Posted on 10/28/2005 3:29:36 PM PDT by Crackingham
A bitter debate about how to teach evolution in U.S. high schools is prompting a crisis of confidence among scientists, and some senior academics warn that science itself is under assault. In the past month, the interim president of Cornell University and the dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine have both spoken on this theme, warning in dramatic terms of the long-term consequences.
"Among the most significant forces is the rising tide of anti-science sentiment that seems to have its nucleus in Washington but which extends throughout the nation," said Stanford's Philip Pizzo in a letter posted on the school Web site on October 3.
Cornell acting President Hunter Rawlings, in his "state of the university" address last week, spoke about the challenge to science represented by "intelligent design" which holds that the theory of evolution accepted by the vast majority of scientists is fatally flawed. Rawlings said the dispute was widening political, social, religious and philosophical rifts in U.S. society. "When ideological division replaces informed exchange, dogma is the result and education suffers," he said.
Adherents of intelligent design argue that certain forms in nature are too complex to have evolved through natural selection and must have been created by a "designer," who could but does not have to be identified as God.
In the past five years, the scientific community has often seemed at odds with the Bush administration over issues as diverse as global warming, stem cell research and environmental protection. Prominent scientists have also charged the administration with politicizing science by seeking to shape data to its own needs while ignoring other research. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians have built a powerful position within the Republican Party and no Republican, including Bush, can afford to ignore their views. This was dramatically illustrated in the case of Terri Schiavo earlier this year, in which Republicans in Congress passed a law to keep a woman in a persistent vegetative state alive against her husband's wishes, and Bush himself spoke out in favor of "the culture of life."
The issue of whether intelligent design should be taught, or at least mentioned, in high school biology classes is being played out in a Pennsylvania court room and in numerous school districts across the country. The school board of Dover, Pennsylvania, is being sued by parents backed by the American Civil Liberties Union after it ordered schools to read students a short statement in biology classes informing them that the theory of evolution is not established fact and that gaps exist in it. The statement mentioned intelligent design as an alternative theory and recommended students to read a book that explained the theory further.
Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller believes the rhetoric of the anti-evolution movement has had the effect of driving a wedge between a large proportion of the population who follow fundamentalist Christianity and science.
"It is alienating young people from science. It basically tells them that the scientific community is not to be trusted and you would have to abandon your principles of faith to become a scientist, which is not at all true," he said.
On the other side, conservative scholar Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute, believes the only way to heal the rift between science and religion is to allow the teaching of intelligent design.
"To have antagonism between science and religion is crazy," he said at a forum on the issue last week.
Science is the exploring of the natural world. Religion is all supernatural. Thus, disrupting scientific progress by injecting religious philosophy is a recepie for disaster.
The domain of this disucssion is the teaching of Creationism in a science classroom. I don't have the training in Physics that would be needed to discuss your points.
Well, at least you're openly admitting that including ID in curricula would amount to the same kind of bar-lowering practiced by the left.
Those are science FICTION, not really science. No physics textbook talks about going back in time. Now, "looking" back in time is possible, because, just like photographs that capture the event, what we "see" is just moving light.
All starlights we see were emitted hundreds/thousands/millions of years ago. Those stars may or may not exist right now, but we sure see the light, so we think those stars are there. THAT is science. Thank you Astronomy 110!
Well, if you don't want to discuss cosmology, don't assert that science does not address the origin of the universe.
Yes in a way I am. You could add science flavor to ID but resting on purely faith is not science (but let us not forget that Godel tried to use science to prove their is a God).Anyway I would like a part of our "liberal" education in the classic sense to put some emphasis on the "THE" question of all time and ID is certainly in that realm. Recognizing the scientific shortcomings of theories of the bigger questions does not in any way prove ID but it puts it in the game IMO. Plus people would feel much better about themselves knowing there may be hope. Modernity has taken away our hope which to me is the epitome of evil. For what my FRiend, for what do we do exist. Science and faith are not all that different.
We've had 150 years to decide if evolution's wrong. I'd say not.
I do, five days a week.
Atheistic science discards God because it doesn't like the competition.
Science is neither atheistic nor theistic.
And some competition anyway. Talking snakes, fertile virgins, and an earth younger than the trees that grow on it. Hard to believe grown adults believe in this nonsense.
Not my problem. Physical laws are stare decissis. If you want to argue for extraordinary suspension of such laws, the burden of proof is on you.
I am saying that you cannot demonstrate that the process has not been guided. To make that statement, which I dont believe you can honestly refute, I don't need to violate any physical law.
Current physics says the continued operation of the earth is deterministic and runs according to laws we've already determined. If you want some exterior intervention, you need to say why certain of those laws were modified or ceased to operate.
What do you have against fertile virgins? An infertile virgin is probably a spinster.
There's a Heisenberg-like aspect to them. Once one quality has been demonstrated, the other is no more. :-)
Actually, the characteristic of science is that it deals with testable and retestable knowledge, not its naturalism.
I have already pointed to the naturalistic, but patently non-scientific cosmology of Lee Smolin, which shows the non-congruence between science and naturalism in one way.
One can see it in another way also: many early scientists did experiments in what is today called 'the occult'. They gave no reproducible results--or rather gave the oft reproduced result that the ceremonial manipulations did nothing--but the attempt shows that the supernatural is not outside the domain of scientific investigation.
Or they showed was that spirits were not natural phenomena.
I didn't say science talked about "naturalism". I said science deals with the natural world, meaning the study of things that actually exist/existed/might exist. Religion on the other hand is the study of the supernatural/paranormal/beliefs something that can't be manifested or proven either way.
Science is physical things, while religion is all mental.
Really, why does he have to do that?
I guess if you insist that current physics is deterministic, you must be using a classical hidden variables interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which case (thanks to the observed violation of Bell's Inequalities) you're stuck with action-at-a-distance. (Last I heard we both have neurons whose firing is dependent on single quantum mechanical events, so if you want determinism, your stuck with action-at-a-distance.)
And even if you have supreme confidence that thermal effects prevent any macroscopic consequences of quantum mechanical events (except maybe the disturbance in the air caused by physicists whooping it up when a 'quantum eraser' experiment gives a bizarre counter-intuitive result), what possible operational meaning can your 'determinism' have when so many of the models we have for classical dyanamical systems (weather and climate for instance) exhibit chaotic dynamics so that even were there an exact correspondence between the physical system and the Platonic ideal of the mathematical model, epistemologically there is no determinism anyway, since one can't know the initial conditions precisely enough to make predictions?
Further, those who claim to speak for "science" tend to be an arrogant lot who, again, seem to be awfully political.
If there's a "hostility" toward science, I suspect it's not really toward "science" per se, but rather a class of scientists who rub people the wrong way by relegating non-scientists to the lower echelons of humanity.
Something many of the FR anti-ID lot should take to heart.
You didn't say that, but by your reply, you define science as naturalism.
It is also worth point out, that is only in the post-reformation West that your identification of religion with the 'mental' makes any sense at all. Religions (perhaps excluding sole fide protestantism) are ways of life with tangible, observable characteristics.
Nope. You just need to abjure separating the universe into system and observer. The Schrödinger equation gives a precise, non-probabilitistic equation for the evolution of the wavefunction of the universe.
And even if you have supreme confidence that thermal effects prevent any macroscopic consequences of quantum mechanical events (except maybe the disturbance in the air caused by physicists whooping it up when a 'quantum eraser' experiment gives a bizarre counter-intuitive result), what possible operational meaning can your 'determinism' have when so many of the models we have for classical dyanamical systems (weather and climate for instance) exhibit chaotic dynamics so that even were there an exact correspondence between the physical system and the Platonic ideal of the mathematical model, epistemologically there is no determinism anyway, since one can't know the initial conditions precisely enough to make predictions?
Talk your way out of i hbar d(psi)/dt= H psi.
See a random operator in there?
I'm not talking about epistomological determinism. I'm talking about physical determinism. Show me how something can 'guide' the system that isn't part of the Hamiltonian.
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