Title: Re: paleonet More creationist problems in
America
"Some
professors say, 'Evolution is a fact. I don't want to hear about
Intelligent Design (a creationist theory), and if you don't like it,
there's
the door,'" Baxley said, citing one example when he thought a
student should
sue.
If this account is true, then that professor is part of the
problem. He (or she) is as narrow-minded and intolerant as a
creationist. If members of the academy are as dogmatic as
members of the clergy or the rest of the religious community, then
what the heck is the point of having an academy? It becomes
simply a different venue for indoctrination.
There is no way that we, as academics, can really look at this
creationist/evolution debate as some sort of old fashioned Western
with good guys in white hats and bad guys in black hats. Charles
Townes, a proponent of intelligent design, just won the Templeton
Prize for his attempts (over nearly 40 years) to reconcile the
perspectives of religion and science. I heard him interviewed on
the radio last night and he seemed like a reasonable man who, at 89,
still had a lot of questions. Interestingly I heard this
interview on As It Happens, a Canadian Broadcast Corporation
show. I don't recall the prize even being announced on National
Public Radio.
To be frank, I think the existence of the intelligent design
movement is analogous to the existence of chronic back problems in
Homo sapiens. That is, both are caused by imperfections due
to historical contingency.
Our spine and pelvis are modified from that of a quadripedal
ancestor, so they don't work all that well. It would have been
nice to start with a better design, but that's just the way it goes;
you can't get rid of the past. Same with intelligent design.
individuals, like Charles Towne, raised in religious households and
communities (societies) are simply used to having God in the universe
with them. It is extremely difficult to simply excise that part
of your view of Nature. It would have been nice to start with a
different perspective, but that's just the way it goes.
College students are much closer to this period of indoctrination
than are their professors, who presumably a good decade beyond the
clutches of their home parish, so to speak. In my own experience
as a professor who began teaching fully 20 years after I entered
college, I found the students of the late 1990s to be much less open
to dialog about values than those of the late 1970s. Students of
this day and age seem to be pretty sure that they know which way is up
on a lot of issues.
The mass media of the last 10 or 15 years has been hectoring them
to be much more open-minded about sexual persuasion, ethnicity and
race, social class, and a host of other social issues. And, for
most of them, their personal experience is much more narrow than the
world that they come to "know" only through the media.
In a mild paradox, I have found that this leads them to be rather more
dogmatic than more open-minded. They are simply being fed too
much information without any instruction in how to order it.
So, when a professor berates a student for clinging to his or her
belief in a literal interpretation of the Bible (in the case of a
creationist) or simply for wanting to continue believing that there is
purpose in Nature (in the case of an ID adherent), he is berating
someone who already isn't really sure of much of anything, but is
doing their level best to work it out as quickly as they can.
Sincerely,
Bill
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William P. Chaisson
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627
607-387-3892