David Campbell switched on the overhead projector and wrote “Evolution” in the rectangle of light on the screen.
He scanned the faces of the sophomores in his Biology I class. Many of them, he knew from years of teaching high school in this Jacksonville suburb, had been raised to take the biblical creation story as fact. His gaze rested for a moment on Bryce Haas, a football player who attended the 6 a.m. prayer meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the school gymnasium.
“If I do this wrong,” Mr. Campbell remembers thinking on that humid spring morning, “I’ll lose him.”
In February, the Florida Department of Education modified its standards to explicitly require, for the first time, the state’s public schools to teach evolution, calling it “the organizing principle of life science.” Spurred in part by legal rulings against school districts seeking to favor religious versions of natural history, over a dozen other states have also given more emphasis in recent years to what has long been the scientific consensus: that all of the diverse life forms on Earth descended from a common ancestor, through a process of mutation and natural selection, over billions of years.
Is there any Science remaining??
Whenever you read “Science” and “concensus” together, most likely what you end up reading is neo-superstition belief.
In school, I would have failed Science class if I would have defined “science” in the way today’s media does.
Don
Of course there is plenty of science remaining! You are using a computer connected to the internet aren’t you? Science had something to do with those inventions…
We have been sadly diverted by this nonsense with the TEC but, in a twisted way, it does highlight what our mission should be. That is, how to share a meaningful faith in the living God in the language of science. I agree with the TEC’s implicit goal to make the Gospel current and accessible to people in the surrounding culture but sadly they have lost their saltiness by trying to make faith too comfortable.
Ignoring the challenge from Islam at the moment we are engaged in a three way conversation between the popular culture, science and the Gospel. Oversimplifying things somewhat, each perspective is antagonistic toward the other two. The mainline and liberal denominations have responded to science by committing suicide. Conservative denominations have put their heads in the sand.
What we really need is a sensible integration of good theology and good science and the AC should be at the forefront of this discussion. The reasserters must clarify in what sense we recognize the authority of scripture. It is not enough to simply say that we have a traditional view. We must be able to explain this in a way that is credible to scientists. (Not that they have to agree with it!) Partly, the mess with TEC has gotten so out of hand because within the so called orthodox groups we have still not gotten over the attacks of the 19 century. It is not the ‘fault’ of TEC. It is more accurate to say that the thinking represented by the TEC has exposed the woolly thinking among the orthodox.
And we could not do better to prepare for that three-way conversation than by reading works such as Lesslie Newbigin’s, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, a well-digested and brilliantly-written treatise of the critical realist philosophy of science, and catholic Christianity; and how both are united by Michael Polanyi’s philosophy that all knowledge is based on a personal decision of what is essentially faith. Bishop Newbigin spent many years as a missionary bishop in south India and as a missiologist working with the World Council of Churches (which later caused him much heartache), and on returning to England in “retirement” to serve as the pastor of an inner-city United Reformed church turned his considerable missiological and evangelistic talents to the interaction of the Gospel, culture and science. As his smaller volume, Proper Confidence, demonstrates, he rejected the responses both of liberal and of fundamentalist Christianity to culture and science.
I’m not sure that Bishop Newbigin would agree with this teacher’s notion of how science cannot “prove” God, probably because he would criticize the teacher’s understanding of “proof” as being inadequately nuanced. Newbigin felt that science was actually cutting itself off from answers by having been constructed in such a mechanistic way that it cut off the possibility of certain (scientific, not only theological) answers a priori. (But he also would have gently critiqued the student’s assertion of “proof” in the putative remnants of the Ark on Ararat.)
Thanks for the tip. It looks like an interesting book.
As I recall the title of Darwin’s book was the “Origin of Species” not the “Evolution of Species”. We still have animals and vegetables that haven’t changed in millions and millions of years.