[extropy-chat] evolution fights back

Tue Feb 21 04:54:22 UTC 2006

> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-
> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Olga Bourlin
> Sent: Monday, February 20, 2006 3:08 PM
> To: ExI chat list
> Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Bad idea, was Transhumanism as Religion
> 
> From: "Bret Kulakovich" <bret at bonfireproductions.com>
> > The Vatican has released recently statements affirming that evolution
> and
> > Catholicism are compatible.
> 
> The Vatican admits they are failed fundamentalists... Olga

Wait, hold the phone.  There is hope:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/02/20/science.evolution.reut/index.html

spike

Scientists enlist clergy in evolution battle

Monday, February 20, 2006; Posted: 9:31 a.m. EST (14:31 GMT) 

-- American scientists fighting back against creationism, intelligent design
and other theories that seek to deny or downgrade the importance of
evolution have recruited unlikely allies -- the clergy.

And they have taken their battle to a new level, trying to educate high
school and even elementary school teachers on how to hold their own against
parents and school boards who want to mix religion with science.

While they feel they have won the latest round against efforts to bring God
into the classroom, the scientists say they have little doubt their
opponents are merely regrouping.

"It's time to recognize that science and religion should never be pitted
against one another," American Association for the Advancement of Science
President Gilbert Omenn told a news conference on Sunday. The AAAS has held
several sessions on the evolution issue at its annual meeting in St. Louis.

"The faith community needs to step up to the plate," agreed Eugenie Scott,
Executive Director, National Center for Science Education in Oakland,
California.

Scott said many people held the "toxic" idea that "you are either a
Christian creationist or you are a bad-guy athiest".

Recent court and electoral battles have made clear that judges and voters
will reject efforts to sneak creationism into the classroom under the guise
of making a scientific curriculum clearer or fairer, Scott said.

By a vote of 11 to 4, the Ohio Board of Education last week pulled a model
lesson plan it had approved in 2004. The plan had permitted science teachers
to encourage students to look at questions about evolution, something
proponents of "intelligent design" call "teaching the controversy."

Last year in Pennsylvania, a federal court ruled the theory could not be
taught in a public school and the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, which
approved the teaching, was voted out.

Intelligent design proponents see the hand of God behind evolution because,
they say, life is too complex to be random.

"As a legal strategy intelligent design is dead. It will be very difficult
for any school district in the future to successfully survive a legal
challenge," Scott said. "That doesn't mean intelligent design is dead as a
very popular social movement. This is an idea that has got legs."

But pastors are speaking out against it. Warren Eschbach, a retired Church
of the Brethren pastor and professor at Lutheran Theological Seminary in
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania helped sponsor a letter signed by more than 10,000
other clergy.

"We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth,
one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human
knowledge and achievement rests," they wrote.

Catholic experts have also joined the movement.

"The intelligent design movement belittles God. It makes God a designer, an
engineer," said Vatican Observatory Director George Coyne, an astrophysicist
who is also ordained. "The God of religious faith is a god of love. He did
not design me."

Gerry Wheeler, executive director of the National Science Teachers
Association said some teachers feared losing their jobs if they taught
evolution. "The pressures come from the students and the parents," he said.