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."
This list of 10's of thousands of 're'verifications only apply within a narrow scope of like biological "kinds" (genus/species). I don't know any ID/creationist scientist that disagree with these theories when applied narrowly. It's when scientists attempt to mold micro-evolutionary observations to macro-evolutionary assumptions that I dissent. Not just because some of it flies in the face of my belief that Genesis is accurate but because nothing used as macro-evolutionary "proof" proves anything of the sort.
I hadn't thought of it this way but you may not be far off by saying, "...his conspiracy has been the most successful the earth has ever seen." (though I doubt he had the foresight or intent to do so)
That's OK Fester, I've got pretty good hops for a 53 year old.
Ah yes, MM, but "science" does not equal "truth."
The Bible is truth, and science is only man's finite (and often failed) attempt to discover one small aspect of it.
In that spirit I offer this counter challenge: Give me evidence of biological macro-evolution. This cannot be unobserved assumptions based on micro-evolutionary observation. For those who went to public schools, this means show me transitional fossils, explain cross-stata fossils, & fill in the holes in the supposed fossil "record".
You believe in macro-evolution, I don't. You believe that the biology class is not the place to teach dissenting ideas, I do. You believe the mainstream is right this time, I don't.
You don't have to agree with me and neither do I you. That said, we are doing our children a disservice by feeding them one theory and not even addressing another.
But you forget that the founder of your faith believed that Africans were not as fully evolved as Europeans.
LOL
Actually, jwalsh07 did meet my challenge as presented. Positive, objective evidence (not proof) of intelligent design without bashing Darwin or citing the Bible. Jwalsho7 gets the lolipop.
Science has yet to get a grip on that nature of time. Those who subscribe to the notion of a billion-year-old earth have the same evidence as one who believes the universe is created from moment to moment. Such notions are better suited to philosophy than to hard science, but don't tell that to a dogmatic evolutionist.
My challenge, my rules. If you don't like it, then don't accept the challege. You remind me of the Freepers and others who waste a lot of energy complianing about the morality of a particular TV show or radio program rather simply changing the channel.
I mean real, empirical proof that any of the tenets of evolutionary faith, are actually facts.
Will that be forthcoming?
Actually, you have to think of the invisible hand as a heuristic metaphor, such as Maxwell's demon or Schrodinger's cat.
Now . . . what about the false assumptions, frauds, and misconceptions pushed by the macro-evolutionists? Can we get rid of those?
Amazingly, 3 years ago, my son's 5th grade science book had a picture of archaeopteryx and a blurb about it being a "transitional" fossil - and absolutely nothing about the controversy surrounding its validity or the complete lack of any other "transitional" fossils.
I now don't worry much about this disinformation for my kids as they are now home schooled. Evolution is now discussed as a theory not fact.
Tell me what the controversy is over archaeopteryx.
What Creationists are demanding is more honesty regarding the fallibility of the methods science uses to base and measure their findings. For instance, how did crystals trap 218 Po without the parent uranium halo? The polonium isotope has a half life of only three minutes, yet it is found trapped inside crystals.
The lava flow that ran into the Grand Canyon measures older than the bottom of the Grand Canyon which is impossible. Science seems to be stuck in a situation in which all data must be shoved, tweaked, and molded to fit into a preconceived paradigm. That is what is being called on the carpet, and the answers have not been forth coming.
I am consistent - the Bible is the Word of God. You cannot dismiss some of it and not be rejecting it all. Just because current science attempts to ensure God is not part of anything, doesn't make it so.
That is the very point of current science, which is the factor that removes its objectivity, and renders it unscientific.
If the real goal of science were to determine truth, it would not purposefully remove potential answers to their questions before they are asked.
I think it's a touch more superstitious than the above, although for the most part it is a metaphor. My impression is that Smith thought there was some sort of mysterious Divine providence that had ordered society in such a way that by seeking your own self-benefit, you unintentionally benefitted others.
More along the lines of, say, bees unintentionally pollinating fruit trees while collecting honey and pollen, thus helping out the fruit trees without meaning to do so. This actual metaphor (bees) was first used by Bernard Mandeville in 1714, in The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Publick Benefits.
It was not unusual for Deists of the time to refer to Divine Providence as a sort of ordering principle for the world that wasn't actively involved in day to day pursuits, sort of along the lines of Natural Law.
Exactly how old the earth is, I don't know. Based on Biblical geneology, it should be about 6 to 8 thousand years. Before you attempt to flame me, those numbers are an semi-Biblically-educated guess.
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