Professor Dumped Over Evolution Beliefs

http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/3/112003a.asp ^ | March 11, 2003 | Jim Brown and Ed Vitagliano

[Remedy]

A university professor said she was asked to resign for introducing elite students to flaws in Darwinian thought, and she now says academic freedom at her school is just a charade.

During a recent honors forum at Mississippi University for Women (MUW), Dr. Nancy Bryson gave a presentation titled "Critical Thinking on Evolution" -- which covered alternate views to evolution such as intelligent design. Bryson said that following the presentation, a senior professor of biology told her she was unqualified and not a professional biologist, and said her presentation was "religion masquerading as science."

The next day, Vice President of Academic Affairs, Dr. Vagn Hansen asked Bryson to resign from her position as head of the school's Division of Science and Mathematics.

"The academy is all about free thought and academic freedom. He hadn't even heard my talk," Bryson told American Family Radio News. "[W]ithout knowing anything about my talk, he makes that decision. I think it's just really an outrage."

Bryson believes she was punished for challenging evolutionary thought and said she hopes her dismissal will smooth the way for more campus debate on the theory of evolution. University counsel Perry Sansing said MUW will not comment on why Bryson was asked to resign because it is a personnel matter.

"The best reaction," Bryson says, "and the most encouraging reaction I have received has been from the students." She added that the students who have heard the talk, "They have been so enthusiastically supportive of me."

Bryson has contacted the American Family Association Center for Law and Policy and is considering taking legal action against the school.

[balrog666]

Nice try, but the onus is still on you to prove something. So as you say "Put up or shut up".

I'd be happy to say I've proved you're invincibly ignorant about the nature and philosophy of science. But you did it all by yourself. Have fun wallowing in your little see-no-evolution playground.

[Doctor Stochastic]

You will posting where in the Scopes trial "Nebraska Man" was cited as evidence, of course.

[bondserv]

gomaaa,

Thank you for your respectful approach to discussion. I very much appreciate your measured responses.

I take it that you rely on historical (prophecy) proofs as a basis for your faith. I respect that, but would question why it is necessary?

My point here is that for discussion purposes regarding religious matters, provable issues are limited to historical accuracy of the prophecies, and historical facts, but is not by any means a basis for faith. These provable truths only reinforce the confidence that we do have a reasonable faith that is not purely nebulous. These can be coupled with moral truths that can be functionally proven to be the best way for life to be experienced (these can be demonstrated in philosophical/political/judicial proofs i.e. laws, rules, limitations and freedoms...the United States being the closest example of adherence to Biblical mandates in history).

I really must disagree with you here. The majority of Christians I know, including some who are VERY conservative in their views on religion, do not take the Bible as literally true.

My experience with Christians who dismiss the literalness of the Bible is that they can be quickly undermined in any discussion of questions of their faith. It seems that many liberal academic Seminaries tend to take the position that the text of the scriptures should be forced to fit the evidence that secular academia presents. Therefore they must cast off many passages of scripture as mythological or a nice story with no factual truth.

I and most Evangelical Christians have found that most interpretation mistakes the Church has made over the past 2000 years can be directly tied to the parties failure to take the passage literally when the text doesn't clearly suggest an allegorical message. Most Old Earth Creationists have a tendency to over allegorize passages in order to tweak the passage to fit scientific beliefs.

A reasonable faith, that is based on a message to us that has been provided by God in their original documents, is what I believe and will gladly defend with intellectual honesty intact.

When I step into eternity with all of my persceptions, hopefully with you at my side, we can expect to understand all that we today question. For the time being I will gladly attempt to give food for thought on those passages that your friends seem to struggle with, as well as attempt to compare scientific evidence that has Scriptual significance, to the truths revealed in the Bible.

[Boiler Plate]

I'd be happy to say I've proved you're invincibly ignorant about the nature and philosophy of science. But you did it all by yourself. Have fun wallowing in your little see-no-evolution playground.

Balrog,

Ahh yes, the tried and true "Evo" "Insult when you can't win" strategy. Unfortunately all you have in fact proved is that you don't know anything about science as you repeatedly ignore even grade school text books and misuse definitions that directly contradict what you are trying say. Apparently you view this as some sort of personal war and can not discuss this subject in anything that even remotely resembles civility or intellectuality. Your childish insults only condemn yourself.

Thanks for adding to the prepondurance of evidence that the Evo's provide the overwhelming number of invectives, diatribes and non sensical babble. Kindest Regards,
Boiler Plate

[Dataman]

In other words, there would be no reason from Newton to even have questioned Biblical creation.

Isaac Newton was the greatest scientist who has ever lived. It is, in fact, generally accepted that he is the greatest scientist who ever will live, since no one, no matter how brilliant, will ever again be in such a unique historical position. Of unequaled mental ability during his entire adult life until his death at age 85, Newton's powers are legendary.

Isaac Newton believed that the Bible is literally true in every respect. Throughout his life, he continually tested Biblical truth against the physical truths of experimental and theoretical science. He never observed a contradiction. In fact, he viewed his own scientific work as a method by which to reinforce belief in Biblical truth.

Of course you (I feel a Joooooooonyer coming on), Jr, posess a substantial enough intelligence to sit in judgement of him without (obviously) knowing much about him.

Allow me to broaden your narrow education by pointing out the first evolutionist, Anaximander. When you look him up, you'll find he lived B.C. which means "before Newton." Here are a couple of old-earthers, one alive when Newton was, the other predates him by a couple of millenia:

Late in the 18th century, a small number of European scientists began to quietly suggest that life forms are not fixed. The French zoologist, George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon , actually said that living things do change through time and that the Earth must be much older than 6000 years. In 1774, in fact, he speculated that the Earth must be at least 75,000 years old.

Berossos, writing in Greek ca. 289 B.C., reported that according to Mesopotamian belief 432,000 years elapsed between the crowning of the first earthly king and the coming of the deluge. [The early Sumerian king list names eight kings with a total of 241,200 years from the time when "the kingship was lowered from heaven" to the time when "the Flood swept" over the land once more "the kingship was lowered from heaven" (Thorkild Jacobsen, The Sumerian King List, 1939, pp. 71, 77).]

I think 289 BC is a little before Newton's time.

You may now remove foot from mouth.

[Junior]

You're all over the board on this one. Newton may have been one of the most brilliant people to ever live, but he had very little to work with when it came to refuting Biblical creation. Folks wouldn't even start considering the Bible might be wrong for another hundred years or so. Your little quote from ancient Greece really has nothing to do with organisms changing from generation to generation, but simply states the Mesopatamians thought the world was nearly half a million years old. As your quote was published in 1939, there may be some possibility that Newton was unaware of the Mesopatamian view, and would have probably rightly have lumped it in with Greek mythology had he known. In other words, your post has been "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

[Lurking Libertarian]

Unfortunately all you have in fact proved is that you don't know anything about science as you repeatedly ignore even grade school text books

Grade school text books are not the most reliable sources of scientific knowledge. I'm sure you know that. Are you just trying to score cheap rhetorical points?

[Nataku X]

Ah, I see. That's how an evolutionist can be postmodernist, liberal, conservative, racist, Nazi, and Marxist all at the same time... makes perfect sense.

[balrog666]

Unfortunately all you have in fact proved is that you don't know anything about science as you repeatedly ignore even grade school text books and ...

Bleeding-edge science isn't conducted by grade school textbook definitions. Can you really not understand that?

You are trying to get us to believe that your version of fantasy science somehow trumps the accepted method used since Roger Bacon.

Yes, exactly. Don't you understand that Popper has changed the definition of what science is by changing it's logical and rational foundations? If not, ask one of your parents to explain it to you.

misuse definitions that directly contradict what you are trying say.

Then show us an example. Or is this just one more of your baseless BS assertions?

Oh, and let's revisit this whopper:

So if you would like to continue to suggest that TOE is valid and true, please provide that time and place of the first succesful abiogenesis experiment and what life form was created in that near famous moment?

Are you willing to admit that the Theory of Evolution has nothing to do with abiogenesis?

[PatrickHenry]

Isn't BP the same fellow who asked me for the name of the first human who had non-human ancestors?

[BMCDA]

Non-human placemarker

[PatrickHenry]

As I always suspected.

[longshadow]

Something to share with the folks who are all hung up on superficial grade-school level definitions of scientific theories, and who rely on same to demand scientific theories be "PROVEN":

In epistemology we want to know why we think our beleifs about the world are true. In the work of Popper we are looking specifically about the theories upon which science is based. The case of scientific theories presents us with particular problems. These are all to do with the lack of any direct or definite proof or disproof of the truth of scientific theories, thus how do we choose between conflicting theories? With the absence of a decision process is science a rational process as we have been led to beleive, or are we faced with a kind of science fetishism which cloaks itself in reason but has no real validity.

Science aims at theories which explain natural phenomena. More precisely, science is looking for theories which tell us about the causation of phenomena and they aim at generality, explaining a particular effect by showing it to be caused by some general regularity of nature. It is this search for generality of scientific theories that precludes our establishing their definite proof. We can examine only a very small proportion of all the cases covered by a general theory which is intended to apply over all space and time as part of its claim. So, because of their generality we cannot verify scientific theories or even be sure they are probable with anything like mathematical certainty. Therefore how can we trust them?

It is difficult to trust what cannot be proved and here Karl Popper overturns the argument by stating that proof is not necesarry but what is important is the concept of falsifiability. Precisely because of the universality of a general scientific theory which states that all phenomena of a certain class have such and such characteristics, only one counter-example is needed to show that the theory is false. Science should attempt to submit theories to the most stringent testing possible and make predictions which have not yet been tested. Poppers favourite example is Einsteins special theory of relativity which in 1905 [sic; he means the General Theory, not Special Relativity] predicted that light was bent by heavenly bodies, this was not tested until the eclipse of the sun in 1919. Thus theories which can easily be tested will be weeded out quickly if false and those that survive can be retained, but even these can only be kept on a provisional basis. The problem of induction prevents the passing of the tests proving the correctness of the theory.

Ther[e]fore science is rational in Poppers view because though complete proof is impossible it follows a critical approach testing theories against the natural world and making predictions for as yet undiscoverd effects.

This thesis was first elucidated in The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

[emphasis added to highlight the fact, and reasons why, scientific theories are never "proven"]

Thus, as you can see, scientific theories are tentatively held as accurate pending disproof by rigorous, frequent attempts at falsification, because there is no method of logically dismissing every possible observation that could falsify it. The falsification process is deductive, not inductive, and hence provides the basis on which we can conclude with certitude that a theory is false, even though we can never be sure with any degree of logical certitude that one is true. Such is the nature of science; it works by deductive exclusion. What is left is held only provisionally.

[BMCDA]

Arrgh! Got me

[Con X-Poser]

Now they will have to rewrite the cosmic evolution chapters in all the textbooks - again. I wonder how many decades it will take until they get this updated?

From a friend:

Now that the March 15 edition of Science News has arrived, I'm finally getting around to posting some information from the March 1 issue. In a feature article "Mature before their time: In the youthful universe, some galaxies were already old " by Ron Cowen, there is some information pointing to possible problems for the standard model of cosmogony.

"In mid-December, scientists announced in a press release that they had found a group of distant galaxies that were already senior citizens, chockablock with elderly, red stars in year 2 billion years after the Big Bang.... Some of those galaxies were nearly as large as the largest galaxies in the universe today."

"On Jan. 7, another team posted on online report asserting it had found that the oldest, and therefore most distant galaxy known. If confirmed, the study indicates that some galaxies were in place and forming stars at a prolific rate when the universe, now 13.7 billion years old, was just an 800 million year old whippersnapper."

"The next galaxy-shaking event occurred on Jan. 9when astronomers reported in Seattle at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society that they had found the farthest known quasar. This quasar is so distant that the light it emitted 13 billion years ago, when the universe was so young that galactic structures were still forming, has only now reached Earth.... The light... is so bright that it almost certainly was fueled by a super-massive black hole that already had coalesced and lead several billion times the mass of the sun. "

"In the Jan. 23 Nature, other researchers reported evidence that such black holes indeed formed early ... and we're already devouring matter voraciously a mere billion years after the big bang... "

"Finally, on Feb. 11, cosmologists unveiled at a NASA press briefing in Washington, D.C., [a study of] the cosmic microwave background ... An analysis of the radiation revealed that the universe had already managed to make a plethora of stars-- which had enough collective energy to ionize all the hydrogen in the cosmos-- just 200,000,000 years after the Big Bang... that's several hundred million years earlier than many astronomers had estimated. "

"However... it's still uncertain how much of the chapter on early galaxy formation will need to be rewritten."

"Astronomers have known for more than a decade that a few rare galaxies, which arose in unusually dense regions of the universe, managed to acquire a large amount of mass in a short amount of time. "

"But the standard model still can't easily account for a large number of much shorter or massive galaxies in the early universe."

"The biggest challenge to the standard model of galaxy formation... could be the number of large galaxies showing the spiral structure... in the early universe. ... the number of large spirals ... is double that predicted by the standard theory..."

"One caveat... There's no consensus on whether the galaxies {in the study}our representative of the universe at large... near-infrared observations of another tiny patch, known as Hubble Deep Field North, don't show a similar population of old or large galaxies... "

On the other hand, the findings showing all those spiral galaxies "aren't the only evidence for a significant population of rapidly maturity galaxies in the early universe. At a galaxy-formation meeting in mid-January in Aspen, Colo., [a researcher] reported other evidence that the 2-billion-year-old universe was populated with as many galaxies marked by a red, senior starters as by blue, more youthful stars. "

"'This is an important result if true, but it's an extrapolation' from a limited data set, cautions Harry C. Ferguson of the Space Telescope Science Institute. If accurate, this new view of Galactic demography might force astronomers to rethink the fundamentals of galaxy formation. "

"it would also solve a puzzle cited by Ferguson and his collaborators in the April 20, 2002 Astrophysical Journal: Young, star-forming galaxies seen in the early universe don't have enough energy to have stripped hydrogen atoms of their lone electrons. If hydrogen atoms in the intergalactic medium had remained un-ionized, they would have absorbed all the starlight and the universe would have stayed dark. Ferguson speculates that the population of massive galaxies seen only with infrared detectors might be the hidden dynamo responsible for the extensive ionization... "

[PatrickHenry]

Good post. Yes, it was the General Theory.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Lilith?

[Boiler Plate]

BR,

Did you not read your own post? Popper stated that

"First, a theory which can't make predictions is a dead end. Second, it would be useless. Oil companies are very pleased that geologists can predict where to drill for oil. And third, if we have two rival theories, we want to use evidence to choose between them. If they are unfalsifiable, then evidence doesn't do that for us. "

In the end a theory has to provide something meaningful such as predictions. The predictions should be lead to something that is tangible or provable. In the case Popper provides it is oil. You somehow believe that a theory should just exist because no one can disprove it. What about sea monsters in the black holes, can you disprove that? You are hanging on to an ever more untenable position. Text book definitions may not be bleeding edge however they would be a step up from what ever you call science.

As far as abiogensis goes, are you willing to admit that it never happened?

Best Regards,
Boiler Plate

[Boiler Plate]

Lurk,

How could I score cheap rhetorical points against someone who's mainstay of arguing his point is cheap shots and insults?

As far as the text book goes I was only referencing the "Scientific Method" that has been in use since Roger Bacon proposed it in the 1200's. Popper has decided to add to it, which is fair enough, however to say that the Scientific Method is dead and gone is a little over the top.

Thanks for asking, I hope I answered to your satisfaction.

Regards,
Boiler Plate

[RadioAstronomer]

Digging out of the blizzard place marker. :-)