Posted on 06/21/2006 8:33:46 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
In a veiled attack on creationism, the world's foremost academies of science on Wednesday called on parents and teachers to provide children with the facts about evolution and the origins of life on Earth.
A declaration signed by 67 national academies of science blasted the scriptural teaching of biology as a potential distortion of young minds.
"In various parts of the world, within science courses taught in certain public systems of education, scientific evidence, data and testable theories about the origins and evolution of life on Earth are being concealed, denied or confused with theories not testable by science," the declaration said.
"We urge decision-makers, teachers and parents to educate all children about the methods and discoveries of science and to foster an understanding of the science of nature.
"Knowledge of the natural world in which they live empowers people to meet human needs and protect the planet."
Citing "evidence-based facts" derived from observation, experiment and neutral assessment, the declaration points to findings that the Universe is between 11 and 15 billion years old, and the Earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago.
Life on Earth appeared at least 2.5 billion years ago as a result of physical and chemical processes, and evolved into the species that live today.
"Commonalities in the structure of the genetic code of all organisms living today, including humans, clearly indicate their common primordial origin," it said.
The statement does not name any names or religions, nor does it explain why it fears the teaching of evolution or the scientific explanation for the origins of planetary life are being sidelined.
Signatories of the declaration include the US National Academy of Sciences, Britain's Royal Society, the French Academy of Sciences and their counterparts in Canada, China, Germany, Iran, Israel and Japan and elsewhere.
It comes, however, in the context of mounting concern among biologists about the perceived influence of creationism in the United States.
Evangelical Christians there are campaigning hard for schools to teach creationism or downgrade evolution to the status of one of a competing group of theories about the origins of life on Earth.
According to the website Christian Post (www.christianpost.com), an opinion poll conducted in May by Gallop found that 46 percent of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years or so.
Scientists say hominids emerged around six million years ago and one of their offshoots developed into anatomically modern man, Homo sapiens, about 200,000 years ago, although the timings of both events are fiercely debated.
Nearly every religion offers an explanation as to how life began on Earth.
Fundamentalist Christians insist on a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis in the Bible, in which God made the world in seven days, culminating in the creation of the first two humans, Adam and Eve.
A variation of this is called "intelligent design" which acknowledges evolution but claims that genetic mutations are guided by God's hand rather than by Charles Darwin's process of natural selection.
US President George W. Bush said last August that he believed in this concept and that he supported its teaching in American schools.
The academies' statement says that science does not seek to offer judgements of value or morality, and acknowledges limitations in current knowledge.
"Science is open-ended and subject to correction and expansion as new theoretical and empirical understanding emerges," it adds.
Why? Would that improve intelligent design?
It's not that the non-Biblical evidence doesn't matter - it is the interpretation and validity of said "evidence" that is the issue.
Do you have a hatred of pronouns?
Your post 71 was more forthcoming. That's what's going on with you and you should just stick to it. That would be honest.
A funny little thing called Faith..... You should try it some time.
This may not be the actual story: He was sitting in his boat smoking a cigar and happened to note the direction and speed of the smoke relative to the direction and speed of the boat. Having some mathematical skills, he determined a formula describing that motion and extended the result to astronomy, which was one of his favorite activities aside from sailing and smoking.
Not so much. I was agnostic before I turned.
Hmmmm. . . . My understanding might be what's wrong? I dunno - the language is pretty clear - even in the original Hebrew and Greek.... I can see lots of room in interpretation of things yet to be - aka "end times" prophecy, as there is a great deal that is not spelled out, and some that may be somewhat metaphorical. But the creation is pretty cut-and-dry in discription.
"Norbert the narc would make a most excellent thread cop, doncha think, always lurking around ...
"
He would, indeed. I cannot find an image of Norbert the Narc, however, on the web. I suppose I shall have to scan one in from one of my vintage Rip Off Press Shelton comics.
Few here know about the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Most were unborn at the time. I have a complete set of originals....because I bought them at the time they came out.
Another era in my life, for sure.
Allegory, Battman. Allegory.
There's tons of allegory in the Bible.
from here:
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/lightandcolor/speedoflighthome.html
"Starting with Roemer's 1676 breakthrough endeavors, the speed of light has been measured at least 163 times utilizing a wide variety of different techniques by more than 100 investigators (see Table 1 for a compilation of methods, investigators, and dates). As scientific methods and devices were refined, the error limits of the estimates narrowed, although the speed of light has not significantly changed since Roemer's seventeenth century calculations. Finally in 1983, more than 300 years after the first serious measurement attempt, the speed of light was defined as being 299,792.458 kilometers per second by the Seventeenth General Congress on Weights and Measures. Thus, the meter is defined as the distance light travels through a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 seconds. In general, however, (even in many scientific calculations) the speed of light is rounded to 300,000 kilometers (or 186,000 miles) per second. Arriving at a standard value for the speed of light was important for establishing an international system of units that would enable scientists from around the world to compare their data and calculations."
"Light traveling in a uniform substance, or medium, propagates in a straight line at a relatively constant speed, unless it is refracted, reflected, diffracted, or perturbed in some other manner. This well-established scientific fact is not a product of the Atomic Age or even the Renaissance, but was originally promoted by the ancient Greek scholar, Euclid, somewhere around 350 BC in his landmark treatise Optica. By the late 1960s, lasers were becoming stable research tools with highly defined frequencies and wavelengths. It quickly became obvious that a simultaneous measurement of frequency and wavelength would yield a very accurate value for the speed of light, similar to an experimental approach carried out by Keith Davy Froome using microwaves in 1958. Several research groups in the United States and in other countries measured the frequency of the 633-nanometer line from an iodine-stabilized helium-neon laser and obtained highly accurate results. In 1972, the National Institute of Standards and Technology employed the laser technology to measure the speed at 299,792,458 meters per second (186,282 miles per second), which ultimately resulted in the redefinition of the meter through a highly accurate estimate for the speed of light."
I do neither so I am destined to end up a nobody. :-)
Sure sounds like it to me, xzins! :^) Implying the existence of a "warm little pond" somewhere along the way....
Always remember:
"Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope."
-- Freewheelin' Franklin, 1971
The errors creep in due to everything from simple "typos" as the scribes copied from older manuscripts (misspelled words, skipping lines, etc.) to "clarifications" on the parts of some scribes attempting to stress a specific point of doctrine or to remove that option from a doctrinal opponent.
But, even leaving that aside, when a literal reading of Scripture is at odds with reality (as in the case with evolution), it is not reality that is wrong.
Creationists still aren't a scientific movement.
>>Even the Discovery Institute bemoans the fact that there is no research, and no proposals for research, that would shed light on the methods, motives, or activities of the alleged designer.<<
Oh, but there are. It is just done in a realm other than science.
>>This would not be true if one found a watch or airplane in an uninhabited desert.<<
What if one found a flying saucer?
You would be in or near Roswell.
I haven't even figured out how to crack the thing open yet.
A sonic screwdriver seems to work well for me. :-)
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