Posted on 08/16/2004 9:40:47 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Samuel Chen was a high school sophomore who believed in freedom of speech and the unfettered pursuit of knowledge. He thought his public high school did, too, but when it came to the subject of evolution -- well, now he's not so sure.
In October 2002, Chen began working to get Dr. Michael Behe, professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University, to give a lecture at Emmaus High School in Emmaus, Pennsylvania.
Chen, who was co-chair of a student group that tries to stress the importance of objectivity on controversial issues, knew that Behe would be perfect, since the group was examining evolution as a topic. The author of Darwin's Black Box, a critique of the foundational underpinnings of evolution, Behe had presented his work and debated the subject in universities in the U.S. and England.
Behe agreed to come in February 2004 and give an after-school lecture entitled, "Evolution: Truth or Myth?" As the school year drew to a close in 2003, Chen had all the preliminaries nailed down: he had secured Behe's commitment, received approval from school officials, and reserved the school auditorium.
Then he found out just how entrenched Darwinist orthodoxy was in the science department at Emmaus. By the following August, Chen had entered into a six-month battle to preserve the Behe lecture.
As the struggle unfolded, it became obvious that those who opposed Behe coming to Emmaus didn't seem to care about his credentials. In addition to publishing over 35 articles in refereed biochemical journals, Darwin's Black Box was internationally reviewed in over 100 publications and named by National Review and World magazine as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century.
Instead, it was Behe's rejection of Darwinism -- in favor of what is called "intelligent design" -- that drove opposition. According to the Discovery Institute, of which Behe is a fellow, this theory holds "that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."
The head of the science department, John Hnatow, sent a statement to every faculty member in the school stressing that Emmaus held to the official policy of the National Science Teachers Association. That policy states: "There is no longer a debate among scientists about whether evolution has taken place."
It appeared there would be no debate at Emmaus, either. Some of the science teachers would not even allow Chen to address their classes and explain to students what Behe's lecture would be about.
Chen said various tactics were apparently used to undercut the event, including an attempt to cancel the lecture and fold the student organization without the knowledge of Chen and other members; requiring that the necessary funds for the lecture be raised much faster than for other student events; and moving the lecture from the auditorium to the school cafeteria.
One science teacher in particular, Carl Smartschan, seemed particularly riled about the upcoming lecture. Smartschan took it upon himself to talk to every teacher in the science department, insisting that intelligent design was "unscientific" and "scary stuff." He asked the principal to cancel the lecture, and then, when the principal refused, asked the faculty advisor for the student group to halt the lecture. Smartschan even approached Chen and demanded that the student organization pay to have an evolutionist come to lecture later in the year.
Smartschan's campaign to get the Behe lecture canceled was surprising to Chen because the event was scheduled after school, and not during class time, and was sponsored by a student group, not the school itself. Nevertheless, Chen persevered. The lecture was a success, attracting more than 500 people.
In the process, however, Chen's struggle took its toll. His health deteriorated over the course of the controversy, to the point where he collapsed three times in one month, including once at school. "My health has been totally junked," he told AFA Journal.
Brian Fahling, senior trial attorney and senior policy advisor for the American Family Association Center for Law & Policy, is advising Chen on his options for the coming year. Fahling said, "Schools are not allowed to interfere with viewpoints with which they disagree, and schools cannot disrupt the right of the students to participate in the academic and intellectual life."
Despite the hardship, Chen said he would do it all over again because the issue is so important. "I feel that there's a dictatorship on academic freedom in our public schools now," he said, adding, "I refer to evolution education as a tyranny .... You can't challenge it in our schools. Kids have been thrown out of class for challenging it."
That tyranny can be intimidating to students. "Some of the students who support me are afraid to speak out, especially because they saw how the science department reacted," Chen said. "They have a fear of speaking out against it in their classes."
On the other hand, he added that some students "are now questioning evolution, some for the first time."
That may be the first step in the overthrow of Darwin's dictatorship.
Secondly, it is impractical to ask a bunch of students, many of whom probably don't have cars, to travel away from the school to another facility for an after-school event. By holding the event on campus many people who by their own free will wanted to attend were likely able to do so, when they would not have been were it held somewhere else.
And finally, you're simply diverting the issue to keep from addressing the central point: if a school opens its facilities for after-school use by student-organized meetings, it cannot discriminate based on the content of those meetings. So if they let an atheist organization meet, or a Republican organization meet, the must also permit a Christian group to meet as well.
How so, Mr. Grumpy? Does every article ever published "relate" to ID?
The original post seemed to set up a strawman.
So you claimed. But which you have yet to demonstrate.
OTOH, school is not there to posit every crackpot idea. There is not enough time to teach the basics as is.
Behe has published on Histone structure in J. Mol. Bio. and other journals.
The point being that therefore "ID" is true or proven? No.
The point being the type of weird denials and smears that go on here by the anti-Creationists are like the dem and lib tactics.
As an aside I wasn't able to read his book. It was too dull.
And they are not. This was an after-school meeting organized by a student group.
Design theory—also called design or the design argument—is the view that nature shows tangible signs of having been designed by a preexisting intelligence. It has been around, in one form or another, since the time of ancient Greece. The most famous version of the design argument can be found in the work of theologian William Paley, who in 1802 proposed his "watchmaker" thesis. His reasoning went like this:
In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever. ... But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think the answer which I had before given [would be sufficient].[1]
To the contrary, the fine coordination of all its parts would force us to conclude that:
… the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. [2]
Paley argued that we can draw the same conclusion about many natural objects, such as the eye. Just as a watch’s parts are all perfectly adapted for the purpose of telling time, the parts of an eye are all perfectly adapted for the purpose of seeing. In each case, Paley argued, we discern the marks of an intelligent designer.
Although Paley’s basic notion was sound, and influenced thinkers for decades, Paley never provided a rigorous standard for detecting design in nature. Detecting design depended on such vague standards as being able to discern an object’s "purpose." Moreover, Paley and other "natural theologians" tried to reason from the facts of nature to the existence of a wise and benevolent God.
All of these things made design an easy target for Charles Darwin when he proposed his theory of evolution. Whereas Paley saw a finely-balanced world attesting to a kind and just God, Darwin pointed to nature’s imperfections and brutishness. Although Darwin had once been an admirer of Paley, Darwin’s own observations and experiences—especially the cruel, lingering death of his 9-year-old daughter Annie in 1850—destroyed whatever belief he had in a just and moral universe.
Following the triumph of Darwin’s theory, design theory was all but banished from biology. Since the 1980s, however, advances in biology have convinced a new generation of scholars that Darwin’s theory was inadequate to account for the sheer complexity of living things. These scholars—chemists, biologists, mathematicians and philosophers of science—began to reconsider design theory. They formulated a new view of design that avoids the pitfalls of previous versions.
Called intelligent design (ID), to distinguish it from earlier versions of design theory (as well as from the naturalistic use of the term design), this new approach is more modest than its predecessors. Rather than trying to infer God’s existence or character from the natural world, it simply claims "that intelligent causes are necessary to explain the complex, information-rich structures of biology and that these causes are empirically detectable." [3]
More info:
But unlike you and your fellow believers here I don;t go through life grumpy.
Exactly. You said it far more elegantly than I.
He should have made up a claim that Behe was a "male lesbian". Then the school would have fallen all over themselves to assist in bringing him to school.
If the school allows the use of school facilities after school hours for extracurricular student groups, then it cannot discriminate between them based on content. If they let a student Republican group meet, they must let a student Christian group meet. In this after-school context, religious discrimination is not permitted.
This statement is BS. I can take hydrogen, add oxygen and burn it off to get water. Burning hydrogen will ALWAYS produce water, no ifs and or buts. Evolution cannot be so duplicated in the lab.
How happy I am that my particular branch of scientific insterest, astronomy, is not home to the closed-minded morons that inhabit the biological sciences.
Evolution is a house of cards.
A house of cards that will never fall, due to it's ability to reinvent itself and evolve with every new discovery.
Riiiight.
All scientists are close-minded.
Riiiight.
How do you reconcile your beliefs with the overwhelming belief in the Big Bang amongst astronomers?
Astronomy provides proof that the universe isn't a few mere thousands of years old.
If the church isn't within convenient walking distance of the school, I'm certain the school has a bus that transports sudents to the neighborhood where the church is located. And arrengements can be made among the parents to pick 'em up afterwards. If that is too "inconvenient", than I doubt that the parents have much interest in their child's religious training anyway.
Howdy! I don't think ID cares who the designer *was*. Check out my ID FAQ on post #46.
No. It is very intellectually dishonest.
Behe is a professor of biology or biochemistry. There is no analogy such as was made. It is dishonest.
Let's see. Hopespringseternal says that "closed-minded morons that inhabit the biological sciences."
You somehow extrapolate this to "all scientists are close-minded."
Your logical ability astounds me.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.