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."
Or perhaps a distant common ancestor. (Probably a rich one, middle names are for stroking rich ancestors.)
A 600ft uncompacted layer of rock and soil fell into the North Fork Toutle , but that was a landslide of the North face of the volcano and will never be "stratified".
Next were the pyroplastic (lava) flows, up to 120ft thick (after cooling). Those too, will never be "stratified".
Following that is the lahars (ash mud erosion); This flow filled 26 ft of the Columbia River. There will be strata downstream where the Columbia enters the ocean.
Least of all is the airborne ash and pumice. That was about a foot thick 10 miles downwind and 1/2 inch at 300 miles. Whatever doesn't wash downstream will be obvious as a discreet layer.
(Hint: Avoid getting your "facts" from geology undergrads posting on creationist web sites)
I don't personally see why people see such a conflict between religion and Darwinian evolution. A natural explanation of life's origin does not preclude God's involvement, if you believe natural laws are a consequence of God's will.
Simple and true. Nice.
It's the scientism that creates the conflict (along with perhaps a dash of opportunism on the part of some religious folk). Naturalism is much more that simply positing "the uniformity of natural causes." Most Christians who do science accept that as the fundamental faith statement that makes science possible. But the presupposition of naturalism, once accepted, tend to lead the investigator to insist that the discovered results cannot point to a supernatural creator, as if this would spell the end of "science". This changes the whole nature of the discipline from that "before 1859". (Obviously, I believe that good science leads toward the identity of the Creator.)
BTW your post #203 makes your position a lot clearer.
It seems we only disagree on the definition of words. What you call naturalism I would refer to as scientific materialism, which is a religion in its own rite. I concur that there needs to be more open discussion between science and religion; if there was I think some great schisms in public opinion could be bridged (with the usual exception, of course, of the excessively radical fringes on both ends). As Einstein pointed out (much more eloquently than I), science and religion are indispensible to one another. I just think we're all better served if we remember the limitations of each.
Much has been written in "E" publications about the increasing intelligence of the homid line of crestures: how it's his BRAIN POWER that has given him advantage over ALL the other species.
One would think that Albert Einstien would be the pinnacle of Man, with his super intellect.
But what of his children and grandkids?
Where ARE they?
What do THEY do?
Have the 'smart' genes, that ol' Al got, simply vanished?
"Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe -- a spirit vastly superior to that of man." -- Albert Einstein
Evidence of ID abounds. You have to close your eyes to deny it. Your simpleton throw-away lines about pink fairies on the dark side of the moon are simply nonsense and discredit a physicist who should pride himself on logical reasoning.
No phenomena exists for which "pink fairies", or "green elves" provide a solution. Tremendous evidence exists for which ID provides a solution.
You are the man operating with blind religion, a religion that denies the existence of God. It is shallow and requires great contortions to maintain that denial.
"The undevout astronomer must be mad." -- William Herschel, astronomer"All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more and more strongly the truths come on high and contained in the sacred writings." -- John Herschel, Astronomer
"Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it befits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God." -- Johann Kepler, Scientist of Astronomy
"With regard to the origin of life, science...positively affirms creative power." -- William Thompson Kelvin, Physical Scientist, Mathematician, Inventor
Ask yourself this question, "What force is it that first motivated molecules in a puddle to reproduce and then afforded them free will"? What is that force? No chemical processes have been discovered which motivates molecules to reproduce themselves in the first instance.
Then also ponder what exactly is a "field"? (magnetic field, or gravity, for instance). Magnetic fields do not exist in our dimension, but we know they exist because they have a force in our dimension that we can measure. We know it exists ONLY by its measurable actions in our dimensions, yet the fields themselves have no dimension. They cannot be seen, they have no depth, width, height, taste, odor or mass. Our senses cannot directly perceive a magnetic field, or gravity, or strong or weak fields.
Yet we know they exist by their actions in our world.
This is the same way we know ID exists. We see its results in our everyday world even though we cannot directly perceive it ourselves, just like all of the fields which form the basis of physical science.
"The equations of physics have in them incredible simplicity, elegance and beauty. That in itself is sufficient to prove to me there must be a God...." -- Paul Davies, Physical Scientist"This beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being...." -- Isaac Newton
"The intellectual beauty of the order discovered by science is consistent with the physical world's having behind it the mind of the Divine Creator." -- John Polkinghorne, Physicist
It's interesting to note that as a Christian I am more open-minded than you!
[BTW: I have peer-reviewed scientific articles affirming the power of intercessory prayer (when the patients had no idea they were being prayed for). Another example of the effects of a force that we cannot see, yet acts in our own dimension in a measurable way.]
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" -- Albert Einstein
Consider also the fact that Christians and Christian society have accelerated the advancement of science and technology at an exponentially greater pace than anybody else in the history of mankind.
The same is true for the worldwide expansion of liberty.
Those who believe Christianity stifles science or enslaves men simply do not understand what it means to be a Christian, (particularly a Protestant) or have accepted without challenge the deliberate attacks by the anti-Christians (socialists).
""The Christian Religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity to its benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind." -- Thomas Jefferson, Mar 23rd, 1801 letter to Moses Robinson
"We are an age characterized by the perfection of methods and the confusion of goals." - Albert Einstein
"The heavens declare the glory of God and the expanse shows the work of his hands." - Ps. 8
Our science today is infantile. We know little more about biology, the mind, the reproductive system, the cell than we did 100 years ago.
Our current mathemathics have reached limits in its ability to describe natural phenomena. We use the most tortuous mathematical language to describe quantum physics, large scale systems, chaotic behaviour, or other non-linear dynamical processes. It is no longeer adequate. We require a new paradigm in scientific language and modelling. We are babies goo-gooing and gaa-gaaing. We get our point across but the fidelity is poor.
We have barely begun to understand the universe. We better keep an open mind.
>Wow, just how ignorant are you? Science explains it just fine.<
Please enlighten me. How does science explain the origin of matter?
I've done research in genetic (evolutionary) programming. A program I use develops the formula for the area of a circle, without pi being originally present. It derives the formula on its own using evolutionary processes. The processes are very powerful and we use them to help solve very difficult problems.
But these processes do not disprove creationism. They affirm a higher creative power.
In your Dawkins program you have made several "Divine" creations.
1) You, God, have created the original material with which to work, the "1/8th of the character strings in the "population"". You have assigned certain properties to this material.
2) You, God, have created a set of rules, in step 2, by which the selection process will proceed. Since when do molecules make such decisions?
3) What force drives them to "breed" in the first place?
Why should they come together?
Evolutionary processes do take place within prescribed limits and only under the conditions previously CREATED by some creative power.
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