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.
First, you need to define "life." I'm not being coy. The simpler you get, organism-wise, the more difficult it becomes to separate life from non-life. If life is defined as "consumption, growth, replication" (which is one definition I've seen) then you get into the problems with self-replicating molecules. Hell, technically, a glacier would be considered "live" by that definition.
I dated a glacier once. But only once.
Certainty is for freshman logic class. In the real world, we deal with the preponderance of the evidence, coupled with our inductive skills.
...why no one has been able to point me to a resource that rigorously demonstrates probability of life being created and evolving to its current state through chance and natural selection.
I already discussed that. As I said, post hoc attempts to calculate the odds of singular events are worthless, and therefore nobody wastes much time trying. You seem to think otherwise, but any "answer" you come up with is going to be essentially meaningless, because it will be wholly dependent on whatever your a priori assumptions are, assumptions that you have no way to test, and therefore cannot really justify in any rigorous fashion.
That's your small, technical problem inherent in the thing you seek. The larger, deeper problem you have is that your question comes about because you've fallen into the same teleological trap that grabs hold of most critics. Namely, the idea that calculating the odds of prokaryotic cells arising is meaningful is implicitly reliant on the assumption that prokaryotes are the only form of life that could have arisen. But of course, evolution isn't teleological like that - it's not goal-driven, and there's absolutely no reason to think that the way things are now is the only way they could have turned out. There is nothing special about the way things are, other than that's the way things are - you have absolutely, positively no way of knowing what might have been, and therefore, how on earth can you set about calculating the odds of one particular solution, when you have absolutely no idea how large the solution space is?
The only reason having a phone number like 555-1776 or 555-1492 or 555-0911 is meaningful is because we assign it meaning. In reality, your odds of getting one of those particular "special" numbers is the same as your odds of getting any other number. In reality, the odds of life-as-we-know-it arising are basically the same as the odds of all manner of life-as-we-don't-know-it arising. With phone numbers you already know how many possible numbers there are, and so you can meaningfully calculate the odds of getting one of them at random. With life, you haven't the faintest clue about how many potential types of life there are, and therefore no way at all to calculate the odds of one particular sort arising at random. That's the piddly end of it - in truth, you got assigned 555-2647, and now you're behaving as though that number is special just because its yours. Realistically, you were going to get some number, and that number was just as likely as any other.
Mountaintop Emmaus, Walk 90, Table of Timothy. Des Colores.
Please, enough with the word games and semantics.
"God did it" is not a scientific statement, it is a religious one.
Science and religion are incompatible in that anything the bible says, cannot be questioned on any evidence whatsoever, you have to take it on faith that it is true.
Scientific theories, hypothesis, etc, are always questioned, changed by new evidence, or removed totally as new hypothesis replaces old ones.
Religion is stagnant, science is always moving forward.
Religion gives comfort through faith.
Science just gives the answers that it concludes are correct, and if they gore someones bull, so be it.
The odds of what (exactly) and as formed how (again as described as precisely as possible)? How can anyone compute the odds of an unknown event?
Do you really think the early life of Earth is so easily described? Do you think that the evolutionary pressures of the environment, predation, catastrophism, and the changes over billions of years are so easily described mathematically? Get real.
I have no idea which hypothesis on abiogenesis is correct, or if the ones that exist are correct at all.
I am clueless as to what the real abiogenesis theory is even going to remotely look like, I can take some educated guesses, because that discipline has come a long way in a few short years.
I am most willing to say though, that abiogenesis will not have the statement "god did it" anywhere within it, when and if it is ever fully developed.
We can't. However, "God did it" is not the default position of science.
Gave you the cold shoulder, did she?
It answers the question of the diversity of life, and secondary questions that arise from thence - I haven't seen anyone claiming it describes "everything".
Being of suspicious nature, I assume that when certain data is not presented it is because it does not confirm author's assumption.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Likewise, sometimes the reason data isn't presented is because there's no data to present. It's really that simple.
Well just today I was reading the book of the prophet Jeremiah and in it, God says that He will send Jesus at a certain time in history. He did just that. There are many many many other examples, but that's the main one.
Frigid, I'd say.
And will you stop with the evolutionist nonsense please, evolution is a scientific theory, not a religion.
Thank you
Those that understand that evolution has stood the test of time and of scientific inquiry do not take the theory on faith. It is a well established, actually one of the best established scientific theories there is.
Creationism, must be taken on faith, you have no proof.
it is religion, and there is nothing wrong with that.
BUT, evolution is not a religion, and by calling someone who understands evolution, an evolutionist, is basically putting them on the same level as a creationist, and the 2 are totally incompatible.
Creationism is faith based, there being no proof, except your faith in the bible.
Evolution is science, based on facts and conclusions based upon those given facts.
Okay, so what is it?
And how many messiahs did your god send at them time? According to history it was a great many and all were contradictory. Perhaps Jesus just won out in the contemporaneous religon religion forum of the time from the many possibilities and therefore satisfied that prophecy post hoc (at least in your mind).
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