Teaching faith
Teaching science
Posted on 06/07/2002 11:35:28 AM PDT by jennyp
To Seattle area residents the struggle over how evolution is taught in public high schools may seem a topic from the distant past or a distant place.
Don't bet on it. One nearby episode in the controversy has ended, but a far-reaching, Seattle-based agenda to overthrow Darwin is gaining momentum.
Roger DeHart, a high-school science teacher who was the center of an intense curriculum dispute a few years ago in Skagit County, is leaving the state. He plans to teach next year in a private Christian school in California.
The fuss over DeHart's use of "intelligent design" theory in his classes at Burlington-Edison High School was merely a tiny blip in a grand scheme by promoters of the theory.
The theory is essentially this: Life is so complex that it can only be the result of design by an intelligent being.
Who is this unnamed being? Well, God, I presume. Wouldn't you?
As unlikely as it may seem, Seattle is ground zero for the intelligent-design agenda, thanks to the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and its Center for Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC).
Headed by one-time Seattle City councilman and former Reagan administration official Bruce Chapman, the Discovery Institute is best known locally for its savvy insights on topics ranging from regionalism, transportation, defense policy and the economy.
In the late '90s, the institute jumped into the nation's culture wars with the CRSC. It may be little known to local folks, but it has caught the attention of conservative religious organizations around the country.
It's bound to get more attention in the future. Just last month, a documentary, Icons of Evolution, premiered at Seattle Pacific University. The video is based on a book of the same name by CRSC fellow Jonathan Wells. It tells the story of DeHart, along with the standard critique of Darwinian evolution that fuels the argument for intelligent design.
The video is part of the anti-Darwin agenda. Cruise the Internet on this topic and you'll find something called the Wedge Strategy, which credits the CRSC with a five-year plan for methodically promoting intelligent design and a 20-year goal of seeing "design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life."
Last week, Chapman tried to put a little distance between his institute and the "wedge" document. He said it was a fund-raising tool used four years ago. "I don't disagree with it," he told me, "but it's not our program." (I'll let the folks who gave money based on the proposed strategy ponder what that means.)
Program or not, it is clear that the CRSC is intent on bringing down what one Center fellow calls "scientific imperialism." Surely Stephen Jay Gould already is spinning in his grave. Gould, one of America's most widely respected scientists and a prolific essayist, died just two weeks ago. Among his many fine books is one I kept by my bedside for many weeks after it was published in 1999, "Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life."
In "Rock of Ages," Gould presents an elegant case for the necessary co-existence of science and religion. Rather than conflicting, as secular humanists insist, or blending, as intelligent-design proponents would have it, science and religion exist in distinct domains, what Gould called magisteria (domains of teaching authority).
The domain of science is the empirical universe; the domain of religion is the moral, ethical and spiritual meaning of life.
Gould was called America's most prominent evolutionist, yet he too, was a critic of Darwin's theory, and the object of some controversy within the scientific community. There's a lesson in that: In the domain of science there is plenty of room for disagreement and alternative theories without bringing God into the debate.
I have no quarrel with those who believe in intelligent design. It has appeal as a way to grasp the unknowable why of our existence. But it is only a belief. When advocates push intelligent design as a legitimate scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations of evolution, it is time to push back.
That's what they continue to do in Skagit County. Last week, the Burlington-Edison School Board rejected on a 4-1 vote a proposal to "encourage" the teaching of intelligent design. Bravo.
Despite proponents' claims of scientific validity, intelligent design is little more than religion-based creationism wrapped in critiques of Darwin and all dressed up in politically correct language. All for the ultimate goal — placing a Christian God in science classrooms of America's public high schools.
And although it posits interesting questions regarding modern western materialism, it really says nothing about any form of government, communistic or otherwise. "The West," in my opinion, covers quite a range of government types, some more disgusting than others to be sure, but not all the same.
And "materialism" covers a lot of ground, too. A lot of people confuse "materialism" in science with "materialsim" in the sense of mindless consumerism, say, or hedonism. I expect that you're not doing that.
objectivity(reality) requires no value judgements---
how you think things should be is normative science(ideology)!
objectivity(reality) requires no value judgements---
how you think things should be is normative science(ideology)!
An assigned value Must interfere with Real observation: Science.
Two can play at this game. Ten paces! Name your typeface!
The tide is turning, evolutionalists...jump on board, or sink!
Teaching science
But that's not spiritually different. That would be materially different since the brain is just organic matter.
Are you seriously implying that good is not an abstraction? Or are you asserting that God is material?
So why are these characteristics necessary for survival? Crocodiles and cockroaches do just fine without them.
Again, an assumption is an assumption, and therefore arbitrary. Assumptions can be reasonable, but not logical. If they were logical, they wouldn't be assumptions. They would be deductions.Great pointsTo hold it necessary that "assumptions must be postulated" changes none of that. It only confirms what I said earlier. Any morality devoid of God as a reference is arbitrary at it's core.
Interesting that your premise hinges on the notion that "all men are created equal," isn't it?
I'm sure you'll want to rephrase it, but the inescapable reason it sounds reasonable is because it echoes a God-derived axiom we've all heard a thousand times.
That's putting it kindly. Difference between Gould and Darwin was that Darwin thought that fossils could prove evolution true, Gould knew they did not and never would but wanted to stay on the evo gravy train nevertheless. Punk-eek is totally unverifiable and unfalsifiable.
If you do not know that evolution is true then your belief in it is no different than the belief of the anti-evolutionists in God. Therefore you should acknowledge that as far as is known evolution is a materialistic/atheistic faith system, not science.
Of course, evolutionists cannot even say that all men are equal because materially speaking they are not. Men are only equal in the eyes of God. Darwin, and evolutionary theory, is based on the superiority of different men, races, species to others.
The guy could have just changed his name after he turned 21, rather than try to take it out on God, couldn't he?
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