Posted on 04/05/2005 7:42:56 AM PDT by bedolido
SEATTLE - (KRT) - Three years ago, the Ohio Board of Education invited a small but influential Seattle think tank to debate the way evolution is taught in Ohio schools.
It was an opportunity for the Discovery Institute to promote its notion of intelligent design, the controversial idea that parts of life are so complex they must have been designed by some intelligent agent.
Instead, leaders of the institute's Center for Science and Culture decided on what they consider a compromise. Forget intelligent design, they argued, with its theological implications. Just require teachers to discuss evidence that refutes Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, as well as what supports it.
They called it "teach the controversy," and that's become the institute's rallying cry as a leader in the latest efforts to raise doubts about Darwin in school. Evolution controversies are brewing in eight school districts, half a dozen state legislatures and three state boards of education, including the one in Kansas, which wrestled with the issue in 1999 as well.
"Why fight when you can have a fun discussion?" asks Stephen Meyer, the center's director. The teach-the-controversy approach, he said, avoids "unnecessary constitutional fights" over the separation of church and state, yet also avoids teaching Darwin's theories as dogma.
But what the center calls a compromise, most scientists call a creationist agenda that's couched in the language of science.
There is no significant controversy to teach, they say.
"You're lying to students if you tell them that scientists are debating whether evolution took place," said Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit group that defends teaching of evolution in school.
The Discovery Institute, she said, is leading a public-relations campaign, not a scientific endeavor.
The Discovery Institute is one of the leading organizations working nationally to change how evolution is taught. It works as an adviser, resource and sometimes a critic with those who have similar views.
"There are a hundred ways to get this wrong," said Meyer. "And only a few to get them right."
Ohio got it right, he said, when its state Board of Education voted in 2002 to require students to learn that scientists "continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory."
Scott said it was a small victory at most for intelligent-design supporters, but Meyer considers it a significant one - a model other states should follow. Minnesota has adopted similar language.
The School Board in Dover, Pa., however, got it wrong, Meyer said, when it required instruction in intelligent design. (The matter is now in court.) Intelligent design isn't established enough yet for that, Meyer said.
He also criticizes the Georgia school board that put stickers on biology textbooks with a surgeon-general-like warning that evolution is "a theory not a fact." The stickers were a "dumb idea," he said bluntly. (A Georgia court ruled they were illegal, and the case is under appeal.)
In Wisconsin, the institute hopes it helped the school board in the small town of Grantsburg switch to a teach-the-controversy approach.
In each place, the institute says it responded to requests for help, although it's working to become more proactive, too. Some critics suspect the ties are even closer.
The Center for Science and Culture opened in 1996 as a part of the already-established Discovery Institute, which also studies more earthbound topics such as transportation, economics, technology and bioethics.
Founder Bruce Chapman - who has worked as an official in the Reagan administration, head of the U.S. Census Bureau and Washington's secretary of state - became interested in intelligent design after reading a piece Meyer wrote for The Wall Street Journal.
Meyer, then a philosophy professor at Whitworth College in Spokane, Wash., was defending a California professor in trouble for talking about intelligent design in biology class. To Chapman, it was an issue of academic freedom.
He invited Meyer to come speak at the institute. The more they talked, the more Chapman and others at the institute became interested in offering a home to Meyer and others interested in intelligent design.
Intelligent design appealed to their view that life isn't really as unplanned or unguided as Darwin's theories can make it seem.
"It interested me because it seemed so different than the reductionist science that came out of the 19th century ... that everything could be reduced to chemistry," said John West, a political scientist and center associate director.
The private institute has an annual budget of about $3.2 million, and plans to spend about $1.3 million on the intelligent-design work, Chapman said, mostly to support the work of about three dozen fellows.
The Fieldstead Charitable Trust, run by Christian conservative Henry Ahmanson and his wife, is one of the largest donors to that effort. Chapman declines to name more.
Meyer, the center's director, is a tall, friendly man who has undergraduate degrees in geology and physics and a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from Cambridge, where he wrote his doctorate on the origins of life.
He says he's no creationist. He doesn't, for example, believe in a literal reading of the Bible, which would mean the Earth is about 6,000 years old.
He doesn't dispute that natural selection played a role in evolution; he just doesn't think it explains everything.
He often points to the Cambrian Period, a time more than 500 million years ago when most of the major groups of animals first appear in the fossil record. Meyer and other Discovery Institute fellows say those groups show up too fast, geologically speaking, to have come about through natural selection. That's one of what they see as controversies they want taught in school.
Scientists, however, say the Cambrian Period may not be completely understood, but that doesn't mean the theory of evolution is in trouble.
"They harp and harp on natural selection, as if natural selection is the only thing that evolutionary biologists deal with," said Scott. "Who knows whether natural selection explains the Cambrian body plans. ... So what?"
Scientists consider Meyer a creationist because he maintains some unnamed intelligence - and Meyer said he personally thinks it is God - has an active hand in creating some complex parts of life.
"I don't know what else to call it other than creationism," said Michael Zimmerman, a critic and dean at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.
Meyer, however, said he's a scientist who starts with scientific evidence, not the Bible. His goal - a big one - is to change the very definition of science so that it doesn't rule out the possibility that an intelligent designer is actively at work.
"Science should be open to whatever cause ... can best explain the data," Meyer said.
That would be a major change for science, which limits itself to the natural world. Scott said it would be a "science stopper."
"Once you allow yourself to say God did it, you stop looking for naturalistic explanations. If you stop looking, you won't find them," she said.
Scott said science isn't an atheistic worldview. In science, she said, "It is equally inappropriate to say God did it, or God had nothing to do with it."
The institute's call to "teach the controversy" meets strong resistance.
"There's no controversy about whether living things have common ancestors," Scott said. "There's no controversy about whether natural selection is very important in creating the variety of organisms we have today."
While the institute touts its list of 370 scientists who have signed a statement saying they have some doubts about Darwin's theory of natural selection, Scott's organization, in a parody of that effort, has a list of 500 names limited to scientists named Steve or Stephanie, in honor of the late Stephen Jay Gould, a well-known biologist who once wrote that evolution is "one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science."
Public opinion is mixed. Many Christian denominations, including Catholics, see no contradiction between evolution and their faith, but a Gallup Poll last November found that only about a third of the respondents think Darwin's theory of evolution is well supported by scientific evidence.
Meyer hopes the Kansas Board of Education will invite the center to speak at its hearings in May. Speakers will be asked to address the issue the center wants to highlight: whether Kansas' science curriculum helps students understand debate over controversial topics such as evolution.
Kansas Citizens for Science, however, has urged a boycott of the hearings, saying the proposals have been "rejected by the science community at large."
Agreed. However, macro evolution fails #1, #2, #3, and #4.
I think I said the same thing you did, just using different words. Thanks for reply.
The evolution before Adam presents a problem for those Christians who believe that Jesus is God Incarnate, that He is God come in human form. Jesus did not consider Jonah or Adam or other named persons in the OT to be allegories. He spoke of them as true human history. If Jesus was wrong about them in any way, then He cannot be God.
For myself, I take these observations in nature and apply a theory such as ID which accounts for my observations.
For example, if there were global flood, there should be billions of dead creatures buried in sedimentary rock. My observation shows billions of creatures in the rock. My theory accounts for them. There is even marine sedimentary rock on top of Mount Everest. My flood theory accounts for that, too. Of course, there are other theories that account for these observations.
New observations at the eruption of Mount St Helens showed that many sedimentary layers dozens of feet thick can be formed in a matter of days trapping many dead creatures. These layers would ordinarily look like sediment laid down over thousands of years.
Your endurance and perseverance under these circumstances is astonishing. You are patient and instructive beyond the call of duty.
I did qualify my statements by saying on the macro evolution level.
1) First of all, your listed observations could also be used in the same manner as observations for ID. I'd also question whether they have anything to do with observing evolution on a macro level. Second, your Pluto orbit logic is flawed - with each passing moment we're observing Pluto slowly progressing around the sun and it's right where we calculated it would be. We don't need to live for 249 years to see it complete its orbit since it's been following it precisely the last 75 years and we can measure it each second. We are not on the other hand, slowing observing evolution, or even if we are there is no way to know that's what we are seeing. It takes a leap of faith to believe so. One you might not mind taking, but you are believing it is such though nobody has ever observed it. Other "evidence" may lead you to that conclusion, but it's not being backed up by the scientific theory.
2) I guess if your observations are flawed to begin with, you can still form a theory based on them. So I take back my statement you can't do #2.
3) As you admit, there's currently no way to observe macro evolution. Again, with reference to the tracing of DNA sequences, this can also be used in the same manner "to test" ID theories.
4) I would argue that this step is not taking place. Evolutionaries, the newest religion, are not looking at or revising any part of the theory that does not jive with their presupposition that ID is a bunch of hogwash, and that anything that leaves room for a creator or architect is unscientific, no matter what the data may say. If the data's not what they want, they trivialize it or completely ignore it. If they don't like the carbon dating results for these latest fossils, no problem, do it another way until we get a date that fits with what we think it should be. I submit there *may* be a few who try to do honest experiments, but if any of the results go against current established evolutionary religion...I mean theory, then they get torn up in peer reviews and if they still stick to their guns they are brandished as outcasts.
The bottom line - either you take a leap of faith and believe macro evolution, that everything happened by chance, that life gains complexity instead of decaying like everything else in the universe, that somehow something can come from nothing inside the laws of the universe, or, by leap of faith you believe that somebody created you and this wonderful universe. No matter which way you believe, it takes faith.
It is indeed a very bad idea to re-define what science actually is, and it's something we're seeing far too much of nowadays. I've mentioned before that ID adopts the rhetoric of science, but has none of the actual properties of a scientific theory: it explains nothing, it predicts nothing, it lacks openness or heuristic value, and can be neither proven nor falsified. ID, to quote John Derbyshire (and I hope you all read his superb evisceration of ID in National Review back in February) is a critique, not a theory.
I would say the exact same thing, except about evolutionists.
Well done, r9 ... you've just hit the nail smack dab on the head, but judging from the responses so far I don't think they understand your point.
Congregants of the Church of Darwinism claim exclusive privilege to define science in order to differentiate their faith from the Creationists'.
One irrefutable fact remains: Science cannot explain the origin of matter. Science observes 'creation' and humans have learned to manipulate it to a small degree and will gain more understanding of and thus more control over 'creation' as time passes. Atheists simply accept that matter has been here all along and will continue to exist thus considering humans to be simply the product of the random combining of elements that evolved into our current intellectual/spiritual state. I find that assumption absurd. Our bodies may have evolved but the spirit of man could not have.
Utter BS, you boob. Ask any geologist if a few dozen feet of ash, clay, and rock will ever look like sedimentary rock.
Wow, just how ignorant are you? Science explains it just fine.
Science observes 'creation' and humans have learned to manipulate it to a small degree and will gain more understanding of and thus more control over 'creation' as time passes.
Huh? You have a point here?
Atheists simply accept that matter has been here all along
Again, utterly wrong. Don't you idiots ever read a book?
... and will continue to exist thus considering humans to be simply the product of the random combining of elements
Random? Proteins are random creations? Absolutely wrong. Again.
... that evolved into our current intellectual/spiritual state. I find that assumption absurd.
Nobody cares what a boob finds absurd, so you might want to get a life.
Our bodies may have evolved but the spirit of man could not have.
What "spirit" would that be? Got any evidence for that supernatural supposition?
It seems to me that you may be making assumptions about what was discovered at Mt St Helens.
The fact is that layers of sediment laid down as different types of sediment which was a surprise to scientists. It did not lay down as a huge admixture as one might assume. It separated out as strata.
Here is a paragraph from one of many Internet discussions on St Helens.
Stratified layers up to 400 feet thick formed during the Mt. St. Helens eruption. A deposit more than 25 feet in thickness, and containing upwards of 100 thin layers accumulated in just one day on June 12, 1980. Naturalists have long claimed that stratified layers such as those found in the geological column have accumulated over vast periods of time, and these laminates represent long season variations or annual changes. However, the Mt. St. Helens deposits have demonstrated that catastrophic processes are able to create these geological formations in a short period of time.
He shares it with Billy the Kid, though.
High fives all around.....
It just shows a lack of imagination: reuse of middle names should be enough proof that .......... (fiyob)
The Dawkins program to produce the string "Methinks it is like a weasel" involves three processes: 1. Random variation -- on each "generation", 1/8th of the character strings in the "population" (size selected by user) have one of their text characters completely randomized to some other character. 2. Selection -- the character string which has the most "correct" characters (or if more than one such string exists, the most recent such) is flagged, and a) will be "bred", and b) won't itself be mutated or replaced by one of its own "offspring". 3. Reproduction -- the current "most fit" character string undergoes "sexual reproduction' with randomly chosen other strings, and the resulting offspring replace the "mates". (This is actually more akin to biological lateral gene transfer.) So all three of the processes necessary for evolution to take place are in the Dawkins program. And, as predicted by "evolutionists", the results are swift and sure -- the mutating, reproducing, subject-to-selection population very quickly (within seconds) produces a Shakespeare text string which the creationist "pure random" methods would not have produced before the Earth permanently froze over. |
Not only that ... but when you are only looking for naturalistic explanations, you wont find anything else.
I see what youre saying ... everything before 1859 wasnt real science ...
I'll give you some credit ... you are committed.
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