Creation and Science Chronicle

Evolution must be taught

November 21, 2007 Comments Off

Mail & Guardian (South Africa), page 28
02 Nov 2007

Your story last week about the teaching of evolution in schools refers. There are only two ways known to us in which new species could have appeared on Earth — either fully formed by miraculous, instant creation or by evolutionary change in older species. Religious groups that accept the first method are “creationists” who believe their creation stories are literally true.

But creationists can study evolution without believing what they read. Our Bill of Rights confers freedom of religious belief on every citizen, and life sciences teachers must respect this freedom.

Other religious groups, such as the Catholic Church, accept findings about evolution and concern themselves with the human soul. Such faiths view their creation stories as allegories, symbolic of God’s creation.

Many evolutionary biologists are adherents of these religions, and religious people who accept evolution have a range of personal beliefs about God’s role in the evolutionary process.

Charles Darwin, for instance, was a creationist during the voyage of the Beagle. He later became an evolutionist and abandoned creationism, but remained religious for many years.

read more…

Evolution, God can co-exist

November 21, 2007 Comments Off

by Kevin Mayhood
Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), page B4
November 15, 2007

Atheists at one extreme and Christians promoting intelligent design at the other are ignoring evidence that supports evolution and the presence of God, says a scientist who helped map the DNA of humans.

“ DNA is a language, it is how God spoke life into you and me,” Francis Collins told two audiences yesterday.

Collins, author of The Language of God, is an atheist turned believer, a physician and genetics expert who is director of the National Human Genome Institute. He told several hundred students at Ohio State University and another audience of hundreds at COSI that religion and science actually support each other.

At COSI, Collins was part of a panel discussion called “ The Intersection of Faith & Evolution: A Civil Dialogue.” Collins was largely supported by the other panelists: two more scientists and a religious historian and teacher.

read more…

2-hour ‘Nova’ reviews Pa. ‘intelligent design’ trial

November 21, 2007 Comments Off

by Jonathan Storm
Philadelphia Inquirer (Pennsylvania), page D1, D40
November 13, 2007

The board members who battled to include “intelligent design” alongside evolution in the Dover, Pa., public school curriculum weren’t very intelligent themselves, tonight’s Nova reveals in “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial,” a two hour special beginning at 8 on WHYY TV12.

To make their case, they offered a book that had been altered, overwriting the text to take “creationist” out and drop “design proponents” in. But it didn’t work very well. The words came out “cdesign proponentsists.”

And the judge who adjudicated the lawsuit brought by parents against the school board 100 miles west of Philadelphia in 2005, a judge who was nominated by former Sen. Rick Santorum, a creationist activist, and assumed to be safely in the fundamentalist fold, wasn’t blinded by science.

He ruled that intelligent design “is a religious view … and not a scientific theory,” and barred it from the classroom.

read more…

Atheists arise: Dawkins spreads the A-word among America’s unbelievers

November 21, 2007 Comments Off

by Ewen MacAskill
Guardian (UK), page 3
October 1, 2007

It is like Daniel going into the lions’ den, though Professor Richard Dawkins might not appreciate the biblical comparison. Britain’s leading atheist is spearheading a campaign in America to challenge the dominance of religion in every day life and in politics, insisting that the millions of US godless deserve to be heard too.

Atheists in the US “have been downtrodden for a very long time. So I think some sort of political organisation is what they need”, he said.

Maybe David and Goliath would be a better analogy. Religion is palpable in US schools, places of work and public institutions. God is invoked by soldiers and politicians in a way that would seem inappropriate in Britain. George Bush used God as one of the reasons for invading Iraq. In Congress, where godlessness can equate with being unelectable, only one representative, Pete Stark, is prepared to admit to being a non-believer.

According to a study published last year by the University of Minnesota, Americans distrust atheists more than any other minority group, including homosexuals, recent immigrants or Muslims.

Now the best-selling author of The God Delusion and chair of public understanding of science at Oxford has set up an organisation to help atheists round the world, including the US.

read more…

Dawkins rails at ‘creationist front’ for duping him into film role

November 21, 2007 Comments Off

by Ewen MacAskill
Guardian (UK), page 6
September 28, 2007

Among the films being shown tonight at the Atheist Alliance convention taking place near Washington is, unsurprisingly, Monty Python’s Life of Brian. What will not be showing are trailers for a new movie, Expelled.

Some of the world’s best-known atheists, including British scientist Richard Dawkins, appear in the documentary, but they are unhappy with it. They say they agreed to appear in a documentary called Crossroads, but have ended up instead in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

They had expected Crossroads to be a debate about creationism versus Darwinism, but Expelled supports intelligent design (ID), a variation on creationism. The premise of Expelled is that scientists sympathetic to intelligent design are penalised by being denied academic posts.

read more…

Does the ghost in the machine have a soul?

November 19, 2007 Comments Off

By Dinesh D’Souza
San Francisco Chronicle (California), page E3
November 18, 2007

There is a powerful strain of atheism that teaches that human beings are nothing more than matter. In this materialistic view, the soul is a fiction, a “ghost in the machine” that has been invented by religion for its own purposes. After all, we never encounter this ghost within the material frame of human beings.

What we do encounter is brains, arteries, blood and organs. These are all made up of the same atoms and molecules as trees and stones and are assembled by a process of evolution and natural selection into this intricate machine we call Homo sapiens. From this perspective, man is a kind of intelligent robot, a carbon-based computer. Consequently, man should be understood in the same material terms that we understand software programs.

“If we do indeed possess an immaterial soul,” physicist Victor Stenger writes in “God: The Failed Hypothesis,” “then we should expect to find some evidence for it.” But science has found none, which leads Stenger to conclude that the soul is a myth.

read more…

The Evolution of Creationism

November 19, 2007 Comments Off

by Gordy Slack
Chicago Sun-Times (Illinois), page 2B
November 18, 2007

Two years ago, Pennsylvania federal Judge John Jones III handed down a stunning decision that many said would take down the intelligent design movement. But American creationism doesn’t die. It just adapts.

Decades earlier, when the courts deemed creation science — proto intelligent design — a religious view and not constitutionally teachable as science in public schools, it adapted by cutting God off its letterhead and calling itself “intelligent design.” The argument for I.D., and for “scientific creation theory” before it, is that evolution isn’t up to the task of accounting for life. Given biology’s complexity, and natural selection’s inability to explain it, I.D. thinking goes, life must be designed by a, well, designer. I.D.ers skirted any mention of God, hoping to avoid getting snagged on the First Amendment’s prohibition against promoting religion by arguing that I.D. was just a young and outlying science.

In the Pennsylvania case, Kitzmiller vs. Dover, Judge Jones ruled that if you want to teach intelligent design in science class, first you have to show that it is a distinct species from its earlier, creationist form, not just a modified type. You’ve got to show us the science part, he said. Besides, Jones declared, your intelligent designer is obviously God.

read more…

A Review of Stellar Remnants: Physics, Evolution, and Interpretation

November 19, 2007 Comments Off

by Danny R. Faulkner
CRS Quarterly, Volume 44 Number 2, Fall 2007, pp. 76-84.

Abstract:
Astronomers think that stars end their existence as one of three possible stellar remnants. In recent decades, astronomers have amassed a tremendous amount of observational data and theoretical models to support an evolutionary interpretation of stellar remnants. We survey this topic and discuss possible creationary responses to it.

Recent issues of this quarterly have contained articles dealing with stellar remnants (Davies, 2007; DeYoung, 2006). In this article, we explore three topics. First, we review the types of stellar remnants recognized in the astronomical field. Second, we briefy describe the observations and physics that support the identification of these objects. Third, we discuss the evolutionary framework that astronomers generally think explains these different objects. In the conclusion we will discuss some of the possible creationary responses to these evolutionary ideas. As creationists, we reject evolutionary explanations and ought to respond to them with criticisms and creationary alternatives. However, in our critique of these evolutionary ideas, we must be very careful that we do not mistakenly “throw the baby out with the bath water” by dismissing some of the conclusions that are based upon good observations and physics. As difficult as it may be, we must separate the evolutionary speculations from the well-established ideas.