Posted on 07/27/2006 3:00:03 PM PDT by BrandtMichaels
What are Darwinists so afraid of?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: July 27, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Jonathan Witt © 2006
As a doctoral student at the University of Kansas in the '90s, I found that my professors came in all stripes, and that lazy ideas didn't get off easy. If some professor wanted to preach the virtues of communism after it had failed miserably in the Soviet Union, he was free to do so, but students were also free to hear from other professors who critically analyzed that position.
Conversely, students who believed capitalism and democracy were the great engines of human progress had to grapple with the best arguments against that view, meaning that in the end, they were better able to defend their beliefs.
Such a free marketplace of ideas is crucial to a solid education, and it's what the current Kansas science standards promote. These standards, like those adopted in other states and supported by a three-to-one margin among U.S. voters, don't call for teaching intelligent design. They call for schools to equip students to critically analyze modern evolutionary theory by teaching the evidence both for and against it.
The standards are good for students and good for science.
Some want to protect Darwinism from the competitive marketplace by overturning the critical-analysis standards. My hope is that these efforts will merely lead students to ask, What's the evidence they don't want us to see?
Under the new standards, they'll get an answer. For starters, many high-school biology textbooks have presented Haeckel's 19th century embryo drawings, the four-winged fruit fly, peppered moths hidden on tree trunks and the evolving beak of the Galapagos finch as knockdown evidence for Darwinian evolution. What they don't tell students is that these icons of evolution have been discredited, not by Christian fundamentalists but by mainstream evolutionists.
We now know that 1) Haeckel faked his embryo drawings; 2) Anatomically mutant fruit flies are always dysfunctional; 3) Peppered moths don't rest on tree trunks (the photographs were staged); and 4) the finch beaks returned to normal after the rains returned – no net evolution occurred. Like many species, the average size fluctuates within a given range.
This is microevolution, the age-old observation of change within species. Macroevolution refers to the evolution of fundamentally new body plans and anatomical parts. Biology textbooks use instances of microevolution such as the Galapagos finches to paper over the fact that biologists have never observed, or even described in theoretical terms, a detailed, continually functional pathway to fundamentally new forms like mammals, wings and bats. This is significant because modern Darwinism claims that all life evolved from a common ancestor by a series of tiny, useful genetic mutations.
Textbooks also trumpet a few "missing links" discovered between groups. What they don't mention is that Darwin's theory requires untold millions of missing links, evolving one tiny step at a time. Yes, the fossil record is incomplete, but even mainstream evolutionists have asked, why is it selectively incomplete in just those places where the need for evidence is most crucial?
Opponents of the new science standards don't want Kansas high-school students grappling with that question. They argue that such problems aren't worth bothering with because Darwinism is supported by "overwhelming evidence." But if the evidence is overwhelming, why shield the theory from informed critical analysis? Why the campaign to mischaracterize the current standards and replace them with a plan to spoon-feed students Darwinian pabulum strained of uncooperative evidence?
The truly confident Darwinist should be eager to tell students, "Hey, notice these crucial unsolved problems in modern evolutionary theory. Maybe one day you'll be one of the scientists who discovers a solution."
Confidence is as confidence does.
I'll bet I can find a Christian who has used the term Bible thumper or snake handler.
Says who? You? Just who the heck are you to insist evo's have a monopoly on what children are taught? Competition of ideas is healthy. Put it out there for all to see.
"What should be trivial for such a powerful being is whether we fully understand that creation. To be so offended that he sentences us to eternal torment because we get it wrong is not the sign of a wise, understanding God but of a whiny adolescent."
It's not ignorance of creation that condemns but refusal of the salvation offered in His Son; that's called justice. The whiny adolescent says "I want to do it my way" while a loving God says "I am the way".
Right. So it wasn't evolution.
I did a paper on the Search for Mitochondrial Eve some while back.
Fascinating subject.
Change from one species to another has never been demonstrated.
It seems you, freedumb2003, have been passed a troll....inadvertently, of course.
You are correct, sir.
And if you either don't do it His way, or refuse to believe that it even is His way He throws you into a lake of fire for all of eternity. He is only loving when worshipped.
Petulant.
Your statement that you want competition of ideas does not ring true. I think what you want is your particular brand of religion taught as truth.
What about the other 4000+ extant world religions? Do they get some time too? And how are they to be taught? As truth? As lies? As just not good enough? As what fools believe?
And does science get equal time to evaluate and criticize the myriad claims (you are advocating this for science classes, I assume)?
I suspect that critical evaluation is the last thing you want if you really think about it.
""Petulant."
"Jealous", I think is the word you are looking for.
"Obviously, a jealous God is a flawed God."
If there is one true God and all the others are fake, why would it not be fitting that He would be offended by worship of false gods? You're trying to judge God by human standards. A God who is not offended by falsehood and deception would indeed by a flawed being.
The Bible doesn't actually say so, but I always assumed that it was for food.
I haven't seen this link posted in a while. It is a way cool interactive called (Journey of Mankind)
It takes a while to get through the whole thing, so you might want to save it for later (if you're interested, of course).
OTOH, public money should not be used to teach mysticism outside of the appropriate enviornment -> Religion and Philsophy classes.
"It's not ignorance of creation that condemns..."
That is what was being claimed. If one didn't see the hand of God in creation then God would get pissed and throw us into the Fire.
You are not correct, sir, and the analogy is utterly flawed.
Abortion is a religious and political issue. The findings of science are neither. There is no controversy in science about any of the elements of evolution that trouble the religious. There is no controversy about the age of the earth. There is no controversy about common descent. There is no controversy about the general interpretation of the fossil record or the geologic column. There is no controversy about the interpretation of ERVs.
The controversies that do exist in biology have no impact on these key items.
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