English sport on the up?

I've been meaning to update about this for a while but hey, time is a scare commodity these days! The crowning achivement of English sport was nearly two weeks ago. We had, at least in my memory, the first time ever that our Football, Rugby and Cricket sides we all in action on the same day. (you can count Rugby League if you want but they are a Great Britain side and so don't really count!)

Football - England vs Argentina (3-2). Only a friendly people were saying, well....wow! What a game, both sides were well up for the win and in one of the best games i've seen England play we were losing 2-1 with 10 minutes to go. Up steps little Michael Owen and casually slots two goals to win the match. Amazing stuff, the crowd reacted like we'd won the world cup and to be honest if we play like that next year who knows.

Rugby - England vs Australia (26-16). Again 'only a friendly' but if you know about Rugby you know Eng/Aus is never friendly! I was apprehensive about this as we've not been great since winning the World Cup and this was a big game. Fair play to our chaps though the forwards played Aus out of the game and it looks as though we are back to some semblanse of normallity, nice to see Charlie getting some kicks for once too - only losing by 4 points to the All Blacks last Sat seemed to bear this out. Let's hope we can fare better at the 6 Nations this season.

Cricket - England vs Pakistan (0-1). Well the Saturday looked good with us taking 6 wickets and we had plenty of opportunity to win the game but a batting collapse on the final day meant we didn't even get a draw. Our batting has been atrocious at times on this tour and barely scrapping the draw in the second test this morning wasn't brilliant. Mind you from 20-4 it did look like we were going to lose the series, finally big Kev managed to find some form and along with Freddie they manged to save the draw. We must win the final match.

So basically what a day the 12th November was, three awesome games against quality opposition. Oh yeah the League boys beat the All Blacks too (38-12) but who cares about Rugby League anyway!

Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School Board

Well it seems the Dover Panda trial whilst not quite over has at least come to a close regarding the in court trail. Judge Jones will hopefully be delivering his verdict this year and after following events quite closely over the last couple of weeks a ruling against Intelligent Design should be forthcoming.

After coming across the Creationism vs Evolution debate only quite recently I am struck by a number of things. The first and initially most stunning was the fact that in the US so many people are so anti-evolution and anti-science.

In my experience, mainly in the UK, the majority of people and most Christians do not have a problem with the scientific theory behind Evolution. I was amazed at first by the often vehement denounciation of Evolution and pretty much any science associated with it in the US and message boards across the internet.

Fortunately there are a great many sane people who, often at their own expense, are combating the misinformation campaign peddled by US creationists. see links right

Upon further participation in the issues I was next struck by the insidious lies, tactics, megalomania and delusion many creationists are under. More worrying was the way that some creationists willfully misrepresented, misquoted and misinformed people about science.

The main culprits in this attack on reason is the Discovery Institute, a 'think' tank in the US dedicated to popularizing ID theory. I'm not too concerned with the more loony fringe of creationism, Kent Hovind, Carl Baugh etc as they represent a minority view however the 'luminaries' of the DI, Michael Behe, William Dembski, Steven Meyer et al present a more incoherent front.

Their propaganda campaign has tried to present creationism as a more 'user friendly' theory called Intelligent Design and attempts to prey on peoples own misunderstandings of how science works, peoples sense of free speech and the lack of credulity that people seem to have these days.

A peculiarity of the US is it's separation of church and state and thus teaching religion is illegal in the US, which is why the Christian right want to teach ID because it is creationism dressed up in 'science' clothing.

I don't think many people mind teaching religion as long as ALL religions are given equal time in the relevant classes and the creationists definitely don't want that.

The coverage of the trial and more on the Creation/Evolution debate can be found pretty much anywhere on the web but I would recommend the relevant links here. I haven't listed any pro-Creation sites since I don't want to give the nutcases any more publicity than they already have but if you insist the DI is probably a 'good' place to start.

As a finishing note, I was concerned to learn of a Young Earth Creationist tourist attraction here in the UK, in fact near where I live. It's Noah's Ark Zoo Farm and whilst it doesn't seem overtly Creationist even a cursory look at their 'education' section of their website sets off all sorts of alarm bells. More worryingly it is trying to target children as it's main audience. To be frank the willful corruption of children's education in the name of God is despicable and unforgivable and to be honest, not very 'Christian'.

I think in the main creationists in the UK are a very small minority who pretty much keep themslves to themselves, the big worry in when the guy in charge of the worlds largest nuclear arsenal says that God told him to invade Iraq.............