Posted on 02/18/2002 4:59:53 AM PST by cracker
The Dispatch tries to verify the identity of those who submit letters to the editor, but this message presented some problems. It arrived on a postcard with no return address:
Dear Representative Linda Reidelbach: Evolution is one of my creations with which I am most pleased.
It was signed, God.
The Dispatch cannot confirm that this is a divine communication, but the newspaper does endorse the sentiment it expresses: that there is room in the world for science and religion, and the two need not be at war.
The newspaper also agrees that Reidelbach, a Republican state representative from Columbus, is among the lawmakers most in need of this revelation. She is the sponsor of House Bill 481, which says that when public schools teach evolution, they also must teach competing "theories'' about the origin of life.
Reidelbach says the bill would "encourage the presentation of scientific evidence regarding the origins of life and its diversity objectively and without religious, naturalistic or philosophic bias or assumption.''
What this appears to mean is that any idea about the origin of life would be designated, incorrectly, a scientific theory and would get equal time with the genuine scientific theory known as evolution.
Those who correctly object that the creation stories of various religions are not scientific would be guilty, in the language of this bill, "of religious, naturalistic or philosophic bias or assumption.''
Never mind that science is not a bias or an assumption but simply a rigorous and logical method for describing and explaining what is observed in nature.
What Reidelbach and her co-sponsors are attempting to do is to require that science classes also teach creationism, intelligent design and related unscientific notions about the origin of life that are derived from Christian belief.
So bent are they on getting Christianity's foot in the door of science classrooms that they apparently don't mind that this bill also appears to give the green light to the creation stories of competing religions, cults and any other manifestation of belief or unbelief. Apparently, even Satanists would have their say.
But the real problem is that Reidelbach's bill would undermine science education at the very moment when Ohio should be developing a scientifically literate generation of students who can help the state succeed in 21st-century technologies and compete economically around the globe.
The fact is that religious ideas, no matter how much they are dressed up in the language of science, are not science. And subjecting students to religious ideas in a science class simply would muddle their understanding of the scientific method and waste valuable time that ought to be used to learn genuine science.
The scientific method consists of observing the natural world and drawing conclusions about the causes of what is observed. These conclusions, or theories, are subject to testing and revision as additional facts are discovered that either bolster or undermine the conclusions and theories. Scientific truth, such as it is, is constantly evolving as new theories replace or modify old ones in the light of new facts.
Religious notions of creation work in the opposite fashion. They begin with a preconceived belief -- for example, that God created all the creatures on the Earth -- and then pick and choose among the observable facts in the natural world to find those that fit. Those that don't are ignored.
The scientific approach expands knowledge about the natural world; the religious approach impedes it.
The classic example of this occurred 369 years ago when the Catholic Church forced Galileo to recant the Copernican theory that the Earth revolves around the sun. That theory contradicted the religiously based idea that man and the Earth formed the center of God's creation. Had the church's creationist view of the solar system prevailed, Ohioan Neil Armstrong never would have set foot on the moon.
Today, Copernican theory is established and acknowledged fact.
When it comes to evolution, much confusion grows out of the understanding -- or misunderstanding -- of the words theory and fact. Evolution is a theory, but one that has become so thoroughly buttressed by physical evidence that, for all intents and purposes, it is a fact. No one outside of the willfully obstinate questions the idea that new life forms evolved from older ones, a process conclusively illustrated in biology and the fossil record.
Where disagreement still exists is over how the process of evolution occurs. Scientists argue about the mechanism by which change occurs and whether the process is gradual and constant or proceeds in fits in starts. But while they debate over how evolution occurs, they do not doubt that it does occur.
Another way to understand this is to consider gravity. Everyone accepts the existence of this force, but many questions remain about just what gravity is and how it works. That scientists argue about how gravity works doesn't change the fact that gravity exists. Or, as author Stephen Jay Gould has put it, "Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome.''
Just as with gravity, evolution is a fact.
Those who persist on questioning this fact are a tiny minority, even among people of faith. But they are a loud minority and, to those not well-grounded in science, their arguments can sound reasonable, even "scientific.'' But their arguments are little more than unfounded assertions dressed up in the language of science.
This minority also insists on creating conflict between religion and science where none needs to exist. Major faiths long since have reconciled themselves to a division of labor with science. Religion looks to humankind's spiritual and moral needs, while science attends to the material ones.
The Catholic Church, which once tried to hold back the progress of science, now admits that it was wrong to suppress Galileo. More than a billion Catholics draw sustenance from their faith untroubled by the knowledge that the planet is racing around the sun.
Religion, in turn, provides spiritual and moral guideposts to decide how best to use the awesome powers that science has unlocked and placed at humankind's disposal.
Nor are scientists themselves antagonistic to religion. Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientific geniuses in history, was deeply reverent: "My comprehension of God comes from the deeply felt conviction of a superior intelligence that reveals itself in the knowable world,'' he once said.
Others have made similar observations. The more the scientific method reveals about the intricacies of the universe, the more awestruck many scientists become.
The simplest way to reconcile religion and evolution is to accept the view propounded early last century by prominent Congregationalist minister and editor Lyman Abbott, who regarded evolution as the means God uses to create and shape life.
This view eliminates conflict between evolution and religion. It allows scientists to investigate evolution as a natural process and lets people of faith give God the credit for setting that process in motion.
As for what to do about creationism and evolution in schools, the answer is easy. Evolution should be taught in science classes. Creationism and related religiously based ideas should be taught in comparative-religion, civics and history classes.
Religion was and remains central to the American identity. It has profoundly shaped American ideals and provided the basis for its highest aspirations, from the Declaration of Independence to the civil-rights movement. There is no question that religion is a vital force and a vital area of knowledge that must be included in any complete education.
But not in the science classroom, because religion is not science. There is no such thing as Buddhist chemistry, Jewish physics or Christian mathematics.
The Earth revolves around the sun regardless of the faiths of the people whom gravity carries along for the ride. Two plus two equals four whether that sum is calculated by a Muslim or a Zoroastrian.
Reidelbach and her supporters genuinely worry that a crucial element -- moral education and appreciation of religion's role in America -- is missing in education. But they will not correct that lack by injecting pseudoscience into Ohio's science curriculum.
And Reidelbach is not the only one making this mistake. Senate Bill 222, sponsored by state Sen. Jim Jordan, R-Urbana, is equally misguided. This bill would require that science standards adopted by the State Board of Education be approved by resolution in the General Assembly. This is a recipe for disaster, injecting not only religion, but also politics, into Ohio's science classes.
These two bills should be ignored by lawmakers.
In a few months, when the State Board of Education lays out the standards for science education in Ohio's public schools, it should strongly endorse the teaching of evolution and ignore the demands of those who purvey pseudoscience.
No, that's creationist urban legend. Before Pasteur, people thought that diseases "just happened," sort of supernaturally. He demonstrated that they came from bacteria (no miraculous spontaneous generation). Thus Pasteurized milk. But his "no spontaneous generation" demonstration has absolutely nothing to do with the ultimate origin of life.
Sigh. Where to find fresh meat?
This really isn't difficult to find, and it's a great example of how creationists love to take stuff out of context and then spin it to fit their weird views. In the case of Pasteur, the creationists take the expression "spontaneous generation" and give it a totally different meaning. Some of them must know how they're twisting the truth, and the rest just read the perverted versions of "science" on the creationist websites:
The Slow Death of Spontaneous Generation (1668-1859) .
From the time of the ancient Romans, through the Middle Ages, and until the late nineteenth century, it was generally accepted that some life forms arose spontaneously from non-living matter. Such "spontaneous generation" appeared to occur primarily in decaying matter. For example, a seventeenth century recipe for the spontaneous production of mice required placing sweaty underwear and husks of wheat in an open-mouthed jar, then waiting for about 21 days, during which time it was alleged that the sweat from the underwear would penetrate the husks of wheat, changing them into mice. Although such a concept may seem laughable today, it is consistent with the other widely held cultural and religious beliefs of the time.[snip]
The theory of spontaneous generation was finally laid to rest in 1859 by the young French chemist, Louis Pasteur. The French Academy of Sciences sponsored a contest for the best experiment either proving or disproving spontaneous generation. Pasteur's winning experiment was a variation of the methods of Needham and Spallanzani. He boiled meat broth in a flask, heated the neck of the flask in a flame until it became pliable, and bent it into the shape of an S. Air could enter the flask, but airborne microorganisms could not - they would settle by gravity in the neck. As Pasteur had expected, no microorganisms grew. When Pasteur tilted the flask so that the broth reached the lowest point in the neck, where any airborne particles would have settled, the broth rapidly became cloudy with life. Pasteur had both refuted the theory of spontaneous generation and convincingly demonstrated that microorganisms are everywhere - even in the air.
I am not wiggling. A prebiotic soup needs an abiotic world (with nothing to eat the soup). The world we have now does not provide these conditions. That's what the lab is for. You're simply grasping at straws.
Even more damaging is that the conditions required by that experiment are now evidently discredited. The early atmosphere was not a reducing atmosphere as the experiment requires.
Abiogenesis had been a subject for speculation long before the Miller experiment. Darwin had supposed something of the sort. Miller consulted Urey for the best available (early 1950s) guess concerning the nature of the atmosphere. The experiment's dramatic results (a soup dark as coffee in about a week) electrified the scientific community. Obviously, the results were very tentative, but they showed that it's not hard to make carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen (what Schopf calls CHON) do its stuff).
The estimates of the early atmosphere were wrong, and it may have been oxidizing rather than reducing. (But the synthesis still works even if it's only a little bit reducing.)
And the synthesis doesn't have to happen in the presence of the atmosphere. It can happen at deep sea vents or in other sheltered places. And the earth was seeded with a good jumpstart of bio-organics from space. Comets and other space ice seem to be full of the stuff now, so there's no reason to suppose it wasn't so then.
The important demonstration was that you don't need life, or even some guy in a lab coat, to make simple compounds form complex organics. It's easy, as simple chemistry had long suggested that it should be. You can't throw all the lessons out by picking nits.
Not yet, but wait until the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are examined. If there's liquid water under the ice, there is a very good chance of either prebiotic soup or life itself.
Why do I bother?
man creates nonsense--evolution!
the dmz--God built a false trail to keep the fools out---
and evolution paves---free busses it!
Liberal-humanist-commies sand bag the sides....float--sail on canal of blood--misery!
All this any of us could do to see the evidence for evolution - but where is the similar evidence for creation? (other than in a single uncorroborated, non-peer reviewed, very old text of uncertain authorship)
349 posted on 2/22/02 8:34 AM Hawaii-Aleutian by cracker
Evolution is what keeps empty souls from overgrazing the heavens---happy in the feedlots over at the spam mill!
Dumb heifers--steers--ox/commies!
God did say he left an angel to guard paradise to keep the riff-raff out---flaming sword of TRUTH---invisible to you---but you're left with the alternative--the flaming sword of lies---EVOLUTION(dialectical materialism)!
352 posted on 2/22/02 8:56 AM Hawaii-Aleutian by f.Christian
Pre-biotic soup is living matter. Pre-biotic soup is non-living matter. Which is it?
Well then don't. I posed my original question to someone other than you. Still, no evidence for a pre-biotic ocean.
You people are pathetic. The sooner we seceed from you rightwing bible-thumping nitwits the better off we'll all be.
528 posted on 2/23/02 9:23 AM Hawaii-Aleutian by New Englandite
You people are pathetic. The sooner we seceed from you leftwing fossil/chest-thumping baboons the better off the human race will all be.
And you can accept cans of soup as evidence of pre-biotic soup. Fine if you wish to accept a questionable experiment as evidence. I don't. Pasteur showed something. If you have evidence that the other side, you know the "spontaneous generation" folks, showed life arising please reveal it. Until then, the contest was won 1-0 by Louis.
And you base that on what?
Andrew, I gave you a link. Go there. Put on your thinking cap. Read the article. You canot do so and still believe that the work of Pasteur has anything to do with the origin of life on earth.
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