Posted on 02/20/2006 10:58:43 AM PST by curiosity
ST. LOUIS, Missouri (Reuters) - American scientists fighting back against creationism, intelligent design and other theories that seek to deny or downgrade the importance of evolution have recruited unlikely allies -- the clergy.
And they have taken their battle to a new level, trying to educate high school and even elementary school teachers on how to hold their own against parents and school boards who want to mix religion with science.
While they feel they have won the latest round against efforts to bring God into the classroom, the scientists say they have little doubt their opponents are merely regrouping.
"It's time to recognize that science and religion should never be pitted against one another," American Association for the Advancement of Science President Gilbert Omenn told a news conference on Sunday. The AAAS has held several sessions on the evolution issue at its annual meeting in St. Louis.
"The faith community needs to step up to the plate," agreed Eugenie Scott, Executive Director, National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California.
Scott said many people held the "toxic" idea that "you are either a Christian creationist or you are a bad-guy atheist".
Recent court and electoral battles have made clear that judges and voters will reject efforts to sneak creationism into the classroom under the guise of making a scientific curriculum clearer or fairer, Scott said.
By a vote of 11 to 4, the Ohio Board of Education last week pulled a model lesson plan it had approved in 2004. The plan had permitted science teachers to encourage students to look at questions about evolution, something proponents of "intelligent design" call "teaching the controversy."
Last year in Pennsylvania, a federal court ruled the theory could not be taught in a public school and the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, which approved the teaching, was voted out.
Intelligent design proponents see the hand of God behind evolution because, they say, life is too complex to be random.
"As a legal strategy intelligent design is dead. It will be very difficult for any school district in the future to successfully survive a legal challenge," Scott said. "That doesn't mean intelligent design is dead as a very popular social movement. This is an idea that has got legs."
But pastors are speaking out against it. Warren Eschbach, a retired Church of the Brethren pastor and professor at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania helped sponsor a letter signed by more than 10,000 other clergy.
"We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests," they wrote.
Catholic experts have also joined the movement.
"The intelligent design movement belittles God. It makes God a designer, an engineer," said Vatican Observatory Director George Coyne, an astrophysicist who is also ordained. "The God of religious faith is a god of love. He did not design me."
Gerry Wheeler, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association said some teachers feared losing their jobs if they taught evolution. "The pressures come from the students and the parents," he said.
Fine with me. I thought it would be useful to know of the other thread.
All I can say is "Ditto". Thanks
Ordained?
Job 10:8 Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about; yet thou dost destroy me
You will note that most of the clergy who sign on with these movements invariably are liberal, and view the Scriptures as "religious stories" but not historically accurate.
Do you believe that God created man?
I have seen web sites that push ID and when I look at their their logic and reasoning, I dismiss them (mostly because it is the old "life is too complex to have been random" reason). Now maybe I went to the wrong sites so to be fair to you and believers of ID, could you please point out some sites you think would help me and others better understand the ID theory?
I doubt it very much.
As a Christian do you also agree with the vatican "astrophysisist" that God did not design you? I suspect he calls himself a "Christian" too.
Depends on what you mean by "design." If you mean He drew up precise plans of what man would look like, and then poofed it into existence, no. Rather, God designed the evolutionary process that eventually led to Man. He designed it in the same sense a programmer "designes" a program that is the outcome of an evolutionary algorithm he sets up.
I agree, the astrophysicist's statement was poorly worded, but I suspect he means what I mean above.
The Christian knows that death entered the world by one man's sin, even as Paul writes in the book of Romans. Do you, as Christian believe this?
Yes.
The finger of God wrote in tablets of stone the Law known to us as the ten commandments. In the writing of that Law the finger of God wrote that "...in six days the Lord made heaven and earth the sea and all that in them is." This resides in direct opposition to premise of millions of years of an evolutionary path from molecules to man.
I don't believe He meant the six days to be literal, human days. A literal interpretation of this passage would fly in the face of not only evolutionary science, but geology, physics, astronomy, and about half a dozen other fields.
As a Christian, who in your opinion is right -- the Cretaor who designed it all in the beginning or today's speculators who clearly were not?
Both are right, modern scientists as well as the authors of the Torah. It is the Biblical literalists who are mistaken. God doesn't lie either in his Word or his creation, but man's interpretation of the Word is frequently wrong.
Jesus Christ without exception endorsed the writings of Moses as true.
Yes, and I accept them as true as well. Jesus never, however, said that every single verse was intented to be taken literally. Nor did he say that the authors of the Torah didn't use metaphor and allegory.
Genesis is the first book containing the writings of Moses. Do you, as a Christian have a problem with Christ's affirmation of the writings of Moses?
Nope.
Jesus Christ, speaking specifically in the context of man, declared that He who made them in the beginning made the male and female. As a Christian, please square the words of Jesus Christ -- the Creator Himself, with the "solid science" of evolution that you believe to be true.
Well, you as a Biblical literalist should have just as much trouble squaring it as I do, for if you take Genesis literally, human beings were not created in the beginning. They came on the 6th day.
Obviously, therefore, Jesus did not mean that males and females were present at the very beginning of creation. He was talking about the beginning of the human race, and indeed, both males and females were present when the human species emerged in Africa some 200,000 years ago.
Some, not all. Surely you are not accusing Pope Benedict of being liberal.
Yes. He created his body using natural processes and his soul directly.
Thank You.
Sorry to interject here but I cannot help myself. I believe that Evolutionary theory (or Science in general) and Religion do not necessarily contradict each other. Neither does the Vatican. However for many people in the US there is a refusal of science when it seems to them to contradict religion. That is fine, except when you want to introduce that refusal onto my children.
The Pope does not consider the bible to be the ultimate authority, preferring to rely on the traditions of men.
> telling a church that it must help save civilians from that dangerous ignorance of believing in the Bible ...
Non sequitur. Evolution is not anti-Bible, anymore than gravity or geometry or geology are.
"Dangerous ignorance" comes in specifically avoiding understanding modern science.
How was He involved in using natural processes?
Which Scripture do you take as most authoritative and why? The Qu'ran, the Hindu Vedas? There are some 300 different creation myths from different historic periods and different peoples. None of them make much sense in terms of a modern understanding of the Universe and planet earth.
Noah's Flood story cannot be historically accurate--it contains internal contradictions; and moral flaws. If true, it would make a great number of things we humans have painstakingly learned from astronomy, geology, physics, biology, oceanography, botany, zoology, microbiology, etc. over centuries untrue. I prefer the science over ancient myths.
Legally, the religion class probably would have to be elective, but I like the idea. Religion classes usually, from what I've seen, provoke some of the most interesting discussions if you have teachers that don't ride a soap box.
It should be a year long class, taught from a historical perspective...frame the religions in history, as well as give the low down on the philosophies, beliefs, etc. But it's a long shot in this country. It's hard enough to get kids to read a book on their spare time, let alone think critically about a purpose beyond the daily rituals of video games, IMing, and TV.
I don't see why this is necessary. Parishes should easily be able to offer religious education classes to students who are not enrolled in parochial schools. I attended such classes during the first 4 years of my primary education, when I was attending a non-Catholic school. Later I transferred to a Catholic school, and it was no longer necessary.
Even if catering to individual religious groups doesn't pass constitutional muster, religion really needs to be better incorporated into Literature and History classes, minimum, simply for a better understanding of the object of study.
Absolutely. I went to a secular high school, but we spent a lot of time on the Bible in literature class. We also covered a good deal of Church history and philosophy in various history and social science classes.
The refusal at the moment is on the Darwinian side.
Indeed. Which one do you believe? Let's see: life began as a virus, life began on a meteorite from Mars, life was seeded on earth by comets, it just came from outer space, maybe it was a chimp who mutated, or evolved, , or a rat, oh maybe a dog, no, wait... and on and on. Which one is right?
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