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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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Posted on 10/01/2002 6:32:12 AM PDT by Phaedrus
Edited on 04/22/2004 12:34:48 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
More than 40 years ago, the film "Inherit the Wind" presented the controversy over the teaching of evolution as a battle between stick-figure fundamentalists who defend a literal reading of Genesis and saintly scientists who simply want to teach the facts of biology. Ever since, journalists have tended to depict almost any battle over evolution in the schools as if it were a replay of "Inherit the Wind"--even if it's not.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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Why not? Does the board member misunderstand the relation of religion to science? One of the features of a true liberal education is an integrated understanding of all the sciences, including theology. Why the various sciences have to bunker and protect themselves from others appears to be more of a disease, than an liberal education. If science abandons metaphysics, not to mention relgion, you know they are cheating for a monopoly.
Ha ha ha, "scientific"???? It presupposes a "designer" aka God. It might fool members of the choir, but it's a religious faith.
Come on. If it weren't for the fact that evolution disagrees with the Biblical account of creation, none of this would be under discussion. There's scientific disagreement about the underlying theory of gravity; why isn't Georgia insisting that that controversy be included in the curriculum?
Dr. John G. West, Jr., is a senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and an associate professor of political science at Seattle Pacific University.
The Discovery Institute is a stealth creationist think-tank. Of course they're going to run interference on this play.
I agree with you that an education in the liberal arts should encompass a wide variety of subjects, including science and theology. However, metaphysics and theology are NOT sciences and should not be construde as such. Nor is science a theology, even though certain stringent athiests have tried to force-fit sience into a theology. THe theological and the scientific extremes have both become extremely dogmatic in their views.
TO me, the Cobb county decision is interesting, provided the critiquing of evolutionary theory is done constructively. In other words, it is done to show the dynamic nature of scietific understanding and that all theories have limitations and areas that lack a complete understanding. It is the process of science that explores those areas, often with conflicting ideas. It happens at the cutting edge of all the sciences, not just biological evolution. What I do fear is that the Cobb county decision will open the door to teach the shortcomings and controversies of evolution rather than focus on the underlying concepts that do unify those scientists involved in biological evolutionary research. ALso, I worry that it will be used to recycle all the worn arguements that abuse other areas of science to try to "disprove" evolution and to "disprove" the chmical, physical, geological and cosmological sciences that are well established.
That is an interesting take. Perhaps there are those who a reserve particular subject matter for the name science. Is it possible to give a date when this shift in the meaning occurred?
The view that only science is science is redundant. The view that areas of human experience cannot come under the scrutiny of human knowledge is the very monopoly of a dogmatism that you warn against.
You're letting the cat out of the bag too soon.
Theology, while one of the most honorable of the schools of thought, is not science. Scientific theories today must be phrased in such a fashion that they are disprovable. Otherwise, they are not considered as valid theories. (A nice side debate might be made, then, on whether the theory of evolution is scientific because it does not conform to that pattern, but that is a separate debate.)
Science mainly consists of using specific techniques - hypothesis, experiment, and theory - to enable use to understand the world around us. One cannot validate or invalidate a hypothesis unless one can phrase it in such a manner that it can be invalidated, i.e. disprovable. Once a hypothesis has been repeatedly hammered by experiment, and as it evolves in response to such experiment, then it becomes a theory. (Hey, look, I used evolve in a sentance. Wanna argue about it?)
It can be argued that certain branches of science fit this conceptual model better than others, and it can be argued that the theory of evolution is no theory at all. But that is not the point here. The point here is that Theology is not science.
Perhaps you want to say it is not specifically a science of matter (or whatever else you reserve for the label).
You're presupposing that the Darwinian evolution being taught is correct. One need not introduce God into the mix to discuss problems with Darwinian evolutionary theory -- problems that even big-name evolutionists acknowledge. If you're as serious about science as you make yourself out to be, I'd think you would welcome something like this, as it allows kids to see the scientific method at work.
Of course, we're still left with the question of God. "Science" tends to assume that God either does not exist, or is irrelevant if He does exist. As Stephen Jay Gould put it, "science covers the empirical realm: what the universe is made of ... and why it works this way and that the nature of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value."
Gould couldn't imagine a scheme whereby science and religion could be unified -- a baseless assumption on his part that God is not active in space and time. If God does exist, then theories that incorporate His existence are certainly not improper; indeed, if God exists, your own oft-stated position on the matter is completely irrational. (Of course the atheist position is irrational anyway, for the obvious reason that it cannot prove its fundamental assumption.)
And, of course, God does exist.
So they're all wrong, right? 158 scientists from around the country, and everyone of them are clueless? Sounds to me like they're allowing nothing more than a discussion about the problems with evolutionary theory. Surely you guys don't object to reasoned discussion?
because they don't have to. evolution is a scientific theory with a massive non-scientific lobbying group behind. explain that without bringing religion/anti-religion into it?
Period.
It is critical that theories be stated in such a way that they can be disproved, or they are not theories. If they are not theories, then they are not science. QED.
Theology does not state its concepts in ways that are disprovable. They are not science, they are metaphysics. I personally think metaphysis is very cool. Matters of the spirit, the soul, God, angels, demons, monsters, and things that go bump in the night - very interesting stuff. But unless the studies are done using the scientific method - not science.
Why the heck do certain people want to make them science, anyway? Unless and until science comes up with some way of accessing the dimensions >3 space, it ain't gonna happen.
You can reject the validity of the underlying data, but that doesn't change the methodology used to interpret it.
Why is nonexistence of God a fundamental assumption? I'd say it's one of many assumptions a person can make (and not terribly important IMO).
I don't know how much thinking they do, but they work hard at being a War Room style PR shop. In this press release, for instance, senior Discovery fellow Jonathan Wells gets out the ID-side spin on the same day as the announcement of an important study supporting the evolution of insects from more basal arthropods.
A mutant shrimp is being claimed as "a landmark in evolutionary biology" that proves creationists wrong, but it's not. Whatever its implications for creationism, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, a senior fellow at Discovery Institute in Seattle, Wash., calls the claim "greatly exaggerated," and describes the mutant shrimp as "an evolutionary dead end that tells us little or nothing about how insects might have originated."The only problem being that the subject of the study was fruit flies, not shrimp.
Science, however, in the proper sense of the term, includes all that comes under the compass of human knowledge. Scientia is the Latin term for knowledge. If you want to reserve true knowledge for only those things that are provable, you will back yourself up to give a philosophical justification for the criteria of of a legitimate proof.
I'll lay a wager that not one American public school student has a textbook that mentions it.
evolution is a scientific theory with a massive non-scientific lobbying group behind. explain that without bringing religion/anti-religion into it?
Does it have such a lobby group? No matter, it still redounds to my point: the battle over creationism is the sole issue here.
I suppose you could look at it that way.
Nope. Science avoids that trap. Science does not reserve "true knowledge" (your term) to things that are provable. Science avoids the philisophical traps by merely requiring that its theories be disprovable - a completely separate and much easier condition to meet. All that is required is that when a theory is specified, it must be done so in such a way that it can be disproved. Do you see the distinction?
This is also why theology is, in general not scientific. If I state "God exists" - that is not a theory as I have not made a statement that can be disproved.
Science really is limited in its domain. I think it is just that because it has become successful (by using the scientific method) that the unwashed masses (and especially the ignorant media, as unscientifically educated a group as can be found outside the NEA) want to call many things science that are not.
In the interests of accuracty--ie, before I get pounced upon--DI isn't cited here. Wells is, and West was allowed to write the article for Fox as though West were were a neutral reporter.
Theology has never been a science.
What was considered "science" at the time of Aquinas is not considered "science" today. The meaning of words changes over the centuries. Theology is considered a branch of metaphysics or philosophy. Your definition really refers to a branch of philosophy known as "symbolic logic", which is related to mathematics.
(1) All winged animals can fly.
(2) Horses have wings.
Therefore, horses can fly.
True, if the assumptions are true. But not science.
Your philosphy might be stated:
(1) Scripture is true.
(2) I can use logic to validate my theology using scripture.
Therefore, my theology is true.
But you cannot prove your 1st assumption. Symbolic logic is a useful tool. But it is not the scientific method, and it is philosophy, not science.
One of those professors is Dr. Henry Schaefer, here at UGA. Here is his guest editorial from Sunday's AJC.
[ The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 9/28/02 ] GUEST COLUMNISTS
Standard evolutionary theory has shortcomings
By Henry Schaefer
Professor of chemistry at the University of Georgia
As a theorist who uses quantum mechanics to solve problems ranging from biochemistry to astrophysics, the subject of this essay is of great interest to me. It is a question that is discussed in depth in my University of Georgia freshman seminar entitled "Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence?"
This autumn 18 gifted UGA students and I are spending six weeks examining Stephen Hawking's best-selling book "A Brief History of Time." Therein Hawking states, "A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements. And it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations."
I consider Hawking's statement to be an excellent definition of a good theory. How does evolution stack up to the two demands of a good theory? By the term "evolution," I mean the claim that random mutations and natural selection can fully account for the complexity of life, and particularly macroscopic living things.
I think that the standard evolutionary model does a good job of categorizing and systematizing the fossil record. It serves as an effective umbrella or big tent under which to collect a large number of observations. If evolution has a weakness in this regard, it is that the tent is too big. Thus the 20th century witnessed a series of hoaxes, beginning in 1908 with Piltdown Man and continuing to recent fabricated fossil "discoveries" in China, that have been embraced as missing links by distinguished paleontologists.
Nevertheless, I give evolution a B grade with respect to Hawking's first category.
The second requirement for a good theory is far more problematical for the standard evolutionary model, sometimes called the modern synthesis. Over the past 150 years evolutionary theorists have made countless predictions about fossil specimens to be observed in the future.
Unfortunately for these seers, many new fossils have been discovered, and the interesting ones almost always seem to be contrary to the "best" predictions. This is sometimes true even when the predictions are rather vague, as seen by the continuing controversies associated with the purported relationships between dinosaurs and birds.
Is the expectation that a good theory be predictive unrealistic? Let us consider two theories to which evolution is often favorably compared. The theory of gravity precisely predicted the appearances of Halley's comet in 1910 and 1986. On the latter occasion I was on sabbatical from Berkeley at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. The newspaper (informed by classical mechanics and the law of gravity) told me exactly when I had to wake up in the middle of the night to enjoy the wonder of Halley's Comet. And in fact, the theory of gravity never fails for the macroscopic objects to which it is applicable.
A second successful theory, the atomic theory, is grounded in Schroedinger's Equation and the Dirac Equation. Atomic theory is able to make many predictions of the spectra of the hydrogen molecule and the helium atom to more significant figures that may be currently measured in the laboratory. We are utterly confident that these predictions will be confirmed by future experiments.
By any reasonable standard the theory of gravity and the atomic theory are good theories, well deserving of A grades. In comparison with these quantitative theories of the physical sciences, when it comes to Hawking's second requirement for a good theory, the standard evolutionary model fails, and should be given a D grade at best.
Might I be more detailed in stating my reservations concerning the standard evolutionary model? Sure. Let me preface these brief remarks by noting that I think the scientific evidence that God created the universe 13-15 billion years ago is good.
My first concern is that, with the collapse of the Miller-Urey model, there is no plausible scientific mechanism for the origin of life, i.e., the appearance of the first self-replicating biochemical system. The staggeringly high information content of the simplest living thing is not readily explained by evolutionists.
Second, the time frame for speciation events seems all wrong to me. The major feature of the fossil record is stasis, long periods in which new species do not appear. When new developments occur, they come rapidly, not gradually.
My third area of reservation is that I find no satisfactory mechanism for macroevolutionary changes. Analogies between a few inches of change in the beaks of a Galapagos finch species and a purported transition from dinosaur to bird (or vice versa) appear to me inappropriate.
The story is about the Cobb County school board. The spin on the story comes from the Discovery Institute. It's like reading an editorial on Toricelli written by the DNC.
Yes, disproving something is a kind of self evident proof. But you must see the difference between stating something so that it can be disproved, and not doing so.
I can understand why you mention my statement is dogmatic in nature. Actually, I'm basing it on a strict definition of science which is: a branch of study in which facts are observed and classified, and, usually, quantitative laws are formulated and verified; involves the application of mathematical reasoning and data analysis to natural phenomena (from the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms). In other words, scientific understanding is a subset of understanding.
Your statement that "areas of human experience cannot come under the scrutiny of human knowledge" does not fit into the classical definition of science. Theology is one such example. Can the mind God (let alone the mind of a human) be reduced to a series of mathematical equations? Could the thoughts of a poet be expressed as a formula? Can the Bible be deconstructed in a lab, a theory developed and new Bible verses predicted?
My point is that thee are many areas of human understanding that fall outside the realm of science. Science is only one way of building understanding. It is systematic and cold in its ways. I do not demean theological study when I say it is not science, because the nature of theology is not scientific, nor is science theological. But that does not mean that either are diminished in the realm of human understanding. They are different tools that let us understand different things.
That's pretty fair, actually. You might want to just work with that.
Yes, and as a subset, it requires justification under its larger rubric. If it is a subset, it is subordinate. In other words, this strict definition of science belongs to a world larger than itself.
How could it not be the fundamental assumption of atheism?
Actually, I believe the issue is larger than that. As a Bible believing Christian I don't see evolution as a threat at all, especially since evolution has nothing to say about the origin of life itself.
I think that new scientific models, not limited to ID, but including Wolfram's algorithms may perhaps prove more useful in describing natural phenomenom than evolution. Nor is anyone suggesting that evolution not be taught, or conversly that Creationism replace it.
Which world, by implication, contains entities not fully accessed by the scientific method.
Or maybe the scientific method is the only legitimate mode of knowledge.
Excellent question.
I was referring to atheists, not atheism. Of all the assumptions a person who happens to be an atheist can have nonexistence of God is not the most funcamental IMO. Btw, we can go into whether atheism HAS an assumption that God doesn't exist:
Robert Flint (a theologian): In his 1885 book Anti-Theistic Theories, he noted that
The atheist is not necessarily a man who says there is no God. What is called positive or dogmatic atheism, so far from being the only kind of atheism, is the rarest of all kinds. ...every man is an atheist who does not believe that there is a God, although his want of belief may not be rested on any allegation of positive knowledge that there is no God, but simply on one of want of knowledge that there is a God.From about.com
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