I have been leading a study group on tuesdays, using the book Do science and religion conflict. I mentioned this in an earlier post. It's a good group of people and the discussions are pretty lively. The book is a little lacking in detail though.
I also mentioned reading The case for Christ by Lee Strobel. I have finished that and started in on another of his books,
The Case For a Creator. This is a truly awesome book. It discusses science in relation to God, to the bible. I am only in chapter 4, but my reaction so far is to think two things 1) that should I have kids, they are going to a christian high school, and 2) to be very angry. Here's why.
Chapter three is called Doubts about Darwinism. In it this atheist legal journalist interviews Johnathan Wells. Wells is a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute in Seattle. He went to UC Berkeley where he majored in science fields, He got his graduate degree from Yale and he has written books and been published in both science and religious magazines.
In this chapter, the author talks about 4 things he learned in school, in the 50's, that made him disbelieve in the existence of God. One is the Miller experiment. A scientist had shot electricity thru an atomsphere like the one on the primitive earth, creating amino acids, the building blocks of life, supporting scientific argument that life could have stared without the intervention of a Creator.
While reading the interview of Dr. Wells, you learn that that experiment has been debunked, but is STILL BEING TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS!!! That's why I am angry!
Dr. Wells states, "Nobody knows for sure what the early atmosphere was like, but the consensus (in the scientific community--added) is that the atmosphere was not at all like the one Miller used....Two of the leading origin of life researchers confirmed that Miller used the wrong gas mixture. And Science magazine in 1995 said that experts now dismiss Miller's experiment because 'the early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller-Urey simulation.'" pg. 37. He goes on to say "my gripe is that textbooks still present the Miller experiment as though it reflected earth's early environment, when most geochemist's since the 1960's would say it was totally unlike Millers."
They then discuss the experiment, using the correct atmosphere, and NO AMINO ACIDS are produced, no building blocks of life. And yet, it's being taught in schools as if it were true. How misleading that is to kids who are struggling with questions!
He goes on to show that there a HUGE problems with every argument that Evolutions use to back up their theory, the holes, the misleading scientific data and the fact that most of it is still in textbooks. I am not going to retype the whole chapter, but I encourage everyone to go buy it! or borrow it from the library.
On to chapter 4, Where science meets faith. Here the interviewee is Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, who recieved his masters and his doctorate from Cambridge Univeristy in England. He states "I believe that the testimony of science supports theism...the major developments in science in the past 5 decades have been running in a strongly theistic direction...Science done right, points toward God." pg. 77 He then backs up his claim in the rest of the chapter.
Okay, back to chapter 3. In 2001, PBS ran a series called Evolution and it asserted that all known scientific evidence supports Darwinian evolution as does every reputable scientist in the world. There were 100 reputable scientists that were very upset about that and they took out a 2 page ad in a national magazine stating "a scientific dissent from darwinism." They stated "we are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life." These are scientists whose doctorate degrees came from Cambridge, Yale, Stanford, Cornell, Rutgers, Duke, and Berkeley, to list a few. The 100 included PROFESSORS from Yale Graduate school, MIT, Rice and Emory, they included the director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry and scientist at the Plasma Physics lab at Princeton. A 151 page critique of the series claimed it failed to present accurately and fairly the disagreements among evolutionary biologists themselves.
This book is even more enlightening and fascinating than The case for Christ. And I can't wait to read more.
BTW, there is currently a trial happening in Penn. The school wanted science teachers to read a paragraph stated there were problems with Darwinism and that another theory, Intelligent Design, might explain those problems. It was a short paragraph and then the class focused on Darwinism and nothing else was said about Intelligent Design. Some parents didn't like that paragraph!
