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Author | Topic: Evangelical Indoctrination of Children | |||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.7 |
I am stuck trying to find a reference so this is off the top of an old brain. Maybe someone can help. There has been, by my recollection, at least one case where an undergrad course did teach the facts of both sides. Bill Thwaites and Frank Awbrey at San Diego State University. Having just pulled out my copy of the class notes (was for sale from the bookstore), the copyright is 1981. They gave half the lectures and leading creationists, mainly from the then-nearby Institute for Creation Research (ICR), gave the other half. The Christian clubs on campus hated that class and kept protesting and applying pressure until the administration finally cancelled it. BTW, that was the class where Duane Gish's bombadier beetle claim was disproven in public and in his presence, so he had to admit publically that they were wrong (he blamed somebody else's mistranslation from a German article). However, both he and other creationists continued to use that false claim. PSOther (in)famous "balanced-treatment" classes include Ray Baird's 5th-grade class in Livermore, Calif, in 1981. It was documented in the PBS documentary, Creation vs Evolution: Battle in the Classroom, KPBS-TV, airing 7 July 1982, and Barry Price devoted an entire chapter to it in his book, The Creation Science Controversy (Sydney, Australia: Millenium Books, 1990). From Price's book, edited for brevity:
quote: From the PBS show, JP Hunt, one of Baird's students said:
quote: There's also Roger DeHart's high school class. The Discovery Institute tried to make him a poster child of discrimination against ID. From an email from a parent of one of his students:
quote: Not only would he himself mock and humiliate the student, but he would lead the class in mocking and humiliating him/her and would even stage a "debate" which pitted the entire class against that student. So much for creationists' claims that they want the students to question what's being taught. PPSWhile looking for something else, I found the site that had tracked the Roger DeHart case in Burlington-Edison High School. Their page is still at Scienceormyth At the time (2002), I also read a CNN transcript on the case (still up at CNN Transcript - CNN Newsstand: Hackers Shut Down Several Internet Sites; Bush Wins Delaware Primary; McCain and Bush Exchanging Attacks in South Carolina - February 8, 2000, with the DeHart story starting about 2/3 of the way down the page). In a 2002 email to a British parent encountering creationist activities over there, I first presented the Ray Baird case and then the DeHart case, to which I provided this quote from that transcript:
quote: The point I was making was that in 20 years, their methods and tactics had not changed. And I was specifically pointing out their persistent goal of compelling students to adopt their beliefs as a contrast to the actual goal of education, which I provided in this quote:
quote: Since the goal of teaching creationism is to compel belief, it is therefore inconsistent with the goal of education. Edited by dwise1, : PS Edited by dwise1, : Added NosyNed's qs Edited by dwise1, : PPS Edited by dwise1, : added HRs
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.7 |
However, I am against naturalism because if he had positive proof of a the supernatural acting in nature, he would reject it because of his belief system. The most explicit demonstration of this is through this quote by Dr. Scott Todd (Immunologist at Kansas state University): Todd, S.C., correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999:
quote: Now you see what Dr. Todd really wrote. Now you can see that Dr. Todd was not expressing resistence to recognizing the existence of God -- as was suggested by the creationist who had lifted that quote out of context -- , but rather he was saying the same thing as you yourself did in your opening paragraph:
I have no problem with methodological Naturalism in these terms, as to avoid the god of the gaps fallacy, you have to presuppose a natural cause to any event you encounter unless you have positive proof of otherwise. Similarly, my signature includes a quote from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle which says the same thing yet again:
quote:As well as another quote from the conclusion of an article on Gentry's halo "evidence": quote: In other words, resorting to "God of the Gaps" kills science. Faced with a mystery, we need to work on solving that mystery rather than just throwing up our hands saying "goddidit" and giving up.
Note that he is not talking about if a single positive evidence of God was found, but if all the collection of scientific data was positive evidence of God, you would still had to reject it. There seems to be this idea that methodological naturalism is so attached to naturalistic philosophies that you cannot take them appart, and so if you take one you have to take the other. But this is false. As we can now see, that is not what Dr. Todd said, nor did he express attachment to philosophical naturalism but rather the opposite. Your misinterpretation is understandable since it was guided by the creationist misquotation, but now you know better. Now was he talking about "positive evidence of God", but rather all the data pointing to the conclusion of "God", as in "indicating". The reason why we cannot accept such a conclusion when doing scientific work is because doing so would be succumbing to the trap of "God of the Gaps", which you yourself agreed must be avoided. {When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy. ("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984) Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world. (from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML) Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles) Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32) It is a well-known fact that reality has a definite liberal bias.Robert Colbert on NPR
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.7 |
The message was directly in reply to NosyNed's needing to know about Thwaites and Awbrey's two-model class. The postscripts were then added to mention two other notable two-model classes.
If it is to be removed, shouldn't at least the first part be retained because it's tied in with NosyNed's implied question?
{I don't clearly see that this message is on or off-topic, but it does seem to be pretty marginal to the topic theme. I thought that the information is more appropriate to the other topic. I have no plans of removing this message from this topic but it probably would be best to pursue this line of discussion at the other topic. Or something like that. - Adminnemooseus} Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Red note.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.7 |
Coyote writes:
Many scientists, including Faraday and Newton, have believed, do believe, in revelation and scripture. Why were they, why are they deceived? Well, the reason you need to try to destroy science is that science produces results, and those results are counter to revelation and scripture. Not trying to speak for him, but I think Coyote should have worded that as saying that those results are counter to the evangelicals' theology, to their sectarian interpretation of revelation and scripture. My own blasphemous view is that theology is Man-made, being fallible humans' doomed-to-failure attempts to delineate in detail the nature and intentions, etc, of supernatural beings and forces that are completely outside our ability to deal with and completely outside our ability to verify in any way. To further that blasphemy, my view is that when that fallible Man-made makes pronouncements about the physical universe, which we can verify, and those pronouncements are found to be wrong, then (and here's perhaps my greatest blasphemy) the fault lies with that theology and not with the universe. In that case, that theology needs to be re-examined and corrected. Attacking science instead is nothing but self-delusion. When one's theology does not conflict with reality, then in that case they should feel no conflict with science.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.7 |
But you forget that everybody builds their own theology. Sure, they take some established "official" theology as their starting point, but then they only partially learn it (it is, after all, impossible to instantly learn an entire complex system, but rather that would require years of intensive study), imperfectly understanding (and even misunderstanding) many parts of what their teachers present of their own partial and imperfect understanding/misunderstanding of that official theology -- of course, one of those teachers is their minister through his sermons and other communications. Then they develop their personal theology further as they incorporation new ideas and as they try to harmonize the every-day real world with their imperfect understanding.
The room for misunderstanding of the official theology becomes greater when it's learned as a child, whose potential for imperfectly understanding what he's being told is far greater (like the young child who was afraid of the Pledge of Allegiance because of the witch, as in "for witch it stands"). Many people's religious understandings don't mature as they themselves mature, so many adults still hold childish ideas about God. So, is it the official theology that everybody believes and tries to live by? Or is it really their own personal theology? Should they blindly hold to their personal theology and denounce the universe for not complying to it? Or shouldn't they examine that theology and seek to correct that which proves to be wrong?
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