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Originally Posted by Rekna
Evolution and Creationism are both theories neither have been proven correct and there is scientific evidence on both sides. So if you are going to teach evolution teach it as a theory then teach the facts on both sides. Don't stop at just the pro but also present the con.
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Evolutionary theory, ideally is a body of knowledge that is not constrained
by the limits that a religiously originated belief system presumably adheres to.
I found the following helpful when posts in this thread challenged me to
re-examine whether my reflexive opinions are reasonable.
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<a href="http://web.mit.edu/lking/www/writing/tech-94.html">Absolute Truth, Dogmatism Antithetical to Science</a>
....The scientific method insists upon questioning not only the objects and events that we find in the world, but also our basic beliefs and assumptions about the way the world is, and the way we come to know things about it. Science works because no fact or belief is ever taken as being final; all knowledge is provisional, and postulates, methods, and conclusions are at all times open to the critical scrutiny not only of the researchers conducting the work, but also of the scientific community at large.
This is why science is so successful, and such an appealing method of rational inquiry: people are always asking questions, and never taking anything for granted. Controversy and discussion of competing ideas are a sure sign of good science in progress; when people start getting complacent, when they claim that all the important problems are solved, or that the final word has been spoken about a particular phenomena, we should be wary.
Scientific knowledge is never absolute. Rather, it represents the consensus of a critical and vigilant community of scholars. It is this idea of consensus which is often confused with Absolute Truth, and this is particularly apparent when we enter the realm of human action, and thus of moral judgment.......
..........Science can adapt to change precisely because its methods take nothing for granted; even these methods themselves are open to scrutiny and re-evaluation! There are no timeless, ahistorical truths. If moral judgment were to be a scientific affair, it would not concern itself with Absolute Truth, but rather with understanding the ways in which people form beliefs, and the possible ways of resolving conflicts between these beliefs -- without appeal to dubious universal laws.
The insistence that we can know Absolutes, moral or otherwise, is a denial of the dynamic character of the world around us, and it arises from the same sort of dogmatic appeal to absolute knowledge that in the present day condemns Salman Rushdie to a life of terror, and in earlier times twice put Galileo before the Inquisition. On this latter point we would do well to remember the response of a scholastic thinker when Galileo asked him to look through his telescope and observe the moons of Jupiter: the man replied that he needn't look through the device, as he would certainly not see anything that Aristotle had not written about more than a millennia before.
This is not a scientific outlook, and those who claim insight into moral Absolutes often find themselves in a similar position as the scholastic here described. They cannot account for new information, new insights, new ideas, precisely because they are trapped into asserting what seemed beforehand to be indubitable truth. New ideas, new interpretations are stifled because they are taken to be wrong a priori.
Thus for the knower of Absolute Truth there is no need to look through the telescope, no need to read The Satanic Verses, no need to meet and talk with a few homosexuals and thus understand that they are thinking, feeling, compassionate human beings, just like us hets.
It would be a shame if science actually were simply a quest for Absolute Truth, and it would be -- and often is -- a tragedy when the same association is made for matters of morals. So, despite Carlin's admonitions, here's to MIT students for escaping the lure of dogmatism, and for making science that much more relevant to society, and the moral problems therein.
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<a href="http://web.mit.edu/lking/www/writing/origins.html">Origins: Some Questions and Answers about Evolution and Creationism</a>
<b>But aren't evolution and creationism both untestable, and therefore unscientific? Don't they both require faith?</b>
Again, in some sense, all human knowledge is arguably based in faith. But this does not mean that all knowledge claims are equally justifiable, equally reasonable. And when we frame evolutionary and creationist ideas as testable scientific hypotheses, the evidence tends to favour the former, and cast doubt on the latter.
To be clear on a point that is often downplayed by both sides to the origins debate: both evolutionary and creationist claims can be scientifically studied, in principle and often also in practice. For instance, the hypothesis that intelligent design and creation explains life on earth is readily testable: first, find the designer or designers, and the creator or creators (if the designers are not also the creators); then, figure out the specific designs, and the motives behind them; see if the stated or apparent motives correspond with the apparent function of the designed objects; find the tools that were used to implement the designs; and figure out where these tools came from, and how they work.
<b>My high school teaches that evolution is a fact. Isn't that presumptuous, to say the least?</b>
Evolution is a fact. Evolution is also a short-hand term for explanatory models that account for the differential success of certain organisms and stategies in terms of heredity and selection pressures. But theories of evolution are not facts: they are explanations of phenomena for which there are varying degrees of empirical confirmation. Some evolutionary explanations are more or less certain (i.e. some models of selection pressures over the short-term in specific ecosystems); whereas others are more uncertain and speculative (i.e. the origins of, and changes in, species over the long-term of earth's history).
<b>Why do scientists and secular teachers ask me to accept, as fact, an account of human origins that is so vague and speculative?</b>
Any account of human origins is bound to be speculative and uncertain. After all, these events took place millions of years ago, and we may never recover the evidence necessary to know for sure what happened. But the account that creationists offer is, I think, far more speculative and controversial, in that they also have to explain the origins of an incredibly powerful sentient being who is responsible for designing and creating the world we live in.
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But if that's the case, how can we ever really say that the theory of evolution is true? I mean, doesn't science demand that we prove theories to be true? You've just hinted above that we probably cannot prove the truth of evolution for a range of phenomena early in earth's history.</b>
Truth is a property of formal and natural languages. But there are no absolute truths in science: Nothing is proven by scientists, and sometimes we just have to accept uncertainty and a lack of evidence. But scientific explanations are checked and re-checked for their internal coherence and consistency, and tested and re-tested for their empirical accuracy with the data we do have. And until specific explanations are disconfirmed decisively and repeatedly, we accept their accuracy provisionally, so long as they are internally consistent and comport with related explanations for which there is empirical evidence. Nothing is 100% certain in science, and strictly speaking, nothing is true in the sense that it is proven absolutely. Every result, every explanation is open to critical re-evaluation in light of new ideas and new evidence..............................
............<b>It seems to me that many of the more zealous advocates of evolution don't really take the time to acquaint themselves with recent approaches to creationism, some of which appear to be more scientific than past efforts.</b>
I'm always open to being corrected on just what creation science is, and I've spent a fair amount of time trying to understand the creationist model as a scientific enterprise.
Having looked over some of the recent literature in creationist publications, what strikes me is the absence of any substantive discussion of specific mechanisms: how does the conjectural intelligent designer (presumably supernatural and god-like, but this isn't a rigid constraint on the model) actually go about designing, and implementing the design? What mechanisms are employed? What processes are invoked? How would we go about studying these mechanisms and processes? Creationists are pretty much silent on these questions, but if they really want to be scientific about their conjecture, they ought to be paying close attention to historians, archeologists, anthropologists and other social scientists who study designed systems as a matter of course.
Again, a creationist hypothesis could be studied scientifically, at least in principle but maybe also in practice. For instance, here again is a candidate model: an incredibly powerful sentient being, existing outside of space and time as we understand them, created the known universe, employing methods and satisfying motives that are as yet unknown to us. Here is an alternative creationist conjecture: an advanced civilization used a remarkable array of technologies to genetically engineer the first life on earth; they then left things to run their course over a billion years or so, the goal being to study how these designed organisms would evolve over time in a complex alien ecosystem.
To explore these conjectures, we'd at the very least need some sort of strategy for identifying the sorts of methods the designers employed in pulling off the remarkable feat attributed to her -- him? it? they? It would also be nice to have some method for figuring out the identity and intentions of the designer or designers. But so far as I know, creationists have yet to elaborate such methods for answering the specific "how" and "why" questions attending to design conjectures, let alone apply such methods.
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