Posted on 10/06/2002 8:16:21 AM PDT by hispanarepublicana
Professor rigid on evolution </MCC HEAD>
By SEBASTIAN KITCHEN </MCC BYLINE1>
AVALANCHE-JOURNAL </MCC BYLINE2>
• Criteria for letters of recommendation: http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/dini/Personal/ letters.htm
• Michael Dini's Web page:
http://www2.tltc.ttu. edu/dini/
On the Net
Micah Spradling was OK with learning about evolution in college, but his family drew the line when his belief in the theory became a prerequisite for continuing his education.
Tim Spradling said his son left Texas Tech this semester and enrolled in Lubbock Christian University after en countering the policy of one associate professor in biological sciences.
Professor Michael Dini's Web site states that a student must "truthfully and forthrightly" believe in human evolution to receive a letter of recommendation from him.
"How can someone who does not accept the most important theory in biology expect to properly practice in a field that is so heavily based on biology?" Dini's site reads.
Dini says on the site that it is easy to imagine how physicians who ignore or neglect the "evolutionary origin of humans can make bad clinical decisions."
He declined to speak with The Avalanche-Journal. His response to an e-mail from The A-J said: "This semester, I have 500 students to contend with, and my schedule in no way permits me to participate in such a debate."
A Tech spokeswoman said Chancellor David Smith and other Tech officials also did not want to comment on the story.
At least two Lubbock doctors and a medical ethicist said they have a problem with the criterion, and the ethicist said Dini "could be a real ingrate."
Tim Spradling, who owns The Brace Place, said his son wanted to follow in his footsteps and needed a letter from a biology professor to apply for a program at Southwestern University's medical school.
Spradling is not the only medical professional in Lub bock shocked by Dini's policy. Doctors Patrick Edwards and Gaylon Seay said they learned evolution in college but were never forced to believe it.
"I learned what they taught," Edwards said. "I had to. I wanted to make good grades, but it didn't change my basic beliefs."
Seay said his primary problem is Dini "trying to force someone to pledge allegiance to his way of thinking."
Seay, a Tech graduate who has practiced medicine since 1977, said a large amount of literature exists against the theory.
"He is asking people to compromise their religious be liefs," Seay said. "It is a shame for a professor to use that as a criteria."
Dini's site also states: "So much physical evidence supports" evolution that it can be referred to as fact even if all the details are not known.
"One can deny this evidence only at the risk of calling into question one's understanding of science and of the method of science," Dini states on the Web site.
Edwards said Dini admits in the statement that the details are not all known.
Dini is in a position of authority and "can injure someone's career," and the criteria is the "most prejudice thing I have ever read," Seay said.
"It is appalling," he said.
Both doctors said their beliefs in creationism have never negatively affected their practices, and Seay said he is a more compassionate doctor because of his beliefs.
"I do not believe evolution has anything to do with the ability to make clinical decisions — pro or con," Seay said.
Academic freedom should be extended to students, Edwards said.
"A student may learn about a subject, but that does not mean that everything must be accepted as fact, just because the professor or an incomplete body of evidence says so," Edwards said.
"Skepticism is also a very basic part of scientific study," he said.
The letter of recommendation should not be contingent on Dini's beliefs, Edwards said.
"That would be like Texas Tech telling him he had to be a Christian to teach biology," Edwards said.
Harold Vanderpool, professor in history and philosophy of medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, said he has a problem with Dini's policy.
"I think this professor could be a real ingrate," Vanderpool said. "I have a problem with a colleague who has enjoyed all the academic freedoms we have, which are extensive, and yet denies that to our students."
Vanderpool, who has served on, advised or chaired committees for the National Institute of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services, said the situation would be like a government professor requiring a student to be "sufficiently patriotic" to receive a letter.
"It seems to me that this professor is walking a pretty thin line between the protection of his right to do what he wants to do, his own academic freedom, and a level of discrimination toward a student," he said.
"It is reaching into an area of discrimination. That could be a legal problem. If not, it is a moral problem," Vanderpool said.
Instead of a recommendation resting on character and academic performance, "you've got this ideological litmus test you are using," he said. "To me, that is problematic, if not outright wrong."
William F. May, a medical ethicist who was appointed to President Bush's Council on Bioethics, said he cannot remember establishing a criterion on the question of belief with a student on exams or with letters of recommendation.
"I taught at five institutions and have always felt you should grade papers and offer judgments on the quality of arguments rather than a position on which they arrived."
Professors "enjoy the protection of academic freedom" and Dini "seems to be profoundly ungrateful" for the freedom, Vanderpool said.
He said a teacher cannot be forced to write a letter of recommendation for a student, which he believes is good because the letters are personal and have "to do with the professor's assessment of students' work habits, character, grades, persistence and so on."
A policy such as Dini's needs to be in the written materials and should be stated in front of the class so the student is not surprised by the policy and can drop the class, Vanderpool said.
Dini's site states that an individual who denies the evidence commits malpractice in the method of science because "good scientists would never throw out data that do not conform to their expectations or beliefs."
People throw out information be cause "it seems to contradict his/her cherished beliefs," Dini's site reads. A physician who ignores data cannot remain a physician for long, it states.
Dini's site lists him as an exceptional faculty member at Texas Tech in 1995 and says he was named "Teacher of the Year" in 1998-99 by the Honors College at Texas Tech.
Edwards said he does not see any evidence on Dini's vita that he attended medical school or treated patients.
"Dr. Dini is a nonmedical person trying to impose his ideas on medicine," Edwards said. "There is little in common between teaching biology classes and treating sick people. ... How dare someone who has never treated a sick person purport to impose his feelings about evolution on someone who aspires to treat such people?"
On his Web site, Dini questions how someone who does not believe in the theory of evolution can ask to be recommended into a scientific profession by a professional scientist.
May, who taught at multiple prestigious universities, including Yale, during his 50 years in academia, said he did not want to judge Dini and qualified his statements because he did not know all of the specifics.
He said the doctors may be viewing Dini's policy as a roadblock, but the professor may be warning them in advance of his policy so students are not dismayed later.
"I have never seen it done and am surprised to hear it, but he may find creationist aggressive in the class and does not want to have to cope with that," May said. "He is at least giving people the courtesy of warning them in advance."
The policy seems unusual, May said, but Dini should not be "gang-tackled and punished for his policy."
The criterion may have been viewed as a roadblock for Micah Spradling at Tech, but it opened a door for him at LCU.
Classes at LCU were full, Tim Spradling said, but school officials made room for his son after he showed them Dini's policy.
skitchen@lubbockonline.com 766-8753
That's just one of many reasons as to why the medical community is so screwed up. They have no footing in reality. They are godless, egotistical morons that believe THEY are god's gift to you. Very few believe in the Judeo Christian God. The doctors I use, I REQUIRE belief in God and welcome a prayer from them if ill. Needless to say, I have a couple of the few good, godly folks who apply their knowledge in godly ways such as staunchly against abortions etc.. Abortions performed by medical people ought to also tell you something about the state of the medical industry as well as how they hand out drugs like candy - especially to kids. It't a disgrace.
I can think of several to whom that description applies. God's Traveller was banned.
Perhaps some niches simply have a small carrying capacity?
I'm not convinced that ALL ET's are benevolant at all. The 9 most commonly reported races seem to be clearly in cahoots with the shadow gov and thereby Christ's enemy setting up his anthesis in a global gov. It is plausible to me that some ET races are on God's side. And, there are evidently authentic angelic activities that some have construed to be UFO phenomena ...
Libraries are usually closed when I can get there, although the wife brings our kids there on Wednesday's so I may get her to copy it.
Still, I kinda like the idea of you typing it out. :-)
Yes, but I don't know what he did to get banned. He apparently wasn't banned for making the posts that made a bad impression on me.
Ya know, talking about your side like that won't win you any friends. :-)
Hello PH! Great to see you again! I'm glad you have no problem with this. Still, I have a quibble or two, for your consideration.
One, as you note the Pope said, "knowledge has led to the recognition that evolution is more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favour of this theory."
Arguably, the Pope was referring to evolution as a general category. For he notes the concept has found favor "in various fields of knowledge." (Inter alia, the concept has seemingly found favor with certain philosophers, such as Eric Voegelin.) He has not said anything here about the doctrine of natural selection per se, which is an exclusive preserve of evolutionary biology.
So we don't know what the Pope thinks about that, for he hasn't said. At least, not explicitly in these statements.
Two, Although man's spiritual nature "is a whole separate issue" apart from the physical sciences, I have very strong doubts that the investigation of what I understand to be man's spiritual nature is the exclusive province of theology. The question depends on what we mean by man's spiritual nature.
There are those who might say the question deals solely with matters religious, in particular with the final destination of the soul -- which many people today consider to be a superstitious fiction in the first place, from both the "soul" and "destination" standpoints. This is clearly the view of Stephen Pinker and Richard Dawkins, for instance. Julian Huxley laughed the idea out of court about a hundred years ago, calling it "the ghost in the machine," a risible idea. This has become the fashionable post-modern view.
But when I think of man's spiritual nature, what comes to mind is the idea of psyche -- an immaterial, "non-existent" (in the sense of not having physical existence) entity that has its source and provenance "outside" of physical nature. Psyche -- soul -- incorporates the conscious and unconscious mind, and includes the intellect as well as man's spiritual substance and ground. This was Plato's insight, predating Christianity by about 500 years. And Christian theology does not appear to refute it. Plato's model, to me, holds up very well in the evolution of historical time and experience.
Now, though he may have coined the term, Plato was no theologian. And neither are scientists working in the fields of psychology and cognitive biology.
I think Plato's model is what lies back of the Pope's remark that "theories of evolution which ... consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they able to ground the dignity of the person."
But this is precisely what Pinker believes -- that the mind is, indeed, an epiphenomenon of matter, to such an extent that "brain" and "mind" are effectively synonymous terms with him.
I'm pretty sure the Pope wouldn't agree with him on this point.
Share your thoughts with me, if you get the chance? Thanks for writing, PH! All my best -- bb.
Creation "science" is usually anti-scientific. But Creationism is nothing of the kind.
These are not "advances", they are grudging, tacit admissions that macro-evolutionary theory has utterly failed. The "discordant leaps" necessary to bridge the fossil and biochemical gaps between "punctuated equilibria" would require literal MIRACLES -- violations of Shannon Entropy (informational theory.)
Creationism is a religious freedom, and I support that. But it is, at it's heart, anti-scientific
Au contraire. Since evolution as a mode of origin (as distinct from one of adaptive radiation), simply does not work in our physical univers, invoking the necessity of outside intervention is a reasonable scientific hypothesis. Evolutionists fume and sputter and come up with ever more ridiculous scenarios requiring ever more ridiculous assumptions, in a desperate attempt to evade the God "problem", while in a startling reversal, it's now creationists who apply Occam's razor and stick with the simpler theory.
That having been said, I don't believe that any school of thought really has it figured out, yet. In my opinion, both atheistic evolution and the "6 x 24hr day, 6kyr ago" young-earth creation model, force one to ignore some evidence. Hugh Ross's old earth creation model seems to have fewer problems,but even that doesn't account for everything. I'd love to see Hugh Ross (www.reasons.org) and Bryan Sykes (www.oxfordancestors.com) hash it out sometime.
American in Israel's testimony is important to me. I've been blessed with miracles also and I delight in hearing of others' experiences. MsLady just today posted a remarkable medical blessing - prayers granted after intercession.
With regard to geology and gold, I have no reason to doubt his first hand field experience on the subject.
I'm pretty sure the Pope wouldn't agree with him on this point.
This just doesn't make any sense. Why do imperfect self-replicators violate Shannon Entropy?
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