Quebec community cool to Darwin

A high school science teacher vowed yesterday to continue telling his Inuit students about Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, despite complaints from parents in the northern Quebec community of Salluit.

Science teacher Alexandre April was given a written reprimand last month by his principal at Ikusik High School for discussing evolution in class.

Parents in the village 1,860 kilometres north of Montreal complained their children had been told they came from apes.

"I am a biologist. ... This is what I'm passionate about," said April, who teaches Grades 7 and 8. "It interests the students. It gets them asking questions.

"They laugh and they call me 'ape,' but I don't mind. If I stopped, they would lose out."

April, who is leaving the town when his contract runs out at the end of the school year, said the principal first told teachers last fall not to talk about evolution.

Debate over the teaching of evolution in Salluit - a village of 1,150 located along the northern coast of Quebec, between Ungava and Hudson bays - is pitting an increasingly religious Inuit population against a Quebec education system that's becoming more and more secular.

Although April, 32, won't be punished, his reprimand has outraged Quebec's scientific community.

"What he's doing is right and it's best for the kids," said Brian Alters, director of the Evolution Education Research Centre at McGill University. "Science should not be de-emphasized for non-science."

Over the years, controversy over the teaching of evolution has erupted in Pennsylvania, along with U.S. states in the so-called Bible Belt. In November, the Kansas State Board of Education approved science standards that cast doubt on evolution.

But with heightened religious fervour among the Inuit and Cree in northern communities, some observers suggest Canada might have its own Bible North.

Molly Tayara, a member of the Salluit school's volunteer education committee, said she'd tell her four school-age children to walk out of a lesson on Darwin.

"The minister (of education) may have come from apes, but we're Inuit and we've always been human," she told The Gazette in a phone interview.

"Most of us rely on God's word. ... God made Adam and Eve and they weren't animals."

Legally, Inuit schools in Quebec's north must teach evolution, as it's part of the provincial curriculum. After April's story came out this week in the magazine Quebec Science, Education Department officials immediately called the school to ensure the curriculum was followed.

Topics like reproduction and diversity of species are part of Science and Technology, a course for Grades 7 and 8. Darwin's work, based on the premise that humans and other animals have evolved over time, is further covered in Grade 11 biology - an elective course.

"We want the curriculum to be applied. We're just saying the theory of evolution could be taught more delicately to students," said Gaston Pelletier, director of educational services for the Kativik School Board, which serves northern Quebec's 14 Inuit communities. "We have to respect their view."

There are plenty of opinions on textual criticism. Ehrman has one of them. If your propensity is against the inspiration of the text, then his approach will be attractive to you. Some of the most Biblically correct commentaries of the New Testament books are written by scholars who don't believe a word of what Paul wrote, yet they pen a scholarly account of what Paul was trying to communicate.

Every "scientific" work has assumptions in it, whether you recognize it or not. Its an assumption that a scribe would make a change to a manuscript to make it easier to read. Its an assumption that the more difficult reading is to be preferred. Its an assumption that earlier textual support provides the weight of textual evidence for a variant. Its an assumption that geographical support should be weighted in textual evidence decisions. There may be good rational arguments why those assumptions should be accepted; but in the end, they are assumptions through which the entire work, including the conclusions and implications, is dependent on.

I've read and studied his work with Metzner, its a solid scholarly work ... but it's his view given his assumptions. If you hold his view, then fine; your are already accepting the implications to your faith and spiritual life.

But you can read a work like this, understand the assumptions, approve of the content within those assumptions; but reject the implications of the arguments based on theological method. Are there places in the text where 2 readings could be probable, where each can make sense in the context of the passage? Yes. Are there places in the text where those 2 readings would have a drastic effect on a major Christian doctrine? No.

In fact, the Bible often contradicts itself

I wont bother you with what you are certainly familar with. It may seem like there are contradictions to someone who believes they are there; to someone who supports the inspiration of the text, there are explanations. The thread we could create going back and forth would last until we are dust again ...

the Bible ... has most certainly changed since its first writing

If your assumption is that the changes are so radical that the original text is not contained in the myriad of MSS evidence ... then I would disagree. The fact is that the vast majority of variants are minor spelling and article discrepencies. Yes, there is a place or two where there is a whole chapter missing (end of Mark) ... but a modern translation would have a lengthly footnote saying something like "The most ancient and reliable manuscripts do not have this section." To the compilers of that Greek text, that is an assumption, that older = more reliable. There are other opinions. The fact is, if you count manuscripts, the vast majority of manuscripts support a common reading (i.e. the Majority Text). So what is most important? I tend to think older is better on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; more manuscripts is better on Tuesday and Thursday; and alternate weekends I change my mind.

My point was not that 2 different interpertations are possible given a single passage, but that different manuscripts may contain different versions of the same passage.

No argument there, different manuscripts can contain slightly different readings of a passage. That's why there are textual critics, to systematically determine from extant manuscript evidence what the original readings were.

This should give the Biblical literalists pause, but strangely, it appears to have no effect.

Why would it? The grammatical-historical approach to Biblical interpretation (what you call Literalism) is concerned with the interpretation of the text ... not the construction of the text.

"The sphericity of the Earth was demonstrated by Pythagoras ca. 550 BC."

This has been a special study of mine for years. Let me just go ahead and fill in some details, so others can recall this when we, yet again, hear that canard about "everyone thought the earth was flat till Columbus came along and proved them wrong":

1) It is true that the Pythagoreans argued for a round earth -- but the basis of their argument was aesthetic, and not scientific. They said that a sphere was the most perfectly beautiful of all shapes.

2) Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, and Democritus all argued for a flat-earth. Round -- but flat -- like a CD. Plato and Aristotle both argued the other side. Aristotle's arguments do not all hold up, but among them were some good evidences that have stood the test of time. I'll give three here:

A. When a ship sails away, it looks to an observer on the shore as if the ship is sinking. When it returns, it looks as if it is rising out of the sea. This can be explained by realizing that the surface of the sea, while appearing flat to us, is curved, and what we are seeing is the ship gradually disappearing over the curved horizon.

B. When a person travels south, stars in the north disappear below the northern horizon, and new stars appear in the south -- and vice-versa.

C. The ancient Greeks understood that a lunar eclipse was the result of the earth getting between the Son and the moon. Aristotle pointed out the obvious -- that the shadow of the earth on the moon during such an eclipse is curved.

3) Aristarchus took this further. Noticing that the shadow of the earth on the moon during an eclipse was not a perfect fit -- he deduced, from his limited observation without instruments, that the earth was about four times the size of the moon. That's a pretty good estimate considering what he had to work with.

[As an aside: Aristarchus also calculated, using a right triangle with the half-moon as the vertex of the right angle, that the sun was much farther away than the moon, and, therefore, much larger. His numbers were way off, but the idea was sound. From this he reached a logical conclusion that the sun was the center of the world, and that the earth and the planets circle the sun.

His reasoning has no empirical basis -- it was just a logical deduction based on an assumption -- so it was dismissed and forgotten -- till Copernicus read about it in the 16th century. Copernicus mentions Aristarchus, in an early draft of his work, as an impetus for his study, but that reference was excised by the time his work was published in 1543.]

4) Eratosthenes used shadows from the sun, on the summer solstice, at two different locations to calculate the circumference of the earth -- and he came remarkably close to the correct figure. He calculated the circumference around the two poles -- north-south -- not east-west, and if he had made sure to line up the two locations due north-south of each other, he would have come even closer.

5) Ptolemy's cosmology, presented in his great work *Almagest,* in the 2nd century A.D., has a round earth at the center of the universe, with all other bodies revolving around it. This was the most important work on the subject of cosmology till Copernicus challenged it, in the 16th C. Of course -- Copernicus was not challenging the SHAPE of the earth, but its PLACE in the system.

6) By medieval times -- long before Columbus -- there were no serious arguments in favor of a flat earth. We do see a few arguments in the early centuries of the church -- but they are based on mystical, symbolic ideas, and not logic or observation, and they had no real influence.

7) As early as the 5th-C, Martianus Capella, the man who formalized the idea of the "seven liberal arts" of the medieval curriculum, clearly argued for a round earth. Going back even further -- Augustine [4th-5th-C] and Basil of Caesarea [4th-C] both argued for a round earth.

8) In the 13th-C, Sacrobosco's *Treatise on the Sphere* repeated a demonstration of earth's roundness from the Arab al-Farghani -- who probably got some of his ideas from Aristotle. Aquinas also repeated the ancient Greek arguments for sphericity.

9) I have left out a lot of names and a lot of evidence -- Cicero, Pliny, Macrobius, the Venerable Bede, duns Scotus; the Royal Orb of the Romans; royal regalia of Christian kings; etc. The evidence showing that "educated" people understood the round earth long before "1492" is overwhelming.

10) The Roman Catholic Church, following the lead, primarily, of Aristotle, has accepted a round earth from as far back as records indicate any mention of it.

I have only touched on a small bit of the evidence for a continuing understanding of a round earth from ancient Greece through medieval times. There is much more. Just one more tidbit -- don't forget Dante's *Divina Commedia* -- which clearly portrays a round earth.

11) The controversy with Columbus and his detractors never included anything about the shape of the earth; that story is false. The real controversy was over the SIZE of the earth -- and Columbus was wrong and his detractors were right.

His crew was close to mutiny -- they were running out of water -- and he was fudging his records along the way to avoid a revolt on board -- when he got lucky and found land.
He thought he had made it all the way to Asia -- but he hadn't even gotten half-way, yet. To his dying day he insisted that he had, indeed, reached "the Indies."

His opponents were right -- it was too far, and the crew would have perished mid-ocean -- but neither Columbus nor his opponents had any idea that something was in the way.

I have talked to many students about this -- and invariably, many of them disbelieve me, because so many teachers are still perpetuating the myth about Columbus proving the round earth. Even the highly respected historian Daniel Boorstin -- who, for a while, was the Librarian of Congress -- while admitting that the roundness of the earth was not at issue in the Columbus controversy, does perpetuate the myth that medieval Christians saw the earth as flat till about 1300.

It is possible that the general population in the middle ages -- mostly ignorant, illiterate, and superstitious -- may have seen the world as flat, if they thought about it at all -- but it is clear that educated people did not.

Finally -- there is a good book detailing the genesis and development of this myth -- by Jeffrey Burton Russell: *Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (New York, 1991).

Whew! That was fun! Perhaps many of you knew this. But I read that nonsense claim every other day!

You know -- thinking about this "flat-earth myth" thing: It's interesting that so many creationist sites deal with this. They seem to believe that "the other side" is always accusing creationists of believing that myth, just in order to ridicule them. They go on and on about it, as if the entire thing is a set-up. They sound like DUers screeching about Karl Rove and how he can manipulate the very order of nature to fool them.

But when I read debates on crevo all over the net -- I see two things again and again and again. I see a complete lack of attacks on creationists for supposedly believing this myth -- without the creationist first giving evidence that he does. And I see creationists resorting to this myth time and again as support for their argument about "going against the scientific grain."

So -- based on my experience with ten years of crevo debates -- it seems a lot of creationists DO believe this myth. But I am sure many others do, too, considering how it has hung on for so long in schools. Like I said in my previous post, I run across students all the time who were taught this myth.

The point creationists are trying to make when they mistakenly cite the myth is that creationism may not be the accepted "model" of "origins" among scientists right now -- but that doesn't make it wrong, by golly. After all -- look at Columbus. As one poster said it just earlier on this thread: "before 1492 a flat earth was established fact."

The better example for their argument would have been the Copernican model replacing the Ptolemaic model. That was a case of going against the widely accepted theory -- but it is still not a good example for creationists. In fact, I have run across several creationists who STILL espouse geocentrism.

Why is this not even a good example for them to use? Because what caused the Copernican model to replace Ptolemaism was not religious apologetics and name-calling. In fact -- the religious apologetics were used AGAINST Copernicanism. No -- what caused Copernicanism to win out was continuing science -- observation, hypthesis, testing, adjusting, correction, etc.

Copernicus's model was not quite correct, after all. It still did not do a better job with the math involved than Ptolemy's model did. It took further observations and induction from Tycho, Galileo, and Kepler to really thrust Copernicanism to the fore, and to cause Ptolemaism to fade.

Science did that. And only science could ever overturn evolution as a scientific theory. Attacking a scientific theory that is so well supported -- by saying, "I don't like the religious implications" or "I can't believe that" or "You are an evil Nazi-homo-commie-atheist" -- is worthless.

None of these "arguments" -- which constitute about 95% of the creationist/ID side of this debate -- have any effect on the science. Evidence wins the day. Evidence is what creationism is short on. Long on bluster and belligerence -- short on evidence.

And I am sad to have to say this, but the evidence for this next comment is pretty strong, too -- they are short on honesty and basic integrity, too. That is what has been so shocking to me -- coming from people who are constantly proclaiming their adherence to a higher morality.

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