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."
I'm not going to allow you to change the rules to my "challenge." If you can't follow directions, then don't waste bandwidth with an irrelevant response. With that said, I do appreciate your admission that creationsism is not "science," but rather a "supernatural event." Supernatural events have no place in science class.
whatever theories there are in 100 years, almost certianly they will be expansions of what is currently understood. Like Newton wasn't "wrong", yet Einstein eclipsed Newton's work, evolution will undoubtedly stand. Yet I'm sure that more details will expand it.
I believe in creation and I agree that creation does not belong in the science class however there are many scientific reasons why the theory of macro-evolution is false. These scientific evidences against macro-evolution need to be included in science class.
Calling something "faith" doesn't make it so.
Evolution fit's the evidence in hand.
The evidence of religion is that few can agree on exactly what the Bible actually means. Note the various denominations, and the fact that even creationists fall into different camps of old-earth and young-earth, and various forms in between. It's awfully hard to take the few hundred words in the creation stories in Genesis and extrapolate them into what we see around us without different people disagreeing.
But in science, the fields of geology, biology, genetics and more all agree with each other. "Macro" Evolution is how the world works. My belief is that God created Evolution first.
Here are some creationst frauds, at least one of which will show up on every crevo thread, and which are never challenged by creationists.
And all these reasons are promoted by the religious ID promoters, who have all the scientific rigor of the Sierra Club.
Sorry, but there is no genuine scientific challenge to evolution. Science doesn't even recognize the term "macro" evolution, which is a dodge to allow the accepted evidence of evolution to stand, yet still cling to religious dogma.
You're making me laugh.
Only those who go through a full "auditing" know the secrets of Scientology (or those who read courtroom transcripts). Not all Christians or Jews (it IS in the Old Testament) subscribe to "creationism" and is "Intelligent Design" lumped together with "144 hours to create the universe, 6,000 year old Earth"? Intelligent Design says that the vast diversity of life that fills the Earth is not a "fluke" (1 in a trillion floating rocks).
If the left truly believes in Darwinism, why is there an Endangered Species Act to protect those lifefroms who's time has come? Adapt or die.
Why is there a social safety net for those who are unable to "fit into" society? Why have same sex adoption for those who are unable (by choice) to procreate?
PLease reread my "challenge." Again, I'm asking for the creationists to support their position not by attacking evolution, but by providing objective, positive evidence in support of creationsim that is not based upon a huge leap of religious faith.
Darwin merely found evidence to support what many people were already coming to believe at the time. And litteraly 10's of thousands of scientists have re-verified ever since.
There's an old saying about conspiracies, that any with more than one conspirator are bound to be discovered. If Darwin was a calculating fraud, then his conspiracy has been the most successful the earth has ever seen.
There are numerous scientific theories against the idea of macro-evolution and they need to be in the classroom. To say that there aren't scientific based theories against evolution is ridiculous.
My answer to that challenge is to read a book called "Darwin's Black Box". I think the author's name is Michael Behe. If you're serious about getting an answer to your question you will read this book.
Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam, taught his followers that black scientists created the white race in a test tube 10,000 years ago. Is that a valid theory to be taught in classrooms, too? If they don't then are they discriminating against black muslims?
"He graduated from high school (his mother was his eighth-grade biology teacher), but flunked out of college after a year and a half."
Wow, if you had taken a little more instruction in philosophy while you were inundating yourself in the physical sciences, you might realize what an absurd statement you just made.
"Supernatural events have no place in science class."
If one postulates that the creation of the world was a supernatural event, then to presume that thesis to be incorrect before expounding the alternative is to presuppose one's conclusion, a violation of the highest principles of both philosophy and science, and one which leads directly to circular reasoning.
Similarly, you might have learned about the concept of ad hominem argumenation, which seems very popular on this thread. But then, that's what bigotry thrives on.
Simple question: did the universe have a beginning? If so, what evidence exists that indicates the instigation of the universe is 'only' natural? In other words, under what evidentiary basis do you rule out a designer for the Big Bang?
"Judging from the rhetoric from some of FR's creationist folks, it's not an atypical educational background."
Sometimes highly educated folks get really really good at their brand of rhetoric too ....
Who said this had anything to do with furthering the "conservative agenda"?
If you're looking for a political group which believes in fairy tales, go visit DU.
Bioengineering. In other words, if man can do it surely it is possible that somebody or something else could do it. ID is a fact, we can do it, we can observe it, we can repeat it. Adaptation and mutation are facts. We can observe them as well.
To accept one and not the other or the possibility of the other in the face of common sense seems kind of silly to me.
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