Posted on 08/04/2005 10:31:34 AM PDT by Right Wing Professor
WASHINGTON - "President Bush, in advocating that the concept of 'intelligent design' be taught alongside the theory of evolution, puts America's schoolchildren at risk," says Fred Spilhaus, Executive Director of the American Geophysical Union. "Americans will need basic understanding of science in order to participate effectively in the 21st century world. It is essential that students on every level learn what science is and how scientific knowledge progresses."
In comments to journalists on August 1, the President said that "both sides ought to be properly taught." "If he meant that intelligent design should be given equal standing with the theory of evolution in the nation's science classrooms, then he is undermining efforts to increase the understanding of science," Spilhaus said in a statement. "'Intelligent design' is not a scientific theory." Advocates of intelligent design believe that life on Earth is too complex to have evolved on its own and must therefore be the work of a designer. That is an untestable belief and, therefore, cannot qualify as a scientific theory."
"Scientific theories, like evolution, relativity and plate tectonics, are based on hypotheses that have survived extensive testing and repeated verification," Spilhaus says. "The President has unfortunately confused the difference between science and belief. It is essential that students understand that a scientific theory is not a belief, hunch, or untested hypothesis."
"Ideas that are based on faith, including 'intelligent design,' operate in a different sphere and should not be confused with science. Outside the sphere of their laboratories and science classrooms, scientists and students alike may believe what they choose about the origins of life, but inside that sphere, they are bound by the scientific method," Spilhaus said.
AGU is a scientific society, comprising 43,000 Earth and space scientists. It publishes a dozen peer reviewed journal series and holds meetings at which current research is presented to the scientific community and the public.
OK.
Currently ID is not being taught anywhere in public schools. And you are right, perhaps it is a subject more appropriate for philosophy classes.
My biggest concern is from a law and inalienable rights point of view. If young kids are brainwashed by schools that exclude God into becoming secularist/atheist, they have no grasp of the concept of where our rights and freedoms come from.
Atheists/Secularists are creating a state-sponsored religion in violation of the First Amendment and it is on full display in our public schools (i.e. government is "god). Resistence to ID being taught anywhere in public school is mostly on the part of people like that.
Do all U. S. Presidents surrender their right freely to comment on issues of the day, when asked, or only Republican presidents?
But gain, you dodge the issue: The claims of the "Evolutionary Scientists" _ or at least the claims you make for them - are not supported by their approach.
I have a hard time understanding ID as a "science," but that is not my point.
It is really a philosophical critique of "Evolutionary Scientist," but since "evolutionary scientist seem to be to be both involved in what is "more than science," and what is actually "less than science," I think that this critique is a valid one to at least consider.
But in term of this thread, much of what we say is "science instruction" in our school system has precious little to do with science whatsoever (the same could be said about "math instruction" and its relation to Mathematics.)
Pace the odd prodigy, I really think that young minds are not developed enough for the concepts until puberty.
Much of what goes on in "Science Studies," particularly before High School, can at best serve mostly to interest and inspire people who later may take up the discipline; often though it is just so much gobbledygook that does almost as much harm as good.
Why do you presume that any alternative to the evolutionary model represents "teaching religion?" Is it because at its roots the theory of evolution, in its application to the origin of life and the indescribably diverse forms of its existence is itself a field of religious belief, as prominent evolutionists have admitted?
There are atheists who cannot accept the evolutionary model of life, simply because of the extremely low probability of its representing objecvtive reality.
Many scientists believe in God. But they do so with no evidence. That's why they call it "faith".
Other scientists would answer that they can describe "God", in that He does not exist. He has no motivations, methodologies, history, etc. and that is an exact description.
What evidence to you have of God? I'm assuming you're talking about the Judeo, Christian God.
There's some old books. But then, there are other old books claiming to describe other deities.
There is some external evidence that Jesus and other prophets existed. But I don't doubt you'd agree that there are false prophets and preachers today. Jim Jones is merely the most horrific example.
There are claims of miracles of Jesus. But how do we know they were not just very good magic tricks? Jesus only had 12 disciples, and it would not be hard to get that many corrupt tricksters in one place. Back to Jim Jones; he had a thousand followers, who sold their worldly goods and met death with him in Central America. Jesus only had 12 followers at His end.
This discussion about the existence of God is the downside of the ID community starting this fight. And they *did* start this fight. There are no significant scientific groups that make their living attacking religion. Certainly none that get comments out of the President.
How many good Christians will be exposed to the overwhelming (and it really is overwhelming) evidence for evolution, and being faced with the choice of believing in God, or believing in the reality in front of their eyes, will reject God? You probably won't. But I did.
There is another way. Google up Dr. Francis S. Collins, the head of the human genome project and evolution proponent, and read his discussions on religion. He does not think there need be a conflict between faith and science.
But if religion insists on escalating this conflict, I predict they will lose badly, once the fight against ID is truly joined.
No it's silly religious commentary from a whack nutcase. Putting America's children at risk my ass.
Actually, I've got this feeling that relativity will be significantly modified someday.
Not that I know enough to argue against it. So I don't. Which is what IDers should do. They should quietly keep their faith, and wait to see what science comes up with.
If "God" can be discovered by science, then someone will do it without the help of political movements. The scientist that "discovers" God will be more famous than Einstein.
Your argument seems to be that you embody and speak for all valid intellectual pursuit in this area, and woe betide anyone that should be so moronic to disagree with you. You talk about science as it were some sort idealized ediface rather than an practice and discipline that fallible human being pursue. SO be it.
You are completely missing my point, perhaps because you are accustom to canned, knee jerk responses to IDers around here.
ID vs. Evolution per se does not interest me from either side. What does interest me is the inability of the "Scientific Crowd" (with a few really powerful exceptions) to differentiate science from philosophy in their own minds, and their inability to understand what the "other side" is saying to them. I am also quite taken aback by the high handed rudeness of the "Evo" group.
I find talking to you pointless, as you are not even paying attention to what I am talking about. Perhaps you do not understand what I am saying, but whatever the story is, you are obviously up on a well worn hobby horse. Ride away, I am sorry I disturbed you.
Because the two "sides" have no common starting point for a debate.
One is faith, and the other is science, and the two do not mix.
God is the subject of science, not the object. That's how it's supposed to be.
Intelligence is the DNA of the universe.
The unfortunate lesson of how we teach science misses the point that it is primarily a methodology to discover the "unknown," rather than indoctrinate us with the "known." At the creative level of science, one does not know what the cause is. Only in retrospect, in the textbooks, or some expert's explanation, is the cause and effect so clearly established. In any real world application, the cause is more likely to be unknown, and even the effect often, is not already known. In the true inquiry, even the "known" is unknown.
In the conventional understanding of the hypothesis, one usually assumes an understanding of the proper relationship of cause and effect -- and designs a test to prove that this is so. But as any computer programmer knows, he can predesign false answers as easily as valid ones. For this reason, probably 99% of the studies and experiments are flawed because of the researchers desire to prove what he wanted to prove -- rather than be the most significant factor to observe. Thus, if one has a preconceived notion of what the answer is, unsurprisingly, he will prove that that is so --regardless if that is a significant understanding of the event.
In the field of exercise for example, it is already assumed without question that measuring the amount of calories consumed or the number of heart beats are the greatest indicators of fitness and well-being -- rather than that the reason they are measured, is that they are the most convenient/easiest to measure, and therefore one can sell a lot of devices to measure that event. However, actual fitness results may vary tremendously. What is the real significant factor is never questioned. One will never notice it because in one's study design, he has predetermined what is to be measured as the most significant factor -- ignoring all the other possibilities, that are summarily dismissed despite that the traditional paradigm doesn't work for most people. The physical educators will just exhort their participants to work harder, believe more strongly -- and never suspect they have a flawed understanding. They'll go back to their data confident that their heart rate measure measured the heart rate -- but whether that was an explanation or predictor of any other desired event is never convincingly established.
Those who are very proficient in their knowledge of useless information may have a high IQ -- but if they mistake answering trivial questions as an intelligent thing to do, one questions whether such a measurement is valid at measuring intelligence.
I don't have a problem with teaching that our Declaration of Independance claimed our rights as given by God. The school does not need to exactly "preach" about God, but that is the history of the Declaration and I wholeheartedly think that it should be taught that way. Neither an athiest or believer should be upset at that (although some will and screw'em).
It's up to churches to take a larger role in society, perhaps by first reestablishing their old traditional place as schools for children.
Just as long as they don't teach the rejection of science based on faith. That way lies the Taliban. Many denominations (the Roman Catholic, for example) have no problem with evolution, and the rest should copy them.
Because the two "sides" have no common starting point for a debate.
One is faith, and the other is science, and the two do not mix.
I take it you've got some reason to view evolution as something other than a religion??
Oh, yes. Some are seriously involved in science. Even the science of evolution and common ancestry. I don't claim to be any expert, but some seriously are.
"My biggest concern is from a law and inalienable rights point of view. If young kids are brainwashed by schools that exclude God into becoming secularist/atheist, they have no grasp of the concept of where our rights and freedoms come from. Atheists/Secularists are creating a state-sponsored religion in violation of the First Amendment and it is on full display in our public schools (i.e. government is "god). Resistence to ID being taught anywhere in public school is mostly on the part of people like that." ~ BaBaStooey
"....[C.S.Lewis] saw the signs of the changing times the vacant stare of the coming postmodernismwritten on the faces of young students in the classrooms before him. He heard in his students’ questions the beginnings of deconstructionism, depriving words of their meaning.
What counted was not that Coleridge’s waterfall was really sublime, but whether that tourist thought it was sublime. I think Lewis saw the mood on the faces of students, when politicians and other cultural elites could not see it in the generation of leaders.
Maybe it was because Lewis understood the power of the imagination and how our aesthetic senses affect the way we ultimately think. ....
Or maybe it was because, as a scholar, Lewis had a well-formed understanding of the struggle between truth, the “Tao,” as he called it, and the great skepticism of those who believed that they could construct their own conceptions of reality. Lewis saw two great world views in collision!
Maybe it was because Lewis had a supernatural gift of insight. He liked to call himself a “supernaturalist” in opposition to the naturalism of the age.
Whatever it was, one thing is absolutely clear from his writings: C.S. Lewis saw the surging tides of deconstructionalism and skepticism that would soon erode the moral foundations of the Western world.
Lewis clearly saw that naturalism would defeat for a timesupernaturalism, in the great conflict of the world views of the later half of the twentieth century. (Although I should say that the conflict is nothing new. Those world views were in conflict back in the time of the ancient Greeks. Aristotle dealt with questions of naturalism, and many Greeks believed in or sought a supernatural explanation for reality. I have always thought of Plato as a pagan searching for Christ. So that debate has gone on for a long time, but it has come to a collision at this point once again in the later half of the twentieth century.)
He saw that the Western world would throw over the natural moral order. He foresaw the emergence of elite “controllers” who would tell us what was good for us and take away our humanity and dignity, instituting the kind of soft despotism Tocqueville wrote about. And Lewis saw that ultimately this would produce tyranny. He saw it all in the forties and fifties when few otherscertainly few Christiansdid.
Historical Background
...From the Greeks onward, Western culture generally embraced the idea of a transcendent, absolute moral order. The Greeks believed in the absolutes of truth, beauty, and justice. They believed that a well-ordered life was a life lived in accord with these things.
Then came the rise of Christianity and the belief in Judeo-Christian truth rooted in revelation. The “God who has spoken, who is” spoke to us, and those words shaped our belief system.
Science became possible only because of that belief formed by the Judeo-Christian tradition; science is only measuring what is, what is real. If there is no order, no absolute order, what is there to measure? You can’t measure chaos. So science and the whole pursuit of knowledge rested upon these foundations.
Dramatic change in Western thought came about in the seventeenth century. I’ll use as my dividing point when Rene Descartes retreated to the isolation of what might be called his “Dutch oven”that famous momentbecause he couldn’t decide what was real in the world.
So he sat in his Dutch oven until he decided what was real. And when he came out, he decided cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” The only thing he was sure was real was the fact that he could think. Although he was a strong believer himself, that phrase had profound and dangerous implications for the West, because it got people thinking of reality not in terms of what is external to us and objective and transcendent, but, rather in terms of how we perceive it.
Truth became a subjective matter.
Not coincidentally the introduction of subjectivity into knowing reality came the Enlightenment passion for the rights of man. The idea took hold that God was no longer needed to explain the cosmos, and therefore God was no longer needed for moral formulation.
Along came Kant, who said that if we can’t perfectly empirically validate something, we can’t really know that it is.
And finally we arrived at Nietzsche, who went beyond Kant and said that if you can’t validate something, it isn’t--so, “God is dead.”
Naturalism, the idea that there is a naturalistic explanation for everything, became a predominant theme of the Enlightenment. But it didn’t become part of popular Western consciousness until the twentieth century.
John Dewey took naturalistic principles and transformed education from the pursuit of knowledge of an absolute truth and moral truth - into a process.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes took these concepts and said that the law is no longer a binding set of transcendent truths--it is merely what sociologists think will work best for the people.
Then there was Freud, in the 1920s, with his preoccupation with the therapeutic approach to life.
And of course there was Darwin, whose naturalistic theory that we have evolved and are merely the highest form of primates has become so popularized.
Paul Johnson, the great British popular historian, marks the dividing era of modern times with Einstein’s discovery of relativity in 1919.
People latched onto the word relativity, confusing relativism in the realm of ideas with relativity in the physical sciences.
Relativism, the idea that all propositions are morally equal and that there is no binding objective transcendent truth, and naturalism or materialism, the idea that there is a naturalistic explanation for everything, have become dominant in today’s culture.
Traditional Western thought fought a valiant fight for a long time -- even into the middle of the twentieth century. When I studied at Brown University in the early fifties, I took a course in sociology. Just to show you how quickly things have changed in the academy, that semester course in sociology was all about the traditional father, mother, the heterosexual family, and how that family worked. Today at Brown you can get your major in gay and lesbian studies. That is all in less than half a century.
..But Lewis saw where naturalism and relativism would lead. In his first book, Pilgrim’s Regress, published in 1933, he saw the utter sterility of materialism or naturalism as an idea.
His allegorical everyman, John, had to pass on his journey through the deception of materialism. And he mocked it! I love the way Lewis did this! He mocked it, dismissing it as “a philosophy for boys.” Wonderful! ....
Three works, to which I would like to refer briefly, capture his prophetic vision for what was happening to the later half of the twentieth century: The Abolition of Man, in 1943, (which includes my favorite essay of all time, “Men Without Chests”); “The Poison of Subjectivism,” also written in 1943; and Miracles, an article that first appeared in 1942, and again later in book form in 1947. In these three writings we see his prophetic vision unfold.
First, he exposed the inherent irrationality of materialism.
The job of the good apologist is always to start with our presupposition, God is: He has spoken; He has created the universe; He has spoken it into existence.
And a good apologist demonstrates that any other proposition is irrational. This is precisely what Lewis did.
Materialism gives us a theory which explains everything else in the whole universe, but which makes it impossible to believe that our thinking is valid. That’s because an accident cannot think of itself in any objective sense.
Consider Lewis’s words: “In order to think, we must claim for our reasoning a validity which is not credible if our own thought is merely a function of our brain, and our brains are a by-product of irrational, physical processes.” Precisely!
Every one of you can handle an argument with materialist, naturalist friends, who say there is a naturalistic explanation for everything. How can they know what they are saying is true? They are making their claim with a brain that supposedly results from a chance collision of atoms that came out of the primordial soup 8 billion years ago.
Then Lewis showed how this irrational materialism would lead to the death of morality.
“This thing which I have called for the sake of convenience Tao, and which others may call Natural Law, or Traditional Morality, or the First Principles of Practical Reason, or the First Platitudes, is not one of a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected.”
He went on to say, as an illustration of this, “Therefore if I say, ‘I ought,’ that has no greater moral weight than if I were to say, ‘I itch.’ ” Exactly!
He saw that relativism was taking the law apart.
The whole attempt to jettison traditional values as something subjective and substitute a new scheme of values for them is wrong. It is like trying to lift yourself by your own coat collar.
I love that illustration, because if you try to lift yourself by your own coat collar, you will not only fail to lift yourself, you will only succeed at choking and strangling yourself in the process.
This is precisely what modern man is doing. Francis Schaeffer said it well: “The modern man has both feet planted firmly in mid air.”
Lewis saw that a world view founded on materialistic principles could allow no room for ethics.
I have lectured on ethics (or the lack of them) at several great universities in America, and I never can get any kind of debate going with the students. They have lost the language with which they can even engage in moral discourse, because they have been so enmeshed in this idea that there can be no absolute truth.
We can’t even communicate today, because we have deconstructed, i.e., taken apart, the meaning of language.
Lewis saw this coming in “Man Without Chests” published in 1943, in which he described the reaction to Coleridge’s example of the waterfall; those who said it was sublime were not saying that it was sublime in reality, but rather that they saw it as sublime. Lewis called this, in another essay, “verbicide,” the killing of words by stripping away and perverting meaning.
If there is no objective meaning, I might say, “This is so” (because of x, y, z), and you would perfectly at liberty to respond, “That is all right, you can believe that” because that is only the way you see it.
Nothing we say conveys the truth about anything other than the way we feel.
I have often lectured on the death of the rule of law.
When I told the students at Yale Law School that their school was responsible for law’s demise because the “school of critical legal studies” (deconstructionism) was born there, I thought I might start a riot.
But they didn’t argue with me, because they have rejected the law of noncontradiction.
I can believe one thing, and they can believe something absolutely antithetical, and we can both be right! Utterly preposterous!
But that is what deconstruction does. And it has affected literature, it has affected education, the law, and every area of life.
But Lewis saw where all of this would lead us. In “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” he said it would give rise to the great utopian pretensions.
Deconstructionism opens the door to the great myth of the twentieth century: the goodness of man, that good people, freed of prudish Victorian restraints, can live in perfect bliss.
But since it is the “controllers” who deliver us from such restraints, it in fact leads to the smoldering ashes of Auschwitz and the flowing rivers of blood in the Cambodian killing fields. The disaster of the twentieth century was the belief that man is good and can create his own utopia.
Lewis saw this ever so clearly, as he wrote in the Abolition of Man:
“Let us decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that, not from any ground of imagined value, but because we want him to be such; having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of man.”
Subjectivism leads to tyranny. “The very idea of freedom,” Lewis wrote in “The Poison of Subjectivism,” “presupposes some objective moral order which overarches both ruler and ruled alike.
Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law, but if there is no law of nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators, and conditioners, and every creator stands outside his own creation.”
That expresses precisely the dilemma of the postmodern age. And remember who the barbarians are. The barbarians come, Lewis told us, not over the parapet, not carrying their clubs and wielding their weapons, but they come with polished fingernails and blue pin-striped suits, gathering in well-lighted conference rooms. They are the good people who say that they know how to make life better for all of us.
Before I tell you what I think we should do with all of this, I must point out one other irony.
It’s rather overwhelming, as a matter of fact. During World War II, when the entire world was mobilized in the great confrontation between the Allies and the Axis, when Roosevelt and Churchill lifted the world to heroic exertions in protection and defense of liberty and freedom, when the world was seen as polar (good versus evil), when that war was seen as the war to end all wars and the war to make the world safe for democracy, when blood was being shed horrifically, when the whole world believed it was confronting the greatest evil, it wasn’t confronting the greatest evil.
All the while, a quiet professor, sipping a pint, reading his beloved books, saw the true struggle differently. He saw the titanic struggle of good and evil not so much between the armies of the Axis and the Allies; he saw it in the workings of the human heart and the mind.
Solzhenitsyn in prison, put it so wonderfully: “The line between good and evil passes not between principalities and powers, but through every human heart, and it oscillates back and forth.”
Lewis understood that. Lewis saw that the virus that gave rise to a Hitler was an alien idea, the embodiment of what Nietzsche had predicted would happen in his “will to power”the superman.
That same virus was infecting the good people here in Cambridge and Oxford and in Washington and in Boston.
The battle lines were not necessarily drawn at Normandy and Omaha Beach and Dunkirk and Anzio, but in the world of ideas, in answering the question: “How now shall we live?”
He understood that in the war over truth, the battle being fought was naturalism versus supernaturalism.
And that is the battle we fight today. How now shall we deal with that issue? How now shall we live?
...I have four thoughts to leave with you this day as to how to answer that question. ....." [snip]
Source: http://www.pfm.org/Content/ContentGroups/BreakPoint/Other_Content/Colsons_Page/Speeches/C_S__Lewis__Prophet_of_the_Twentieth_Century.htm
As I mentioned, the "two sides" are so completely in different universes that they really can't be argued against one another. As we cannot.
As for "hobby horses" and the "rudeness" of evolutionists, many around here have been frustrated by a continual repetition of the same old discredited arguments. Many of them debunked literally a hundred years ago.
I do admit that you come at this from a completely different direction, so it has been a pleasure talking with you.
Sorry for the briskness.
Wrong, they need basic understanding of how to count and spell and speak.
(And I really doubt it, BTW. Certainly the level of invective would get you fired anywhere I have ever worked, as would the shoddy epistemology. I think that is part of the problem here.)
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