Bush gets mixed reception at Christian college

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (Reuters) -
President Bush on Saturday championed faith in American society, but ran into some criticism as courted his Christian base in a commencement speech at a Michigan college.

"We need to support and encourage the institutions and pursuits that bring us together. And we learn how to come together by participating in our churches and temples and mosques and synagogues," Bush told graduating seniors at Calvin College, a Christian liberal-arts college.

The college describes itself as a "center of faith-anchored liberal arts teaching and scholarship," and Bush has aggressively sought to reinforce his support among religious conservatives who helped deliver him a reelection victory in 2004.

But anti-Bush ads that ran in the local newspaper, protests outside the event and buttons worn on graduates' robes made clear that many students and faculty objected to Bush's policies.

"We believe your administration has launched an unjust and unjustified war in
Iraq," said a letter signed by about one-third the college's 300 faculty members and published in Saturday's Grand Rapids Press.

"As Christians, we are called to be peacemakers and to initiate war only as a last resort," it said.

The letter criticized economic policies that it said favored the wealthy over the poor, and faulted Bush for mixing religion and politics and exhibiting and "intolerance" for others' views.

It cited "conflicts between our understanding of what Christians are called to do and many of the policies of your administration."

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Federal Court Strikes Down Nebraska's Anti-Gay-Union Law Banning Protections for Same-Sex Couples

LINCOLN, NE -- In a ruling issued today, a federal court struck down Nebraska's anti-gay-union constitutional amendment that bans any and all forms of legal recognition for same-sex relationships, including domestic partnerships and other basic protections. The state is expected to appeal the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit.

The Court noted in its ruling that the plaintiffs in the case had not requested any recognition of their relationships through marriage or any other legal status, but merely sought an equal opportunity to persuade legislators of the need for protections. Judge Joseph F. Bataillon went on to say, "The court finds Section 29 is a denial of access to one of our most fundamental sources of protection, the government. Such broad exclusion from 'an almost limitless number of transactions and endeavors that constitute ordinary civil life in a free society' is 'itself a denial of equal protections in the literal sense.'"
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All scientific conclusions are probability statements: an observation is repeated a number of times and, say, nine times out of ten the results confirm a given idea, so . . . the idea is thrown out. A ninety percent chance of being right is not good enough. The probability of being right has to be nineteen out of twenty in the biological sciences. It has to approach ninety nine out of a hundred in the physical sciences. Imagine applying those standards in your personal life.

In science, that's just the beginning. The hypothesis, which is an expensive word for educated guess, is merely said to be confirmed once it passes that bar. These guesses are dignified with the name of "theory" when they have been confirmed so many times there is no real chance they won't continue being confirmed. They are called "laws" when that certainty becomes crushing, but even laws are probability statements. The law of gravity is a probability statement with an extraordinarily low chance of not working.

Against that backdrop, evolution is called a theory because there are so many facts in its favor. It's a parallel case to our understanding of stars and electrons. We have no personal experience of any of them, but scientists who have studied the facts have come up with coherent explanations that pan out. Evolution can explain practical things, such as how bacteria develop antibiotic resistance and why measles epidemics run in cycles, and it can provide mind-altering insights such as that insects and mammals have the same basic body plan, except the plan is back to front.

None of the other ideas for explaining the patterns of life rests on any facts that contradict evolution. The theory of intelligent design (and "theory" is used here in its common meaning) has not been able to show the existence of intelligence in the design, using scientific methods. Creationists can't show that creation occurred. If the scientific method is not used, the result is not science.

People who argue against evolution can, and do, fit some of the facts into their theories, but they have to ignore all the facts that disagree, which is about as far from the scientific method as you can get. They have no measurable observations and no testable, independently verifiable predictions.

I am: 2% Republican.

"You're a complete liberal, utterly without a trace of Republicanism. Your strength is as the strength of ten because your heart is pure. (You hope.)"

February 11, 2004: At about 1:30 P.M., while kayaking through the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas, Gene Sparling of Hot Springs, Arkansas, watched as a huge and unusual woodpecker with a red crest flew toward him and landed on a nearby tree. The bird hitched around the tree in what he later described as a "herky jerky" or "cartoon-like" motion. Sparling noticed several field marks suggesting that the bird was an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

About a week later, Tim Gallagher, editor of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology's Living Bird magazine, and Bobby Harrison, associate professor at Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama, interviewed Sparling about his sighting after reading a post on a web site. Gallagher and Harrison had been following up on ivory-bill sightings in preparation for a book Gallagher was writing. Sparling's description was so convincing that Gallagher and Harrison traveled to Arkansas so that Sparling could take them back to the bayou where he had seen the bird.