>>Chris
>>Is there someone who has gathered information on this issue, to determine
>>if *either* evolution or design is being taught, and to what degree? (I
>>know that nearly everyone I've met who has exhibited any awareness of it
>>at all has a fantastically shallow grasp of it, as if those two pages
>>were all that they had ever seen or heard regarding evolution.)
>Bill
>Hi Chris,
>
>A friend of mine who does "understand" evolution from both sides wrote
>the following about an experience he had in the 60s:
>
><snip for brevity>
>There is an analysis of the science textbooks publishers orffered to the
>public schools in Alabama in 1995, which may be found at:
>
> http://www.arn.org/docs/anderson/analysis_main.htm
Chris
Thanks, Bill, for the info. I visited the site above, and was disappointed
in both the material from the textbooks and ARN's treatment of it. In some
cases, I found their remarks accurate. In others, they seemed to be
imitating Stephen Jones by reading into the quotations implications that
were not there.
My impression of the textbooks gained by this indirect route is that we are
not, except in a shallow, almost cliche-ic way, teaching evolutionary
theory to our children, but, rather, merely, for the most part, giving some
of the *conclusions* of the theory. My guess is that this dumbing down of
the theory is done in the interests of passing on the surface of evolution
without having to bother presenting the real evidence and the real
arguments in such a way that it could be understood by youngsters. In
effect, both the facts related to evolution and the theory itself have been
reduced to the printed equivalent of sound-bytes.
But, this supports the view that I pretty much expected it to: Evolution as
it is, and evolutionary theory as it is, are *not* being taught in the
public school system. I know that I was taught almost nothing about
evolution in my biology classes in high school, in California, in the early
sixties, and I know that today I only *extremely* rarely meet anyone who
has much more understanding of evolution as fact or evolution as theory
than I was given in high school. I include thirty years of living in the
San Francisco Bay Area, as well as my more-recent experience in Oklahoma.
In short, neither the average supporter of teaching evolution in schools
nor those who seek to pretend that ID theory or YEC creationism are science
understand evolution as an observational fact (based on observations of
presently-living organisms and on observations of fossils, etc.) or modern
evolutionary theory as to why and how that evolution occurs.
ARN and other such organizations do not help by their pretense that
supernaturalism is just another metaphysical assumption like the assumption
that there is a natural world. We can *see* the natural world, and touch
it, etc. We can reliably test for its existence and basic factuality. We
*can't* do this with any supernatural world that might be claimed to exist,
or any supernatural God who might be claimed to hang out there with his
buds. By the very nature of the claim, supernaturalism involves a burden of
proof that the claim that there is a natural world does not involve
(because, for the existence of the natural world, that burden has long
since been carried). Yet ARN, like Phillip Johnson and Stephen Jones,
pretends that these two claims are on an equal footing.
Naturalism, despite Jones' claims, does not involve the claim that *only*
the natural world exists. It includes this idea only as a *presumption*
because of the lack of any *evidence* for a non-natural or supernatural
world. As such, there is no burden of proof for it, any more than there is
a burden of proof for the presumption that a man found dead with an
apparent bullet-hole through his head was not killed by aliens from another
galaxy.
It's probable that some or all of the books mentioned do not deal with the
issue of assumptions (and burden of proof) adequately, but their apparent
alternative is not acceptable either.
Chris Cogan
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