Published: Jan 5, 2008
To believe or not to believe. This will always be a question of faith for mankind.
The trend to teach the Theory of Evolution is wise but there should be a balance between science and what many believe as the creation of all living things. There is merit in the use of the Scientific Method that has shown how, through the ages, there are species that evolved from sea life to land creatures.
Paleontologists have shown that fossils from eons ago suggest a relationship of what was on Earth then and what inhabits our lands and seas today. In most cases, the similarities show a connection to present day living things, including bipeds. I can't say with any certainty that prehistoric apes are of our ancestry, although this is generally seen as the evolution of man.
On the other hand, there are those who believe in a Supreme Creator, known as God, The Lord, Allah, Jehovah and Yahweh, among other deities. Various interpretations of the Bible might suggest the Tower of Babel has more to do with conflicting religious beliefs than the thought that the divide of cultures was separated with multiple languages. Differing religions offer their own translation of the Bible creating divisive ideologies. Through all of time this has lead to wars, including the current extremist actions of some Islamic and Muslim followers. At times, there is little compromise.
There will always be debates on the rationale of the creation of man and civilizations on Earth. This is where educational teachings can bring together minds and thoughts toward enlightenment on our existence.
It is difficult to understand the hesitation of the scientific community to accept the idea that at some point there was the Creation of time and space (the concept of the Big Bang theory) yet that, as time has progressed, the outward expanse of the universe suggests a force brought to light galaxies, suns, planets, moons and life. There is no proof, but there is the feasibility of other forms of life in the universe, some of which surely would be prescient beings, as we are. There would be more advanced societies, others less so.
My belief stands firm with the thought that there has been the evolution of all earthly creatures from insects to viruses to animals and man. As others have suggested, I also believe that there was a time when all became into existence by what could be called a Supreme Presence. Perhaps all of creation through the universe was made by His design; it is a small-minded, arrogant idea that intelligent beings are strictly limited to this planet.
Intelligent Design fits very well, even though it sounds much too formal a term. This would be in line that man was created in His image where intelligence gives us a means to grow in spirit and knowledge even though we may never "evolve" to His level of knowing.
This thought would be in line with science and religion; there was a beginning and through the process of time and space the origins of life became a progression of growth and expansion of all things of creation. There is ample reason for each corner of belief to be in harmony with the other. Each should be taught in the classroom. Students would be given a balanced view of life where rational thought can provide dialogues of debate, thus an evolvement of the mind.
Man is not to worship false prophets nor worship images of His design.
Personally, I worship the sun for sustaining our lives. I worship all of nature that my Creator provided toward an understanding of my existence in this concept of life. My belief gives revelation to all that He created. These are my sole beliefs; it is the belief in my soul.
Ron Rae
Spring Hill
Updated: Jan 05, 2008 - 19:09:23 PST
Document headed by UCI evolutionary biologist states religion and science can coexist, just not in scientific discussions.
By Joseph Serna
The nation's leading science organization is taking a firm stance against creationism as a legitimate alternative to evolution, according to a report released Friday by the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine.
The report, significantly larger than its predecessors in 1999 and 1984, was headed by UCI evolutionary biologist and former Dominican priest Francisco Ayala. Former UCI Chancellor Ralph Cicerone is president of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Despite the overwhelming evidence supporting evolution, opponents have repeatedly tried to introduce nonscientific views into public school science classes through the teaching of various forms of creationism or intelligent design," according to the report. "[The report's authors] strongly maintain that only scientifically based explanations and evidence for the diversity of life should be included in public school science courses."
Cicerone said the report's key point is that religion and science can coexist, just not in scientific discussions.
Costa Mesa Councilwoman and former Newport-Mesa school board member Wendy Leece said that discussing intelligent design as an alternative to evolution does not mix religion with science.
"Faith is already in the classroom. It's a faith in scientists. It's in the book. Evolution is a belief system," Leece said. "You have to have a leap of faith when you go to your biology class, and you read your biology book that says this is true."
Creationism and intelligent design are not the same, Leece said. Intelligent design is simply accepting that science does not have all the answers, she said.
Cicerone disagreed.
"To me, they seem like part of the same story," he said.
"There's so little time for science and math in the classroom already, to contaminate it with a religious fervor is inappropriate," said Gilbert Omenn, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan and former president of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science.
"We are totally opposed to teaching creationism in the science classroom," he added. "It's not so much to fight with other people's views as to say how important it is to understand the scientific method."
JOSEPH SERNA may be reached at (714) 966-4619 or at joseph.serna@latimes.com.
From The Times January 5, 2008
Nigel Hawkes, Health Editor
Aromatherapy, homoeopathy and other popular complementary therapies are to be regulated for the first time under a government-backed scheme to be established this year.
The new Natural Healthcare Council – which is being backed by the Prince of Wales – will be able to strike off errant or incompetent practitioners. It will also set minimum standards for practitioners to ensure that therapists are properly qualified.
Patients will be able to complain to the council about practitioners and the new body will be modelled on the General Medical Council and other similar statutory bodies.
Millions of Britons currently spend £130 million a year on complementary treatments and it is estimated that this will reach £200 million over the next four years. Among the practices to be covered by the scheme would be aromatherapy, reflexology, massage, nutrition, shiatzu, reiki, naturopathy, yoga, homoeopathy, cranial osteopathy and the Alexander and Bowen techniques.
Research also shows that more than two thirds (68 per cent) of people in the UK believe that complementary medicine is as valid as conventional treatment.
However, there have been long-standing concerns over its regulation. At present anyone can set themselves up as an acupuncturist, homoeopath, herbalist, or other complementary therapist. However, a poll for The Times found that three quarters of people assumed that anyone practising complementary therapy is trained and registered by a professional body.
Although the scheme will initially be voluntary, it is hoped that all practitioners will be forced to join or lose business as the public will use the register as a guarantee of quality. The council will register only practitioners who are safe, have completed a recognised course, are insured and have signed up to codes of conduct.
Both alternative and complementary approaches to medicine — when a therapy is used as an alternative to conventional medicine and when it is used in conjunction with it — will be covered by the new regulator, although treatment without consideration of mainstream medicine is likely to come under greater scrutiny.
A number of high-profile cases in which therapists have assaulted clients have reached the courts in recent years. In 2000, a man claiming to be an aromatherapist was spared a jail sentence after being convicted of indecently assaulting a woman who came to him to treatment. An osteopath from Ipswich was jailed last February for seven and a half years after a series of sexual assaults.
But as the law stands, there is nothing to prevent such people setting up in practice again. By checking that they remain registered with the new council, patients will gain reassurance.
Only mainstream alternative therapies such as traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture are to be the subject of statutory regulation. Osteopathy and chiropractic are already covered by such legislation.
The council, whose formation has been driven by the Prince of Wales's Foundation for Integrated Health, will consist of lay people appointed through an independent process, with a clear division between it and the professional bodies representing the therapies that it will cover.
The work of setting up the council, which is likely to be finished by the spring, led by Dame Joan Higgins, has been funded by the Department of Health and it will follow the best-practice model set out by the department in its white paper on regulation, Trust, Assurance and Safety.
Ian Cambray-Smith, of the foundation, said: "Although it is a voluntary scheme, we believe that in dealing with misconduct by therapists it will be almost as robust as statutory regulation, and as tough as we can make it. Suspension from the register will be the ultimate sanction.
"It will be good for practitioners, good for patients, and even good for the NHS. If there is a complaint, the council will convene a board of lay people, plus two practitioners, to review the case. If it is proven, a second board will determine what disciplinary procedures to take."
The NHS spends £50 million a year on complementary therapies that will be covered by the new council.
The council - eight people plus a chairman — will be financed by registration fees from practitioners and will have a permanent staff, who are in the process of being recruited.
January 5, 2008 Posted January 5th, 2008 at 9:00 am
Guest Post by Morbo
The United States entered World War II after Pearl Harbor was attacked on Dec. 7, 1941. Victory in Europe Day was celebrated in May of 1945, and Victory in Japan Day occurred the following August.
We can safely say that World War II, at least as far as the United States' military involvement is concerned, took place from 1941-45. If I began arguing that World War II actually occurred in the 1920s, you'd say I was crazy.
No journalist in his right mind would write something like, "Most historians believe World War II occurred between 1941-45." Yet how many times have you seen a story about the supposed conflict between evolution and creationism that portrays the two as rough equivalents when in fact the former is well established scientific fact and latter is a ton of horse manure?
This drives me crazy. Why does it keep happening? In part because journalists are trained to give both sides of an issue. If Mr. Jones is accused of robbing a bank, a reporter might write, "Police say Jones robbed the bank on Thursday, but Jones insists he was at home during the robbery." A court will sort out which side is correct eventually, but for the time being the story must be written this way because not all of the facts are known.
Journalists don't need to write like this when the facts are known. Recently, Leonard Steinhorn and Charles Steinhorn wrote a great column on the History News Network, a site run by George Mason University, pointing this out.
Leonard Steinhorn is a professor of communication at American University and Charles Steinhorn is a professor of mathematics at Vassar College. The two are brothers. In their column, they smack down the idea that journalistic balance requires evolution and creationism to be treated equally.
The two write:
Recently we conducted a newspaper database search of the phrase 'believe in evolution' and found nearly a thousand citations from the last five years. Typical is a New York Times article that describes a married couple as "Christians who believe in evolution," which suggests that scientific evidence and facts, like religion, can be true or false based on whether we believe in them or not. […]
Compounding the problem is the he-said, she-said style of journalism so prevalent today, which leaves media vulnerable to a trap set by proponents of the latest attack on evolution, "intelligent design," which is little more than an artifice devised to inject religion into the biology classroom.
Bingo. You see, I can really, seriously, strongly and sincerely believe that World War II occurred in the 1920s. No matter. It still occurred in the '40s. My belief that it occurred in the 1920s need not be respected by the media or portrayed as plausible, as it is simply wrong.
This has implications for political reporting as well. When Candidate A accuses Candidate B of having raised taxes 12 times as governor, when in fact Candidate B raised them only 10 times, that is a distortion, the kind of thing that happens during campaigns. The record can be easily corrected. When Candidate A accuses Candidate B of being a Muslim when Candidate B has never in his life been a Muslim that is a made-up-out-of-whole-cloth, huge, honking, outright lie and should be labeled as such.
Being "fair and balanced" is important for news organizations, but some things are just facts and some beliefs, even those sincerely held, are just wrong. There is no need to balance truth with falsehood.
By Max Brenn 18:22, January 5th 2008
Just a day after ordained Baptist minister Mike Huckabee won in Iowa in the first stage of choosing a Republican candidate for president, scientists warned Americans in a report against electing a leader who doubt evolution.
Former Arkansas governor Huckabee affirmed last year in May that he did not believe in evolution and thinks creationism should be taught in the schools.
"Our public schools should present both evolution and creationism," Huckabee told the Christian Broadcasting Network. "I would not support public schools teaching only creationism. Evolution is a theory based on a lot of science, so it must be part of the curriculum."
"The logic that convinces us that evolution is a fact is the same logic we use to say smoking is hazardous to your health or we have serious energy policy issues because of global warming. I would worry that a president who didn't believe in the evolution arguments wouldn't believe in those other arguments either. This is a way of leading our country to ruin," said Francisco Ayala, professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at University of California, Irvine, who chaired the panel that wrote the book.
As a response to these accusations, Huckabee toned down his anti-evolution stance, saying in a phone interview that the question of whether to teach creationism in schools was "not an issue for our president."
The National Academy of Sciences, the nation's most eminent scientific organization produced books which support the theory of evolution and argue against the introduction of creationism or other religious alternatives in public school science classes.
The academy and the Institute of Medicine issued the report at a time when the theory of evolution, first offered in the 19th century, faces renewed attack by some religious conservatives.
"Biological evolution is one of the most important ideas of modern science. Evolution is supported by abundant evidence from many different fields of scientific investigation. It underlies the modern biological sciences, including the biomedical sciences, and has applications in many other scientific and engineering disciplines," the report stated.
According to this report, creationism and the related idea of "intelligent design" are not science. Therefore, they should not be taught in public school science classrooms.
US President George W. Bush is one of the sustainer of teaching "intelligent design" creationism to American students. "Intelligent design" is a theory advocated by conservative Christian groups and some scientists in the U.S., which says that complex biological organisms cannot be explained by evolutionary chance alone and must be the work of an intelligent designer – namely God.
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Classroom off-limits to other teachings, group's book asserts
By Frank D. Roylance and Michael Hill | sun reporters
January 5, 2008
Facing continued challenges to evolutionary science from religious conservatives who insist that public schools teach alternative explanations, the National Academy of Sciences has issued a new book that outlines the scientific evidence for evolution.
"Evolution is one of the bedrock theories in all of modern science, and we are coming to understand better and better as to why that is," said NAS President Ralph Cicerone at a panel discussion of the 86-page booklet, called Science, Evolution and Creationism.
"We are trying to give the public a coherent explanation of that and concrete examples of the impact of evolution," Cicerone said of the booklet, which insists that theories such as creationism and "intelligent design" have no place in science classrooms.
Two years in the writing, the NAS book is aimed at school board members, science teachers, policy makers and legal scholars on the front lines of the debate.
Only hours before, the political power of religious conservatives was made clear when former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee decisively won the Iowa Republican caucuses. A Southern Baptist minister, Huckabee has declared that he doesn't believe in evolution and thinks creationism should be taught in the schools.
"Our public schools should present both evolution and creationism," Huckabee told the Christian Broadcasting Network. "I would not support public schools teaching only creationism. Evolution is a theory based on a lot of science, so it must be part of the curriculum."
Members of the NAS panel also made their point: Although faith and acceptance of evolution need not be incompatible, creationism does not belong in a science classroom.
"I would worry that a president who does not believe in evolution would not believe in other [scientific] arguments as well," said Francisco Ayala, professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at University of California, Irvine, who chaired the panel that wrote the book. "That is a way to lead the country to ruin. If all the other countries that are chasing us are behaving rationally, we are doomed."
Barbara Schaal, a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, agreed. "A lot of what we do in the United States is based on science and technology, and anything that weakens science and technology for students would necessarily be harmful," she said.
Vice president of the National Academy, Schaal was on the panel that wrote the evolution booklet, an update of editions published by the NAS in 1984 and 1999. The academy is a private, independent society of scientists chartered by Congress to advise the federal government on scientific and technological issues.
The science of evolution is founded on the observation that during reproduction, errors in the duplication of DNA - an organism's genetic blueprint - create individuals with different traits. Those traits that enhance survival are preferentially passed on to subsequent generations. That "natural selection" leads to differing populations and, with enough time, new species.
Earlier editions of the NAS booklet focused on the scientific evidence for evolution and the legal arguments for excluding faith-based theories from science classes.
This one also argues that acceptance of evolutionary science and religious faith are not mutually exclusive - that many evolutionary scientists are deeply religious, and many faiths and theologians accept evolutionary biology.
The Rev. Joseph Pagano, rector of Emmanual Episcopal church in Mount Vernon, said he read the booklet and found it compelling.
"It comes down to how certain people understand the nature and authority of the Scriptures," he said. "If one reads them in an extremely literalistic fashion, then one is going to have a problem with evolution. But of course that is not the only way to read them."
Pagano compared such a literal reading to someone who reads a sports headline that says, "Vikings Destroy Bears" and concludes "that a Nordic race has killed off a North American mammal."
The Rev. Jason Poling of the evangelical New Hope Community Church in Pikesville said he also has a non-literal reading of Genesis as a theological statement, a declaration that God created the parts of nature that others were worshiping - the sun and moon and stars.
"There are and always have been those who read the first chapter of Genesis and see it as a literal blueprint and those who see it as figurative," he said. "I really want to affirm that it is possible to be faithful and intelligent and take either of those views."
The NAS booklet suggests there is no real conflict. "The evidence for evolution can be fully compatible with religious faith," the booklet states. "Science and religion are different ways of understanding the world. Needlessly placing them in opposition reduces the potential of each to contribute to a better future."
Despite what the NAS says is incontrovertible scientific evidence, nearly 150 years after Charles Darwin first proposed his ideas in his paper, On the Origin of Species, a controversy still swirls.
In Texas, the current science curriculum requires the teaching of evolution. But that's up for review and a vote by the state school board. Conservatives hope to introduce changes that will discuss "weaknesses" in evolutionary science.
In Florida, proposed revisions to the science curriculum are up for public comment on the Internet. The revisions include, for the first time, references to evolution as a "big idea," critical to students' understanding of natural science.
Creationists there are making themselves heard, challenging evolutionary science and urging inclusion of alternative theories.
In Dover, Pa., a school board ended up in federal court - and voted out of office - after requiring in 2004 that science teachers tell students about intelligent design. The court ruled that intelligent design is "grounded in theology, not science" and should not be taught in science classes.
The NAS booklet argues that evolutionary biology "has been and continues to be a cornerstone of modern science." It has made "major contributions" to public health and medici