical creation in the science curriculum of public schools. That the shirt makes fun of that, since the mere presence of a controversy didn\u2019t suffice \u2013 in my mind \u2013 to make something \u201cscience.\u201d There will always be people with ideas that are not science \u2013 should we include all of them? Even alchemy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another couple people had wandered over, and asked \u201cso do you oppose teaching creation in the schools?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

technolope<\/a> had, at this point, settled back, made metaphorical popcorn \u2026 and was watching the show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did my best to stay positive, but also to clearly state my position. To do that, I needed to talk about what I believe \u2013 rather than letting the conversation be about what they believe. I wound up with something like this: Philosophy and religion are different from science. Science is, necessarily, about evidence. About predictive models with real world power. In some basic cases, like electromagnetism, it\u2019s pretty simple to test in a couple of hours in the classroom. Either a given setup will make the lightbulb go on, or not. Newtonian mechanics are similarly straightforward. In other cases, like evolutionary biology and astrophysics, we wind up looking at the preponderance of evidence and having to make a bit of a judgement call. We can\u2019t actually re-play the evolution (or not) of multicellular life with even a week or a month in a high school lab.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To their credit, they didn\u2019t let me off the hook. \u201cSo you don\u2019t think that creation should be taught in the schools?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had to admit that, no, I don\u2019t think that the biblical creation story qualifies as science. I tried to lighten it with the fact that I don\u2019t think that physics qualifies as religion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Long story, less long: I got called out, and learned that I\u2019m not as ready to back up my snotty t-shirts as I might have liked. Back to the honing stone \u2026 gotta sharpen that wit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, technolope came over for a quick lunch, which is one of those rare treats when you work from home. We went to Common Grounds cafe, an eclectic little restaurant around the corner from my house. The restaurant is run by a small community…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-real-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1175,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174\/revisions\/1175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}