Re: Cornell

Chris Barden wrote:

> "Rawlings said that some polls show that 40 percent of Americans
> believe that creationism should be taught instead of evolution in
> public schools, and about half of the Cornell students in the large
> course on evolution for nonmajors agree that 'some sort of "purpose"
> [is] informing the process through which life develops.'
>
> It is a grevious issue that those two positions ought to be equated in
> wrongness by academia. The first is a misunderstanding of science,
> but the second is a position taken by all theistic evolutionists,
> including evolutionary luminaries like Dobzhansky. ID thus threatens
> to truly take "God out of the classroom" if the political backlash
> mandates the teaching of evolution as unguided.

I fully agree, and many ID advocates are explicitly supporting this
confusion. In Kansas, the ID proponents, who wrote the alternative
standards, changed the definition of evolution in the standards to
explicitly state that it is "unguided." Their whole argument was that
evolutionary science implicitly supports atheism and that therefore ID
must be offered as a balance. It was the Kansas science and
educational community that was arguing that evolution is NOT in
opposition to divine guidance and purpose. This has been the most
frustrating part of the whole issue. Many of the ID advocates WANT
people to equate evolution with an unguided, purposeless and
meaningless universe. That argument is where their power of public
persuasion lies.

Keith

Keith B. Miller
Research Assistant Professor
Dept of Geology, Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506-3201
785-532-2250
http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~kbmill/
Received on Fri Oct 28 23:14:37 2005