Posted on 02/20/2006 5:33:50 AM PST by ToryHeartland
Churches urged to back evolution By Paul Rincon BBC News science reporter, St Louis
US scientists have called on mainstream religious communities to help them fight policies that undermine the teaching of evolution.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) hit out at the "intelligent design" movement at its annual meeting in Missouri.
Teaching the idea threatens scientific literacy among schoolchildren, it said.
Its proponents argue life on Earth is too complex to have evolved on its own.
As the name suggests, intelligent design is a concept invoking the hand of a designer in nature.
It's time to recognise that science and religion should never be pitted against each other Gilbert Omenn AAAS president
There have been several attempts across the US by anti-evolutionists to get intelligent design taught in school science lessons.
At the meeting in St Louis, the AAAS issued a statement strongly condemning the moves.
"Such veiled attempts to wedge religion - actually just one kind of religion - into science classrooms is a disservice to students, parents, teachers and tax payers," said AAAS president Gilbert Omenn.
"It's time to recognise that science and religion should never be pitted against each other.
"They can and do co-exist in the context of most people's lives. Just not in science classrooms, lest we confuse our children."
'Who's kidding whom?'
Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, which campaigns to keep evolution in public schools, said those in mainstream religious communities needed to "step up to the plate" in order to prevent the issue being viewed as a battle between science and religion.
Some have already heeded the warning.
"The intelligent design movement belittles evolution. It makes God a designer - an engineer," said George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory.
"Intelligent design concentrates on a designer who they do not really identify - but who's kidding whom?"
Last year, a federal judge ruled in favour of 11 parents in Dover, Pennsylvania, who argued that Darwinian evolution must be taught as fact.
Dover school administrators had pushed for intelligent design to be inserted into science teaching. But the judge ruled this violated the constitution, which sets out a clear separation between religion and state.
Despite the ruling, more challenges are on the way.
Fourteen US states are considering bills that scientists say would restrict the teaching of evolution.
These include a legislative bill in Missouri which seeks to ensure that only science which can be proven by experiment is taught in schools.
I think if we look at where the empirical scientific evidence leads us, it leads us towards intelligent design Teacher Mark Gihring "The new strategy is to teach intelligent design without calling it intelligent design," biologist Kenneth Miller, of Brown University in Rhode Island, told the BBC News website.
Dr Miller, an expert witness in the Dover School case, added: "The advocates of intelligent design and creationism have tried to repackage their criticisms, saying they want to teach the evidence for evolution and the evidence against evolution."
However, Mark Gihring, a teacher from Missouri sympathetic to intelligent design, told the BBC: "I think if we look at where the empirical scientific evidence leads us, it leads us towards intelligent design.
"[Intelligent design] ultimately takes us back to why we're here and the value of life... if an individual doesn't have a reason for being, they might carry themselves in a way that is ultimately destructive for society."
Economic risk
The decentralised US education system ensures that intelligent design will remain an issue in the classroom regardless of the decision in the Dover case.
"I think as a legal strategy, intelligent design is dead. That does not mean intelligent design as a social movement is dead," said Ms Scott.
"This is an idea that has real legs and it's going to be around for a long time. It will, however, evolve."
Among the most high-profile champions of intelligent design is US President George W Bush, who has said schools should make students aware of the concept.
But Mr Omenn warned that teaching intelligent design will deprive students of a proper education, ultimately harming the US economy.
"At a time when fewer US students are heading into science, baby boomer scientists are retiring in growing numbers and international students are returning home to work, America can ill afford the time and tax-payer dollars debating the facts of evolution," he said. Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/4731360.stm
Published: 2006/02/20 10:54:16 GMT
© BBC MMVI
No I haven't. I've established an objective yardstick against which to measure anyone's claims about God. There is a significant difference.
Why should I take your claims about the Almighty with any more validity than I take anyone else's, especially when you claims and his might not, in any way, match?
No one said "God's visions." We said "man's visions." You, yourself, claimed it was men's visions that were translated to Scripture and that is why we have such "minor" anomolies as bats being classed as birds.
Sorry--I meant visions sent from God.
I have not once asked you to take my word for anything. What I have repeatedly asked you is to you simply forsake the limits of your own understanding and human arrogance and seek the greater understanding of God's word. But I am repeating myself.
I have given you plenty to consider in a search for truths greater than that of your own understanding. If you are in fact seeking those truths. The Bible says that the power is in the seed of His word and not the sower. So I will leave you to ponder what I have wrote and beseech you again, to forsake just for a moment, the limits and the arrogance of your own understanding, a seek the greater understanding of God's word.
I'll be back later to see if you've learned anything.
How would you have him describe it? Their units of measurement were usually in whole numbers. He was talking in cubits. Should he have said "...thirty cubits and a small fraction that I'm not going to describe"?
Thirty-one and a half would've been closer. Once again, something the Almighty would not have overlooked (being the detail-oriented fellow He is).
...
Yup. When Genesis says "day", it means "day." Not some metaphorical period of time.
Hmmm.... So some books are "descriptions that people (in first-century Middle-East) would understand" while others are to be treated as modern history, biology, and physics textbooks. It is getting fairly easy to see how Christianity fractures into numerous factions.
My understanding of it and yours will not jibe (as yours will not jibe with folks' understanding if they come from a different denomination). One could then ask, why doesn't my understanding have equal or greater validity than yours? Mine at least tries for something objective, rather than the subjective experience of "divine revelation."
It would have been sufficient to simply say that it was 10 cubits across. Then, anyone who knew about pi would have automatically known the circumference. By going on to describe the circumference (incorrectly, given the diameter), it's obvious that the author didn't realize that the diameter alone is all that was needed.
Better to not mention the circumference than to give a wrong value for it.
No one said that. However, there are differences in the way Hebrew is written. Genesis is written in a narrative style, which indicates it should be taken literally. Other books were written in a different style. Much like poetry.
However, to take one minor point--no history recorded in the bible has been proved false. Some may seem false, but never proven false.
Quite what you would accept as a proof of falsehood I don't know. There is no geological evidence whatsoever of a global flood about 4000 years ago; nothing of what we would expect to see if that story is true can be found. Likewise there is no genetic bottleneck, on the contrary the genetic diversity of humanity and other species whose genomes have been mapped is far too great for humanity to originate from 8 people that recently. (The situation for other species, with their 2 founders from the ark is even worse). You can argue that God "fiddled" to create the current appearance of no flood and excessive genetic diversity, but the possibility of such fiddling makes any disproof of Biblical writ impossible, since any contradictory evidence can then be put down to God editing the evidence for inscrutable reasons of His own.
Who said that the narrative passages should be taken literally while the poetic ones whould be taken as allegory? Why shouldn't it be the other way round?
This is not science's charter. So it is not a failing of science that it doesn't try.
Those answers will never be found in the minds of men.
Perhaps not. But the major, persistent ethical failings of those who thought to look for them in the minds of Gods gives me no optimism that seeking these answers is a fruitful enterprise. Let's ask Galileo and Bruno, and 100,000 or so jews, gypsies, or anabaptists horribly murdered by the agents of God's Perfect Love what they think of the project, why don't we?
I argue no such thing. Again, I go back to intrepration of the data and our understanding of how things "should" work. I genuinely believe that we don't even know what we don't know about genetics and dating.
s/intrepration/interpretation/
'Cause it riles you up so!
Well, now, God must be particularly proud of your motivation. Does God think you should also torture the innocent grand-children of those who mocked him? Does God think you should pull the wings off flies, as well?
(PSST: Some folks think it's "The Word of GOD"
(psst: some folks burned Bruno to death because of the "word of God". Do you think any kind of cruel behavior can be justified by convincing yourself you have have God on sidelines cheerleading?) Small wonder the founding fathers didn't want your ilk running the show anymore.
Gee, that looks mightily like a primitive, Bronze Age cosmology operating there. One which has no idea what a star is.
So basically, when you say that historic events in the Bible aren't disproven, what you really mean is that you are content to reject any scientific investigation or conclusion that appears to reject the results that you would like to see. No-one who hasn't signed up to the inerrancy of the bible has the slightest difficulty with dating methods (multiply cross-confirmed with numerous other data). The geologists who first decided that there was no global flood *were* biblical creationists, and they were surprised by their own findings. No evidence has appeared since to contradict them.
Your point about interpretation is an oft-repeated fallacy of those who reject the findings of science. Science isn't about interpretation. Interpretation of observations to form a hypothesis is the first stage in a long road that leads to theory. Critically theories have to make successful predictions of as-yet unmade observations. Standard scientific theories in the fields of astronomy/physics/geology/paleontology/genetics/geography/archeology/cosmology all falsify YEC, and they *don't* just rest on interpretation of the data. They have made successful predictions which had no reason to come true unless the theories were correct.
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