>How many college courses like that of Will Provine's are going on? How many
>students? How many of those students really give a flip after the course
>ends?
>
>Comments anyone?
>
>Burgy
I too am very interested in how much real interest there is in these
topics. I just spent the last semester sitting in on a course in the
zoology department here at southern Illinois U. in which we read "Science
on Trial: the case for evolution" by Futuyma. The purpose of the class was
to use the book as a means of looking at the potential problems of
evolution and then discussing those and also for looking at how an
evolutionists should (or should not in this case!) go about defending
evolution from scientific creationists.
The class was billed as a discussion of evolution and origins issues but
didn't really raise many eyebrows in the department. Only 6 students (4
for credit) were in the class. I told the instructor I would sit in the
class to give the perspective of the scientific creationists (though not
usually at all sympathetic with them) and I am glad I did because there
were rampent misconceptions about what scientific creationists believe and
the text didn't aid in clarifying the issues. Overall I found I was given
unprecedented opportunities to present the gospel message and demonstrate
the reasons why these issues are so important to Christains (and why they
should be important to everyone) to the members of the class. I don't
think most students cared coming in about the issue at all, but we did have
some very prolonged discussions about whether one's beliefs concerning
beginnings/origins played a significant role in ones general philosophy.
Overall a good experience for me because I got to freely challenge many of
the beliefs of students in the class and force them to look at the issues
from new perspectives. One thing that did surprise me though was that all
the students were concerned about the issue for one reason: they wanted to
know what to do when a student (or worse yet a parent of a student) calls
them and tells them they can't teach evolution. EVERY student and every
faculty member sitting in the class said they had had numerous scathing
evaluations that all mentioned that they shouldn't use the word evolution
in class. This surprised me because I see SIU and being a very
unreligious environment and I didn't think there would be that many
students who would speak out on the issue but all the faculty members said
they are confronted every semester at some point.
Yes, lets hear the numbers. I am very intersted in how many people are
reading the books put out over the past couple of years. BTW, if you want
a book defending evolution don't waste your money on "science on trial" its
about 80% rhetoric and even the devout evolutionists in the class found
most of the book to be quite obnoxious.
Joel
http://www.intrnet.net/~virkotto/index.html
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