Posted on 06/23/2007 12:21:46 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Pro-Darwin Biology Professor Laments Academia's "Intolerance" and Supports Teaching Intelligent Design
Charles Darwin famously said, "A fair result can be obtained only by fully balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question." According to a recent article by J. Scott Turner, a pro-Darwin biology professor at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, modern Neo-Darwinists are failing to heed Darwin's advice. (We blogged about a similar article by Turner in The Chronicle of Higher Education in January, 2007.) Turner is up front with his skepticism of intelligent design (ID), which will hopefully allow his criticisms to strike a chord with other Darwinists.
Turner starts by observing that the real threat to education today is not ID itself, but the attitude of scientists towards ID: "Unlike most of my colleagues, however, I don't see ID as a threat to biology, public education or the ideals of the republic. To the contrary, what worries me more is the way that many of my colleagues have responded to the challenge." He describes the "modern academy" as "a tedious intellectual monoculture where conformity and not contention is the norm." Turner explains that the "[r]eflexive hostility to ID is largely cut from that cloth: some ID critics are not so much worried about a hurtful climate as they are about a climate in which people are free to disagree with them." He then recounts and laments the hostility faced by Richard Sternberg at the Smithsonian:
It would be comforting if one could dismiss such incidents as the actions of a misguided few. But the intolerance that gave rise to the Sternberg debacle is all too common: you can see it in its unfiltered glory by taking a look at Web sites like pandasthumb.org or recursed.blogspot.com [Jeffry Shallit's blog] and following a few of the threads on ID. The attitudes on display there, which at the extreme verge on antireligious hysteria, can hardly be squared with the relatively innocuous (even if wrong-headed) ideas that sit at ID's core.
(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)
Turner on the Kitzmiller v. Dover Case
Turner sees the Kitzmiller v. Dover case as the dangerous real-world expression of the intolerance common in the academy: "My blood chills ... when these essentially harmless hypocrisies are joined with the all-American tradition of litigiousness, for it is in the hand of courts and lawyers that real damage to cherished academic ideas is likely to be done." He laments the fact that "courts are where many of my colleagues seem determined to go with the ID issue” and predicts, “I believe we will ultimately come to regret this."
Turner justifies his reasonable foresight by explaining that Kitzmiller only provided a pyrrhic victory for the pro-Darwin lobby:
Although there was general jubilation at the ruling, I think the joy will be short-lived, for we have affirmed the principle that a federal judge, not scientists or teachers, can dictate what is and what is not science, and what may or may not be taught in the classroom. Forgive me if I do not feel more free.
(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)
Turner on Education
Turner explains, quite accurately, that ID remains popular not because of some vast conspiracy or religious fanaticism, but because it deals with an evidentiary fact that resonates with many people, and Darwinian scientists do not respond to ID's arguments effectively:
[I]ntelligent design … is one of multiple emerging critiques of materialism in science and evolution. Unfortunately, many scientists fail to see this, preferring the gross caricature that ID is simply "stealth creationism." But this strategy fails to meet the challenge. Rather than simply lament that so many people take ID seriously, scientists would do better to ask why so many take it seriously. The answer would be hard for us to bear: ID is not popular because the stupid or ignorant like it, but because neo-Darwinism's principled banishment of purpose seems less defensible each passing day.
(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)
Turner asks, “What, then, is the harm in allowing teachers to deal with the subject as each sees fit?” ID can't be taught, he explains, because most scientists believe that "normal standards of tolerance and academic freedom should not apply in the case of ID." He says that the mere suggestion that ID could be taught brings out "all manner of evasions and prevarications that are quite out of character for otherwise balanced, intelligent and reasonable people."
As we noted earlier, hopefully Turner’s criticisms will strike a chord with Darwinists who might otherwise close their ears to the argument for academic freedom for ID-proponents. Given the intolerance towards ID-sympathy that Turner describes, let us also hope that the chord is heard but the strummer is not harmed.
Honorary Doctorates? Bah! Halfway measures. Again nothing like the old days. A generation ago, even less, a Judge Jones would have had a Galapagos Mansions staffed with 5,000 slaves (not including the Harem).
If we're down to counting on denying tenure and issuing honorary doctorates then this conspiracy is doomed to imminent dissolution. In but a few years the truth about the Hollow Ear... er, I mean Creation, yeah, Creation, will be revealed.
==Why have EVILutionists allowed these dissenters to live?
You are right. If we use history as our guide, in all countries where EVILutionists do manage to completely take over...reeducattion camps, gulags and mass murder do indeed follow.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s quite inevitable.
==So what? What has the bible got to do with science?
If we are IN FACT created beings, then the Bible could very well have a lot to say about the scientific study of origins.
You don't even begin to grasp the depth and extent of the EVILution Conspiracy (until it went soft anyway). If you know about it, it wasn't us! Granted that some of our most bitter enemies, like Stalin, copied some of our methods, in far more crude and less subtle fashion of course, but we defeated him in the end.
See, you didn't even know the Cold War was fought over EVILution, did you? Even if you did, you would have had the sides backward. Granted the Soviet Lysenkoists that Stalin championed hadn't stumbled onto the real refutation of Darwinism, but again that's just my point. In the old days the EVILution Conspiracy went after any threat, and shook the foundations of global civilization to do so. Today this conspiracy is a pathetic shadow of its former self.
People used to assume it said everything there was to say about origins. Science has discredited those interpretations and shown much of the early part of it was borrowed and shaped from other cultural myths in the region. What else could be in there in terms of scientific knowledge, apart from trying to match certain biblical stories to historical events e.g. the flight from Egypt and the explosion of Santorini?
Stalin is EVILution’s bitter enemy because he deviated from Marx and Lenin.
==Granted the Soviet Lysenkoists that Stalin championed hadn’t stumbled onto the real refutation of Darwinism
Again, the Lysenkoists are hated because they deviated from the arch-Darwinist founders of modern Communusm, ie Marx and Lenin. Once the Cult of Stalin was put to rest, the Communists REINSTATED Darwin to his rightful place. Had Stalin been predisposed to elevate Darwin, he would have killed off the Lysenkoists. Indeed, this is so elementary even low-level Darwinists such as yourself should be able to understand it.
When you have mastered the basics, drop me a line.
Ex nihilo creation does not appear unambiguously in Gen. That is usually not argued.
“”Unlike most of my colleagues, however, I don’t see ID as a threat to biology, public education or the ideals of the republic.”
Teaching ID as science requires one to completely separate oneself from the basic priciples of scientific research and methodology.
Not at all. Even high priests from the Church of Darwin, such as Richard Dawkins, admit that IDers are asking eminently scientific questions...he just happens to side with the Church of Darwin.
From the intro to your link.
This website is a rough draft collection of my own notes and thoughts as well as the thoughts of many others
Ha Ha Ha!
Like I said, it’s a primer. I wanted to get you used to the shallow water before introducing concepts that might be out of your depth.
I think that cloud I see out my window was intelligently designed. I mean, how can that moisture segregate itself with defined edges of such beauty unless it was designed? How could a cloud form “by accident”?
Spare me the condescension. Pitman doesn’t have anything new to say there anyway. We’ve been hearing for decades about the conspiracy of silence, intimidation and suppression of doubt about evolution in the scientific field. 911 conspiracists and holocaust deniers/skeptics make the same kind of claims all the time. And what has all of that got to do with the bible? Lets assume for a moment that someone like Behe was correct, and it could be proved that the prokaryotic or even eukaryotic cell were actually designed and created somewhere along the line - that doesn’t prove anything whatsoever in relation to the christian god or the bible or any other religious claim.
==I think that cloud I see out my window was intelligently designed. I mean, how can that moisture segregate itself with defined edges of such beauty unless it was designed? How could a cloud form “by accident”?
I suggest you brush up on ID before making reading “design” into cloud patterns. You might want to start with Dembski’s Explanatory Filter.
http://www.arn.org/docs/dembski/wd_explfilter.htm
Don't worry, that's being taken care up by scientists like this.
It's too bad there are no scientists who have been able to generate positive evidence for God in subjects such as ID and the eternal struggle against evolution.
How about the fact that there's no scientific evidence in favor of ID, and the subject being taught is science? If there were such evidence, then that would translate into positive scientific evidence for the existence of God, and that doesn't exist. Just like there's no scientific evidence of the existence of Allah, or Zeus, or Thor, or ghosts. Sure, Jesus existed, but so did Mohamed. That a person existed doesn't validate all the stories told about them. There are lots of whoppers told about people who existed in History.
PS When you say that “Pitman doesn’t have anything new to say there anyway,” should I take that to mean you have read the entire contents of his website?
How does labeling evolution a faith make ID true? Assuming that evolution is a faith, that's one faith against another, how would that fact help your case?
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