I don’t know how you can do that without violating SOCAS.
I didn’t know there were any “science-based serials and soaps”. (Or is that your point?)
This would alienate most of his audience and they would tune out in droves. It’s difficult to convince a man to cut his own throat.
Again, such prgramming would not be popular enough to be profitable. No one likes to be told his religion is not always a force for good.
I wish we could do these things, but success does not seem likely. I am at a loss to know what should be done. I think Cecil took on eradicating ignorance because he knew he’d have a job for life.
So, in your opinion would you take it to be more or less irrational on my part if I tell you I believe in both evolution and creationism, to a degree?
I believe that species do evolve and change. Things must adapt to their environment, so it’s reasonable that there would be physical changes. Darwin’s theory about finches seems entirely plausible to me. That we’ve evolved explains why we have useless organs taking up room in our bodies, and why we have tailbones, and why we’ve discovered the fossils of three-toed horses. I also believe that the earth is considerably older than 7,000 years, and that the bible isn’t describing the earth’s creation in Genesis but it’s re-creation (the language in some versions of the bible seems to support this idea).
However, I do not believe that all life has a common ancestor. Perhaps people originated from Neanderthals, but I think God created them at that stage, and the other ancestors of modern animals. It’s the whole monkey thing that gets to me most. Logically, if one thing turns into another, you don’t have any of the original thing left. Look at language for example-once upon a time there was an Indo-European language, which evolved into the Germanics; today there is virtually no trace of I-E. I have to believe it would be the same for animals, or did just the unlucky monkeys not evolve into people? I think that if we evolved from monkeys, there would be no monkeys, just like there are no Neanderthals.
Maybe you’ll still gnash your teeth in despair, but I really don’t think that either creationism or evolution is more valid than the other, for just the reason I said before-neither has been proven conclusively enough for me to believe fully in one, and not at all in the other.
Okay, I think part of your problem is a misunderstanding of evolution. Humans did not evolve from monkeys, any more than Spanish evolved from Italian. Humans and monkeys share a common ancestor, which no longer exists. So you’re right in your logic–the original thing is no longer left! You were simply mistaken in thinking that humans evolved from monkeys.
Part of the confusion rests in the fact that this common ancestor was more similar to monkeys than it was to humans. So, sometimes people simply call it a “monkey.” Again, to take the language analogy, English is considered a “Germanic” language. But English did not evolve from German. It evolved from a common ancestor language, which happened to be much more similar to modern German than it is to modern English. Likewise, while humans and monkeys both evolved from a common ancestor, humans deviated more from this ancestor than did our evolutionary cousins.
I won’t gnash my teeth in despair. You showed signs of good logical thought. But you should realize that just because evolution hasn’t been proven to you doesn’t mean that the evidence is not conclusive. People with professional degrees in biology have examined the evidence, and their conclusion is overwhelming: common descent of all living organisms. Such evidence includes, but is not limited to:
Each of these fields is actually composed of numerous smaller pieces of evidence. I have a file detailing the evidence for macroevolution. It’s usually on-line, but both sites which I know to hold it are currently down.
Only if you refuse to change your beliefs based upon new evidence will I gnash my teeth in despair. But hopefully you’re smart enough not to do that.
‘And there you have the problem. When science is used to augment faith, it is no longer science: it becomes a distorted, subjective, meaningless discipline. It is typically the scientifically ignorant and the fundamentalists who attempt to fit science into their belief, so (as I think Triskadecamus implied) the best way to deal with these people is the Socratic Method. If you are good enough to use this method, the ignorant and the fundamentalist ought to be convinced by the sound of their own voices contributing to the argument for evolution.’
If reconciling faith with evolution is ‘distortion’, what about nofaith atheism distorting science to a degree? This is what I mean about testifying for atheism.
“When science is used to augment faith, it is no longer science: it becomes a distorted, subjective, meaningless discipline.”
This thread is about evolution right? So, I am susbstituting ‘evolution’ for ‘science’, in that it is the science that is being considered here. So, if one considers reconciling science, in this case evolution, with faith, as ‘meaningless discipline’, is it any wonder that one with faith who hears this would reject this science out of hand? Are we supposed to give up our faith in the face of almighty science, since both are supposedly incompatible? And you wonder why I rail at some who advocate a no-faith agenda while discussing evolution? So, in answer to your question, Ben, yes, I do think that this is a subtle but prime example of testifying for atheism in the name of advocating science in general, and evolution in particular. If you think not, well, you read it differently than I do.
Here’s the quote from Lib to which Abe was replying:
“He falls prey to the Creationists easily because they treat the faith with respect and the “science” as augmenting the faith.”
If you ask me, the “science” to which Abe was referring was clearly creationist pseudoscience- not, as you claim, evolution. If I’m wrong, I hope Abe will correct me.
Can you come up with more examples? Given that you have raised this complaint in nearly every discussion of evolution that I’ve seen you in, I should think that it would be easy for you to find a dozen or so.
ek:Logically, if one thing turns into another, you don’t have any of the original thing left. Look at language for example-once upon a time there was an Indo-European language, which evolved into the Germanics; today there is virtually no trace of I-E.
I think you’re mixing up two things here with your “turning into” concept:
A language (or a biological species) gives rise to a modified form with enough differences from the original to be considered a new language (or species).
The original language (or species) dies out.
The occurrence of (1) doesn’t necessarily imply the occurrence of (2). (If it did, though, that wouldn’t be a problem for humanoid–>human evolution, because as other posters have noted, the common ancestor of modern humans and monkeys has died out.)
Sometimes the original does die out, as in the case of our primate ancestor, or Proto-Indo-European which gave rise to the Indo-European language family but didn’t survive in its original form. Sometimes it doesn’t; for example, French and Italian evolved linguistically from Latin, but Latin continued to be used for many centuries afterwards (and still hasn’t entirely died out as a learned language). Birds evolved from reptiles, but they didn’t replace reptiles. In short, the ways in which new languages or organisms evolve from earlier ones and then compete with them for survival is always pretty complex and dependent on circumstances; it’s not as simple as one thing “turning into” another.
Be, he made it sound like a general statement regarding faith. The reason I don’t bring up more examples yet isd because many who are advocating evolution agree that evolution in of itsel cannot prove or disprove god’s existence.
If everybody agrees with you, then why do you constantly harp on this issue? Are you saying that while you’ve raised this issue, apparently without fail, in every single C/E thread you’ve participated in, all that time no one was really testifying for atheism?
So far as I know, not once has anyone “testified for atheism” in any of the threads where you raised the issue. On a couple of occasions (including, IMO, this one) you pointed to a semi-ambiguous case, but in the past you’ve invariably turned out to be wrong. I would suggest that the entire “testifying for atheism” problem exists mainly in your mind, and you should reexamine what people are actually saying and how you interpret them.
I teach chemistry and physics at a prep school. I don’t have hard statistics, but I get at least one vocal student a year espousing creationist beliefs.
My courses do not include evolution in the syllabus, but it still comes up. I generally try to avoid a big discussion, any more than I get into big discussions about the shape of the Earth. However…
When discussing the scientific method, and what exactly a “theory” means to a scientist, it is evident that many students indeed think it means a “wild-ass guess.” Comparisons with “atomic theory” and the theory of relativity seem to help. I do make the point in class that one cannot dismiss evolution because it is “just a theory,” any more than one would dismiss the concept of atoms because they are “just a theory.”
Two of my creationist students stand out in my mind:
The first didn’t discuss the issue with me until after graduation. She was heading off to college, she told me, and planned to study biology. She said that she was concerned about how that would work out, considering the fact that she did not accept evolution. I wished her the best of luck, and meant it. I figured she would either: change her mind, change her major, or fake it. She was bright, though, so education in biology might have helped her adopt a more scientific approach.
The other student I had just this year. Nothing was going to change his mind. He was truly one of the most close-minded people I have ever met. He offered to bring some creationist debator around to convince me of my error. I explained that science is not debatable (i.e. debates, polls, etc. are meaningless in assessing the validity of a theory).
Months later in class, after I mentioned periodic magnetic pole reversals of the Earth over the course of millions of years (and the evidence thereof) he got very upset in class. What was interesting was one of the other students, who asked me after class what all the commotion was about. I explained the first student’s belief in the literal truth of the Bible, to which the second student gave a truly memorable response.
He said, “I thought the Bible was all about how to live your life in a Christian way. I never thought of it as a science book.”
DITWD … since you didn’t post an e-mail address, this is the only way I can repsond to you.
You were banned from this board. That means that you’re not allowed to come back and post under any name, no matter how much righteous indignation you feel. I’m sure you know the rules, and your blatant disregard of them is one sure sign that you will not be allowed back here anytime soon.
I’m closing this thread until this situation is rectified.
Hm, I open this thread out of curiosity several days after I made my post, and I see people debating my observation. Good job I got here!
Capacitor, allow me to try to explain what I was talking about. Ben is definitely on the right track here, and in fact I see he has made a point extremely similar to mine a number of times. The post in question was a response to Libertarian:
I then replied to this excerpt with:
Faith is highly subjective unverified belief largely based on dogma and tradition, whereas science is any objective discipline based on the scientific method (with all that that entails, including verification). The two are remarkably different. And they don’t mix very well. So in a way Capacitor is correct when he says that I “made it sound like a general statement regarding faith”, but it is also a statement about science.
When you take science (objective study) and use it to support belief, you are necessarily compromising its objectivity in order to support subjective views. The meaningless babble of creation “scientists” notwithstanding, science cannot serve subjective purposes for which there is no valid evidence (which can be anything from faith, to racial supremacy, to homophobia, etc., not that I am saying that faith is at all morally comparable with racial supremacy hypotheses). The best example of how science is perverted is of course the work cranked out by those who employ science for the specific purpose of supporting their extreme agendas: Velikovsky immediately springs to mind, as do many creationists in general.
This is not at attack on faith, but on the methods employed by those who think science can be tailored to fit their needs. Science and religion are not irreconcilable, because they discuss completely different things. It is simply not effective to combine the two, for the simple reasons already mentioned.
This is trickier territory. It is generally very difficult to prove an unrestricted negative, such as “God does not exist”. However, what science may have done thus far is render God epistemically redundant: what we attributed to God in the past is explained by science-based reasoning, so you could argue that God is an outdated superstitious concept that is no longer necessary to explain our environment, lives, minds, etc. Remember, however, that science is objective, and belief is subjective, and this is precisely why I said early on that the two practices ought not to be mixed. Although I believe you could effectively prove that God is epistemically unnecessary, you could not actually prove that God does not exist; that would be an inference that could prove erroneous, and as such it would be an incorrect conclusion.
I am against theists using science for theistic purposes, but I am also against atheists using science to claim there is no such thing as God. Both the theist and the atheist are engaging is poor thinking if they hope to accomplish anything with such methods.
I’ll admit right now I haven’t had a chance to read all 3 pages of this post so I’m sorry if this is way off topic…
I doubt education is the key. I don’t believe everything I’m taught in school. Why should I? They used to teach that the Earth was flat. Just because it’s the year 2001 doesn’t mean we have everything right.
Do all you evolutionists really believe everything they taught you in school? Are you going to be that narrow-minded? It’s no wonder CEO’s have to constantly tell their employees to “think outside the box”, you’ve fortified it beyond comprehension.
You can throw facts out all day but what’s a “fact” now, maybe laughed at 300 years from now.
I’m not sure what to make of this. After all, it starts out by saying that education isn’t the real key to fighting creationist pseudoscience… but then it ends on the typical creationist (for, for that matter, crank) conclusion of, “in 300 years you might turn out to be wrong.” Not to mention the entirely gratuituous slight to the evolutionists in the thread.
The problem with your analysis is that “education” doesn’t consist merely of telling people what to believe. Part of the reason that so few well-educated people are creationists is because well-educated people are more likely to know how to think. If you know how to think, then you aren’t suckered in by creationist arguments from non sequitur like, “In Japan, some fishermen caught a plesiosaur- therefore, evolution is wrong!”
Plus, even in terms of pure facts, education is a good way to fight creationism. If evolutionists say “evolution is true,” and creationists say, “creationism is true,” that doesn’t give you much guidance on which way to go. But if creationists say, “evolutionists say that similar animals have similar proteins,” and evolutionists say, “similar animals don’t necessarily have similar proteins,” then it starts to become clear which one is worth believing.
So, if you don’t think education is the key, then how would you fight creationist pseudoscience?
How do you figure? Where’s the data that says their are few well-educated people that are creationists?
Again, what are “pure facts”? Science “proves” things only by disproving everything else. And, as histroy has taught us, we can be wrong. I’ve yet to see Creationism disproved.
Among those with degrees in science, creationism drops off even further. Members of the National Academy of Science are almost entirely atheistic/agnostic, which I can only assume would exclude Biblical creationists. AFAIK, no poll has been done of NAS scientists regarding creationism specifically, probably because anecdotal evidence suggests that the response would be so overwhelmingly in favor of evolution that such a poll would reveal little valuable information.
No Nobel Prize winning scientists are creationists. Here’s an Amicus Curiae brief filed in the Supreme Court decision Edwards v. Aguillard. A ringing support of evolution, it was signed by all 72 living, American Nobel Prize winning scientists, as well as dozens of state academies of science and other scientific organizations.
So there’s your data.
Now, on to disproving creationism. What exactly do you mean by creationism? The argument that the Earth is 6,000 years old? If so, that has been disproven about as well as science can hope to disprove something. The belief that species do not change over time outside of a pre-defined “kind”? Again, the evidence is overwhelming that all species share a common ancestor. What exactly are you looking for in terms of evidence against creationism and for evolution?
(Note that if you are defining creationism simply as the belief that God created everything, that’s a completely different issue.)
