Posted on 03/30/2009 8:31:35 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Using Religion to Suppress Debate on Evolution
By John G. West Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute
Evolution was back in the headlines this week as the Texas State Board of Education voted 13-2 to require students to "analyze and evaluate" major evolutionary concepts such as common ancestry, natural selection, and mutations, as well as adopting a critical thinking standard calling on students to "critique" and examine "all sides of scientific evidence."
The vote was a loss for defenders of evolution who had pushed the Board to strip the "analyze and evaluate" language from the evolution standards and gut the overall critical thinking standard.
Evolutionists typically cast themselves as the champions of secular reason against superstition, but in Texas they tried to inject religion into the debate at every turn.
Indeed, this past week it seemed that they couldn't stop talking about religion. They boasted about their credentials as Sunday School teachers and church elders. They quoted the Bible and appealed to theology...
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.washingtonpost.com ...
“I don’t supposed it ever occured to you that anything you’ve posted is arrogant and condescending.”
Oh, absolutely. I think in general when you disagree with someone you run the risk of sounding arrogant or condescending. I appreciate that it took you until the second time for that to sufficiently tweak you.
I only start with the arrogance on the evolution posts, though. I’m not that way as a rule, but tend to be a bit defensive when I know the audience already has a chip on their shoulder. I love the discussion, but I will tweak you from time to time as you will me. Can you handle it?
“You might like to read some background regarding this general subject... (if you have time)”
Thanks! I’ll check them out. I’m used to the broken record, but I can be one myself from time to time. I know they prime each other on one post and coagulate on the other.
To be honest, they sharpen my resolve as well.
I haven't disparaged your religious beliefs, or been insulting. We have obvious differences of opinion about some things. If we cannot simply agree to disagree about those things, and concentrate on the things we can discuss without them becoming personal then I don't believe there's any good reason to continue this right now.
“I haven’t disparaged your religious beliefs, or been insulting. We have obvious differences of opinion about some things. If we cannot simply agree to disagree about those things, and concentrate on the things we can discuss without them becoming personal then I don’t believe there’s any good reason to continue this right now.”
I don’t think you’ve been unfair to me in any post now or in the past. Again, I am passionate about what I believe and as such occasionally am a bit zealous about my beliefs. If you have strong-held beliefs you are also, but if you’ll look at some of the posts on these threads it’s hard to tell friend from enemy. There are those who would attack and call anyone disagreeing things like simpleton’s, morons, cretard’s. You do not speak in that way and I must thank you for that.
We can agree to disagree about those things. The personal insults should have been reserved for those who deserve them and that has certainly not been you.
You absolutely gave me a good answer as you say. Now I’ve had to apologize twice in one evening... don’t let it happen again! sarc/
Thanks. GG
I don't understand the question. As far as I know, the standard is whatever the best estimate is that they can give, given the sample they have to work with and the technology they have to measure it.
Do you know of any technology or methodology that produces more reliable results that they should be using instead?
Fair enough. I abhor the level some of these threads descend to, and I admit to having occasionally gotten caught up in a “race to the bottom” in the past and regretted it later. I will occasionally get involved in some “give and take” with others I’m familiar with, but too many times I’ve seen minor disagreements esacalate to downright mean,ugly and stupid in just a few posts.
“Do you know of any technology or methodology that produces more reliable results that they should be using instead?”
I don’t. But then as I said that’s not my field... not sure what my field is. I’ve done many things.
I’m just not sure how scientific, “whatever the best estimate is that they can give, given the sample they have to work with and the technology they have to measure it.” The thing is, I think you have nailed what I’m saying right here. If there is no standard (point of reference to compare results) then the science is flawed. We could find items that are a few hundred years old and work from there forward, but when you get out 1000, 4000, 10000, 100000, 1000000 years there is no standard. My logic may be flawed in this but I don’t see how we can assume accuracy in the millions of years when any known reference point is millions of years later.
I’m not trying to make a cricular argument or confuse the subject, I’m just trying to understand it.
“too many times I’ve seen minor disagreements esacalate to downright mean,ugly and stupid in just a few posts.”
I can even understand that at times after a few posts when beliefs are challenged and tempers flare. But it’s especially disgusting to me the people who start out of the box that way. The ones who do it just to attack folks. I was kind of surprised when I started looking at the evolution/religion posts at the kind of attacks that were allowed. I am glad we have a place to share ideas and differences of opinion in an almost entirely conservative format.
There are some samples they can use for baseline reference based on events in recorded history - samples gathered from sites of past volcanic eruptions like Vesuvius for example.
They can date some samples take from deep ice cores in the Arctic and Antarctic regions by drilling down and bringing up ice cores and counting the seasonal layers in the ice like rings in a tree. In the Antarctic, those layers go down over 100,000 years. There's not a lot of organic matter in some of them, but enough to use for comparative analysis and establishing reference baselines.
I’m plagued by my faith! The problem I have with a lot of the ice-core samples and the like is my belief in the Great Flood. Even if the global flood is not taken into account there were certainly major floods that took place with various climate shifts over the ages that would account for shifts in the soil samples and in the ice cores.
The science is imperfect at best and I believe you acknowledge that. It’s a whole lot easier to weed through relevant information when both parties are willing to acknowledge where the weaknesses in the arguments are.
I know we disagree on most of this, but I don’t even understand where some of these guys are coming from and you give some very good and helpful knowledge.
If you have a response to the statement at the top, please post it. I’ll be back on tomorrow night.
Thanks.
Gordon
I think most of the time this is the result of somebody coming into a thread still mad from the last one.
I'll give your other post some thought and take it up againg tomorrow. I'm headed for bed, too.
“They can date some samples take from deep ice cores in the Arctic and Antarctic regions by drilling down and bringing up ice cores and counting the seasonal layers in the ice like rings in a tree. In the Antarctic, those layers go down over 100,000 years. There's not a lot of organic matter in some of them, but enough to use for comparative analysis and establishing reference baselines” [excerpt]
Uniformitarian scientists derive many more ‘annual layers’ in the Greenland ice cores than creationists because of their assumed old age time scale. The differences between the two paradigms also show up in the interpretation of the Ice Age portion of the cores. Large changes in oxygen isotope ratio are interpreted by uniformitarian scientists as wild fluctuations in temperature in the North Atlantic region. Such wild fluctuations in the previous ‘interglacial’ sparked a reinforcement syndrome and other such fluctuations were then ‘discovered’ in other data sets, such as deep-sea cores. These ‘interglacial’ fluctuations have been used to justify speculation on rapid climate change in the present climate due to increased greenhouse gasses. The ‘interglacial’ ice core fluctuations are now seen by most scientists as an artifact of ice flow. Uniformitarian scientists are still perplexed over the huge Ice Age fluctuations. Creationists, on the other hand, can interpret the oxygen isotope swings in at least four ways by events within a short post-Flood Ice Age. The oxygen isotope fluctuations could represent seasonal changes, longer period climate changes caused by variable volcanic dust loading, changes in sea ice, or atmospheric circulation changes.
(Excerpt) Read more at answersingenesis.org ...
A milestone in deep ice drilling occurred on Thursday, 17 July 2003.1 The deepest ice core in the Northern Hemisphere hit bedrock on the Greenland Ice Sheet at a depth of almost two miles. The new core was drilled by the North Greenland Ice Core Project (NorthGRIP, or NGRIP for short), which took seven years to drill, after overcoming many problems.2 The ice core is located 203 miles from the highest point on the ice sheet, on a north–north-west trending ice ridge. European glaciologists had drilled the high point to bedrock back in the early 1990s. Their ice core was called GRIP. American scientists had drilled another hole to bedrock at the same time, 18 miles to the west of GRIP, called GISP2.3
(Excerpt) Read more at answersingenesis.org ...
Ice cores have been drilled deep into both the Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets. These cores represent snowfall that has turned to ice. During snowfall on top of the ice sheets, dust, air, acids, etc. are added and eventually incorporated into the ice. Some of these parameters oscillate during the seasons and can be a signature for an annual layer of snowfall. The annual snowfall over Antarctica is normally too small to resolve annual layers down an ice core. It is the Greenland Ice Sheet that exhibits annual cycles of one or more of the variables down an ice core.
(Excerpt) Read more at answersingenesis.org ...
On December 3, Dr. Hugh Ross’s Reasons to Believe website featured a new result from the Dome C ice core, drilled from on top of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. This ice core was drilled down to 3,190 meters and is supposedly over 800,000 years old in the uniformitarian* timescale.1 The website stated that evidence for the great age of the core is demonstrated by the discovery of the Matuyama-Brunhes geomagnetic reversal at about 780,000 years in the core, based on a recent article from Nature.2 However, this deduction is equivocal, even from a uniformitarian point of view.
(Excerpt) Read more at answersingenesis.org ...
Paul H. Seely has written a rebuttal to creationist’s ice sheet and ice core interpretations in the December 2003 Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, a journal put out by American Scientific Affiliation.1 [Ed. note: Seely is an ostensibly evangelical theologian whose main hobby for decades seems to have been to argue that the Bible contains scientific errors, and is thus much beloved by anti-Christians—see
He primarily challenges my reinterpretation of the 110,000 claimed annual layers in the GISP2 ice core from the top of the Greenland Ice Sheet to the depth of 2,800 metres and defends the extensive timeframe, claiming independent corroboration by multiple methods. I will show that these methods are not independent and open to significant reinterpretation. The root of the problem is the uncritical acceptance of the uniformitarian paradigm.
(Excerpt) Read more at answersingenesis.org ...
Not at all, spam away!
I don’t mind. IMHO, any critical reading of AIG’s articles usually does more harm than good to their position. They provide little if any hard data to back up their conclusions and their comparative analysis consists mostly of assigning perjoratives to non-creationists theories, reasarch and scientists and describing their own in glowing terms.
Maybe you’ve simply not studied the arguments against old earth (see creationscience.com). Also maybe you have not considered nor studied those that have attempted to meet in the middle (google Gravitational Time Dilation or read Starlight and Time by Russell Humpreys Ph.d.). Not everything is as uniform as it appears.
The best question I’ve seen posed to the evolution intellectuals is:
Why do you put so much stock in Charles Darwin w/ a fairly checkered educational background and mostly overlook the work of Albert Einstein w/ a highly scientific and mathematical educational background as well as some of the most astounding breakthroughs in modern science?
The small cults of Christian Communists of the 18th and 19th centuries developed independently of the Marxist, atheistic variety, and can by no stretch of the imagination be linked to the eugenics and mass murder practiced by the latter.
At the time when Marxism first emerged on the political scene, the concept of secular or atheistic communism did not yet exist. All communism was rooted in religious principles. During the mid-to-late 1840s, the largest organization espousing communist ideas in Europe was the League of the Just, whose motto was "All Men are Brothers" and whose aim was to establish a new society "based on the ideals of love of one's neighbor, equality and justice". Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels joined the League of the Just in 1847. Under their influence, the organization became secular and atheistic and changed its name to the Communist League. The League invited Marx and Engels to write a programmatic document that would express communist principles, and they obliged, producing the Communist Manifesto.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_communism
Cordially,
The motto of the League of the Just (Bund der Gerechten) was "All Men are Brothers" and its goals were "the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth, based on the ideals of love of one's neighbour, equality and justice."
And, as you point out, Marx and Engels joined in 1847, 12 years before Darwin published Origins. It's true that the movement moved away from God, but that was my point. Marx specifically moved away from previous socialist efforts, even using the term communism to disassociate himself from them. However, these movements grew from Christianity, not evolutionary biology..
And the fact is that the Oneida colony practiced eugenics in the 19th century. The elders decided who would be allowed to reproduce. They didn't follow any biological theory of Darwin, or anyone else, in this.
Why do you put so much stock in arguments about Charles Darwin? "Old Earth" theories originated in geology, and predate Dawrin by several decades.
What evidence can you present that Albert Einstein disagreed with the geologists and nuclear physicists about the age of the Earth based on radiometric dating?
These movements were small cultish aberrations of Christianity. There is nothing inherently Biblical or historically Christian about Communism in any of its forms.
And the fact is that the Oneida colony practiced eugenics in the 19th century. The elders decided who would be allowed to reproduce. They didn't follow any biological theory of Darwin, or anyone else, in this.
On whose shoulders did later eugenicists explicitly stand, the "Christian Communists' or Charles Darwin?
Cordially,
Agreed. I'm just saying there is well documented evidence that communist movements started as Christian utopian movements.
On whose shoulders did later eugenicists explicitly stand, the "Christian Communists' or Charles Darwin?
I think both the Bible communists and the later 20th century eugenics movements come from Lamarck. Especially in the 20th century where they assumed that having athletic, "fit" parents would result in superior children.
This fits perfectly with Lamarck's idea of acquired characteristics, which ironically was the one of the dominant evolutionary theories that Darwin's theory eclipsed.
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