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well, the obvious conflict is over who gets to control the criteria that shape judgments about scientific models--large-scale cosmology is a huge modelling. the creationists/fundamentalist protestant types who keep working on this question know full well that what you can demonstrate using a particular set of rules says nothing about the status of the rules themselves, that questions of which rules are more and less legitimate is a political question--at least in spaces like education which are not themselves scientific operations but rather spaces that talk about scientific operations. from that viewpoint, all this is rearguard action--these folk know they're fucked, but are trying however they can to use political power to impose their frameworks. and they're loosing for the most part because once they manage to persuade people in particular areas that this is a political conflict, it seems that the "what the fuck are you doing?" question emerges right away and kills them. and that's the trick: for their arguments to work, the field has to be understood as political, so subject to change from interest groups (say), but when they win that fight, they loose the war because from a political viewpoint what they're trying to do is impose a religious problematique on a secular school system.
that said, this texas decision is very very strange. what the fuck does it mean to say that the universe is ageless? well, at one level, is there time outside of human experience? there's motion, there's change: but is there time?
i don't think the answer is obvious at all.
we impose time through the act of observation because we deal with succession in those terms. so for us, movement/succession is temporal--but that's entirely for us.
but i don't think the arguments operate on this level of conceptual problems---i just think they're interesting.
what would it mean for a fundamentalist/creationist to argue that the universe is ageless?
the movement probably goes that by seeing the universe in that way, you make of it a kind of manifold in a platonic sense--so it already contains all possiblities---then the question of why these particular possibilities are manifest and not others turns up. since you've already framed the problem in platonic terms, the answer is the agency of some god. so to move from all possible outcomes to particular outcomes means that there has to be a designer or selector.
what a curious proposition to agree to.
sheesh.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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