This about the brouhaha over creationism in the UK. I copied this from a
thread over at the Internet Infidels forum, where, God help me, I lurk and
even post occassionally (Yes, I must surely believe I have an enternity of
time to waste).
The Saturday Column by Tom Utley
God knows what Professor Dawkins is talking about
I worry about Professor Richard Dawkins, and his crackpot theory that the
universe evolved from some kind of accidental explosion at the dawn of time.
It is not that I am against far-fetched theories in general. Who knows, the
professor may even be right - although it seems much more plausible that all
life and matter were created by a supreme and intelligent deity, as most of
the cleverest men have believed for many thousands of years.
It may even be that we are both right - that God created the universe, and
that He did so by means of an explosion, followed by a process of evolution,
which He did not see fit to tell us about in the Book of Genesis.
Why should He give away his trade secrets, after all? The Bible would hardly
have become the best-selling book in history if it had begun with several
pages of complicated formulae and descriptions of genetic mutations. Far
more impressive to kick off with one of the simplest and most powerful
opening sentences in all literature: "In the beginning, God created the
Heaven and the Earth."
What worries me is the superstitious way in which Prof Dawkins clings to his
theory, and refuses to admit even the slightest possibility that anybody
else may be right. There is something almost hysterical about his attack on
the science teachers at Emmanuel City Technology College (CTC) in Gateshead
that puts me in mind of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition. The
professor is seeking out heretics - unbelievers in the religion of science -
with a view to silencing them.
"These people are teaching that the Earth is a mere thousands of years old,"
he said. "The children are being taught ludicrous falsehoods. This is not a
matter of one scientific position against another scientific position. There
is no scientific position which states that the earth is a few thousand
years old."
Just hold on there, professor. It is true that some Creationists have dated
the beginning of time to only a few thousand years before Christ. In 1650,
for example, the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, claimed to have worked
out that the world was created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 bc. But there is
no evidence that this is what is being taught, as fact, at Ernmanuel CTC.
If I understand Prof Dawkins correctly, he is saying that, if man had been
created six days after the beginning of time, as Genesis suggests, fully
developed and looking like Michelangelo’s vision of Adam on the ceiling of
the Sistine Chapel, then it would follow that the universe could be only a
few thousand years old.
This, he would say, is patent rubbish, because we have evidence that mankind
has been stalking the Earth for at least 50,000 years - and maybe even for
200,000 years (scientists are terribly vague about these things). There is
also some evidence that the universe has been in existence for several
billion years, perhaps 15 billion.
I do not know quite how Prof Dawkins arrived at his theory that, if the
Creationists are right, the universe can be only a few thousand years old. I
may be wronging him here, but I suspect that .he is relying on the work of
Archbishop Ussher and others like him.
Ussher based his calculation of the age of the universe on the genealogies
in the Old Testament- on what the Bible has to say about who begat whom, and
how long everyone lived. Open-minded as ever, I am prepared to admit the
possibility that he was talking absolute tosh.
But it strikes me as thoroughly anachronistic - and unscientific - of
anybody to believe that the author of Genesis had the same concept of time
as we have now. I simply do not believe that Methuselah lived to 969 years,
as years are understood now, or that the universe was created in six days,
as we now understand days.
Before Herodotus, the father of history, nobody had much of a concept of
time, and nobody much thought of writing down events in chronological order.
The amazing thing about the Book of Genesis is that it does attempt to put
the creation into some sort of order of time - and it is an order not so
very different from that in which the evolutionists believe that life
evolved: plants, fish, birds, "creeping things", beasts, man.
It seems odd to me that Prof Dawkins should be so hung up on the difficulty
of squaring time, as it was understood by Genesis, with time as modem
science understands it. It is less than 100 years, after all, since Einstein
came up with his staggering theory - now widely accepted by scientists -
that time is relative to space. If Prof Dawkins is prepared to accept that
there is no absolute now, and no absolute then, why does he find it so
difficult to stomach what Genesis has to say about time?
But enough philosophical meandering. The question that really puzzles me is
what Prof Dawkins is so afraid of. Does he worry that the’ students of
Emmanuel will suddenly rampage through the streets of Gateshead, slitting
the throats of the evolutionists and hurling copies of Darwin’s Origin of
Species into the Tyne?
I find that very unlikely. They look perfectly sweet to me, from the
photograph in yesterday’s paper, and almost everybody seems to accept that
they are thoroughly intelligent and well taught - as much about evolution as
about alternative theories.
My hope is that, at the last trump, the Almighty will take Prof Dawkins
aside and show him, in His vengeful, mysterious way, how the trick of
Creation was done.
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----posted March 18, 2002 09:51 AM
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quote:
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Originally posted by Oolon Colluphid:
Anyone know of anything positive in the British press? Please?!
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Mr. Colluphid ( a Secular Web moderator from England) is dismayed by the thought that there could possibly be in cool Britannia a secondary school that is deficent in the teaching of evolution. He should try living in the good ol' USA where one state has outright banned the teaching of evolution in high school and several states are considering such a ban
Fortunately, yes.
Dawkins' rebuttal to Tom Utley's polemic is pasted in below (It appeared in today's Telegraph).
Matthew Parris also wrote a good editorial in The Times on Saturday. The Times
Regards,
=================================================
Young Earth Creationists teach bad science and worse religion
By Richard Dawkins
(Filed: 18/03/2002)
THE absurd row over Emmanuel City Technology College in Gateshead has raised an even more absurd confusion, which must be cleared up.
There are not two debating positions, but three. Actually more than three, and some of them could be represented as a shaded continuum, but for simplicity I'll stick to three.
1) Young Earth Creationists. They believe the world is only thousands of years old, based on a literal reading of Genesis (or the Koran, or whatever is their holy book).
2) Old Earth Theists. Theirs is a broad church, embracing the great majority of educated religious people. They believe in a Divine Creator, but they read their creation myth allegorically rather than literally, and accept that the world is billions of years old.
With the exception of some Old Earth Creationists, they mostly agree that evolution happened, but may allow God some supervisory role. Many think evolution was God's ingenious way of accomplishing his creation. Some believe he helped evolution over the difficult jumps.
Others think God kept his hands off evolution, but set up the universe in the first place in such a way as to make it likely to happen.
3) Atheists and agnostics.
Within the broad middle group, you'll find the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of Oxford (who gave an admirable Thought for the Day on the subject on Friday) and, I would guess, most of the bishops and clergy of the Roman and Anglican churches.
You'll also find Tony Blair and those of his parliamentary colleagues of all parties who profess religious belief. You will not find the head of science at Emmanuel CTC, Gateshead.
I count myself in the third group, but it is not in that capacity that I object to what is happening in Gateshead. From time to time, I argue against Old Earth Theists, but not on this occasion.
On the Gateshead issue, scientists and theologians, bishops and atheists stand shoulder to shoulder. Young Earth teachers may do some damage to science education, but it's a pinprick compared with the damage they'll do to religious education if they get a grip on this side of the Atlantic.
Confusion is rife because commentators have failed to understand that the Gateshead row is about Young Earth Creationism. Wrongly presuming that we who have asked Ofsted for a re-inspection are attacking religion, they have rushed intemperately into print, not least in this newspaper, imputing to us all sorts of horrific Torquemadan motives.
Without bothering to read what we have said, and - worse - without bothering to read what the Gateshead teachers have said, they have assumed that we are attacking the middle group of mainstream religious believers.
As one retired contributor to The Daily Telegraph (letters, Mar 16) said: "I am a Christian and a scientist. I see no particular problem in reconciling the evolutionary and Creationist approaches to the formation of the Earth."
Well of course you don't see a problem, sir! You are a member of the large consensus in the middle. But the whole point of the Gateshead row is that the head of science at the school does see a problem. He is a Young Earth Creationist.
In the same issue of this newspaper, Tom Utley ("God knows what Professor Dawkins is talking about") tells me at insulting length what I already knew, namely that many Creationists don't think the earth is young. Why, Utley ponderously wonders, do I assume that the Gateshead teachers do?
For one excellent reason. I take the trouble to read what they say. Steven Layfield, the head of science at Emmanuel, gave a lecture on September 21, 2000 (which would therefore have been available to the Ofsted inspectors).
The full text is at: http://www.christian.org.uk/html-publications/education3.htm. Read it. If you love true science, or if you love true religion, the thought of what the children must be missing under this travesty of teaching may sadden you enough to provoke a letter to the Secretary of State for Education, urging her to reopen the case with Ofsted.
Layfield remarks that there is no immediate hope of evolution being removed from the national curriculum, and he lists ways in which Creationist science teachers can compensate.
For example: "Note every occasion when an evolutionary/old-earth paradigm (millions or billions of years) is explicitly mentioned or implied by a text-book, examination question or visitor, and courteously point out the fallibility of the statement. Wherever possible, we must give the alternative (always better) Biblical explanation of the same data."
For Layfield, then, the universe is not billions, not even millions, of years old. It is only thousands.
This head of science - this science teacher and mentor of other science teachers - blinds himself to the whole edifice of exciting scientific work, not just in biology and geology (fossils, the molecular clock, the geographic distribution of species in the light of plate-tectonic continental movements), but also physics (numerous independent methods of radioactive dating converge on the same answer) and cosmology (in a young universe, all stars would be invisible to us except the tiny minority within a few thousand light years).
Moving on in the lecture: "In view of the current inclusion of earth science into the Sc3 component of the national curriculum, it would seem particularly prudent for all who deliver this aspect of the course to familiarise themselves with Flood geology papers of Whitcomb & Morris . . .
"In particular, they would do well to point out that no rock is unearthed with a clear age label and that dating processes in general are speculative, frequently contradictory and in many instances altogether incompatible with a great age."
Yes, Flood geology means what you think it means. We're talking Noah's Ark here. Noah's Ark - when the children could be learning the spine-tingling fact that Africa and South America were once joined, and have drawn apart at the speed with which fingernails grow.
We have here the head of science, in a school that has received star rating from Ofsted. When I suggested a re-inspection, it had not occurred to me that the people who really come out of the affair badly are the Ofsted inspectors. It is not too late for them to make amends and look properly at what they obviously overlooked before.
With hindsight, it might have been better if those of us in Group Three had kept our big mouths shut and left it to the bishops. They have more to lose than we have, and are less vulnerable to prejudiced and perverse misunderstanding.
Over to you, gentlemen. Power to your elbows. If there is anything I can do to help, you'll find me lying low, with my head down. With the best will in the world, I seem to do more harm than good. It's somebody else's turn.
Richard Dawkins FRS is Oxford's Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. His latest book is Unweaving the Rainbow
I must say I like the kinder, gentler Dawkins. He used to think ALL religious folks were idiots.Now, he looks to the sensible middle to bail his side out. Unfortunately, I doubt that one of the world's most outspoken atheists will keep his mouth shut for long.
Shuan Rose 2632 N Charles Street,Baltimore MD 21218 [410]467-2655
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