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."
The motivations are clear, The Creationoids have no evidence for their position so in their warped mind they think if they could somehow discredit Darwin (By calling him an Atheist, Racist, whatever) as a human being that somehow makes evolution false and creationism correct.
It's really no different then the Liberal personal assassination tactic they use on people like Tom Delay
Simple questions
* Origin of Species was published in 1857, Was there more slavery before or after it was Published?
* The past, present and future members of the KKK, are they Creationist or do they believe in evolution?
* The people who fought in the civil war to keep the institution of slavery, were they Creationist or did they believe in evolution?
* Did the people who fought to keep segregation in 1950's & 60's were they Creationist or did they believe in evolution?
As interesting as your list of cards is, it just supports my point: try dealing 100 billion cards out of 100 trillion possible. You assuming you could flip cards constantly w/out a break, you might do 100/min - 6000/hr - 144000/day. It would take you 694,444 days to do the first set. Now that was 1 try for a desired combination (mutation): did you get one? Great! Only a few billion more trys to get a positive mutation.
Now to top off our "fun with playing cards": let's do the whole process with proteins and proceed for a few million eras to get to the first single-celled organism. Oh crap! Where did we get the proteins?
No it was 52 of 52 : 52 x 51 x 50 ... 2 x 1 = 52! or 8.066 x 1067.
... try dealing 100 billion cards out of 100 trillion possible ... desired combination ...
It wouldn't matter. If there is no goal, then one outcome is as good as another.
People are sinful (the Bible tells us that). I could give you a list of racist evolutionists too if I wanted to play that game, but I don't.........at least not now.
I've done a lot of research on the subject, and you won't win the argument with me, because I have too many facts at my disposal. In fact, I'm writing an essay on the subject, complete with names and facts to back it up........not some 1960's TV stereotyping of whose racist and who's not, like you've just given.
Nice try, though. Really. 'A' for effort.
I use only facts. You make up silly accusations to make yourselves feel better in your denial of those facts.
Why am I not surprised.
uuummm, You are the one trying to disprove evolution by trying to make Darwin out to be a racist
People are sinful (the Bible tells us that). I could give you a list of racist evolutionists too if I wanted to play that game, but I don't.........at least not now.
I've done a lot of research on the subject, and you won't win the argument with me, because I have too many facts at my disposal.
LOL! Yeah sure, That's why your spending your time throwing out accusations attacking the character of Darwin instead doing actual scientific research to prove your position.
In fact, I'm writing an essay on the subject, complete with names and facts to back it up...
<YAWN>
I hate to be the one to break it to you, But you can write all the essays you want about Darwin's personality, you can even write one proving Darwin was a child molesting axe murderer. And guess what, it won't make any difference on whether the Theory of Evolution is true or not.
The Theory of Evolution's validity is based on facts & evidence, not on the good/bad personal characteristics of Darwin or any other single person.
Sorry
.....not some 1960's TV stereotyping of whose racist and who's not, like you've just given.
So there is no such thing as the KKK and Christians embraced anti-segregation laws and the Emancipation Procramation?
Nice try, though. Really. 'A' for effort.
I already give your essay an 'F'. Because I already know what it's going to be about. You going to pick and choose some idiots from the late 19th to early 20th century and blame their actions on Darwin while ignoring your fellow Christians who proposed/did the same thing (including the obligatory Goodwin's law Hilter reference, even though he and his fellow Nazis were mostly Christian) and of course you will leave out that the TOE today is as widespread and accepted as ever and racism today is probably at it's lowest level its been in all of human history.
And I'm not researching evolution. It's much broader subject than that. I'm finding all kinds of HISTORICAL FACTS in my research (you should try it sometime, instead of looking up little factoids to defend your man). It's not about his personality; it's about his philosophy, and those who followed his leading.
But thanks for the negative review of an essay you've never seen. It proves that you are as open minded as an evolutionary zealot can be......i.e. not at all. You're one of those 'don't confuse me with the facts' kinda guys. Just like a scientist ought to be, right??.........ROFLOL!
I've got to give you this, though.......your implication that Darwin was part of the reason slavery ended is too funny for words. Let's forget about the Christian abolitionists, and that Christian fellow with the name of Abraham Lincoln.
I said clearly that we are all sinners, and that racism existed on both sides of the fence.......but you, as all your buddies here, ignore the bulk of my post to pick and choose your little pet, imaginary theories about what I'm saying....
But that's OK......your distorted defense of Darwin has been amusing........it just sorta makes me think that you might have evolved on another planet.....
When I refer to evolutionary zealots, I'm not referring to the many reasonable folks who don't disagree with what their science teachers and profs taught them, and believe in evolution. I'm talking about guys like you quam, who are so nasty and emotional about it that you embarrass even them, and make them stay as far away from these threads as they can.
Have a nice life..........even if you don't know where that life came from.
Why am I not surprised.
Careful; you're making fun of the intellectual creme de la creme of the anti-Evolution movement. Ordinary anti-evos never make it to the Sactum Sanctorum, only college flunk-outs and people with bogus degrees are admitted into those hallowed chambers.
You have no idea where I learned what.
My conceptions of "religious history" I got from Bible history classes at Oklahoma Baptist University and years of Sunday school in the Southern Baptist Church.
Where the miscommunication here is that I got that education, and I came to my conclusions of evolution over 40 years ago. That was before the creationist movement gained ground within the religious community. And later the ID movement, after creationism was shot down in flames.
I've not seen any significant change over my lifetime in what science understands. Some additional detail, but no fundimental change.
It is religious believers that have changed their minds about evolution, and returned to the controversies that they lost in the 1930's. It is religion (not God, but organized religion) that has been inconsistent over time. And inconsistent between denominations even today.
Because you see, if you don't believe in the divinity of Christ, you are not a Christian at all, and that is an important issue for others to see.
Well, I see you can stick with the subject of evolution and Genesis. What's Christ got to do with it? Yes, Christ talked about the creation. But neither He, nor Genesis itself has more than a few hundred words on the subject, that can be interpreted in many different ways. All that Genesis or Christ really says on the matter is that "God did it", with no significant details about HOW God did it. Why is this so difficult for you people to understand?
We disagree on that interpretation. Deal with it.
Just what in the world are you talking about? Evolution has been established science for over a hundred years. It has abolutely zero to do with politics, except that some people on the right are attempting to make it so.
I firmly believe the politization of evolution will blow up in the face of conservatives, and Christians. Trying to warn of that impending mistake is my passion for arguing this subject.
You knew what he meant. Why resort to silly responses like that, unless you have nothing else to offer in the discussion?
Which parts of the Bible do you accept, and which do you reject (besides Genesis), and on what basis do you make that decision?
For the record, I have been a Christian for nearly 50 years, and have never rejected the truth of God's creation, and I am not alone in that.
You may take comfort in placing arbitrary blame on some movement if you wish (as all you zealots apparently do), but it's not accurate. Some of us have never rejected the truth of God's word.
Now if you don't wish to answer the questions I have repeated, I will assume that you also arbitrarily choose passages of Scripture to reject outside of Genesis because they don't fit your worldview, and the conversation is over.
And as for what Christ has to do with it...............the answer is, everything. Because He is the Creator.
Do some research.
I know what you believe about conservatives who believe in creation. You think we should shut up.
Do you also believe that about those of us who are pro-life? We cause all kinds of trouble by speaking up about abortion? Should we shut up about that too?
How about the Ten Commandments? Does that embarrass you too, when we say that religious doctrine should be allowed in public places?
Exactly how embarrassing are we religious freaks to you, as a so-called conservative Christian?
Darwin is your boogyman.
The funny thing is that the leftie that works in my office thinks that George Bush is the boogyman because he might make children pray in school.
Both sides play the game. But it is only a game.
If your grand essay is about "Darwin", but not about evolution, then you too are playing the boogyman game.
The sad thing is that it works. I'm sure you will be a great success.
Humans can be such stupid creatures.
Wonderful. I agree. But that's not the question. The question is HOW did He create it? And all the evidence in God's creation is that it was through evolution. The evidence in God's word does not have that kind of detail.
Why can't you people get this through your heads?
Scientists are supposed to be objective, and you, decidedly are not, so before you say anything else, back off, and try not say anything to further incriminate yourself.
(And, FYI, it's spelled "bogeyman," and you're not the first person to make that silly accusation. If you want people to think you know what you're talking about, it's best to spell your words correctly).
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