Posted on 04/22/2005 4:21:47 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Evolution found a home Thursday in the oldest church in Kansas during a forum about the controversy over science instruction for public school students.
"There is no conflict between evolution and the Christian faith," said the Rev. Peter Luckey, the senior pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church, 925 Vt.
Luckey was preaching to the choir during a five-hour forum that featured scientists, teachers and politicians who argued in favor of teaching students evolution because it is the foundation of science, knowledge of which will be needed to compete for jobs in the growing bioscience industry.
About 75 people attended the forum at Plymouth, which was founded in 1854 and was the first established church in the Kansas Territory. Attempts to inject intelligent design -- the notion that there is a master planner for all life -- into science class should be rejected, they said.
"Intelligent design is nothing but creationism in a cheap tuxedo," said Leonard Krishtalka, director of the Kansas University Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center.
‘Think critically'
The forum was another round in the debate that has thrust Kansas on the national stage.
With control of the State Board of Education in conservative hands [AAARRGGHHH!!], state officials again will consider science standards that will guide teachers.
A committee of scientists has drafted standards that include evolution teaching, but a minority report, led by proponents of intelligent design, wants criticism of evolution included. A State Board of Education committee, comprising three conservative [AARRGHH!!] board members, plans six days of hearings that will revolve around that debate.
The speakers at Thursday's forum were adamant that evolution instruction not be reduced, watered down or dumbed down.
Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' science adviser, Lee Allison, said when the state approved a $500 million bioscience initiative, it included a provision to recruit top scholars who met the standards of the National Academy of Sciences, which supports evolution without equivocation.
"The state really has taken a position on this in a broad, bipartisan way," Allison said.
Charles Decedue, executive director of the Higuchi Biosciences Center, said teaching evolution was critical because bioscience companies want to locate in places where the work force has received a solid education in chemistry, physics and biology.
"They want people who can think critically," he said.
‘Hayseed state'
Andrew Stangl, a Kansas University sophomore, said his high school science teachers in his hometown of Andover refused to teach evolution.
He bought books and taught himself. He said fear of teaching evolution would hurt the United States in the long term. "I don't want to see other countries pass us by. We are going to economically suffer as a result," he said.
In 1999, Kansas made international news, much of it negative, when a conservative [AARRGGHH!!] board de-emphasized evolution. The 2000 election returned moderates to power, and evolution was reinstated. But with conservatives [AARRGGHH!!] back in control, international criticism was starting again, several panelists said.
Rachel Robson, a doctoral candidate at KU Medical Center, said one of her friends was applying for a job with a Japanese company, and the company officials made fun of Kansas and questioned whether good scientists could come from there.
Thursday's forum attracted national attention from National Public Radio and NBC.
Krishtalka said even though the battle over evolution was going on in several states, "Kansas will be tarred and feathered by the media as the hayseed state."
Carol and Tom Banks, of Prairie Village, attended the forum, saying they were getting tired of conservatives [AARRGGHH!!] controlling the political agenda.
"If intelligent design were taught, that would be teaching religion in public schools," Carol Banks said.
But Jerry Manweiler, a physicist from Lawrence, said he supported teaching intelligent design. "It's important to know the theory of evolution, but it's also important to understand the nature of God," he said. Manweiler said he was put off by the forum speakers' "lack of humility."
Don Covington, vice president of networking for Intelligent Design Network Inc., said he disagreed with the speakers.
"They want their kids to know how to think, but you can't develop critical thinking skills when you tell them to memorize Darwin," he said.
• May 5-7: Science standards hearings in auditorium of Memorial building, 120 S.W. 10th St., Topeka. Time to be determined later.
• May 12-14: Science standards hearings, time and location to be determined later.
My thought is that of the 60% working scientists that rely on the bottom line for success, will begin an exodus toward ID, forcing a flip to 60% ID - 40% evolutionists.
...
Deductive logic on my part having read so many polls like these:
This looks like the "imminent demise of Darwinism" that has been predicted for the last 150 years.
You'll have to explain your "deductive logic" to me to justify how you derived your conclusions from those links. I missed the bit in those 4 links that would allow anyone to realise that "working scientists" have a sharply different view from "academic scientists".
I have a sharp suspicion that your comments are about as well founded as the nonsense on your profile page.
I hope you spend some time thinking about this, A-Girl. You may be one of the very few people in the world who doesn't see what ID is all about.
One Nation, Under the Designer. The true goals of the ID movement.
Discovery Institute's "Wedge Project". Replacing science with theism.
The Wedge at Work. The Discovery Institute's war against reason.
The "Wedge Document": "So What?" The Discovery Instutute defends the Wedge document.
Bad logic, The trends aren't in your favor
http://www.sbcbaptistpress.org/bpnews.asp?ID=20311
The poll of 1,028 teenagers ages 13-17 found that 38 percent don't believe in evolution, believing instead that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." Another 43 percent believe that humans "developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided" the process.
Adults actually are somewhat more likely not to believe in evolution. In a Gallup poll of adults last November, 45 percent said they believed in creationism while 38 percent believed that God guided the process of evolution. Only 13 percent of adults said they believed that evolution occurred without God's guidance.
So with adults it's 55-45 favoring evolution against Creationism while Teens it's 62-38.
And if you think Teens are going to turn to YEC later, Think again, From the Southern Baptist Convention.
-- 88 percent of the children raised in evangelical homes leave church at the age of 18, never to return.
"In academia there is a 95% evolutionist to 5% ID split"
What happens if you only include scientific fields (not all of acedemia), and furthermore only those scientific fields relevant to the theory of evolution (biology, paleontology, etc). Then that figure becomes closer to 99.9% to 0.01% split.
People outside of the field who are clueless about biology aren't going to shift anything, it's not their job. It is the biologists who dictate biological research, and determine biological consensus based on it. It is only these people that can ever cause a shift to occur - based on research not opinion polls. It doesn't matter how clueless the general public, or social acedemics are about biology. A load of people and a Pope shouting "rar rar rar" isn't going to suddenly change the data biologists are looking at that convinces them of evolution.
Bush's Science Advisor: "Evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology. Period"
I've never caught a fish with feet while i've been fishing. Have you? No? I thought not. I rest my case.
Bear in mind that bondserv is a young earth creationist. He doesn't just reject modern biology. He rejects pretty much every other modern applied science as well. Modern physics, astronomy, geology, cosmology, archeology all go out the window along with the life sciences. I guess pure maths is fairly safe.
The number of practicing scientists, "working" or "academic" (a distinction that seems important to Bondserv) who agree with him on that one is safely below 0.01%. For example Behe and Denton the creationist poster-boys are on record as supporting an old-earth and the fact of common descent. Beats me why the YEC love them so much, but I think it is because talk about "design" sounds as if the YEC arguments have some scientific credibility (they don't).
I'll issue my standard challenge to bondserv at this point. Name a single achievement of the modern scientists who espouse young earth creationism. They've got all the advantages with their better understanding of how the universe works. Where are their new inventions? Where are their wonderful gadgets? Where are the modern creationist engineers using the insights of the modern creation scientists? (Prediction: Bogus response about historical scientists prior to ToE who happened to be devout Christians. We aren't talking about those; I want to hear about the achievements of scientists who reject modern scientific orthodoxy and embrace biblical literalism, for example the guys who use YEC doctrinal geology to find oil with their superior understanding of geological processes in defiance of the documented experience of Glenn Morton)
"Time to be determined later."
When you have forgotten about this.
If the MSM can paint us as mindless followers of William Jennings Bryan like you say.
The conservatives should paint the liberals as mindless followers of Clarence Darrow, Karl Marx, Roger Baldwin, Margarette Sanger, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Howard Dean, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Barney Frank, the ACLU and Charles Darwin.
Here are some excerpts of the links and a few more that I found on first blush:
God created humans in present form:
All Americans 55%
Kerry Voters 47%
Bush Voters 67%
Humans evolved, God guided the process:
All Americans 27%
Kerry Voters 28%
Bush Voters 22%
Humans evolved, God did not guide the process:
All Americans 13%
Kerry Voters 21%
Bush Voters 6%
Intelligent Design poll – Ohio scientists
Nine out of 10 scientists (91 percent) felt the concept of intelligent design was unscientific and the same number responded that it was a religious view
A vast majority (93 percent) of the scientists were not aware of "any scientifically valid evidence or an alternate scientific theory that challenges the fundamental principles of the theory of evolution"
Almost all scientists (97 percent) said they did not use the intelligent design concept in their research
Ninety percent of the responding scientists stated that they felt no scientific evidence supports intelligent design, while 2 percent were unsure
Approximately 7 percent felt that intelligent design had some support from scientific evidence
Some 84 percent felt acceptance of the evolution theory was "consistent with believing in God"
PBS on the CBS Poll
However, a 2004 CBS News poll indicates why evolution remains a battleground in America. The poll found that just 13 percent say that God was not involved in the process of creating humans. Fifty-five percent said God created humans in their present form. Overall, about two-thirds of Americans want creationism taught along with evolution. Only 37 percent want evolutionism replaced outright. 60 percent of Americans who call themselves Evangelical Christians, however, favor replacing evolution with creationism in schools altogether, as do 50 percent of those who attend religious services every week. These findings echo those of a series of Gallup polls conducted in 1982, 1993, 1997, 1999 and 2001. In that series of polls no fewer than 44% of those responding subscribed to a strict creationist view.
There is some common ground among scientists and religious Americans. Forty percent of Americans hold that God "guided" evolution from simpler to more complex life forms over millions of years. Similarly, four out of ten middle-ranking scientists -- a random sample we took from American Men and Women of Science (AMWS) -- also believe that God "guided" evolution. These believing scientists also said in the survey that they can accept a God who answers prayers. This implies a God who intervenes in nature and the world, though we did not probe the God question further….
Only about 5 percent of the natural scientists we polled -- some 4,000 such professionals -- think that God created humans "pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years." While rare among scientists, this is the view held by nearly half of all Americans -- a striking figure, considering that fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals make up only a quarter to a third of the population.
To get a further sense of the American debate on evolution, this year we surveyed deans at theological seminaries about their schools' approach to the topic. Seventy percent of academic deans at schools in the Association of Theological Schools responded. (The ATS has 237 members.) We asked them which view of natural history and human origins predominates on their ca pus, and gave them five options:
"Theistic evolution," the belief that God works in and through the evolutionary process; "progressive creation," in which God creates at various points over millions of years; "young earth creation," according to which God created the cosmos within the past 10,000 years; or, a mixture of the first two categories or the latter two. About two-thirds of the deans indicated that their schools adhere to either theistic evolution, progressive creation or a mixture of the two -- all suggesting an ancient universe. Less than a tenth of the schools supported a young-earth stance. Most of the rest of the schools -- about 25 percent -- mix progressive creation and young-earth creation, both having an emphasis on God's intervening acts of special creation.
Catholic schools made up the largest proportion of those at which theistic evolution dominates (50 percent). As recently as 1996 the pope stated that evolution was "more than a hypothesis," as long as one accepts that God intervenes to create the soul. Slightly over a third of the Protestant schools and nearly a fifth of the nondenominational enclaves also were thoroughly evolutionist.
Young-earth creationism dominated at less than a tenth of the Protestant outposts and a fifth of the nondenominational schools. Progressive creation is the dominant view at less than a tenth of Protestant institutions, and barely more of Catholic. Nearly a third of the Catholic schools reported a mix of theistic evolution and progressive creation. Each of the mixed stances, moreover, is established at roughly a quarter of the Protestant and nondenominational schools.
On the basis of this data, we suspect that at one-third of the schools--the ones that are purely evolutionist--students struggle to understand God's creative acts and response to prayers in a material universe that runs according to strict laws. The young-earth schools solve this problem by believing that miracle override nature. The majority of the schools--nearly six in ten--try to combine the view of a material universe driven by natural laws with a God who, in principle, can miraculously intervene.
Overall, nearly seven in ten students (66 percent)--there were about 70,000 enrolled last year--study God and the Bible against the backdrop of belief in an ancient earth and universe. That antiquity for them included evolution--total or in part--of life, a process that nearly all scientists define as purposeless, unguided, random.
USAToday on a Poll of Teachers
A National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) e-mail survey gauges how much pressure science teachers report feeling about evolution instruction in their classrooms:
31% say they "feel pressured to include creationism, Intelligent Design, or other alternatives to evolution in their science classroom." More of the pressure comes from students (22%) and parents (20%.)
30% agree that "they feel pushed to de-emphasize or omit evolution or evolution-related topics from their curriculum."
85% say they did "feel well prepared to explain the reasons why it is important for students to understand evolution." 11% said they did not.
74% disagree, while about 19% agree, when asked if "they must de-emphasize or omit from their lessons the term 'evolution' so as not to draw attention to it."
CSICOP on Gallup polling – complaining about the wording effecting the results
Consider the most basic evolution polls: A series of surveys conducted over the years by the Gallup Organization and the General Social Survey. Gallup's polls show that 46 percent of respondents (on average) believe "God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years" and another 38 percent believe "Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, including man's creation." Just 10 percent believe "Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. God had no part in this process," while 6 percent don't know. But the General Social Survey asked a different question. These polls found (on average) that 14 percent of Americans consider the statement "human beings developed from earlier species of animals" to be definitely true and another 29 percent consider it probably true, while 15 percent said "probably not true" and 33 said "definitely not true" (9 percent didn't know).
43 percent of Americans considering evolution to be at least probably true (General Social Survey) doesn't seem so hard to reconcile with 48 percent of Americans believing in some form of evolution, guided or unguided (Gallup). But now consider a 2001 Gallup poll that used very different wording, explicitly mentioning "evolution" instead of speaking of life forms having "developed" over time. When the question took this form--"Would you say that you believe more the theory of evolution or the theory of creationism to explain the origin of human beings, or are you unsure"--the respective results were 28 percent, 48 percent, and 14 percent, with 10 percent saying they didn't know. Here the level of affirmative support for evolution came out dramatically lower, an effect that seems attributable to question wording and the differing choices presented to poll respondents.
Conversely, a professor looking for advancement in the academia would not mention his beliefs about God at all.
There is a trend, bondserv. The greatest evidence for it is the long term polling by Gallup from 1982-2001 – namely, that the number of strict creationists remains stable at about 44% despite all the graduates from higher education over the past 20 years, the public education commitment to evolution and the mainstream media. IOW, the numbers suggest that Americans are more likely to obtain or rekindle a belief in God as Creator than retain a belief which ignores Him.
This bodes very well for Intelligent Design supporters! IOW, it doesn’t seem to matter what influence publicly funded education wields – people at large will be inclined towards a view which includes a Designer.
Where there is an "official" position, that is the one which must be given credibility - secondary evidence notwithstanding. Otherwise our science debates here will be caught up in trying to read intentions and hidden agendas.
However, if the correspondents want to "go there" - I'm game. There's poison on both sides.
The 6% of Bush voters that are evolutionists are not all scientists. So we can deduce that amongst the 94% of Bush voters that believe God created or guided the process -- ID -- we could conservatively say 70% of scientists that were Bush voters are ID proponents.
Even if 90% of the mostly tenured government scientists voting for Kerry were evolutionists, we can deduce that 40% of all scientists are ID proponents, because most scientists don't drink from the Liberal trough.
This looks like the "imminent demise of Darwinism" that has been predicted for the last 150 years.
The threat being posed by the ID movement is in every newspaper across the country. Things have changed, and it isn't moving in the atheists direction.
Alignment is critical!
nope
I really don't see which hat you pull the rest of your figures from, such as "we could conservatively say 70% of scientists that were Bush voters are ID proponent" I doubt it.
All that matters are scientists in fields relevant to evolution. A Physicist for example has no more authority on evolution than a non-scientist. The polls you are using poll all scientists, including ones who are not relevant to biology. It probably even polls social scientists, such as psychologists that are totally irrelevant.
Nothing changes:
Today, at the dawn of the new century, nothing is more certain than that Darwinism has lost its prestige among men of science. It has seen its day and will soon be reckoned a thing of the past. A few decades hence when people will look back upon the history of the doctrine of Descent, they will confess that the years between 1860 and 1880 were in many respects a time of carnival; and the enthusiasm which at that time took possession of the devotees of natural science will appear to them as the excitement attending some mad revel." Eberhard Dennert ***1904***
Humans evolved, God did not guide the process:
All Americans 13%
Kerry Voters 21%
Bush Voters 6%
All that matters are scientists in fields relevant to evolution.
Scientists are familiar with using scientific evidence to make judgments. Their assessment of the discernment of their colleagues is relevant. As I said, unfortunately the Liberal trough is in use at the University.
You make so many errors of math and logic here that I don't know where to begin in deconstructing them. Essentially none of your conclusions follow from your premises, and you don't bother to demonstrate the truth of most of your premises either. It looks as if math and logic are no more your strengths than biology or geology. Why don't you just admit that you are making your numbers up out of wishful thinking?
You sound more and more like a wishful Democrat. Resist the Dark Side Thatch!
We can explain it to you, but we can't comprehend it for you. :-)
"I can explain this to you; I can't comprehend it for you."
JohnDoeDidit placemark
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