Posted on 04/21/2005 4:34:42 AM PDT by gobucks
In the last year, Silicon Valley has been a center of a showdown over religious beliefs in public schools. Meet the other side. LYNN HOFLAND often talks faster than he thinks. For Hofland, it seems the circumstances demand it. A creationist, he happily espouses a point of view that mainstream culture considers ridiculous and unenlightened.
The earth, according to Hofland, is about 6,000 years old. God created it in six 24-hour days. And, of course, evolution is just a theory.
Most people around here will shake their heads and wonder how anyone could think that in this day and age. But for Hofland, it's a basic foundation of his belief system.
And his belief system came to the South Bay in a big way last fall when Stephen Williams, a fifth-grade teacher at Stevens Creek Elementary School in Cupertino, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Cupertino Union School District (and against Stevens Creek Elementary's principal), claiming he had been discriminated against because he was Christian. Williams, backed by the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal organization engaged in contesting cultural issues across the nation, said that his principal stopped him from handing out historical materials in class that referenced God. After an initial Drudge Report headline about the Declaration of Independence being "banned" at a California school, Williams' case was egged on by right-wing radio and blogs. Sean Hannity, of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, brought his show to the Flint Center in Cupertino for a special "Take Back America" broadcast.
Mark Thomas was one of the panelists for that broadcast. Thomas, the president of the Atheists of Silicon Valley (www.godlessgeeks.com), believes everything that Hofland does not. He believes men came from monkeys. He believes the animate sprung from the inanimate; the concept even has a scientific-sounding word for it: abiogenesis.
Thomas has met Hofland on more than one occasion; he even went so far as to give Hofland the floor during one of his atheist meetings held bimonthly in the community room of his townhouse complex in Mountain View. But the truth is, he thinks Hofland is a kook. Or, if Hofland's not a kook himself, that his ideas about the origins of life are definitely kooky.
"It's rather irritating to get into these conversations about the origins of life with him," says Thomas. "You keep coming back with God did this, God did that. The problem is for him there are no contradictions because he's right. In some ways you can't refute him. God could have created the world a hundred years ago with everything looking as though it were ancient. You can't disprove it. God could have created the universe a day ago with everything, including people's memories intact. You can't disprove that."
Evolution of an Anti-Evolutionist
Hofland may think the world was created in six days, but it took him a lot longer than that to arrive at that belief—30 years and then some, in fact. Born in Montana, near Missoula (he still mixes Montana wheat into homemade breads and waffles), Hofland, now 50, has always had a Midwestern sensibility. He graduated from high school (his mother was his eighth-grade biology teacher), but flunked out of college after a year and a half. Then, he did a six-year stint in the Navy, floating around the South Pacific on a nuclear submarine.
"My background," he admits, "did not lend itself to me being a creationist."
Of all things, it was a subsequent job at NASA, where he's still employed today, that led Hofland to discard the evolutionism he had grown up with. Watching NASA scientists taking lessons from the physiology of giraffes to develop gravity suits for astronauts (the thick-skinned giraffe boasts a unique blood pressure for mammals, which is especially helpful for outer-space modeling) eventually convinced Hofland to do his own research into the giraffe—an animal, as it turns out, that has been widely used in creationist arguments.
What he found, he says, converted him. The giraffe, he learned, has seven neck bones (the norm, for many mammals), even though, as far as he could tell, there's no reason why evolution wouldn't have demanded the number of the giraffe's neck bones increase with the size of its neck. Hofland was also amazed at the giraffe's capability to withstand extreme blood pressure (due to its height) in its legs, and to adjust the pressure when it bends its head down to drink water—without its reinforced artery walls, its collection of valves and a "web" of small blood vessels, intense pressure would reach the giraffe's brain every time it bends its head. Not to mention what Hofland considers the miraculous design of the giraffe's birthing process—the new calf, which drops into the world from a height of five feet, cannot fall neither head or feet first, as both positions would end up breaking its neck; instead, the giraffe maneuvers a "perfect" exit, hind feet first and supporting its flexible neck around its shoulders.
Before he learned all this, Hofland insists, he, always scientifically inclined, was very much an ardent evolutionist. But, after his study, he ended up penning an article which became the basis for a new creationist ministry he calls Stiffneck Ministries.
"I had to struggle with this, but when I did my homework, I was convinced the giraffe was created," he says. "And, if the giraffe was created, then I was created, and, if I was created, then I had some answering to do for my life."
Thomas, however, is hardly impressed by Hofland's conversion. "I'm very well aware of his Stiffneck Ministries and his giraffes," says Thomas, with an exasperated tone. "His arguments are false; they are completely false. Giraffes have evolved over a period of time, and it's not a very good system. Giraffes have a lot of problems, many babies die during birth because they have a long distance to fall, but it works well enough for them to survive."
Thomas has little patience for Hofland's logic. "What creationist and intelligent designers like to point out is, basically, 'Isn't X amazing? I don't understand how X could be. Therefore, there must be something else that designed X and that created X. I don't understand what this other thing is either, but it must exist, because I don't understand X. That's fallacious reasoning."
Tie For First: The way Lynn Hofland's neckwear pointedly quotes the opening of the Christian Bible leaves no doubt as to where he stands on the question of life's origin.
Putting God Into Schools
Hofland was in the audience for the Hannity special in Cupertino. For him, the hubbub was about nothing other than certain people—in this case, the elementary school's administrators and the concerned parents—being too "sensitive." The United States, Hofland likes to say, is largely a Christian nation, though Hofland's definition of what a "Christian" nation is seems to vary subtly with the context. Sometimes, as in the case of Cupertino's Williams, who Hofland argues was only distributing material that reflected the roots and realities of the United States, the nation's very Christian; sometimes it's not Christian enough.
Even the question of what "Christian" belief is in regard to creationism has shifted over time.
"The irony, of course, in all of this creation science stuff is that modern conservative Christians are not the equivalent of their 19th-century counterparts," says J. David Pleins, a professor of religion at Santa Clara University.
Pleins, who has written extensively about readings of Genesis, argues young earth creationism—Hofland's view of a 6,000-year-old history—wasn't always a traditional Christian perspective.
"In the 19th century, you people who we would today call fundamentalist or conservative Christians, who didn't think the earth was young. They were anti-evolution Christians; they were against Darwin, but they believed the earth was old because they believe that the science told us about all these ancient lost eras. And so you had conservative Christians who were committed to an old-earth creationism. That seems to be an option that's lost today, and it's lost not because of the Scopes trial."
Instead, Pleins contends that a book, The Genesis Flood, put young earth creationism on the map. "It argued that science, rewritten and interpreted differently, would validate a literal reading of the Bible, so with creation science, you get a commitment from all conservative Christians committed to a young earth reading of the text. That's new."
The reasons behind the shift in perspective are strikingly similar to the modern fundamentalist worries that Christianity would erode away if not somehow protected, which results in a defensive posture by the Christian right in the American culture wars. The book's authors, says Pleins, thought that "if you give away the literal reading of the Bible, you start giving up the biblical truth. Where would you stop?"
Similarly, Hofland wants to establish the Bible's authority in America's public schools.
"There's nothing wrong with the Bible being added as a reference text," he insists. "If the science classroom is asking questions about how old the earth is, then this"—Hofland pats a tiny blue Bible—"is as good of a reference as rocks in the ground."
Employing Hofland's logic, solutions for teaching evolution in public schools would, seemingly, become exercises in political correctness.
"Question number one," Hofland says, "could be according to the theory of evolution; question number two could be according to the theory of creation; question number three could be according to the Buddhism or whatever. Or something like that."
Hofland may seem to be far out of the mainstream, but his beliefs have made some inroads in popular culture, as seen in cases like that of the Atlanta school district that voted in 2002 to put stickers in biology textbooks which stated that evolution is "a theory not a fact." A federal judge ruled that the stickers had to be removed.
Others who criticize the way evolution is taught in public schools say they aren't necessarily creationists, but simply believe God has been pushed too far out of the debate over life's origins. In 1998, after receiving a letter co-signed by two widely respected religious scholars, Huston Smith and Alvin Plantinga, the National Association of Biology Teachers was forced to edit its definition of what to teach about evolution in schools. The association had described evolution as "unsupervised" and "impersonal"; Smith and Plantinga argued there was no scientific basis for those descriptors, and the association ended up agreeing, deleting the two words.
At NASA, Hofland often visits an artistic depiction of the origins of human life that has been put up in a building neighboring his workspace. The depiction, a colorful painting that, from left to right, shows the evolutionary stages of life through bold white lines. It begins with volcanoes exploding, moves on to micro-organisms in the oceans, to various kinds of mammals in the forests, to cave men, and finally to modern man driving along a highway.
"I did meet the artist, the original artist," he says of the painting. "At first, he told me they told him to paint all the volcanoes exploding. Then, they told him, Oh that was too much, that would cause a nuclear winter and shut everything down, so they only had two volcanoes that were exploding and the rest were dormant. And see, they keep changing their view of what happened."
Why are you asking me these questions? I was trying to find out what someone else was thinking. I am not questioning science.
Clearly you have a tendency to overreact and overstate your case. No one is forcing anything. Proponents of a particular philosophy cannot stand the thought that their philosophy is not worthy of being called "science," much less holding sole sway in the clasroom. They cannot answer the demand for evidence with evidence, yet they cry like stuck pigs when the evidence points to a biological world operating in a fashion more complex than any machine designed and manufactured by humans, and doing so largely apart from human intervention.
I've got to give you points for creativity.
The only problem is that true evolutionists don't believe in God, because the purpose of the theory was to come up with some way to explain the earth without God. So where in the world did your creativity come from if you evolved and weren't created?
You may choose to believe the Godless left if you want, but I don't believe what's being foisted on us as science by the left any more than I believe the revisionist history foisted on us by leftist political science profs.
It doesn't mesh with Scripture, because it denies the God-breathed uniqueness of humanity. We have the whole of creation to study indeed, but we have the whole of Scripture as well, and evolution doesn't fit the whole either. If man was not uniquely created, and did not sin against the Creator, there is no need for redemption, and there would be no need for a Savior. If you choose to throw out Genesis, you throw out the words of Jesus, and the Apostle Paul, as well as the entire book of Hebrews.
It doesn't work, narby, if you follow your thoughts to their logical conclusion. It just doesn't work.
I can't imagine what Fester Chugabrew is supposed to reflect, so I'll let that one go. But where does the literal interpretation end and the symbolism begin? Mr. Hofland accepts the literal version of creation, 6 days, 6000 years ago. If that is literally true then why isn't it literally true that the sun stopped, which would mean that the sun revolved around the earth? Why is one true and not the other?
To answer, Yes Chris Nedin has been a fully qualified PhD University prof. He's also an Australian (inserts Monty Python philosophy department at the University of woolloomooloo Bruces sketch here).
And I fail to see your argument. It's because Archaeopteryx IS transitional that there can be debate over which side of the imaginary dividing line between the dinosaur and bird "kind" it should be put.
I've been reading Darwin's own words, and the words of those who influenced him, and whom he influenced.
Try it yourself sometime. You might be surprised that your hero isn't such a hero after all.
wOULD YOU KINDLY EXPLAIN WHY EACH ONE OF THE ISSUES YOU LIST ARE FRAUDULENT. MAKING A LIST AND CLAIMING THEY ARE FALSE IS USELESS UNLESS YOU HAVE AN EXPLANATION.
I lost patience trying to point this out. None of the internal bickering over the placement of Archaeopteryx or sea turtles or whatever has the slightest impact on evolution. Now if turtle DNA doesn't fit anywhere, that would be interesting.
But Your Bible does not say that.
To start with the ones in single quotes are taken from Answers in Genesis. The rest I will have to google later, if I have time this evening.
If you are curious about them you could google them yourself. That way you would get all sides. I guarantee you will find people defending each and every one.
The science my father was taught in medical school (taught as fact) in the 1930's is laughable now.
What is it that gives you the confidence that in another 70 years (or less), the things you believe are 'facts' won't be laughed at by those who now have 'new' information?
Science is supposedly based on empirical evidence and study. What empirical evidence do you have to support ANY of the things you believe about evolution? (Answer.....none). You are taking it on faith, based on the deductions of others, who continue to be proven wrong.
I prefer to put my faith in something more consistent.........in Someone who is immutable.
You can put your faith wherever you choose, regardless of how weak and changing the basis of your faith may be. Your Creator has endowed you with the right to reject Him.
Phenomenological language is not unique to the Bible. Context should be taken into account. Some folks gain pleasure from straining language beyond its intent. Nothing new. Sheez. Even certain judges can't get the Constitution right.
Thats what it all comes down to. Either man was uniquely created by God or we are just a fancy bacteria.
And why do I suspect your source is Darwin for Dummies published by some Creationist group?
I would not have faith to execute someone solely on the claims of a scientist. Few would. That's why there are trials.
Do you think TOE should be required to meet the standards of a criminal trial?
Unless you account for a separate creation of humanity, you deny the whole of Scripture.
It is actually more consistent to deny the existence of God and say it all happened by chance than to say that God started the ball rolling and the earth did the rest itself. It's also completely illogical and almost humorous in its preposterous impossibility to believe that evolution occurred, but at least it is consistent if you're an atheist.
Well said.
What evolutionists are claiming as lack of evidence on the Creationists side, they don't have themselves. Yet they ardently and FAITHFULLY believe in evolution and ridicule those that believe differently.
They have a bunch of bones and say they have evidence. If I had a bag full of parts from a 2003 Corvette and a bag full of parts from a 2006 Corvette and reconstructed it; can I now claim that the 2006 version evolved (on its own) from the 2003 version because they have commonality? When in reality, both versions share a common creator/design team.
I have read Darwin, a la Darwin. I've never even seen a Creationist website.
Anyone who works in design of systems, of complicated systems, machiery, software or archictecture can draw and evolutionary chart. Evolution of designs is obvious, and the chart of nearly any design evolutions parallels biological evolutionary charts.
Moreover we have systems that use random draws (monte carlo simulation) to drive closed and open loop models, we have software sandboxes that evolve proofs and algorithms from snippets of building blocks. Yet we know that all useful, working software in the world (with rare exceptions) is designed.
Still an zealout nutcase of a hard-line evolutionist could employ every argument used to demand that attention be paid ONLY to biological evolution towards an equally forceful, demanding and nutty argument that all code has evoloved designer-free. Such a nut denies the belief in programmers.
No need to spend the time, we will interpret them based upon our personal beliefs and neither one of us will be objective. Just didn't like the listing without specifically explaining.
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