Christian medical students want anti-evolution lectures

Aftenposten (Norway News) ^ | 19 Nov 2003 | Jonathan Tisdall

[yonif]

Medical student John David Johannessen and the leader of the Christian Medical Students Circle have petitioned the medical faculty at the University of Oslo for lectures "that not only argue the cause for evolution, but also the evidence against", student newspaper Universitas reports.

"The theory of evolution doesn't stand up and does not present enough convincing facts. It is one theory among many, but in education it is discussed as if it is accepted by everyone," Johannessen said.

Johannessen is a believer in creationism, based on the biblical account.

"Of course one has to know the theory of evolution, it is after all part of the curriculum. But certain lecturers demand that one believe it as well. Then it becomes a question of faith and not subject," Johannessen said.

Johannessen told the newspaper that he and his fellows are often compared to American extremists. Besides not being taken seriously or being able to debate the topic relevantly, Johannessen said that 'evolutionists' practically harass those who do not agree with them.

Dean Per Brodal said it was regrettable if any university staff were disparaging to creationists, but that there was no reason to complain about a lack of relevant evidence. Brodal also felt that evolution had a rather minor spot in medical education.

Biology professor Nils Christian Stenseth argued that instead of indulging an 'off-topic' debate the medical faculty should offer a course in fundamental evolutionary biology, saying that nothing in biology could be understood out of an evolutionary context.

The Christian Medical Students Circle want three basic points to be included in the curriculum:

1 According to the theory of evolution a mutation must be immediately beneficial to survive through selection. But many phenomena explained by evolution (for example the eye) involve so many, small immediately detrimental mutations that only give a long-term beneficial effect.

2 There is no fossil evidence to indicate transitional forms between, for example, fish and land animals or apes and humans.

3 Evolution assumes too many extremely improbably events occurring over too short a span of time.

[Gunslingr3]

Magic being...? Don't stand so close to me.

Magic, miracles, whatever you want to call it. BTW, I'm not standing by you at all.

Course their is no magic in belieiving that we all arrived by evolution, yet no one knows what it is that we evolved from. Life form zero.

Life from zero is your assumption, otherwise you are correct, we don't yet know everything. A full understanding of how living organisms function and reproduce has not been established. But, upon reaching the extent of their knowledge scientists do not assume a magic man is responsible for everything they can't explain - they simply push on to further their understanding.

It seems that evolution should not be taught at all unless the proponents of theory acknowledge there has to be, a priori, something to evolve from, and two, we don't know what that original organism that all life evolved from is.

Oh, that's just too picky. Let's go ahead with evolution without caveats, we seem to be so much more high-brow that way.

What we're aware of is the functioning and genetic composition of much of life. Further exploration may yet learn that life itself is a force working in tandem with other differentiated forces in the universe (gravity, strong and weak nuclear, etc.) It certainly takes advantage of how the universe works itself to work (chemical bonding, etc.) Whether causality is unlocked back to the initial processes of life's emergence remains to be seen, but I'll take scientific investigation over myth.

Should religious instruction 'not be taught at all unless the proponents of religion acknowledge there has to be a priori'? Do you have to acknowledge something came before god to acknowledge god?

[MEGoody]

Why doesn't the university host a debate between an evolutionist and a creationist? The debate venue is not unusual in the university environment, is it?

[MEGoody]

"These are the future doctors I would not want treating me."

Because they don't believe life came from non-life all by itself, you don't want them treating you?

You have strange criteria.

[MEGoody]

"Shouldn't they just go to a Christian medical school instead of dictating curriculum?"

Shouldn't universities be encouraging critical thinking and academic freedom and diversity of ideas?

[MEGoody]

"In a related development, other students ask to teach Tibetan medicine and zen shiatsu therapy"

There's probably a university or two already teaching that.

[RightWhale]

Here we go, GEOS F112X The History of Earth and Life 4.0 Cr. Meets core breadth or depth natural science requirement or natural science degree requirement with lab. Cool? Be kind of a waste of time and money if we can simply read half a page and get everything a geoscientist would need to know.

[job]

>>What we're aware of is the functioning and genetic composition of much of life. Further exploration may yet learn that life itself is a force working in tandem with other differentiated forces in the universe (gravity, strong and weak nuclear, etc.) It certainly takes advantage of how the universe works itself to work (chemical bonding, etc.) Whether causality is unlocked back to the initial processes of life's emergence remains to be seen, but I'll >>take scientific investigation over myth.


But here's the deal: evolution, by its very definition depends on something having come before it. It can't happen, it can't even get started, unless there was an initial something to start from. Yet, this huge, elemental part of the theory is swept under the rug and left unexplained, while changes in brachiopod ridges are discussed instead.

You sir, believe in a magic man, whether you admit it or not, you just call your magic man "Chaos Theory."

[Abe Froman]

If you are claiming that they are wrong in their assertion then please do reveal your ground-breaking evidence that the entire field of paleontology has failed to provide.

"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.…
Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study." Professor Stephen Jay Gould,
The Panda's Thumb, 1980, pp.179-181.

"Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least 'show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.'
I will lay it on the line–there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record." Dr. Colin Patterson,
Senior Palaeontologist, British Museum of Natural History, London "Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems," [1984], Master Book Publishers: El Cajon CA, Fourth Edition, 1988, p89

[Abe Froman]

If we're talking a legal-type proof to determine an event, then a debate is the perfect forum. No living human was there to observe either creation or evolution. The theory of evolution stipulates that events occurred that, to modern biologic science, would be indistinguishable from a miracle. No one has ever observed life evolving from non-life in the natural world nor made it happen in the laboratory. Therefore to contend that in spite of our observations it DID happen is not science. Science is the study of the testable, repeatable, and verifiable. Evolution meets none of those requirements.

[Abe Froman]

"Further exploration may yet learn that life itself is a force working in tandem with other differentiated forces in the universe (gravity, strong and weak nuclear, etc.) It certainly takes advantage of how the universe works itself to work (chemical bonding, etc.) Whether causality is unlocked back to the initial processes of life's emergence remains to be seen, but I'll take scientific investigation over myth."


That you would accuse evolutionary skeptics of mythology while similarly asserting vague cosmic references that admittedly "remain to be seen" is the most breathtaking piece of doublespeak I have ever heard.

[RightWingNilla]

If you are claiming that they are wrong in their assertion then please do reveal your ground-breaking evidence that the entire field of paleontology has failed to provide.

Failed to provide? Do you have any idea what you are talking about? There are plenty of fossils in the catalog which provide clear evolutionary histories of many organisms. The example of "apes to man" is a lame one to say the least (I repeat, how did these morons get into medical school?). We have the skulls and other bone fragments from Australopithecus, Homo habillis, etc. From a link I have bookmarked.

The FReeper VadeRetro has collected a veritable database of these findings and has presented them here often.

[stanz]

We have never observed life springing from non-life in the natural world nor the laboratory.

Evolution speaks to how life has changed and adapted over geologic time. Species either survive or go extinct. That is an observable phenomenon and doesn't require any faith on the part of the student.
Biologists (and medical students) need to study evolution which focuses on comparative anatomy and functional morphology to gain insight into the workings of how, developmentally, we are related to other species and how this may affect our own evolutionary destiny.
Tempering one's biology curriculum by favoring the Big Etch-A-Sketch in the sky story to explain phenomena over tenets tested on the basis of observable evidence requires nothing more than faith and that is bad science.

[stanz]

Read my post #33.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

The Christian Medical Students Circle want three basic points to be included in the curriculum:

1 According to the theory of evolution a mutation must be immediately beneficial to survive through selection. But many phenomena explained by evolution (for example the eye) involve so many, small immediately detrimental mutations that only give a long-term beneficial effect.

2 There is no fossil evidence to indicate transitional forms between, for example, fish and land animals or apes and humans.

3 Evolution assumes too many extremely improbably events occurring over too short a span of time.

"All the evidence contradicting our position should be ignored," he added.

[RightWhale]

What else: there is only one man who could possibly pull this off, lecture on Creationism. I forget--what's his name? He's good, darned good. Any credentialed philosopher could turn his case into a rapidly expanding gas anyway.

[Abe Froman]

"Tempering one's biology curriculum by favoring the Big Etch-A-Sketch in the sky story to explain phenomena over tenets tested on the basis of observable evidence requires nothing more than faith and that is bad science."

Evolution does far more than that, if you are not aware. Evolution attempts to explain origins by stipulating a method by which the extravaganza of life on earth could come into being without a need for a supernatural act of a Creator. However, those methods remain unexplained at all the key moments, the most important of which being the actual origin of life itself. If you are concerned with the "observable evidence" then you should probably go out and find some to contradict what is otherwise completely and utterly fatal to the entire theory of evolution. Without a method for random natural processes to circumvent the as-yet observedly unbroken Law of Biogenesis, the theory of evolution is a mountain of speculation built on a sand castle to a degree that makes securities trading look like hard science.

To believe in spontaneous generation requires, in my opinion, far more faith than the creationist, for the creationist stipulates that forces were in action that cannot be explained or understood. The evolutionist asserts that the laws governing matter, energy, thermodynamics, and biology as we know them all today, were at multiple points apparently violated, yet not by a being that had the ability to do so (a Creator.) We are to believe they were simply violated in spite of all known observations to the contrary. That is not science. That is faith.

[spunkets]

"No living human was there to observe either creation or evolution."

Of course they weren't there at creation, but they aere and are there for evolution. Take the condition of sickle cell anemia. Thats a condition that results from exactly the type of genetic change that ddrives evolution. Normally SSA would have dropped to an insignificant number of occurances, but the presence of malaria changed that. Folks with SSA live much longer with malaria than folks with normal hemoglobin, because the parasite infested red blood cells of SSA victims don't plug the capillaries up like normal ones do. The occurrence of SSA in some areas of Africa was ~20-30%. The trait occurs at ~8% in African Americans.

" The theory of evolution stipulates that events occurred that, to modern biologic science, would be indistinguishable from a miracle."

Not. The evidence indicates evolution occurred. The evidence is extensive and can be understood. If one rejects this, they can't possibly understand genetics, molecular biology and treat disease. They'd be no different than shamen.

"No one has ever observed life evolving from non-life in the natural world nor made it happen in the laboratory."

See SSA. In the same way folks understand the sun's workings...ect., they can know the workings of biology.

" Therefore to contend that in spite of our observations it DID happen is not science.

The science still stands.

" Science is the study of the testable, repeatable, and verifiable. Evolution meets none of those requirements."

Yes it does.

[mgstarr]

It would be at this point that f.Christian would post that silly hominid tree graphic and begin speaking in a strange clipped manner.

[Quick1]

The Theory of Evolution says absolutely nothing about where we may or may not have come from. You are referring to Abiogenisis.