Don’t settle for separate but equal (Dover trial Darwinists, are 'absurd' says YDR Editor)

The most frustrating thing about following the Dover school board trial is seeing both sides maneuver for a legal advantage with arguments that not only seem disingenuous, but miss the point.

Dover school board members may deny it, but religion did influence the vote to introduce intelligent design into science class. Lawyers for the plaintiffs jump on the legal requirement demanding a “secular purpose” for science curriculum by lining up witnesses who denounce intelligent design as religion. Slam-dunk case, right?

Not really, because the plaintiffs’ argument is built on faulty premises. Their witnesses insist that Darwinism is pure fact, that it is neutral in regard to religion. Then they roll out the old chestnut that science and religion are two entirely different realms of knowledge — separate but equal. We’ve heard that before.

The truth is that anyone who’s being intellectually honest will admit that science can never be divorced from religion, that a person’s philosophical outlook will always affect how he or she interprets nature’s phenomena. Honest people will also admit that Darwinism supports a definite philosophy about nature, one that is hostile to theistic faith held by many Americans.

This is why I find the Dover plaintiffs’ arguments disingenuous. Their witnesses, like many adherents to Darwinism, insist modern science respects religion when in reality it marginalizes it and usurps its authority.

Consider how many leading scientists frame the issue. The late Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould went further than many of his colleagues in allowing that religion has the right to pursue “questions of ultimate meaning and moral value.” But then he undercut the credibility of religion by stating that only science deals with actual facts.

This implicit disdain for religion makes it hard to take the Dover plaintiffs’ argument at face value, such as when theology professor John Haught explained why he does not consider intelligent design science.

Science, Haught said, is supposed to address the question of “how;” while religion answers “why.” They are two different schools of thought, he said.

What Haught did not say was that this alleged restriction fails to prevent some scientists from encroaching upon subjects supposedly reserved for religion.

Physicists argue that miracles are impossible. Behaviorists equate human morality with the instinctive reactions of laboratory rats. Oxford professor and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins insists that an evolutionary view of life and the cosmos makes God “gratuitous.”

The late biologist Julian Huxley even went so far as to call for “an evolutionary and humanist religion” to replace faiths such as Christianity he considered either dead or outmoded.

Does this kind of agnostic evangelism sound like the product of a field of study that restricts itself to answering certain kinds of questions? It does not, and to suggest otherwise is absurd.

But even if Haught is right, what does that say about the priorities of public education? If religion answers the question “why” — why we are here, why evil exists, why any choice we make matters at all — wouldn’t you think religion would be considered indispensable to the curriculum?

But as far as public education is concerned, religion is quite dispensable. Religion courses, if they’re offered at all, certainly are not presented as students’ best chance to learn about divine truth. How much “ultimate meaning” can you expect to get out of an elective, anyway?Science courses, by contrast, are usually mandatory. And don’t forget about those standardized tests.In reality, the separate-but-equal standard works about as well for religion in public education as it did for minorities during Jim Crow.

What does this means for students? It means that explicitly and implicitly they’re taught that science trumps faith.

It means they learn that men in white lab coats — the ones who offer medicines, iPods and weapons of mass destruction — speak with greater authority than pastors, rabbis and priests. It means they’ll be told the reason they exist is no reason at all, just chance, mutation and blind law.

And chances are they’ll believe it, because after all, it’s based on science.

Dave Dentel is a copy editor for the York Daily Record/Sunday News. Reach him at ddentel@ydr.com or by calling 771-2043.

Funny, I've never seen plate tectonics reproduced in the lab, either. Why do YOU think the eastern side of S. America fits so well next to the western side of Africa?

But the continents are still here and you can examine them, test the unique features that only exist in those two places, etc. Also, we know the plates are moving by measuring them and from earthquake events.

However, when you make the claim that the African Ant (Ciafu), with its highly organized and disciplined culture evolved from the earliest life forms by random mutation and natural selection, where is the evidence that is what happened? Certainly fossils can tell us some things but not that the mechanism was random mutation. We have no genetic material from that long ago and have never even witnessed any form of speciation event of any kind. How do we know that random mutation is the mechanism?

But the continents are still here and you can examine them, test the unique features that only exist in those two places, etc. Also, we know the plates are moving by measuring them and from earthquake events.

Sure, we have the same facts. It's all in the interpretation, isn't it? And all we've seen is microtectonics, not macrotectonics. We've never seen a macrotectonic movement.

Again, I would note that the effect of gravity is observeable and that a label "gravity" was applied to the observed effect. A theory then is propounded in investigation of the causal nature. In Evolution, the opposite is true, a thoeory was concocted and people have since been out looking of an observation to hang it upon. So, no, you don't get to ride the coattails of proper science in trying to excuse what you otherwise want to call science. Gravity and evolution do not follow the same rules for their approach. Gravity is observeable in it's effect - only it's detailed cause is not understood. Evolution has a cause looking for an observation to prove it. Macroevolution is that theoretical cause - and it is not observed. Gravity is observed - macroevolution is not. This is how you sell poison. It is also how you sell lies.

What a steaming pile. Nothing scribbled by this guy has any relevance to the bottom line: science addresses the particular facts of the universe, religion addresses how one ought to respond to them.

It really is opaque to you people, isn't it? The issue that is...

I'll try to be brief: someone decided that 'science' and 'religion' should be separated in the minds of little kids. Little kids whose parents are taxed, and taxed regarding public schools whether they want to be taxed or not.

Tell me how this division was decided? Who decided dividing these two topics, these two ways of learning, is righteous and why? Who decided that only scientific learning was appropriate in public schools - were these people righteous? ... and why is this decision righteous?

Who decided that only scientific learning was appropriate in public schools

The people who wrote the Constitution, and made religion the province of the individual and the family, not of the state. Duh.

Sure, we have the same facts.

Not really. Inert matter cannot self-replicate. But in both cases telling how we got to the relatively steady state we are in now is incredibly difficult to do. Specifically the claim of random mutation as how we got from a single life form(an assumption in itself) to where we are today.

It's all in the interpretation, isn't it. And all we've seen is microtectonics, not macrotectonics. We've never seen a macrotectonic movement.

Or macrotectonic event. You are right. Whether they started out as Pasmeria and split or may never be known. The mechanism early on could be quite different as well, more rapid, kind of like punctuated equilibrium for continents.

Bottom line here is they will learn more about microtectonic theory by studying empirical data to help deal with earthquakes and tsunamis and macrotectonic theory will be the stuff of universities and museums.

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