Conflict Thesis and the Scopes Monkey Trial

This is on the mark.

Henry Morris pushed this hard. In his view, “evolution” basically meant all rebellion against God, whether or not it involved biological theories. He was inclined to think that evolution came from Nimrod and the tower of Babel, not from Darwin and his predecessors.

As for Ken Ham, the balloons in his famous warring castles cartoon (https://assets.answersingenesis.org/img/articles/au/2006/symptoms-of-evolution-scrn.jpg) all predate Darwin by millennia. The absence of logic in that claim is enormous, yet it continues to be repeated all the time.

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Technically correct about the trial, but misleading in its implications.

The Butler act (the Tennessee law) forbade only the teaching of human evolution, not evolution among animals or eugenics. So, the trial focuses on that. Bryan made a brief, negative reference to eugenics in court, but it wasn’t germane to the legal question. He did intend to talk about social and moral implications of teaching evolution in his long closing statement (partly quoted in this thread), but the judge ruled that there would be no closing arguments–which thrilled Clarence Darrow, who (despite his fame as rhetorician) feared that the greatest political orator of his generation would outdo him.

Generally speaking, the larger implications of human evolution, including eugenics, were central to Bryan’s opposition to teaching it in public schools and universities. He also had major biblical and theological objections, but he didn’t try to ban it until after the Great War–after he’d read Vernon Kellogg’s Headquarters Nights and Benjamin Kidd’s Science of Power, books that linked Darwinian evolution with German militarism, a type of social Darwinism different from eugenics but rooted ultimately in the same type of thinking about putting Darwinism into practice.

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All you really need for this misapplication of science is Mendelian genetics, and even then there may be little to no genetic basis for many diseases that were treated in asylums.

There’s nothing in the theory of evolution that says who should or shouldn’t have children. That’s all human prejudice.

I suspect that some (a lot?) of the reaction was due to Evolution being seen as a challenge to the authority of scripture.

There are tons of YEC’s and Christians who think evolution implies atheism. We see them all of the time in this forum.

It would also help to point to what Dawkins is saying, specifically. From what I have seen, Dawkins still leaves the possibility that God exists, and that evolution only disproves the YEC depiction of God.

You’ve not read his superb God Delusion then?

How does teaching the facts of life; evolution, contravene the prevention of the government from making laws that regulate an establishment of religion, or that prohibit the free exercise of religion, or abridge the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress of grievances?

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No, I haven’t. Dawkins and I are very different kinds of atheists. His stuff on evolution is ok, but his tirades against religion are a bit much.

I have often seen this quote from God Delusion:

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It doesn’t.

My point was that teaching Dawkins’ belief that evolution implies atheism would violate the first amendment. SCOTUS has ruled that teaching creationism violates the establishment clause of the first amendment, in a case that could perhaps have given them the opportunity also to rule that teaching evolution violates the first amendment. They didn’t go there.

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Yeah, I think so too. in his conversation with Collins I think he was even open to deism.

Wow, thanks for the link to this case. To be honest, I used to be judgmental of people who supported ID and advocated for teaching “critical thinking” in the classroom along with evolution. Now I think I understand their point and even agree with it to a certain extent. Maybe not so much “critical thinking” as much as philosophy of science and epistemology.

Hmmm. 6 sigmas. 1.973E-09 = 1.973 ppb.

He rants superbly. You should read it. His sins are those of omission. He’s not Humean. Doesn’t Haidt. And certainly doesn’t steel man the ultimate claim of incarnation or even try a goodwill natural explanation of Jesus.

Evolution doesn’t imply atheism, i.e. no divine intervention in the scientifically, naturally elucidated story of life on Earth, it doesn’t have to go there. It completely excludes it. I fail to see any threat to the Constitution in that. But I’m sure if you threw a billion dollars at it you could sell the threat: make it politically true.

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It seems that the problem was the teaching of philosophy and epistemology is well and good in philosophy or religion classes, but really is not appropriate to the biology classroom.

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Given this viewpoint, Paul, you might appreciate what I wrote in response to the ID trial that took place in Pennsylvania in 2005. https://www3.trincoll.edu/csrpl/RINVol8no3/intelligent%20design%20on%20trial.htm
See the section about the “nature of science” for the most pertinent comments.

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The elephant in that room is whether the methodological naturalism practiced by scientists in all scientific fields implies philosophical naturalism–the proposition that nature is all that there is, that there is no transcendent realm “above” or “beyond” nature that science cannot explore. That of course is not a scientific question, but one that does impinge on an individual scientist’s view of science.

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I hadn’t noticed that the link to “Spring 2003” is wrongly labeled, since the trial took place in the fall of 2005 and my article wasn’t published until late that year. The link still goes to my article, so no problem.

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Philosophical naturalism isn’t a requirement to practice science and is scientifically excluded, science dealing only with with probabilities (in observation) as Dawkins implicitly acknowledges, even utterly absurd ones like the Boltzmann Brain, (and falsifiability). Physicists are more biased toward incredulity and therefore intentionality than biologists, just look at the Templeton Prize. Having mainstream religious or political or philosophical beliefs doesn’t stop one doing rocketry. YEC stops one doing genetics, palaeontology, geology, cosmology. So do rocketry. Only being a flat earther will tend to put the kibosh on that. As far as I’m concerned methodological naturalism explains everything including all supernatural stories, all of eternal infinity (which of course can have no qualitative regression, God or no). It still doesn’t stop me yearning for God-meaning-eternal life thanks be to God in Christ. There’s just no warrant, no elephant in the room, for that.

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I would agree. No public school teacher should be telling students that any scientific theory disproves the existence of any deity.

Teaching evolution doesn’t violate the first amendment. The theory of evolution says nothing about the existence of any deities. Just because a sect within a religion feels like a scientific theory is problematic for their beliefs does not make that scientific theory a first amendment issue.

If we are looking at the Lemon test, there is a very clear secular purpose for teaching evolution. It is a theory that students must understand if they want to have a career in the biological sciences, and it is a theory the public would need to know if they want to understand the findings within biology.

I’m sure we can find some religious person who thinks diseases are caused by demons instead of microorganisms. This doesn’t mean we should stop teaching the Germ Theory of Disease.

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Given all of the Christian scientists alive today, apparently not. People of all faiths can be found in science. I would challenge anyone to read a random scientific paper and try to glean the religious beliefs of the authors from the content of the paper. Do you think only atheists can be meteorologists on the local news because soon as you conclude that natural processes make rain you can no longer believe in God?

https://biologos.org/articles/atheistic-meteorology-or-divine-rain

Added in edit:

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We agree, T_aquaticus, that methodological naturalism doesn’t equate to atheism. I’ve often used the meteorology point myself–all that atheism going on at NOAA, as it were. As a relative newcomer here, you probably aren’t familiar with the roughly 100 columns I wrote several years ago. I was simply stating the fact that for many Christians (including some who are scientists) methodological naturalism is not acceptable, at least not certain forms of it. I won’t prolong this exchange.

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@Paulm12 ,
I can’t really tell, if you’re using Conflict Thesis as a theme for the topic or an indicator of your position. I’m deliberately assuming the former.

I’m assuming by “classroom” you’re talking about the K-12 and undergrad science classrooms, where various science instruction and lab work take place in public schools and publicly-funded colleges and universities. Private schools are a different matter.
I want to address two of your posts, which I quote below.

ONE

I don’t understand what Dawkins has to do with the teaching of evolution in public schools. Why would one man’s opinion about atheism be of interest to text-book writers, curriculum directors, and teachers all trying to get kids to learn this: Next Generation Science Standards, the U.S.'s most current, most widely used science standards?

Classwork and instruction are simply not concerned with God’s/gods’ hands in the work of the universe, but in how the universe functions “under normal conditions.” “A miracle occurred,” requires no instruction from a science teacher.

Most of my life I have heard layman-quality “legal arguments” from Christians, who would like to claim that humanism and atheism are actually religions, so that we can fight the teaching of this “religion” in schools. But the layman involved fails to do the real homework to make the real argument AND must misrepresent to himself and others what atheism and humanism are and must deliberately misunderstand what “non-theistic” actually means.

This idea was intended to force schools to treat non-theistic approaches to science as the promotion of atheism, and therefore a religion. This is dishonest at every level. All subjects in public schools should be taught non-theistically. As I mentioned in a post above, we don’t trouble ourselves about leaving gods out of the teaching Mathematics, Literature, Languages, Weight-Lifting, Marching Band and the rest.

Nothing about the straight-forward, non-theistic teaching of evolution (or any other science topic) is religious or illegal or immoral. We simply consider the natural processes and how they work. That is enough. That’s what science is.

TWO

ID stems from and does three things that have no place in a public school classroom:

  1. It stems from the moral requirement that God be acknowledged as evident in the human understanding of natural processes. See Romans 1:19&20. This is debatable, even among Christians and certainly has no place in a public school classroom.
  2. It is an apologetic tool for theism. The open-ended nature of the conclusions – fill in the blank yourself for the non-natural explanation of the basis of the ID claim (like irreducible complexity) – provides an “out” so IDers can claim not to be teaching theism or religious belief. But that’s dishonest. The artifically created blanks are intended to be places for God to be inserted.
  3. It runs counter to the scientific method by not relying on testable ideas or evidence to support #1 and provide for #2.
  4. It necessarily changes science and therefore teaches something other than the current best understanding of how things work.

Critical Thinking is essential in all school subject areas. Before I left teaching in June 2000, the teachers I worked with were obsessed with teaching critical thinking by any means in all areas. 22 years later, I see from my now-middle-aged former students, who are in the prime of their lives, that we failed utterly. So Sisyphus begins again every semester.

I am curious why you would not advocate the teaching of Critical Thinking. Do you favor teaching UNcritical Thinking? That would be terrifying. Actually, it IS terrifying to see it so widely employed right now.

OR
By “Critical Thinking” do you mean “Considering All Options” which means to treat all views, no matter how well supported or how unsupportable, as equally valuable and explanatory? If that is the case, you are talking about something other than Critical Thinking. That would be uncritical thinking.

THREE
Clearly, while I am a Christian, I see no place for the invocation of any god in the science classroom. Whatever my views on miracles, or the work of the Holy Spirit, or God’s providence, or any other spiritual topic, they have no place in the classroom. There are a number of reasons for this:

  1. They are off topic. Because the study of science is the study of nature and how nature works, spiritual matters are out of scope. They certainly don’t help teachers accomplish the strenuous demands of the teaching standards. Where would a teacher cram spiritual education to a science class?

  2. They are off topic. In a secular democracy in an ideally pluralistic society, all belief systems are supposed to get a fair shake. Or none. All of them. So, if we’re going to include Christian origin stories and explanations of nature and its processes, we get to do that for all other religions as well. This sounds like Anthropology or World Religions. A fine class, but NOT biology, chemistry, physics, geology, cosmology or the like.

  3. Instructor’s spiritual beliefs are not part the picture. They should never come up in class. When I was teaching high school German and English, my friend Cathy was the sweetest New Age person. Delightful. You would love her. Her recommendation for treating my infertility problem was to hang a picture of the Holy Family over my bed and to contemplate it, before further attempts at fertility. Really, would you want Cathy teaching a human biology class? Or ANY CLASS in which she was allowed to bring her aromatherapy, crystals, chakras and prayer flags? Do not open that box. Just don’t.

Christians need to come to terms with the fact that we can understand how nature works by studying nature. We can’t understand any aspect of nature better by involving any form of religion or faith. Period.

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