Posted on 02/07/2005 3:50:28 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Al Frisby has spent the better part of his life in rooms filled with rebellious teenagers, but the last years have been particularly trying for the high school biology teacher. He has met parents who want him to teach that God created Eve out of Adam's rib, and then then adjusted the chromosomes to make her a woman, and who insist that Noah invited dinosaurs aboard the ark. And it is getting more difficult to keep such talk out of the classroom.
"Somewhere along the line, the students have been told the theory of evolution is not valid," he said. "In the last few years, I've had students question my teaching about cell classification and genetics, and there have been a number of comments from students saying: 'Didn't God do that'?" In Kansas, the geographical centre of America, the heart of the American heartland, the state-approved answer might soon be Yes. In the coming weeks, state educators will decide on proposed curriculum changes for high school science put forward by subscribers to the notion of "intelligent design", a modern version of creationism. If the religious right has its way, and it is a powerful force in Kansas, high school science teachers could be teaching creationist material by next September, charting an important victory in America's modern-day revolt against evolutionary science.
Legal debate
Similar classroom confrontations between God and science are under way in 17 states, according to the National Centre for Science Education. In Missouri, state legislators are drafting a bill laying down that science texts contain a chapter on so-called alternative theories to evolution. Textbooks in Arkansas and Alabama contain disclaimers on evolution, and in a Wisconsin school district, teachers are required to instruct their students in the "scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory". Last month, a judge in Georgia ordered a school district to remove stickers on school textbooks that warned: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things."
For the conservative forces engaged in the struggle for America's soul, the true battleground is public education, the laboratory of the next generation, and an opportunity for the religious right to effect lasting change on popular culture. Officially, the teaching of creationism has been outlawed since 1987 when the supreme court ruled that the inclusion of religious material in science classes in public teaching was unconstitutional. In recent years, however, opponents of evolution have regrouped, challenging science education with the doctrine of "intelligent design" which has been carefully stripped of all references to God and religion. Unlike traditional creationism, which posits that God created the earth in six days, proponents of intelligent design assert that the workings of this planet are too complex to be ascribed to evolution. There must have been a designer working to a plan - that is, a creator.
In their campaign to persuade parents in Kansas to welcome the new version of creationism into the classroom, subscribers to intelligent design have appealed to a sense of fair play, arguing that it would be in their children's interest to be exposed to all schools of thought on the earth's origins. "We are looking for science standards that would be more informative, that would open the discussion about origins, rather than close it," said John Calvert, founder of the Intelligent Design network, the prime mover in the campaign to discredit the teaching of evolution in Kansas.
Other supporters of intelligent design go further, saying evolution is as much an article of faith as creationism. "Certainly there are clear religious implications," said William Harris, a research biochemist and co-founder of the design network in Kansas. "There are creation myths on both sides. Which one do you teach?" For Mr. Harris, an expert on fish oils and prevention of heart disease at the premier teaching hospital in Kansas City, the very premise of evolution was intolerable. He describes his conversion as a graduate student many years ago almost as an epiphany. "It hit me that if monkeys are supposed to be so close to us as relatives then what explains the incredible gap between monkeys and humans. I had a realisation that there was a vast chasm between the two types of animals, and the standard explanation just didn't fit."
Other scientists on the school board's advisory committee see no clash in values between religion and science. "Prominent conservative Christians, evangelical Christians, have found no inherent conflict between an evolutionary understanding of the history of life, and an orthodox understanding of the theology of creation," said Keith Miller, a geologist at Kansas State University, who describes himself as a practising Christian.
But in Kansas, as in the rest of America, it would seem a slim majority continue to believe God created the heaven and the earth. During the past five years, subscribers to intelligent design have assembled a roster of influential supporters in the state, including a smattering of people with PhDs, such as Mr Harris, to lend their cause a veneer of scientific credibility. When conservative Republicans took control of the Kansas state school board last November, the creationists seized their chance, installing supporters on the committee reviewing the high school science curriculum.
The suggested changes under consideration seem innocuous at first. "A minor addition makes it clear that evolution is a theory and not a fact," says the proposed revision to the 8th grade science standard. However, Jack Krebs, a high school maths teacher on the committee drafting the new standards, argues that the campaign against evolution amounts to a stealth assault on the entire body of scientific thought. "There are two planes where they are attacking. One is evolution, and one is science itself," he said.
"They believe that the naturalistic bias of science is in fact atheistic, and that if we don't change science, we can't believe in God. And so this is really an attack on all of science. Evolution is just the weak link."
It would certainly seem so in Kansas. At the first of a series of public hearings on the new course material, the audience was equally split between the defenders of established science, and the anti-evolution rebels. The breakdown has educators worried. With the religious right now in control of the Kansas state school board, the circumstances favour the creationists.
In a crowded high school auditorium, biology teachers, mathematicians, a veterinarian, and a high school student made passionate speeches on the need for cold, scientific detachment, and the damage that would be done to the state's reputation and biotechnology industry if Kansas became known as a haven for creationists. They were countered by John James, who warned that the teaching of evolution led to nihilism, and to the gates of Auschwitz. "Are we producing little Kansas Nazis?" he asked. But the largest applause of the evening was reserved for a silver-haired gentleman in a navy blue blazer. "I have a question: if man comes from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? Why do you waste time teaching something in science class that is not scientific?" he thundered.
Science teachers believe that the genteel questioning of the intelligent design movements masks a larger project to discredit an entire body of rational thought. If the Kansas state school board allows science teachers to question evolution, where will it stop? Will religious teachers bring their beliefs into the classroom?
"They are trying to create a climate where anything an individual teacher wants to include in science class can be considered science," said Harry McDonald, a retired biology teacher and president of Kansas Citizens for Science Education. "They want to redefine science."
Religious right
Young Earth creationism: God created the Earth, and all the species on it, in six days, 6,000 years ago
Old Earth creationism: The Earth is 4.5bn years old, but God created each living organism on the planet, although not necessarily in six days
Intelligent design: Emerged as a theory in 1989. Maintains that evolution is a theory, not a fact, and that Earth's complexity can be explained only by the idea of an intelligent designer - or a creator
NIKOLAI LENIN: (b. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov,1870; d. 1924.) Lenin, the first murderous communist dictator of the USSR said: “Darwin put an end to the belief that the animal and vegetable species bear no relation to one another, except by chance, and that they were created by God , and hence immutable.” (The heart of this statement is: “Darwin put an end to the belief that the animal and vegetable species..were created by God....”)
Lenin was “...a confirmed atheist, dedicated to the destruction of...all religious worship...he regarded Christ with undisguised hatred.”
On his desk Lenin had a statue displayed in a “prominent position for all to see...its vivid presence dominated the room.” (What kind of statue?)
It was a “...bronze statue of an ape gazing at an oversized human skull.” This symbolized the evolutionary core of Lenin’s atheism. It further symbolized the core of Marx’s Communism which Lenin set about imposing on Russia and much of the rest of the world. When Lenin died in 1924, control of the Soviet Union passed to Joseph Stalin.
Let’s glance at the role evolutionism played in Stalin’s mind (a mind, all agree, which conceived and carried out the calculated murder of at least ten--and more likely--twenty to thirty million people, mostly Christians):
JOSEPH V. STALIN: (b. IOSIF VISSARIONOVICH DZHUGASHVILI, b.1879; d. 1953; Following Lenin, Stalin ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist for thirty years. From Landmarks in the Life of Stalin we read:
“At a very early age, while still a pupil in the ecclesiastical school, Comrade Stalin developed a critical mind and revolutionary sentiments. He began to read Darwin and became an atheist.”
G. Gludjidze, a boyhood friend of Stalin’s relates: “I began to speak of God. Joseph heard me out, and after a moment’s silence said: ‘You know, they are fooling us, there is no God....’”
Gludjidze reported: “I was astonished at these words. I had never heard anything like it before. How can you say such things, Soso?” he asked Stalin, who replied:
“I will lend you a book to read: it will show you that the world and all living things are quite different from what you imagine, and all this talk about God is sheer nonsense.”
“What book is that?” his friend inquired.
“Darwin. You must read it,’ Joseph impressed on me.”
A few pages later, another person who was in school with Stalin, said of what they were taught:
“...in order to disabuse [i.e., free from deception or error] the minds of our seminary students of the myth that the world was created in six days, we had to acquaint ourselves with the geological origin and age of the earth, and be able to prove them in argument; we had to familiarize ourselves with Darwin’s teachings.”
So, in plain words, the church school Joseph Stalin attended labored to get the Bible’s explanation for origins out of kid’s heads and fill those same heads with the evolutionary explanation for origins. And that was church school well over a hundred years ago! Education--public, private, church, TV, whatever--is THE tool for getting the evolution explanation for the origin of man and all else into peoples heads.
A quick note on how Mao Tse-tung made indoctrination into evolutionism his very first priority after the Communist victory in China in late 1949 is of interest, I think. See if you agree:
MAO TSE TUNG: (b. 1893; d. 1976) In a graduate school paper about the way the communists dealt with the 85% illiteracy problem in China, I found two things that stuck with me:
1) Mao’s method was quite resourceful given what he had to work with. He called it “Each One Teach One”. It was basically the idea that every literate person would teach an illiterate person and, as soon as the pupil learned enough to read and write he would then teach what he had learned to another illiterate person. Within a few short years the 85% figure was totally reversed.... It was quite an accomplishment given all the obstacles.
2) Being a Marxist and an atheist and a firm believer in evolutionism himself, Mao mandated that the reading material used in this early day “Great Leap Forward” in literacy would be the writings of Charles Darwin and other materials supportive of the evolution paradigm. Understanding modern China of necessity includes an understanding of the transference of this state mandated indoctrination into evolution-based atheism from one generation to another for more than a half century. The fact that Mao’s regime was responsible for the out-and-out murder of somewhere between 30 and 60 million people...many of them Christian missionaries and their flocks...does not suggest that all evolutionists are potential mass murderers, of course. However, it does strongly suggest that a passionate belief that man is just another evolved animal is a conviction that is fully capable of creating a mind-set which cheapens life and excuses whatever behavior and policies individuals may pursue, no matter how hurtful and even deadly that behavior and those policies may be to millions of other people. Indeed, one abiding result of this passionate belief in the evolutionary origins scenario--a result more evident in the lives of the Lenin, Stalin, and Mao than in Hitler--is an utter disdain--often escalating to outright hatred--of Christians in particular. One can see the source of this malevolence in a few facts about modern communism’s founder:......
KARL MARX: (b. 1818; d. 1883) When Darwin’s book came out in 1859, Marx read it and exulted: “Darwin’s book is VERY important and serves me as a BASIS for the class struggle in history.” “Basis”, as we know, is a strong word meaning “the foundation” or “underpinning” upon which something is built. In other words, we learn from the horse’s mouth itself that the very foundation of Marxist Communism--the one thing that underpins the whole concept and holds it up--is an all-out belief in the evolution of man and everything else out of energy and matter, and a corresponding all-out belief that whatever teachings there are that God Created everything are teachings that must be purged from peoples minds.
In all the 70 tumultuous years of Soviet Communism and the 45 years of the “Cold War” between Soviet Communism and the West, and the half-century of the no longer sleeping giant of Chinese Communism, and all the incidental “little” Communist states of Cuba, N. Korea, and Viet Nam still with us, and the wars, etc., this central fact that the very foundation of the system of communism, its very BASIS, is a belief in Darwinian evolutionism, is a huge FACT that is scarcely if ever heard. Does that strike anyone as just a little bit of an oversight on the part of “International Relations Experts” and a lot of world leaders et al who were making “Cold War” policy for the West??
It is good to recall this fact as well: Another name for Communism has always been “Scientific Materialism”. This concept rests on two beliefs: First--as Friedrich Ingles (Marx's side-kick) made clear--"Communist physics permits no inertia in the cosmos, i.e., the stationary earth in Bible teaching is forever anathema and the Copernican cosmology is forever true science." Second, man is an accidentally evolved animal who has no spiritual needs. His needs are only material ones, and “science”, not God, will fulfill those needs. “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” as Marx put it.
In his book: Was Karl Marx A Satan Worshipper?, author Richard Wurmbrand gives plenty of evidence that he was. At the very least, Marx was a hate-filled man who, from his college days throughout his life, was bent on inflicting as much grief and woe on the world as he possibly could. Those who know something about how Satan-worshippers operate can see that Marx fit all the criteria. Check some of his own words and draw your own conclusion:
“I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above.” (From a poem).
Another poem: “The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed. See this sword? The Prince of Darkness [Satan] sold it to me.”
From a drama Marx wrote and called “Oulanem” (an inversion and anagram for Emmanuel, a Biblical name for Jesus), is loaded with devilish stuff, including these lines:
“You will sink down and I shall follow laughing, whispering in your ears, ‘Descend, come with me friend.”
The Drama ends:
“If there is something which devours, I’ll leap within it, though I bring the world to ruins - the world which bulks between me and the abyss, I will smash it to pieces with my enduring curses. I’ll throw my arms around its harsh reality. Embracing me, the world will dumbly pass away.”
Only eighteen years old when he penned those sweet uplifting thoughts, Marx found the destructive instrument he was looking for in Socialism and its most radical expression, Communism. Some of his acquaintances included Moses Hess, Bakunin, and Proudhon. Bakunin, an anarchist who quarreled with Marx (everybody did!), was supposedly a militant atheist, but actually praised Satan openly. He also longed to become the anti-Christ of the Bible. Proudhon, another anarchist, “worshipped Satan”. Hess, like Marx, a Jew, inserted a racist dimension into Marx’s ideas: “Race struggle is primary, class struggle is secondary,” he wrote. Hess was a modern forerunner of the Zionist Movement launched in 1897 by Theodore Herzl. Hess said and Marx listened: “Every Jew has the making of a Messiah in himself....”
Marx’s main writings were his three volume tomes entitled, Das Kapital. You may have three guesses as to whom he tried to dedicate this work: 1) Charles Darwin; 2) Daffy Duck; 3) The Salvation Army.
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Leaving aside evolutionary zealots and their records in the Political realm, we can glimpse the impact on modern man’s mind stenciled there in diverse fields by other evolutionary zealots. One may have to flip a coin to determine whether these men (and a thousand like them) have had as much or more impact than Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Marx....
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SIGMUND FREUD: (b. 1856; d. 1939) Sigmund Freud’s impact on 20th century thinking is almost too great to measure. Read these statements from different commentators about Freud and that impact:
1) “Sigmund Freud’s name is as cardinal in the history of human thought as Charles Darwin’s.”
2) “Few others in the history of the world have had a more profound influence on the way man thinks about himself.”
3) “The very intellectual air we breathe has been infused with Freud’s categories of thought.”
4) “In the wide area of experience covered by the Humanities and Social Sciences it is difficult to find a single discipline that is not indebted to Freud’s theories.”
5) “...probably no scientist has ever had so strong and so widespread an influence upon literature.”
6) “No other thinker in modern times has had a comparable effect upon so many branches of knowledge.”
So, upon what concept of man did this mover and shaker of men’s minds base his theories? These are Freud’s own words:
“Man is not different from or better than, the animals.... The present development of mankind seems to me to demand no other explanation than that of the animals...”
Freud based everything he came up with on the idea that man was just a highly evolved animal whose brain contained a lot of stuff imprinted upon it from past stages of evolution. This writer hits the proverbial nail on the head:
“Freud, like Marx, sees the development of man in evolutionary terms.... He sees primitive man as one who gives full satisfaction to all his instincts, and also to those perverse instincts which are part of primitive sexuality....”
Many observers have noted the way Freudianism complimented and advanced Marxism. Here is one example:
“...Freud...deserves place with Darwin and Marx in the revolutionary discoveries he has made concerning man. Whoever wishes to maintain a claim to being a revolutionary...must also embrace, as an essential Marxian outlook, the Freudian dynamics of psychological phenomena.”
How did a man who thought he was either Moses or a new Moses have such a world shaking impact on modern man’s “knowledge”? How did a man who by the age of forty had stopped having sex with his wife and could only be stimulated by perverse fantasies become the world authority on sex? How is a man who brought statuettes to the dinner table and talked to them become recognized as one of the 20th century’s leading intellectuals? How did...Ah, forget it....(For more on this, see section on Freud: HERE.)
JOHN DEWEY: (b. 1859; d. 1952 ) John Who?? This name is not a household word, to be sure. Nevertheless, this man almost single-handedly reshaped and transformed the basic emphasis of American education from being Bible centered to being evolutionary “science” centered. Dewey has been called “the philosopher who influenced American education more than any other thinker”. His books were required reading in teacher’s colleges for two generations. What inspired Dewey to lead the charge to get God out of the schools and put Darwin in? From Source Problems In Education we find part of the answer:
“John Dewey, whose reconstruction of philosophy fundamentally conditioned modern thought, was himself conditioned by Darwinian evolution... Instrumentalism, the name Dewey used to describe his philosophy, reflects its Darwinian temper just as its humanistic naturalism reflects the inspiration of science.”
So impressed by the theory of evolution was Dewey, that on his own 50th birthday, he wrote an essay to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the appearance of Darwin’s book (which was also “born” in 1859). About that book, Dewey rhapsodized:
“...the Origin of Species [Darwin’s book] introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.”
That’s a mouthful! And he had it exactly right! “Transform the logic of knowledge...the treatment of morals, politics, and religion....” Whew!
If evolutionism had any solid evidence behind it, all this would be well and good, of course. If, however, it is a contra-scientific lie, the American education system throughout the 20th century (and now into the 21st) has been the primary indoctrination tool for instilling false logic and false knowledge--all based on a false science--into innocent student’s minds. (Other countries have had their own Dewey-like education leaders, of course. Remember Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, et al were indoctrinated with the same thing in their early “education”! French Jesuit Priest Tielhard de Chardin’s writings had a big effect on Catholic schools everywhere from the 20’s to the 50’s and beyond. Chardin’s theistic evolutionism included an early day globalist outlook and incorporated the pagan concept that even rocks have divine force.)
So, three and four generations of students have been robbed of the most basic spiritual Truth (confirmed by real science) that mankind can know, i.e., the Truth about their Origins, how they got here. All Truth begins with the Truth about Origins. Origins Truth is absolutely foundational. Other Truths in all areas can be erected on that foundation. If the foundation consists of lies about Origins, only lies in all other areas can be erected upon it. Modern man’s “knowledge” consists of deceptions in all areas of learning built upon the foundational lie that the Origin of all that exists came about as the result of a Big Bang explosion 15 billion years ago, and that the earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago, and that an evolutionary process leading from a spontaneously generated germ to Rachmanioff began 3 billion years ago (HERE). As a result of these compounded deceptions built on the sand of evolutionary mythology, modern man’s “wisdom” is foolishness to God (I Cor.3:19).
...Where was I? Oh, yes: Transforming the mind.... Dewey has had a lot of company in this endeavor, especially since Copernicus. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries Darwinism had dug in its heels in the Universities and was filtering into the high schools (a la “The Monkey Trial” in 1925: HERE). Steadily, stealthily, Creation by God was being pried out of people’s belief systems and Darwinian evolutionism was being funneled into their minds. Even as far back as the early 1880’s, German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was writing essays like “The Transvaluation of Values” and declaring that: “God is dead; we have killed him with our science”. I think Dewey got a lot of his ideas from Nietzsche.
So, this transforming of minds from a creation mode to an evolutionary mode, has been going on for a good little while, as we can see. Now, today, NASA’s “Origins Program” is all set to put an end to the transformation by administering the coup de grace to Creationism with its high tech Virtual Reality Flim-Flammery: (HERE & HERE)
But verily, there was another writer over nineteen hundred years ago who also talked about transforming the mind. He wrote:
“...be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God” (Rom.12:2).
http://www.fixedearth.com/hlsm.html
Time may change the shape of rocks, but it can not create life. Just look at the face of most living things the two eyes are above the nose which is always above the mouth, this shows design. From the smallist thing such as the atom to the largest thing such as the universe they both appear much the same through the microscrope or telecsope.
Here's the problem. Why shouldn't science teaches be questioning the theroy of evolution? We want our science students to question everything until it's proved to their satisfaction.
Evolution (apart from natural selection) is a theory not a fact
Sorry about that last one, I didnt think it would paste like that, I had them yank it
yes, I know, preview is your friend...(sigh)...
Indeed. . who is YOUR leading candidate for the role of the Reverend Nehemiah Scudder ???
So how can you trust a theologian to tell you anything meaningful about science? That would be like me asking a dentist to overhaul the engine in my car! That's what you are doing when you trust Answers in Genesis for your science answers....you get bad advice.
HUH?
wHAT THEOLOGIAN DID i MISTRUST THAT YOU ARE REFERRING TO?
tHE POST YOU RESPONDED TO WAS MY EDITING ERROR, NOT THE ERROR OF THE SITE...
So is my caplock...sorry, doing CAD
Evolution is NOT scientific. There can be no replication
by independent study. There are too many "missing links"
too much theory that can no more be Proven via scientific
method than the Creation story in Genesis can be proven
by scientific method. Darwinian evolution belongs to that
class of godless religions such as Secular Humanism and
don't you forget it.
Seems that WildHorse crash dinged your brainbox -when you
have something worth listening to I will listen. But your
IGNORANCE and Unbelief are UnAmerican.
"Unbelief" is "UnAmerican"?
What do you propose doing with all of us who don't agree with you?
The 24-hour period during which the earth completes one rotation on its axis.
As it relates to the sun. Without Sol, how would you know when you completed the rotation?
Isn’t that like saying without a microscope how would you know there are bacteria?
Bacteria exist irrespective of their detection by the microscope. Also, even a complete nonscientific mind can think of ways to detect and observe the rotation of the earth without the presence of the sun.
Don't know if he has emerged yet.
Nice to meet another Heinlein fan.
All Science stems from Religion. When the student is of the
belief that he/she/it is greater than the schoolmaster
then the student fails. Evolution is a godless religion that
claims there is NO God.That it all happened by chance.
And Doc. If you look at the insignia of the Medical Science.
You will see a snake on a pole.And the source for that symbol was the Bible. The story of Moses given orders by God to lift up a brazen snake that all who looked upon it
would be healed. I have NO complaint with Science in it's
proper place. But Agreat deal of problem with those students so foolish as to believe Science is everything and God mere outdated myth.
It is not anti-science. But this debate is getting fun. Finally, the "evolutionists" must make their case, as opposed to just saying that if you disagree with them you must be "anti-science."
Thanks to the internet, both Dan Rather AND "evolutionists" have learned that the ad-Hominem attack has gone the way of the longbow as a useful weapon.
Huh?
To put it in perspective. I see this debate as ants arguing this subject. They may be the smartest ants on the anthill, but they are still just ants. They are limited.
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