Evolution In The Classroom

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Mystic_Banana said:
Actually, new age pantheism may well be making a come back… ties in neatly with ecologism. All a bit ridiculous really - it’s like the 20th century saw scientific progessivism wreck half the world, and now it’s cuddling up with the pantheism it opposed (and opposed it) in opposition to panentheism, which appears to be rejected and blamed by both…
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“scientific progressivism”? The scientists wren’t in charge. The military dictated where research money would go. Hey. We can make atom bombs? Do it. After 2 billion in 1945 dollars. Prior to World War II, a German general wrote a two volume set titled Technische Krieg - Technology War. It included photos of high-tech toys that may be featured in the war to come. After that, the real Military-Industrial Complex went back to the scientists and said, We want faster, deadlier, cheaper toys. Do it!

After the war in Vietnam ended in the early 1970s, the ‘sex industry’ exploded and Hollywood kept turning up the volume on more skin and more sexual situations until it began to bleed into TV, the radio and the media in general. It was built on the addiction model: everybody goes to the movies, everybody watches TV. For Catholics, the process was so gradual, along with people acting out their hedonism around us, that the ‘conventional wisdom’ identifies a lot of this behavior today as average or normal. It is not.

We are living through a Technological Paganism. Some people no longer sacrifice their kids to a stone statue, they go to the abortion clinic. The mind of man is worshipped and exalted, containing some undefined potential. People get their kicks from marveling over how smart we are. And who is calling the tune? What has been the fruit of all this? As the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., a Christian minister, once wrote, Guided missiles are in the hands of misguided men.

Creationism/God must never be allowed back into public schools, but the worship of man through science must be the new idolatry. Evolution is another form of nature worship: nature made me and gave me some undefined potential. I am told to listen to anybody and everybody except those religious types.

Peace,
Ed
 
Gottle_of_Geer said:
To explain scientific phenomena other than by strictly scientific methods would be an appalling step to take. It would also be atrocious as Christian theology. One expects Fundamentalists to come up with such nonsense - but not Catholics. 😦
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Michael, in 2005 some Muslim clerics in southern Indonesia blamed the tsunami deaths in Band Aceh on the apostasy of their Muslim fellow countrymen. Plate tectonics evidently was not a sufficient scientific explanation of this disaster for them. There seems no clear way to quantify or measure the degree of apostasy necessary to provoke divine retributive wrath, as some communities with a great deal more sin escaped the tsunami unscathed and unchastized.

StAnastasia
 
edwest2 said:
“scientific progressivism”? The scientists wren’t in charge. The military dictated where research money would go. Hey. We can make atom bombs? Do it. After 2 billion in 1945 dollars. Prior to World War II, a German general wrote a two volume set titled Technische Krieg - Technology War. It included photos of high-tech toys that may be featured in the war to come. After that, the real Military-Industrial Complex went back to the scientists and said, We want faster, deadlier, cheaper toys. Do it!

After the war in Vietnam ended in the early 1970s, the ‘sex industry’ exploded and Hollywood kept turning up the volume on more skin and more sexual situations until it began to bleed into TV, the radio and the media in general. It was built on the addiction model: everybody goes to the movies, everybody watches TV. For Catholics, the process was so gradual, along with people acting out their hedonism around us, that the ‘conventional wisdom’ identifies a lot of this behavior today as average or normal. It is not.

We are living through a Technological Paganism. Some people no longer sacrifice their kids to a stone statue, they go to the abortion clinic. The mind of man is worshipped and exalted, containing some undefined potential. People get their kicks from marveling over how smart we are. And who is calling the tune? What has been the fruit of all this? As the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., a Christian minister, once wrote, Guided missiles are in the hands of misguided men.

Creationism/God must never be allowed back into public schools, but the worship of man through science must be the new idolatry. Evolution is another form of nature worship: nature made me and gave me some undefined potential. I am told to listen to anybody and everybody except those religious types.

Peace,
Ed
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Got to say, I suspect it was the invention of antibiotics which really brought on the sexual revolution - although the literature of earlier syph-addled generations had been obsessed with it for a long long time…

Just to make a final statement - the fact is hippies brought back spirituality into the popular sphere, faulted or not. They were a pretty diverse bunch, as far as history (and my CD collection) paints them, and if their legacy is more negative than positive, I think that can partly be blamed on what aspects of the movement are celibrated in later ages…

And the Jesus movement phenomenon did come from it all too - although since you can probably draw a line between that and the Assemblies of God, that may also a mixed blessing…

I can’t be entirely negative about Hare Krishnans either! Give me George Harrison over John Lennon any day!

Actually, not only for science but the military, I think it’s the money that does it - the military also need to get paid, afterall

Anyway - after curbing my earlier lamentations, I’ll stop ranting… on with the original thread!
 
grannymh said:
…only if you really think that Baal and friends actually have some power over natural phenomena. Seems to me that the kids’ saying about “sticks and stones” would also apply to explanations which happen to be words like “names”. The idea that a supernatural explanation would have the power to change what is under a microscope is rather funny. 🙂
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Whereas to assume a supernatural explanation couldn’t change what is under a microscope is hilarious. 😉

Nearly as silly as assuming preposterous absurd unlikelihoods occurring by chance is a better explanation than intelligent design!
 
Some postings painting those who do not accept ID and the creationist books as atheists listen too much to “Talk Radio” in which the hosts are provoke anger to increase ratings.
 
Ed_CA said:
Some postings painting those who do not accept ID and the creationist books as atheists listen too much to “Talk Radio” in which the hosts are provoke anger to increase ratings.
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It’s worth mentioning that the current trend in the media is inappropriate emotion. To get people to pay attention, a local news program plays loud music, followed by an announcer saying: “FOX 2 News Starts Now.” Apparently, creating ‘excitement’ and wasting time doing so, is the thing to do. I would avoid news or news talk shows that get people riled up instead of presenting the facts, hearing any arguments related to them and presenting some conclusions. No argument is (or should) be won because someone thinks they can outshout their opponent or get him or her angry for no good reason. I blame the media and the desire of marketings execs to “get eyeballs” as opposed to informing viewers.

Peace,
Ed
 
When teaching evolution in the classroom, the lesson should begin with the origin of life. Evolution is useless to explain the origin, and the reason should be made abundantly clear to the students: namely, that the appearance of the first living microbe able to eat and sustain itself, and at the same time reproduce, is so far off-the-wall unlikely that scientists cannot account for the event either by evolution or by accident, and refuse to account for it by design.

A little honesty is in order.
 
tjm190 said:
He states that if things were different, life could not have formed but makes no argument that the four fundametal forces could be different- I’ve yet to hear it postulated that the ratios of the four fundamental forces are random.
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I think it probably has been…

In a universe generated by chance, the ratios of the four fundamental forces would presumably also be generated by chance.

In an undesigned Universe, where are the laws of physics supposed to come from, anyway? Why is there any constancy to them in the first place?

Of course, this would just result in life being even more unlikely to occur by chance, wouldn’t it?

Howsat? 😃
 
Charlemagne_II said:
When teaching evolution in the classroom, the lesson should begin with the origin of life.
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Not a problem, though in general it is up to the teacher how to teach the curriculum.
Evolution is useless to explain the origin
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Correct. That is why we call the origin of life ‘abiogenesis’ and not ‘evolution’.
and the reason should be made abundantly clear to the students: namely, that the appearance of the first living microbe able to eat and sustain itself, and at the same time reproduce, is so far off-the-wall unlikely that scientists cannot account for the event either by evolution or by accident, and refuse to account for it by design.
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Incorrect. The reason we do not know how life originated is because we are still working on it. We have some pieces of the jigsaw, but not yet all of the pieces.

rossum
 
rossum

Incorrect. The reason we do not know how life originated is because we are still working on it. We have some pieces of the jigsaw, but not yet all of the pieces.

Sounds like a kind of religious faith to me … you know … like what Paul said about knowing God darkly, though in the fullness of time more truly.

The truth is that we have no pieces of the jigsaw about abiogenesis. Everything is conjecture. Can you give me a single fact, other than that it did occur?
 
Mystic Banana

In an undesigned Universe, where are the laws of physics supposed to come from, anyway? Why is there any constancy to them in the first place?

Exactly. Why are there laws rather than pure chaos?
 
Charlemagne_II said:
Can you give me a single fact, other than that it did occur?
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Yes.Here we show that activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides can be formed in a short sequence that bypasses free ribose and the nucleobases, and instead proceeds through arabinose amino-oxazoline and anhydronucleoside intermediates.

Source: 2009et al
That is a single fact, relevant to abiogenesis. That single fact on its own is more than creationism has.

rossum
 
rossum said:
Yes.Here we show that activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides can be formed in a short sequence that bypasses free ribose and the nucleobases, and instead proceeds through arabinose amino-oxazoline and anhydronucleoside intermediates.

Source: Powner et al 2009
That is a single fact, relevant to abiogenesis. That single fact on its own is more than creationism has.

rossum
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God created out of nothing. It doesn’t matter if science cannot prove that or demonstrate that. We do not pray to no one. Science can only offer partial and incomplete information.

Peace,
Ed
 
rossum

That is a single fact, relevant to abiogenesis. That single fact on its own is more than creationism has.

The fact remains that God has boxed in science in such a way that it can never prove abiogenesis by accident. Therefore, when discussing evolution in the classroom, which is what this thread is supposed to be about, the first lesson to discuss, however briefly, is that evolution has nothing to do with abiogenesis, and that science cannot prove that life began by a random configuration of atoms and molecules. If anything, the mathematical probability that such a randomly based event could have occurred is extremely remote.

Let the student draw his own conclusions.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
rossum

That is a single fact, relevant to abiogenesis. That single fact on its own is more than creationism has.

The fact remains that God has boxed in science in such a way that it can never prove abiogenesis by accident. Therefore, when discussing evolution in the classroom, which is what this thread is supposed to be about, the first lesson to discuss, however briefly, is that evolution has nothing to do with abiogenesis, and that science cannot prove that life began by a random configuration of atoms and molecules. If anything, the mathematical probability that such a randomly based event could have occurred is extremely remote.

Let the student draw his own conclusions.
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Very well, but I deny the holocaust, the moon landing, anything opposed to geocentric theory, I believe Tupac is still alive, and I’m a 9/11 conspiracy theorist- I want students to hear ‘both sides’ of all of these issues and draw their own conclusions.

Also, you can’t make statements about probability without a mathematic basis, and it seems that such a calculation would either be brutally simplified and invalid or beyond the scope of human will.
 
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