Texas House Bill to allow Creationis Universities to grant science degree
An oxymoron (plural oxymorons or oxymora) (from Greek ὀξύμωρον, “sharp dull”) is a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. Oxymorons appear in a variety of contexts, including inadvertent errors such as ground pilot and literary oxymorons crafted to reveal a paradox.
The most common form of oxymoron involves an adjective-noun combination of two words. For example, the following line from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King contains two oxymora:
“And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.”
Other examples of oxymora of this kind are:
- Dark light
- Living dead
- Open secret
- Original copy\
or Science Degree from a Creationist University. Critical thinking skill are required for science, them must be absent or impaired to believe in a fairy sky wizard
Is there no end to the lengths that Texas lawmakers will go to push their religiously motivated, anti-evolution agenda on science education? This time it isn’t Don McLeroy who is in my sights, it is Republican Leo Berman who is a member of the House Higher Education Committee of Texas.
Berman is the sole sponsor of House Bill 2800 that was introduced on March 9, 2009 in the Texas House of Representatives. It seems that Berman is motivated by his religion to flex his political power to help the Institute for Creation Research to have the authority to award master’s degrees in science.
According to a report by the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), Berman has not yet made a statement concerning the bill. NCSE did contact a staffer who said that “…he believed that the bill’s objective was to aid institutions that want to teach creation science or intelligent design.”
According to NCSE’s Glenn Branch, “[w]hen the Institute for Creation Research moved its headquarters from Santee, California, to Dallas, Texas, in June 2007, it expected to be able to continue offering a master’s degree in science education from its graduate school. … But the state’s scientific and educational leaders voiced their opposition, and at its April 24, 2008, meeting, the Texas Higher Education Coordination Board unanimously voted to deny the ICR’s request for a state certificate of authority to offer the degree.”
If House Bill 2800 is enacted, it will make ICR exempt from state regulations thereby allowing them to grant science degrees. As put by NCSE, the bill will “exempt institutions such as the Institute for Creation Research’s graduate school from Texas’s regulations governing degree-granting institutions.”
According to ICR’s Web site, they “[equip] believers with evidence of the Bible’s accuracy and authority through scientific research, educational programs, and media presentations, all conducted within a thoroughly biblical framework.” To that end, it seems, they take discoveries and force them into current biblical understandings of… things. For example, they discussed the recent discovery of the fossilized brain. They said:
“Since the Bible’s historical data is usually ignored in most scientific investigations, it comes as no surprise that this recent discovery ‘all happened by chance.’ The researchers would not expect to find fossilized soft brain tissues if today’s slow processes were all that was at work in the past. However, given the catastrophic formation indicated by most of earth’s geologic structures and the massive extermination of life represented in the fossil record—as well as the preservation of soft tissue from creatures supposedly millions of years old—the biblical Flood is a valid and relevant interpretive key to earth’s past. It can be expected that more soft tissue fossils, including brains and perhaps visceral organs, will be found.”
How does one logically go from finding a fossilized brain to deeming the biblical flood valid and relevant? This is obviously one of those “schools” that will only accept scientific discoveries that they can “make fit” into scriptural accounts of… things. I hate to break this to them, but that is not science. It is intellectual dishonesty. And a school like this has no business whatever granting degrees in science. After all, what they teach is not science.
And, it is downright disgusting to know that there is yet another lawmaker in place in Texas that doesn’t care about what he is supposed to care about… in Berman’s case - higher education. His is too concerned with his own religious agenda to see that this school is an offense to the realm of science. Further, I would say that ICR is an insult to the concept “school.”
