Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
A topic that probably causes among the most heated discussions on this blog is the attempt to either displace evolution from Public School Curriculum, or to at least give “intelligent design” equal footing to evolution. My own opinion is that “intelligent design”, or “Creationism” as some call it, has no place in our public school system. Those who would force it on our schools would be destroying the Constitutional separation of Church and State. We saw a blog post by Professor Turley a week ago discussing some crazy State Legislator in Missouri introducing a bill to teach “Creationism” as a scientific theory and to teach “Evolution” as a philosophy, almost all who commented were not only outraged, but some disparaged Missouri as a backward state. A few of the comments belittled religion in general. http://jonathanturley.org/2013/02/15/missouri-legislator-introduces-bill-to-teach-creationism-as-a-scientific-theory-and-to-teach-evolution-as-a-philosophy/ . Another blog post by Professor Turley in October 2012, about Missouri Senate Candidate Todd Akin brought a firestorm of angry comments, also disparaging Missouri. http://jonathanturley.org/2012/10/15/akin-disproves-evolution/#comments Interestingly this Conservative State voted for Todd Akin’s opponent when Election Day came around.
Earlier on April 1st, 2012 David Drumm (Nal) did a guest blog titled “The Evolutionary Gorilla in the Room” http://jonathanturley.org/2012/04/01/the-evolutionary-gorilla-in-the-room/ and received almost 240 comments. Now in truth this was an excellent guest blog and certainly drew a lot of discussion. But as I perused the comments, all 238 of them, I noticed something that I think is worth discussing. More than half of the comments were between Gene Howington and Dredd as a continuance of their ongoing argument about Dredd’s microbial theories. I must admit that when it comes to the scientific aspects of biology, I tune out as quickly as Lawrence Rafferty does when Calculus is raised. Another long time regular Bron did have more than a few comments as he tried to insinuate Ayn Rand into the discussion as usual. J Now here is the interesting part, on all three of those blogs there was nary a voice raised in defending “intelligent design.” While here at the blog many of the usual suspects are hostile to organized religion, we do have more than a few “religious” people who drop by and comment. Given the tradition of contentious, yet “civil” discussion here how can that be? I think I have a possible answer to that coming from a study done at MIT, by a renowned Physicist and I must admit I found his answer surprising.
In a Huffington Post article dated 2/12/13 (Darwin’s birthday), Mark Tegmark, MIT Physicist, wrote this to begin his article titled: “Celebrating Darwin: Religion and Science Are closer Than You Think”:
“He looked really uneasy. I’d just finished giving my first lecture of 8.282, MIT’s freshman astronomy course, but this one student stayed behind in my classroom. He nervously explained that although he liked the subject, he worried that my teaching conflicted with his religion. I asked him what his religion was, and when I told him that it had officially declared there to be no conflict with Big Bang cosmology, something amazing happened: his anxiety just melted away right in front of my eyes! Poof!
This gave me the idea to start the MIT Survey on Science, Religion and Origins, which we’re officially publishing today in honor of Charles Darwin’s 204th birthday. We found that only 11 percent of Americans belong to religions openly rejecting evolution or our Big Bang. So if someone you know has the same stressful predicament as my student, chances are that they can relax as well. To find out for sure, check out the infographic below.”
I frankly don’t know how I could present the “infographic” chart from the article because the technology is beyond me so I suggest you follow this link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-tegmark/religion-and-science-distance-between-not-as-far-as-you-think_b_2664657.html and see it for yourself because I think it is of great interest to those, who like myself are nonplussed by the resurgence of religious Fundamentalism, The “infographic” is done as a circular chart that lists all the religions practiced in this country, their percentage of the population and each religious belief’s official view of Evolution. Only about 11% percent of the religious population of this country belong to faiths that are opposed to Evolution, For instance:
Catholics are 23.9% of the population and their official teachings see no conflict with Doctrine.
Methodists represent 6.1% of the population and feel evolution is “not inconsistent with religious doctrine.
Lutherans represent 4.6% of the population and of them only 1.4% (The Missouri Synod) are opposed to the theory of Evolution.
People with no Church affiliation represent 16.4% of the population and see no conflict.
Jews represent merely 1.7% of the population and 1.3% see no conflict with Evolution, while the other .4% have no official position on it.
There are conflicts between the various Baptist and Presbyterian Denominations, with some accepting Evolution and some rejecting it. Again please look at the chart at the link because I guarantee you will find it as absorbing as I did.
What are we to make of this data which demonstrates that of the various religious beliefs that make up our country, 89% seemingly have no religious conflict with Evolution? Yet Evolution has become a major issue. Professor Tegmark comments:
“So why is this small fundamentalist minority so influential? How can some politicians and school-board members get reelected even after claiming that our 14 billion-year-old universe might be only about 6,000 years old? “That’s like claiming that my 90-year-old aunt is only 20 minutes old. It’s tantamount to claiming that if you watch this video of a supernova explosion in the Centaurus A Galaxy about 10 million light-years away, you’re seeing something that never happened, because light from the explosion needs 10 million years to reach Earth. Why isn’t making such claims political suicide?
Part of the explanation may be a striking gap between Americans’ personal beliefs and the official views of the faiths to which they belong. Whereas only 11 percent belong to religions openly rejecting evolution, Gallup reports that 46 percent believe that God created humans in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. Why is this “belief gap” so large? Interestingly, this isn’t the only belief gap surrounding a science-religion controversy: whereas 0 percent of Americans belong to religions arguing that the Sun revolves around Earth, Gallup reports that as many as 18 percent nonetheless believe in this theory that used to be popular during the Middle Ages. This suggests that the belief gaps may have less to do with intellectual disputes and more to do with an epic failure of science education.”
Professor Tegmark’s is of the opinion that scientific education in America has been a failure and thus we have the gap between religious belief and science. I think his explanation is a rather middle of the road one and to that extent I disagree with him. The science education I received in elementary and high school was excellent, even if I was too lazy a student to study much. How much I do know scientifically and how much those peers of my age know is quite adequate. There has been a two pronged attack on our educational system that began in the late 60’s. A conscious effort to “dumb down” the people of America has been in effect since then to make them more pliable and easier to fool. The first part has been cutting funding and the second part has been attacking the curriculum. If you add to it the evolving of the Internet and the changes that has wrought, we see that it is not that the scientific education has failed, but the political support for it.
Most of us assume when we are told by someone that they are deeply religious and know their “bible” front to back, that they are truthful. I believe that in their hearts most feel they are being truthful, but their truth falls far short of reality. Many people don’t read their entire holy documents, but instead rely on their religious leaders to guide them as to what is “true” and what is important. We know that some religious leaders focus on what THEY think is important like The Book of Revelations and they don’t “preach” the Jesus who gave The Sermon on the Mount” I think there are many, like Professor Tegmark’s first year student who didn’t know just what his denomination believed about the Cosmos. This is not just true for Christians, but I believe it is true for Jews, Muslims, Hindu’s and Buddhists.
Another problem is our mainstream media plays a role in religious ignorance. I addressed this in July 2011. I was writing about the many TV documentaries being produced on networks like The History Channel and even ABC’s Primetime-Nightline which ran a series titled “Battle With the Devil”, a show that “investigates the belief in satanic will or possession by a demon”. Because the Religious Right in this country is so well funded, they speak with a loud voice. Our media, corporate controlled, fears anything that might hurt the bottom line, so they cater to those with the loud voices and the money behind them. http://jonathanturley.org/2011/07/23/fundamentalist-religion-and-tv-documentaries-a-problem/ What we see then is that a population if 11% in our country, that is working to force their silly, medieval beliefs onto all of us.
Two days ago Professor Tegmark followed up with a second Huffington Post article relating his experiences after he posted his first article. Here are some snippets from it:
“I’d been warned. A friend cautioned me that if we went ahead and posted our MIT Survey on Science, Religion and Origins, I’d get inundated with hate-mail from religious fundamentalists who believe our universe to be less than 10,000 years old. We posted it anyway, and the vitriolic responses poured in as predicted. But to my amazement, most of them didn’t come from religious people, but from angry atheists! I found this particularly remarkable since I’m not religious myself. I have three criticisms of these angry atheists:
1)They help religious fundamentalists:
A key point I wanted to make with our survey is that there are two interesting science-religion controversies: a) Between religion & atheism b) Between religious groups who do & don’t attack science
2)They could use more modesty:
If I’ve learned anything as a physicist, it’s how little we know with certainty. In terms of the ultimate nature of reality, we scientists are ontologically ignorant. For example, many respected physicists believe in the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, according to which a fundamentally random process called “wavefunction collapse” occurs whenever you observe something. This interpretation has been criticized both for being anthropocentric (quantum godfather Niels Bohr famously argued that there’s no reality without observation) and for being vague (there’s no equation specifying when the purported collapse is supposed to happen, and there’s arguably no experimental evidence for it).
3)They should practice what they preach:
Most atheists advocate for replacing fundamentalism, superstition and intolerance by careful and thoughtful scientific discourse. Yet after we posted our survey report, ad hominem attacks abounded, and most of the caustic comments I got (including one from a fellow physics professor) revealed that their authors hadn’t even bothered reading the report they were criticizing. Just as it would be unfair to blame all religious people for what some fundamentalists do, I’m obviously not implying that all anti-religious people are mean-spirited or intolerant. However, I can’t help being struck by how some people on both the religious and anti-religious extremes of the spectrum share disturbing similarities in debating style.
Having watched the religious debates that go on here continually, I do think that Professor Tegmark has a valid point. Although I am a Deist, I have no affection for either organized religion, or for the “holy books” that make up their various canons. However, I have in my life experienced what I would call the ineffable, so I personally won’t preclude the fact that there is a “Creative Force” of some kind that drives this Universe. Please understand me in this, because as Tegmark saw even his peers criticized him far too quickly: Because I don’t preclude doesn’t mean I think there is one, I just won’t rule it out. From what I know of modern physics in its current fashion there is the belief that the Universe is a lot “weirder” than science at the beginning of the 20th Century imagined it to be.
While I understand that most of us are angry and fed up with those 11% who believe in something like Genesis, perhaps we should aim our fire directly at that group of benighted fools and accept that others might be more approachable. What do you think? As I finish this I have a vision in my head of having to duck, where do you think that comes from?
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
`
Dredd,,
Thanks for the Swedish scientist bone. It should be spelled
Per-Olov Löwdin according to Wikipedia. How you found him is a mystery.
While he never got a Nobel Prize, he sat on the committee that selects them and did some good stuff in Florida, which is not easy to do, Florida being Florida.
I prefer this TED bit. Your Englishman with the muslim name, I will save for later
I post this site address for an exciting fast paced presentation.
The source for the url will not be revealed. It is in American english!
Riesling 1, February 23, 2013 at 3:14 pm
If evolution is scientific fact, why does one have to “believe” in it?
===================================================
The same goes for just about everything, so let me introduce you to the study of belief, faith, trust within science-religion, which is affectionately called Epistemology:
(The Pillars of Knowledge: Faith and Trust?). These religion vs evolution and counterclaim, evolution vs religion, discussions are, at its quantum biological center, merely a way of dealing with our vast insecurities within.
It is an old insecurity that has been with us since before rock n roll.
idealist707 1, February 23, 2013 at 11:23 am
Scrolling by after Dredd:
“Why should I wash my hands. I’ve been dissecting corpses and delivering babies for years.”
And then there are the supposedly unfriendly ones. Why supposedly? Because the chief of ???? here does not get flu shots. She prefers to get the stimulus to her immune system that flu gives.
As for artificial defenses against flu, the latest is that flu viri are evolving and soon the current vaccine development method won’t be efficacious anymore.
A “radícal” new technique will be ready in maybe five years.
Five years, and viri have been with us how long? Idiocy.
Simple, live and let live. Welcome the virii. (Viri=plural of virus?)
Me? I get the shot. A firm believer in crackpot medical science.
How about you, Dredd?
============================================
I found a fantastic Swedish scientist, or should I say his revolutionary paper.
It even relates to the current Mike S post we are populating with comments.
It delves into the great canyon that creationist and evolutionist have heretofore been somewhat reluctant to explore.
I speak of the great canyon betwixt abiotic evolution and biotic evolution.
His name is Per-Olow Löwdin who evidently professionally takes notice of the phrase “quantum biology”:
(“Proton Tunneling in DNA and its Biological Implications“, 1963). I suppose we could say that it is akin to an earlier paper in some ways, written by Erwin Schrödinger titled “What is Life” (1944).
At any rate, the puffing by evolutionists and creationists has built a bridge over that canyon, a covered bridge, since they do not like to tread there.
One reason may be alluded to by Mike S where he writes:
The video at the bottom of this comment features a physicist who delves into the touchy subject, showing simple experiments that can show your eyes what Mike S was referencing.
So basically, both creationists and evolutionists gloss over the vastness like the venerable Dr. Keith Richards, of the great Rolling Stones University does when he explains all things mysto with “shit happens.”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgQVZju1ZM%5D
If evolution is scientific fact, why does one have to “believe” in it?
Kant’s fourth antimony.
http://www.phil.pku.edu.cn/resguide/Kant/CPR/16.html#415
Enough said.
One company is experimenting with lighting homes with microbes that consume waste products:
(Phillips). The concept is in the developmental, experimental phase, but shows some promise.
Being hypersenstive, I reacted to what I thought was anti-semitism.
You? Perish the thought. It’s been awhile since you were here, or we have been on different threads.
I thought it was shared genes that united them, but you say language.
How come only the Assyrians are the only ones who speak Aramaic and can relate Jesus teachings in his language. The oldest church they claim. Feisty bunch So do they brag to me in Stockholm.
Anywho it is now a moot point. Nice to read you!
……which drew dictionary attention.
Maybe the thought was:
………… Atheism is just as much of a faith as religion is.
Faith – A belief not based on proof.
.
Some people who have faith are at ease with the universe.
Some people who have faith are no so at ease.
.
I think creationists are not at ease.
They protest too much. They do this because they feel fundamentally threatened by any suggestion that one can have faith without absolute certainty.
The fact is, modern science grew out of esoteric religious traditions.
Bacon saw experimental science as a means to restore the human race to a pre-fall condition, by giving us access to divine mysteries. When Leibniz invented binary arithmetic, he had a theological motive.
The conflict between science and religion has been more often driven by politics than by actual religious tensions.
Take heliocentrism, for example.
Where Galileo ran into trouble with the Pope, it was over politics, not theology. Galileo had had previous difficulties with the Church, and, when he undertook to write his empirical treatise on heliocentrism, had actually been granted permission by the Church to do so — provided he presented his findings as theory (or, in today’s terminology, hypothesis) rather than fact.
What got Galileo put under house arrest was his technique: he wrote his treatise as a dialog, and put several quotes from personal meetings with the Pope into the mouth of his doubtful idiot character, Simplicio.
Back up a few years to the period between Copernicus and Kepler:
Dominican Friar Giordano Bruno became quickly convinced of the truth of heliocentrism based on a diagram published by Copernicus: it wasn’t the math that interested him, but the iconography. What got him burned at the stake was what he read into that diagram, not that he republished the diagram or promoted the view as true. Bruno reasoned that if the Earth went about the sun, then the earth was a star (planets were called “wandering stars”). Because stars were associated with heavenly powers, Bruno took this to mean that the earth was alive in some manner. He also postulated that each star in the sky also had planets in orbit, and that the universe was infinite in size. Bruno did get into trouble over heliocentrism, but not on the basis of any scientific demonstration of the idea.
About the same time, Francis Bacon, who is often remembered as the “father” of empirical science, *rejected* heliocentrism. Bacon did so not because he found Copernicus’s math unconvincing — he utterly disregarded the math — but rather, Bacon rejected heliocentrism for political reasons. James I took the English throne after Elizabeth. James was terrified of magic, and published a demonology.
At the time, magic was closely allied with mathematics, perhaps in part as a result of the diffusion of cabbalistic systems of numerical permutation which spread throughout Europe following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, as well as due to numerous connections between astronomy and a “natural magic” that connected various grades of celestial beings with astronomical phenomena.
James was terrified of mathematics, as a tool for magic that could attract demonic influences. Consequently, Bacon — the “father” of modern science — rejected heliocentrism to distance himself from the mathematics used by Copernicus, as a means of currying favor with the new crown. His motive was political.
There are similar dynamics at play in today’s debates about evolution. Politicians reject science for political reasons. They fabricate the conflict between science and religion for reasons of short-term political gain. They create discontent among fervent believers in order to profit from it.
Eternity is so Ephemeral.
POOF were here,…POOF were gone.
POOF, POOF baby,
What goes on between the POOFS stays between the POOFS.
…. All my ancestors went POOF.
I accept that I will follow them all, and my descendants will follow too.
ID,
Those using the Hebrew and Aramaic languages, the Old Testament originalists. There are many more Semitic languages but I was thinking along the lines of ‘well, if one is going to give credence and choice regarding one portion of the old testament why not also honor the belief by doing the same to the original language (or its root) of the book itself?’ Makes as much sense and would benefit the students and country just as much.
Doesn’t matter to me if one is talking about Muslims or fundamentalist Christians, their holy books have no place dictating curricula in a secular school. Their only relevance IMO is in a high school or college level philosophy course, any examination of philosophy must include religions and their influence.
James in LA.
Lived in a house on a hillside (it is all uphill, cruising up from Sunset Blvd) with some other freaks. Two french, one dutch, one aspiring American actress, age 30+.
Moved later to Silver Lake district. No real upgrade. LA is LA. People are people.
I left LA and found folks pretty much the same. But suspect Hollywood still leads in the mixture of hopes, has-beens, and ?????? people.
I always thought that writing computer code was mind developing, and then I got a job doing it after a year at Stockholms U. There are apparently (you) those who are better than I was. But that is no news.
I know some fanatical atheists.
humans have a spiritual component, they will fill it with something else if isnt God.
Good stuff Lotta,
But with your argument the religious could answer: “Our faith does advance society. See where the muslims stand if you don’t believe us”
BTW the muslims of some genetic “closeness” are also semitic. `
Which semites are you referring to?
I will stop sniping, stop sniping, etc promises.
@idealist, thank you for your kind words! I write mostly computer code, followed by English, followed by music. So I do have outlets.
As for Hollywood being nearby, why yes, it is. Like, across the street, border-wise. You can smell the pee from here… Hollywood isn’t what it was. Too many people can make movies now. L.A. is now too expensive for artists. But not for those who exploit them.
RWL: “My question to the federal and state governments: Why can’t we give the students and their parents a choice: Do you want to learn about Creationism, Evolution, or both in K-12?”
***
For the same reason that schools don’t poll students and their parents on whether students should have years long training in maths or be taught how to inscribe a hand full of symbols on clay in order to keep track of their possessions and debts. Though as such things go symbols in clay were good enough as a root for the Semitic languages and to get your average Semite through the year’s accounting so why not now?
Because public schooling does not exist to cater to the whims or traditions of children and their parents, that’s what private schools, churches and fraternal organizations are for. Public schools are there to provide children with enough knowledge- facts strung together in an understandable fashion- to prevent them, through their gross ignorance, from being a lifelong burden on society. As well public education is to provide the society with a compliment of potentially productive, creative and innovative citizens to maintain and advance the nation and its culture. Public schooling exists at it’s core for the benefit of the nation/culture and re-inventing the wheel every generation does not advance the nation or its culture.
James in LA,
“……James in LA1, February 23, 2013 at 12:24 pm
Dredd, I want to tell you about the Day Felix Caught A Bird. Felix is a black cat in the care of a neighbor who recently caught himself a sparrow. ….”
==========
Do you do storyideas for a living? Consider it. “Hollywood” is close by.
Yeah. I want to see you talk your way out of that one too, Bron. I think your dictionary is out of whack. OED sez “religion” is as a noun means “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods”. Contrast this with “atheism” which is a noun meaning “disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods.” I submit you are not using the right word at all. I submit the word you are looking for is “fanatic(al)”, an adjective meaning “filled with excessive and single-minded zeal.” By definition, atheism cannot be a religion, but practitioners of both schools of thought can and do advocate their positions with fanatical devotion that can and does lapse into the extreme. Atheism and religion can be similar, but they are not equivalent.
Microbes do a lot of neat things for higher order complex beings. Some of them kill us, but a great many of them don’t. Some of them provide benefit. A lot of them do nothing at all to us. The same can be said of their non-living simpler cohorts in smallness, the prions and the viruses.
They are not, however, controlling our genetic destiny.
The best explanation of the mechanisms behind adaptive evolution is still natural selection.
Bron asserts, “Atheism is just as much of a “religion” as religion is.”
How so? Maybe you ought to define your terms.