KU prof's e-mail irks fundamentalists (Christian Bashing OK)

"Have you ever said "Christians would'nt do evil things"? Or something like that?"

Of course not. That's so contrary to the tenets of Christianity as to be ridiculous. We are all sinners. We all fall short.

"Yes, some scientists have used evolution as a baseball bat against religion. But they are a minority,"

That number depends on one's definition of "use like a baseball bat." And then, we could talk about "use like a garotte," or "use like a stiletto in the back."

"and they're out of bounds."

Yes, they are. But they're not going to stop, and that's why we need explicit statements, even in science classes, that belief is not the exclusive province of the stupid and the ignorant.

Yes, evolution is the preferred dogma of lefties everywhere.

Their low level of tolerance ranks right down there with Islamofacists, with whom they share a hostility to both God and America.

Devotees of scientism have always sought to rule out challenges to their faith in strictly materialist metaphysics.

Sometimes their monopolistic claims are not vindicated, and they throw a hissy fit, like this KU professor. They insist on the right to use Other People's Money to promote their faith, masquerading as science, and to filter out all competing views, or evidence that fails to butress their claims.

A useful example of how to combat such pretensions is provided by the following rhetoric-laden retreat from a statement that was too blatantly scientistic, as opposed to scientific, to stand up to serious scrutiny:

http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/8954_nabt_statement_on_evolution_ev_5_21_1998.asp

NABT Statement on Evolution Evolves
by Eugenie C. Scott

In 1995 the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) issued a "Statement on the Teaching of Evolution" which was reprinted in Reports of NCSE (17(1):31-32). In a list of "tenets of science, evolution and biology education," the first item read:

The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments.

After the statement was published, anti-evolutionists criticized the use of the terms "unsupervised" and "impersonal." UC Berkeley lawyer Phillip Johnson (author of Darwin on Trial) and other anti-evolutionists have claimed that the NABT statement is "proof" that evolution is inherently an ideological system, rather than simply a well-supported scientific explanation. Criticisms of the statement have appeared in newspaper letters to the editor, in newsletters and other publications. It appears that when most Americans other than scientists hear evolution described in blanket fashion as "unsupervised", they hear, "God had nothing to do with it" -- a statement which is outside of what science can tell us.

In September of 1997, two distinguished scholars, Alvin Plantinga, John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame University, and Huston Smith, Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, wrote to NABT Executive Director Wayne W. Carley, suggesting that the words "impersonal" and "unsupervised" were inappropriate because, "Science presumably doesn't address such theological questions, and isn't equipped to deal with them. How could an empirical inquiry possibly show that God was not guiding and directing evolution?"

The inclusion of those two words, Smith and Plantinga said, "...gives aid and comfort to extremists in the religious right for whom it provides a legitimate target. And, because of its logical vulnerability, it lowers Americans' respect for scientists and their place in our culture. If the words 'impersonal' and 'unsupervised' were dropped from your opening sentence [sic] it would help defuse tensions which, as things stand, are causing unnecessary problems in our collective life."

The NABT annual meeting was held in Minneapolis October 8-11, and the letter and its request were considered by the Board of Directors on Wednesday, October 8. The Board initially voted to retain the extant wording, focusing on Plantinga's and Smith's comment that the statement "contradicts the beliefs of the majority of the American people, 90% of whom (according to opinion polls) believe that a personal agent -- God -- supervised in some way our arrival on this planet." Board members considered the comment irrelevant because scientific definitions are independent of the percentages of individuals holding opinions on religion. Carley's October 8 statement to the press underscored this view.

Reflecting upon that decision, Executive Director Carley commented, "We were at the end of a 9 hour meeting, we were tired, and we didn't give the subject enough time." During the next few days of the meeting, however, Board members consulted with other NABT members, and reconsidered the underlying message of the Plantinga-Smith letter. The letter exemplified how describing evolution as "impersonal" and "unsupervised" was being interpreted by individuals outside of science as anti-religious and unscientific.

NABT Board members realized that they had a communication problem on their hands: they had not intended the statement on evolution to include theological positions! President-elect Dr. Richard Storey, one of the drafters of the statement, and other members of the Board called for a reconsideration of the decision, and the Board met on Saturday, October 11, the last day of the conference. After a more extensive discussion than had been possible on Wednesday, the Board considered that:

1) The extant wording which included "unsupervised" and "impersonal" apparently was miscommunicating both the nature of science and NABT's intent;

2) The deletion of those two words would not affect the statement's accurate characterization of evolution, and affirmation of evolution's importance in science education.

Evolution is still described as a "natural process" (the only phenomena science can study), and a later bullet states that natural selection "has no specific direction or goal, including survival of a species." The strong position of evolution in biology and other sciences was not compromised by removing two adjectives that miscommunicated NABT's meaning.

As the leading association of biology teachers in the United States, the NABT speaks with authority on issues affecting science teachers. Joseph McInerney, a former NABT president and a drafter of the Statement has said, "...teachers are at the front, dealing with direct challenges to their teaching from real students and real parents who have immediate questions and immediate demands." One such question is, "Are you a Christian, or do you believe in evolution?" (Reports of NCSE, 17(1):30.) Plantinga's and Smith's letter underscored a very real problem: many people perceive that they have to make a choice between their religious beliefs and evolution. As a science education organization, the NABT needs to avoid giving the impression that they are taking sides in theological issues -- an impression given by the original text of their statement.

As McInerney pointed out, one of the goals of the NABT's statement on evolution was to "provide support for biology teachers when they are confronted with challenges to the teaching of evolution." By eliminating two nonessential words, the NABT Board of Directors made a statesmanlike decision that better fulfilled this goal by reducing a potential source of conflict in the classroom.

May 21, 1998

They insist on the right to use Other People's Money to promote their faith, masquerading as science, and to filter out all competing views, or evidence that fails to butress their claims.

Yup, that sounds like ID, all right.

Evolution Ping

The List-O-Links

A conservative, pro-evolution science list, now with over 320 names.
See the list's explanation, then FReepmail to be added or dropped.
To assist beginners: But it's "just a theory", Evo-Troll's Toolkit,
and How to argue against a scientific theory.

Mirecki said the private e-mail was accessed by an outsider.

Typical Leftist bullcrap. As seen here, the idiot in question (Mirecki) doesn't deny his wrongdoing. Instead, he just makes up a bogus "bigger wrong" done to him so he (the aggressor) can claim to be the victim in all this!

It is confirmed. Leftists have no shame because they have no soul.

ID has not sought to eliminate the discussion of evolution, just to have it included. What's the big deal?

Ah, I see. So Christianity is to be above criticism.

Why not? One cannot criticize Islam in any public court without official and unofficial reprisals.

Spoken like a true secular fundamentalist zealot, still fervently committed to that "Old Time (Darwinist) Religion".

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1328

Evolution and Evolutionism
by Huston Smith

Dr. Smith is professor of religion at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York. This article is adapted from his new book, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (Crossroad).This article appeared in the Christian Century July 7-14, 1982, p.755. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation and used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.

Not since the days of Clarence Darrow and the “monkey trial” has America been so caught up in the debate over human origins. Now as then the issue has polarized our nation. It did so conspicuously this past winter, when spokespersons for mainline churches, the scientific establishment and the universities lined up behind the American Civil Liberties Union. Together they knocked out of Arkansas’s statutes the bill that would have required creationism to be taught alongside evolution in the public schools.

I rooted for the ACLU during that trial, but my rejoicing over its victory was more subdued than that of most of my friends. Because the issues are important and unresolved, I wish to explain my response.

Between the creationists’ claims concerning human origins and those of neo-Darwinists, truth is more evenly divided than our nation realizes. The creationist notion that our planet is no more than 10,000 years old is so strained that I have difficulty taking it seriously; on this point I side solidly with the liberals. But what the liberals do not see is that the neo-Darwinist account of how we got here is not much stronger.

In addition to being logically flawed, neo-Darwinism has unfortunate psychological consequences. Yet it is being taught as “gospel truth”; the lip service being paid to science’s fallibility does little to lessen neo-Darwinism’s impact. The upshot is that the civil liberties of those who disagree with the theory are being compromised. Of this situation the ACLU and its backers seem to have little inkling.

Before I proceed to the central issue, three short quotations will set out the psychological consequences of teaching neo-Darwinism.

First, “If anything characterizes ‘modernity,’ it is loss of faith in transcendence” (Chronicle of Higher Education, January 9, 1978).

Second, “There is no doubt that in developed societies education has contributed to the decline of religious belief” (Edward Norman, in Christianity and the World Order [Oxford University Press, 1976]).

Third, one reason education undoes belief is its teaching of evolution; Darwin’s own drift from orthodoxy to agnosticism was symptomatic. Martin Lings is probably right in saying that “more cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution . . . than to anything else” (Studies in Comparative Religion, Winter 1970).

The Civil Liberties Union’s handling of the creationist case abets the historical drift these quotations point to with logic that runs roughly as follows:

Major premise: Creationism is religion rather than science; therefore, according to the principle of separation of church and state, creationism may not be taught in public schools.

Minor premise: The science which is and should be taught our children “must be explanatory [and] rely exclusively upon the workings of natural law” (ACLU’s witness Michael Ruse, a Canadian philosopher of science, as quoted in Civil Liberties, February 1982).

Unspoken conclusion: The only explanation for human existence that public schools may teach is a natural-law theory which precludes in principle, as we shall see, even the possibility of (a) purpose and (b) intervention in the workings of the observable universe.

Restated to bring out its practical import, the ACLU position is that it is science’s responsibility to explain things by natural laws. The alternative to such natural explanations is supernatural ones. Thus, insofar as religion involves the supernatural, church-state separation requires that only irreligious explanations of human origins may be taught our children. Already we may be wondering if this is what our forebears intended by the First Amendment. The irony is that evolutionists have no plausible theory to pit against religious accounts of human origins. Their discoveries show a history of evolutionary advance but do not explain how or why that advance occurred.

This brings me to my central point. The notion of evolution harbors an ambiguity which moderns have finessed rather than faced. On the one hand, the word “evolution” describes life’s advance; on the other, it claims to explain that advance. If these two meanings part company, with which should the word side?

As description -- of the fossil record and of the age, continuities and discontinuities in life forms that the record discloses -- evolution is true and creationism mistaken. But as an explanation (let’s call this evolutionism), neo-Darwinism is largely a failure, and one that has the important psychological consequences noted above. This crucial distinction is not being drawn today. As a result we witness a standoff, a shouting match between the scientific establishment and the fundamentalists, each of which has hold of a half-truth and a partial error.

Neo-Darwinism’s proponents do not present it as a mere description of life’s journey on this planet; they claim that it is a theory explaining that journey. Specifically, neo-Darwinists claim that natural selection working on chance mutations accounts for what has occurred. But “natural selection” turns out to be a tautology, while the word “chance” denotes an occurrence that is inexplicable. A theory that claims to explain while standing with one foot on a tautology and the other in an explanatory void is in trouble.

Take “natural selection” first. The phrase encapsulates the argument that the pressure of populations on environments results in the survival of the fittest. But as no criterion for “fittest” has been found to be workable other than “the ones who survive,” the theory is circular. As the late C. H. Waddington wrote, “Survival . . . denotes nothing more than leaving most offspring. The general principle of natural selection . . merely amounts to the statement that the individuals which leave most offspring are those which leave most offspring. It is a tautology” (The Strategy of the Genes [Allen & Unwin, 1957]). E. 0. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975) reiterates this point and updates the support for it.

As for “chance mutations,” chance is the opposite of having a cause; something that happens by chance admits of no reason or purpose for its occurrence. A scientist would be happy to discover a “reason” that would replace chance, but he or she is debarred by the rules of the scientific enterprise from introducing one that is intelligently purposive. For, in the words of Jacques Monod in Chance and Necessity, “The cornerstone of scientific method is . . . the systematic denial that ‘true’ knowledge can be got at by interpreting phenomena in terms of. . . ‘purpose.’” The determination with which evolutionists insist that chance be read as the opposite of purpose can be seen in the way they speak of “blind” and “pure” chance, when there are no such things in science itself. In science, chance is a number.

If we step out of the strictures of science, however, there is an alternative to this nonpurposive view of chance: it could be an occurrence whose cause lies outside the world of discourse in which the event is considered. If a bird found birdseed sprinkled on the snow only when a forest ranger passed its way and the ranger came only at night while the bird was asleep, the bird would doubtless attribute the seeds’ appearance as “due to” chance. (Note the way “due to” seems to produce a cause where none is offered.) According to this second reading, the combination of chance and necessity -- that is, of random mutations joined to natural selection -- “is precisely just the necessary and sufficient condition required for any who would wish to assert that the evolutionary process is . . . purposive,” as physicist and Episcopal priest William Pollard pointed out in his “Critique of Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity” (Soundings, Winter 1973).

“The introduction of probability [as the specification of chance’s perimeters] into scientific description constitutes the one case in which science expressly renounces an explanation in terms of natural causes,” Pollard went on to say. But evolutionary theory then faces the statistical improbabilities that pepper life’s ascent. It used to be argued that geological ages are so interminable that they allow time for anything and everything to happen. That notion required getting used to, but as long as it was thought of in single numbers (analogous to the number 26, say, turning up on a roulette wheel exactly when it was needed in a given evolutionary thrust), it could be accepted.

But we now see that significant organic changes require that innumerable component developments occur simultaneously and independently in bones, nerves, muscles, arteries and the like. These requirements escalate the demand on probability theory astronomically. It would be like having 26 come up simultaneously on ten or 15 tables in the same casino, followed by all the tables reporting 27, 28 and 29 in lockstep progression; more time than the earth has existed would be needed to account for the sequences that have occurred. Moreover, the number of generations through which a large number of immediately disadvantageous variations would have had to persist in order to turn reptiles into birds, say -- scales into feathers, solid bones into hollow tubes, the dispersion of air sacs to various parts of the body, the development of shoulder muscles and bones to athletic proportions, to say nothing of conversion to a totally different biochemistry of elimination and the changeover from coldblooded to warm -- makes the notion of chance working alone preposterous. As Professor Pierre Grasse, who for 30 years held the chair in evolution at the Sorbonne, has written:

The probability of dust carried by the wind reproducing Dürer’s “Melancholia” is less infinitesimal than the probability of copy errors in the DNA molecules leading to the formation of the eye; besides, these errors had no relationship whatsoever with the function that the eye would have to perform or was starting to perform. There is no law against daydreaming, but science must not indulge in it [Evolution of Living Organisms (Academic Press, 1977)].

Professor Wickramasinghe of the department of applied mathematics and astronomy at Cardiff, Wales, did not take the stand for the creationists in Arkansas out of sympathy for their alternative scenario. A non-Christian from Sri Lanka, the professor said that it was for him not a question of the Bible’s inerrancy; he didn’t believe in the Bible at all. He testified for the creationists solely because he felt it was important to puncture neo-Darwinism’s pretenses. “Some 2,000 or so enzymes are known to be crucial for life,” he reported, and continued:

At a conservative estimate, say 15 Sites per enzyme must be fixed to be filled by particular amino acids for proper biological function. . . [T]he probability of discovering this set by random shuffling is one in 1040,000, a number that exceeds by many powers of 10 the number of all atoms in the entire observable universe [Science News, Vol. 121 (January 16, 1982)].

If we want to retain our belief in chance, obviously something is going to have to intervene to reduce it to conceivable bounds. This area is where the search goes on today. Vocabularies proliferate as repressor genes, corepressors and aporepressors, modifier and switch genes, operator genes that activate other genes, cistrons and operons that constitute subsystems of interacting genes -- even genes that regulate the rate of mutation in other genes -- are invoked. Anything to narrow unlimited chance to chance within conceivable proportions. On a different front, with the displacement of Darwin’s gradualism by the “punctuational” model, it is now conceded that the “missing links” between most species will not be found. It all happened too fast. “Most change has taken place so rapidly and in such confined geographic areas that it is simply not documented by our imperfect fossil record,” according to Steven Stanley (“Darwin Done Over,” the Sciences, October 1981).

From The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, which can be taken to summarize intellectual orthodoxy at the time of its publication in 1979, one would gather that neo-Darwinian theory is as settled as Newtonian theory. The Britannica tells us that “evolution is accepted by all biologists and natural selection is recognized as its cause. . . . Objections . . . have come from theological and, for a time, from political standpoints” (Vol. 7). Who would suspect from this statement that biologists of the stature of Ludwig von Bertalanffy had been writing: “I think the fact that a theory so vague, so insufficiently verifiable and so far from the criteria otherwise applied in ‘hard’ science has become a dogma can only be explained on sociological grounds”? Or that Arthur Koestler’s investigation into the subject led him to conclude that neo-Darwinism is “a citadel in ruins” (Janus: A Summing Up [Random House, 1978])? Koestler compares Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity to Custer’s Last Stand. Even Harvard’s spokesman for evolution, Stephen Jay Gould, concedes in the April 23 issue of Science that “neither of Darwinism’s two central themes will survive in their strict formulation.”

As the creationists continue to press differently nuanced bills in 20 or so state legislatures, we can expect social pressure to continue to bear on the evolutionism issue. The pressure buttresses certain errors, but in doing so forces others into the open. The civil libertarians have not recognized the problem: by their lights, the liberties of the creationists and others who hold other-than-naturalistic views of human origins are not being infringed upon because only scientific truth is arrayed against them.

The creationists, with all their literalist excesses, are performing a public service for us. It is as though an excess on the science front -- scientism, that over-extrapolation from the findings of science which Nobel laureate Elias Canetti says has “grabbed our century by the throat” -- has given political leverage to an opposite excess on the religious front: fundamentalism.

The New Encyclopaedia Britannica article cited above tells us that “Darwin did two things; he showed that evolution was in fact contradicting scriptural legends of creation and that its cause, natural selection, was automatic, with no room for divine guidance or design.” Do biologists really want to take on issues like “creation,” “divine guidance” and “divine design”? It is time that the negative theological conclusions implicit in the neo-Darwinism I have here called evolutionism -- and the shaky status of that theory itself -- be brought into the open and separated from what the fossil record actually shows: that in the course of millions of years on earth, life has indeed advanced.

"Tim Miller, a fellow professor in the department of religious studies, said intelligent design proponents are showing that they don't like having their beliefs scrutinized."

I think the proper word would be "ridiculed", not "scrutinized".

It's a good thing he isn't the English professor.

Another article on the same subject here as well:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1528320/posts

Spoken like a true secular fundamentalist zealot, still fervently committed to that "Old Time (Darwinist) Religion".

Nice name calling. Pretty good series for this early on a post-holiday morning.

Do you take an interest in the advancement of all sciences, or have you just selected evolution as your special field of study?

To me, it sounds like he was joking/being sarcastic. Besides you don't know what the context was. It may have been part of a longer discussion.

BTW- A few thoughts about Creationsim being unsound. Is there any evidence for evolution? There aren't any evidences of inter-species change. All we have are tiny speciations and mutations that may or may not change a species. There should be tons of fossil evidence. There isn't.

BTW2- Myth actually is evidence for Intelligent Design and a flood. Every racial and religious group has had a creation myth and flood one. Usually myths are based in fact and since it occured so much throughout the Earth it probably is based in fact.

BTW3( the last)- def. of science. The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena. According to this Creationism/intelligent design is science.

Devotees of scientism have always sought to rule out challenges to their faith in strictly materialist metaphysics.

Sorry, you don't get to change the definition of science. Science can & always has & always will address the natural world only, and has a myriad of facts on its side to support evolutionary theory. Good for the NABT for reiterating the importance of the theory.

Y'all have been asking for years that ID be given time in the classroom, and now you got it. As they say, be careful what you wish for...

You miss the fact that he is paid with taxes.

That removes his first amendment rights?

Unfortunately, yes. The ACLU has seen to that.

BTW- A few thoughts about Creationsim being unsound. Is there any evidence for evolution? There aren't any evidences of inter-species change. All we have are tiny speciations and mutations that may or may not change a species. There should be tons of fossil evidence. There isn't.

Wrong on all counts. This is just a small part of the fossil evidence--there are tens of thousands of additional specimens.

BTW2- Myth actually is evidence for Intelligent Design and a flood. Every racial and religious group has had a creation myth and flood one. Usually myths are based in fact and since it occured so much throughout the Earth it probably is based in fact.

You criticize science for lack of evidence then you espouse a global flood and claim it is based in fact?

For a start, here is a decent overview of the flood evidence (or lack thereof): Problems with a Global Flood, Second Edition, by Mark Isaak.

If you want more, let me know. But first, you have to specify the date of the flood. Do you accept 2304 BC -- Answers in Genesis (+/- 11 years)?

The apparently illegally obtained 'private' e-mail really struck a nerve. What hypocrisy on the part of the indignantly offended. It's okay to try to push teaching of ID and a supernatural cause in high school biology science classes and it's okay to mock the ToE and call it a religion, but it's not okay to explore ID and Creationism as religious beliefs in a college level comparative religion course.

Behaving just like left-wing postmodernist decronstrutionists, they attack the course by attacking the 'motives' of the course instructor.

Well, then we'd better quit whining about the MD4BUSH affair, then.

Spoken like a true secular fundamentalist zealot, still fervently committed to that "Old Time (Darwinist) Religion".

Nice name calling. Pretty good series for this early on a post-holiday morning.

Do you take an interest in the advancement of all sciences, or have you just selected evolution as your special field of study?

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
A devotee of scientism typically takes umbrage at having favorite dismissive epithets tossed back in his face. They can generally dish it out far better than they can take it. So be it.

My Ph.D. is in mathematics (Univ of MN, 1975), but I have also studied physics, chemistry, and astronomy at the university level, and done wide reading in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science beginning with a series of college level courses in philosophy. My formal study of biology ended in high school, but personal studies have kept me in touch with developments in molecular biology at the level covered in, e.g., Watson's "Molecular Biology of the Gene". I see, in checking the Amazon listing, that I am one edition behind (4th). I will have to pick up the 5th edition and see what I've missed in the last few years.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080534635X/102-5784961-9541720?v=glance&n=283155&v=glance