Posted on 04/01/2004 11:17:06 AM PST by Heartlander
April 01, 2004, 9:00 a.m.
Evolving Double Standards
Establishing a state-funded church of Darwin.
The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) is on the front lines of the battle to keep religion out of the nation's science classrooms. A group whose self-described mission is "Defending the Teaching of Evolution in the Public Schools," the NCSE routinely condemns anyone who wants to teach faith-based criticisms of evolutionary theory for trying to unconstitutionally mix church and state.
But in an ironic twist, it now turns out that the NCSE itself is using federal tax dollars to insert religion into biology classrooms. Earlier this year, the NCSE and the University of California Museum of Paleontology unveiled a website for teachers entitled "Understanding Evolution." Funded in part by a nearly half-million-dollar federal grant, the website encourages teachers to use religion to promote evolution. Apparently the NCSE thinks mixing science and religion is okay after all — as long as religion is used to support evolution.
The purpose of the "Understanding Evolution" website is to instruct teachers in how they should teach evolution, and the federal government (through the National Science Foundation) came up with $450,000 for the project. As might be expected, the science presented on the website is rather lopsided. Although there are vigorous arguments among biologists about many aspects of neo-Darwinism, teachers aren't informed about those scientific debates, ignoring guidance from the U.S. Congress in 2001 that "where topics are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution), the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist."
But the strangest part of the website, by far, is the section that encourages educators to use religion to endorse evolution. Teachers are told that nearly all religious people, theologians, and scientists who hold religious beliefs endorse modern evolutionary theory, and that indeed such a view "actually enriches their faith." In fact, teachers are directed to statements by a variety of religious groups giving their theological endorsement of evolution.
For example, educators can read a statement from the United Church of Christ that "modern evolutionary theory... is in no way at odds with our belief in a Creator God, or in the revelation and presence of that God in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit." Needless to say, statements from thoughtful religious groups and scholars who critique Darwinism because of its claim that the development of life was an unguided process are not included. Nor is there any indication of the fact that, according to opinion surveys, the vast majority of Americans continues to be skeptical of Darwin's theory of unguided evolution.
This effort to use religion to endorse evolution is part of a larger public-relations strategy devised by the NCSE to defuse skepticism of neo-Darwinism. On its own website, the group advises inviting ministers to testify in favor of evolution before school boards, and it has created a Sunday-school curriculum to promote evolution in the churches. The NCSE even has a "Faith Network Director" who claims that "Darwin's theory of evolution... has, for those open to the possibilities, expanded our notions of God."
Eugenie Scott, the group's executive director, is an original signer of something called the Humanist Manifesto III, which proclaims that "humans are... the result of unguided evolutionary change" and celebrates "the inevitability and finality of death." Although a non-believer herself, Scott apparently understands the political utility of religion.
Of course, as a private group, the NCSE has every right to use religion to promote its pro-Darwin agenda, whether or not it is sincere. But what about using government funds to do so?
Taxpayers might wonder why it's the government's business to tell them what their religious beliefs about evolution should or shouldn't be. Presumably this government grant was supposed to be spent on science, not on convincing people that evolution comports with "the revelation and presence of...God in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit." Where's the ACLU when you really need it? It's difficult to see how the website's presentation of religion even comes close to following Supreme Court precedents on the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
One wonders whether those at the NCSE appreciate the irony of their situation. All over the country they have tried to prevent the teaching of scientific criticisms of evolutionary theory as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. But here they spend tax money to promote evolution, explicitly invoking religion, and that's supposed to be okay.
It seems the Darwinists have overseen the evolution of a new species of religion-science crossbreed: one that fits their agenda.
— John West is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Seattle Pacific University.
This is one big reason why I'm an evo-skeptic. The proponents seem to use techniques more akin to marketing or propaganda than detached science.
What would be the big crisis in the advancement of knowledge if the idea was doubted that every living thing descended from the same cell via undirected events?
Nothing "lame" or "absurd" about it. He's making the perfectly valid point that there are thousands of religious creation stories out there, and any argument for including one as an "alternative" explanation to evolution can equally be applied to all.
Of course we know that such "philosophers" are heretics. It's definitely turtles all the way down.
Correct.
it is a philosophical worldview consistent with the scientific method; hence not covered by the First Amendment's Establishment clause.
Also correct.
That only applies to grubby fundamentalist Christians.
Incorrect -- it applies to the other kinds too, as well as to other religions.
Disappointing, but not surprising. I once went a-Googling to see if I could find Buckley's views on evolution. He's ambivalent at best. Surprisingly, this debate took place a couple of years after the Pope's public announcement on evolution: PBS's Firing Line creation/evolution debate.
BLASPHEMER! We StationaryTurtletarians denounce your cult of false prophets, and call upon the Great Tortuga to furiously smite those who would spread these heathen lies, and cast them into the Frogpond of Everlasting Fire(tm).
And please visit our website on "Scientific Turtleism", which has nothing whatsoever to do with our religious beliefs, honest, and is only a purely objective review of the overwhelming evidence for the existence of a giant Earth-supporting T*rtle, which cannot possibly be denied unless you're a deluded member of the vast antiT*rtle conspiracy.
So, to the heretics, infidels and non-believers I say, "Go to Shell!"
The Big Question is: Is the turtle male or female? This might become even more acute if we sight another turtle.
When worlds collide...
"Baby, did the Earth just shift for you, too?"
WARNING! Adult cosmological content: Click if you dare.
Gravity Constant = 6.6739 10-11m3kg-1s-2
Neo-darwin Constant = humans arose from happenstance void of intelligence and design?
The National Association of Biology Teachers [NABT] in their 1995 Official Statement on Teaching Evolution stated the following:
"The diversity of life [all 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."
Anyway, let's look at a college textbook and see what it has to say on the subject:
According to Douglas Futuyama’s widely used college textbook Evolutionary Biology(1998), Darwin’s “theory of random, purposeless variations acted on by blind, purposeless natural selection provided a revolutionary new answer to almost all questions that begin with ‘Why?’” Darwin “made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous,” and thereby “provided a crucial plank to the platform of mechanism and materialism” that is now “the stage of most Western thought.”
Well, we can't use this because it is a religious statement. I guess we should look at a required/recommended reading book for college biology:
"Paley's argument is made with passionate sincerity and is informed by the best biological scholarship of his day, but it is wrong, gloriously and utterly wrong. The analogy between . . . watch and living organism, is false. All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in the mind's eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparent purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.
The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (p. 5)
-Richard Dawkins
Another religious statement? Hmmm… The National Association of Biology Teacher's, college textbooks, and required/recommended reading material.
Maybe it's just human nature (human nature? Humans - intelligent -- nature – stupid </Frankenstein mode>)...
If things that people detest exist in religion i.e. --- dogmatism, conceit, mockery, intolerance, and power-obsession, --- why would we not expect to see it in science as well?
Especially when science becomes religion.
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