Posted on 04/22/2005 4:21:47 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Evolution found a home Thursday in the oldest church in Kansas during a forum about the controversy over science instruction for public school students.
"There is no conflict between evolution and the Christian faith," said the Rev. Peter Luckey, the senior pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church, 925 Vt.
Luckey was preaching to the choir during a five-hour forum that featured scientists, teachers and politicians who argued in favor of teaching students evolution because it is the foundation of science, knowledge of which will be needed to compete for jobs in the growing bioscience industry.
About 75 people attended the forum at Plymouth, which was founded in 1854 and was the first established church in the Kansas Territory. Attempts to inject intelligent design -- the notion that there is a master planner for all life -- into science class should be rejected, they said.
"Intelligent design is nothing but creationism in a cheap tuxedo," said Leonard Krishtalka, director of the Kansas University Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center.
‘Think critically'
The forum was another round in the debate that has thrust Kansas on the national stage.
With control of the State Board of Education in conservative hands [AAARRGGHHH!!], state officials again will consider science standards that will guide teachers.
A committee of scientists has drafted standards that include evolution teaching, but a minority report, led by proponents of intelligent design, wants criticism of evolution included. A State Board of Education committee, comprising three conservative [AARRGHH!!] board members, plans six days of hearings that will revolve around that debate.
The speakers at Thursday's forum were adamant that evolution instruction not be reduced, watered down or dumbed down.
Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' science adviser, Lee Allison, said when the state approved a $500 million bioscience initiative, it included a provision to recruit top scholars who met the standards of the National Academy of Sciences, which supports evolution without equivocation.
"The state really has taken a position on this in a broad, bipartisan way," Allison said.
Charles Decedue, executive director of the Higuchi Biosciences Center, said teaching evolution was critical because bioscience companies want to locate in places where the work force has received a solid education in chemistry, physics and biology.
"They want people who can think critically," he said.
‘Hayseed state'
Andrew Stangl, a Kansas University sophomore, said his high school science teachers in his hometown of Andover refused to teach evolution.
He bought books and taught himself. He said fear of teaching evolution would hurt the United States in the long term. "I don't want to see other countries pass us by. We are going to economically suffer as a result," he said.
In 1999, Kansas made international news, much of it negative, when a conservative [AARRGGHH!!] board de-emphasized evolution. The 2000 election returned moderates to power, and evolution was reinstated. But with conservatives [AARRGGHH!!] back in control, international criticism was starting again, several panelists said.
Rachel Robson, a doctoral candidate at KU Medical Center, said one of her friends was applying for a job with a Japanese company, and the company officials made fun of Kansas and questioned whether good scientists could come from there.
Thursday's forum attracted national attention from National Public Radio and NBC.
Krishtalka said even though the battle over evolution was going on in several states, "Kansas will be tarred and feathered by the media as the hayseed state."
Carol and Tom Banks, of Prairie Village, attended the forum, saying they were getting tired of conservatives [AARRGGHH!!] controlling the political agenda.
"If intelligent design were taught, that would be teaching religion in public schools," Carol Banks said.
But Jerry Manweiler, a physicist from Lawrence, said he supported teaching intelligent design. "It's important to know the theory of evolution, but it's also important to understand the nature of God," he said. Manweiler said he was put off by the forum speakers' "lack of humility."
Don Covington, vice president of networking for Intelligent Design Network Inc., said he disagreed with the speakers.
"They want their kids to know how to think, but you can't develop critical thinking skills when you tell them to memorize Darwin," he said.
• May 5-7: Science standards hearings in auditorium of Memorial building, 120 S.W. 10th St., Topeka. Time to be determined later.
• May 12-14: Science standards hearings, time and location to be determined later.
I am not advocating "skipping the science," js. I was suggesting that even science has its limits.
We don't know everything, and never will. that is a limitation. But any phenomenon that can be observed can be studied by scientific methodologies.
It's nice to know we agree about something, js1138. :^) Thanks for writing!
I think one of the places we disagree is in our expectations.
We do not know everything, but we know enough about filght, for example, to make aviation the safest long distance form of transportation in human history.
We know enough about medicine to wipe out Smallpox with a handful of doctors and a couple hundred paramedics, over a span of half a dozen years.
I think that technology will continue to progress, and in two hundred years our descendents will look upon our lives with horror, just as realistic people look upon the middle ages with horror.
(I don't look back on the Middle Ages "with horror." There were some extraordinary, glorious intellectual achievements that occurred during that "Dark Age.")
Going back to the original purpose of the metaphor, the gaps which have been mapped around, in science, are often recognized by both sides. The scientific materialist trusts in explorers and adventurers to fill in those gaps sometime in the future. Intelligent Design supporters point to the gaps as evidence that the picture is incomplete and thus, faithful but not true. But more significantly, scientific materialists write on the edges “there be dragons” when they defer to the “anthropic principle” or “plentitude argument” or "fallacy of quantizing the continuum" (etc.) rather than to so much as consider the possibility of an intelligent designer.
As betty boop has been pointing out all along, the needed perspective here, as with the ancient drafter of maps, is the big picture. In the case of the mapper - that the earth is round, in the case of science - the Cosmology.
In nature, we do observe collectives of organisms which act with a single mind – such as bees, ants, schools of fish, musk oxen, penguins – but as far as I know we have not been able to tap into even such a simple collective much less establish a direct joining with a self-willful being.
Among Christians, however, we do share the mind of Christ – so to the extent we are surrendered to His will over our own, it is possible to understand what the other person is thinking. Still, that does not allow us to invade another Christian’s self-will, his consciousness/mind.
Beautifully said, Alamo-Girl! Thank you so much for this excellent post!
You would choose to believe there is something like ESP going on, rather than search for more mundane explanations?
The only way an observer could be absolutely sure what is going on in the consciousness/mind of a person with a damaged brain (receiver/transmitter) is to enter that mind directly.
You are essentially saying that we cannot verify the existence of other people or know whether they are empty puppets. I'm sure you don't really do this in real life. Perhaps it's an act of faith, but we all assume we can judge the character of other people's consciousness by careful observation.
I would trust the judgement on this issue to neurosurgeons and neurologists before I would trust armchair pundits.
As for your map problem: science is more like a grainy photograph that becomes clearer and sharper with time. The outlines of large objects remain unchanged, but the resolution becomes sharper as more data becomes available. Mistakes are made by inferring details before they are clear, but these are corrected over time. We seldom see situations where large scale objects have to be reinterpreted. There really isn't any other human enterprise that works this way.
It depends upon what you mean by "evolution". If you mean, "any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next" that's one thing. If you mean, the successive changes "that led from the earliest protoorganism to snails, bees, giraffes, and dandelions", that's quite another. The former is observable. The latter, however, purports to account for the natural development of all life from a simple beginning, which is not an observable, and which consequently is a completely unneccessary accounting for a thing that was never observed in the first place.
Cordially,
Yep, the ol' "slice and dice" approach among all the specialities. As the poet said, "We murder to dissect." In the end, it's like the blind men trying to decide what an elephant looks like. One grabs the tail, and says the elephant is like a tail. One feels the trunk, and says the elephant looks like a trunk. Another has found the elephant's leg, and says the elephant is like a leg....
Excellent point betty! Knowledge of the parts do not give us a knowledge of the whole unless we "stand back" and see the relationships between the parts. This same problem exists in spades even in theological studies, where theologians study the greek & hebrew to the nth degree trying to figure out the mind of GOD, and forget that their are important relationships between all those greek & hebrew words that go well beyond the meaning of each individual word. That's why I prefer biblical translations like the NIV and 'The Message' to older, more "literal" translations like the KJV and NASB. The meaning of the words is far greater than just the words themselves. (But I do admit that those more 'literal' translations do have an important role to play as well.)
Why do you say that? An expectation about what Creation is supposed to look like is an a priori philosophical or theological premise rather than a scientific argument.
Cordially,
there really isn't much difference between these two concepts. The human genome has fewer genes than any of thousands of "lower" organisms. The working code is tighter, but has fewer lines.
The real increase in complexity occurred during the billions of yers when life was single-celled. All the computational machinery necessary to produce multi-celled organisms is present in single celled organisms.
you: You would choose to believe there is something like ESP going on, rather than search for more mundane explanations?
IOW, if they are not communicating in a physical sense then there must be something else going on.
But to answer your question more fully - yes, we relate to other people based upon our own interpretation and confidence in what they reveal to us. Still we do not know of a certainty whether our understanding is true.
When it comes to relying on professional assessments of the character of any person's mind, I would never turn to neurosurgeons or neurologists. For me, "character" is better understood by theologians and philosophers.
As Nicolo Dallaporta said (paraphrased) the crime of modern science is that it has become so massive and thus, so specialized, there are few big thinkers as in the days of Einstein and Heisenberg.
But for me, there is great hope for another reinterpretation coming from the geometric physics corner. Einstein believed it was there but didn't live long enough to formalize the theory that the base wood of matter transmutes to the pure marble of geometry.
OK, my metaphor can be misread. Quantum effects and relativity take place on scales that are completely outside out ordinary experience. You are correct that they are big ideas, but I had in mind the fact that older formulations still work within the observational boundaries of the people who made them.
The switch from geocentricity is really close to my point. Copernicus envisioned circular orbits. His was the first really revolutionary scientific idea. But orbits aren't circular; they are elliptical, and with relativity tossed in, more complex yet.
But if you diagrammed the solar system on a piece of paper, the difference between circular orbits and the true elliptical orbits would mostly fall within the width of your pencil lead. This is what I meant by science progressively adding resolution to a picture.
Einstein's greatest regret, recently communicated to me via extra-dimensional freepmail, is this: "Oy, Patrick, I vish I had liffed long enough to enjoy der blessings of Viagra!"
Yes there is. It is the gigantic extrapolation from the former to the unobserved latter that is the bugaboo.
All the computational machinery necessary to produce multi-celled organisms is present in single celled organisms.
Only if you assume common ancestory from a single (or a few?) source(s), which is the very bone of contention. For example, how could the computational machinery present in single celled organisms give rise to to the very complex, specified cellular machinery of sexual reproduction?
Cordially,
Euclidian geometry still holds for planes despite not working on spheres, etc. – thus we can say that Euclidian geometry still works within the observational boundaries of Euclid. Likewise, Newtonian physics still works at a “classical” level but not for the astronomical nor for the quantum.
But to return to my metaphors v your metaphor – you’d rather view what we do not yet know as a fuzziness in the image of what we do know whereas I’d rather point to the gaps where we know virtually nothing and the edges of what we shall endeavor to know rather than to warn people away ("there be dragons"). I aver it should be boundary-less.
We should probably agree to disagree on the fuzziness v gaps because it is an expression of confidence of the body of knowledge - which can be rather personal.
However, unless your fuzzy image is also on a sphere (boundary-less) then you still have an edge problem to address if we wish to fully compare our perspectives.
Evolution, meaning exactly the development of all life from a simple beginning, is the best explanation for the existing evidence. The alternative is to believe that a designer, or "God", zapped species into existence by some unexplained manner. And this "designer" killed off entire species, as he was creating more over a long period of time, but has apparently stopped doing this magic, as no new species have appeared that were documented to have previously not existed.
Sorry, but there has been no evidence of a designer found (non-fatal critisisms of evolution are not positive evidence FOR a designer), he is not observable, not testable, and such a designer is completely unnecessary since the completely viable explanation of evolution is at hand that does have a great deal of evidence to support it (although, not infinite evidence, which is apparently what is sought by some).
For myself, I believe that God's greatest creation was evolution. As an engineer, I can recognize an elegant solution to a difficult problem. The designer of evolution truly was intelligent.
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