Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Education

  • Another Shift in the Kansas School Board

    It’s looking good for the teaching of evolution in Kansas public schools, as reported by MSNBC, Evolution’s foes lose ground in Kansas. The balance of power shifted from 6-4 in favor of the ID standards to 6-4 against. The general election could change things slightly, but that looks like the worst case scenario for science standards.

    Don’t miss Josh Rosenau’s comments on Thoughts from Kansas and his post titled Final Tallies: Science Wins in Kansas.

    Science standards will be coming up here in Florida soon, so keep your eyes open. We want to make Florida’s standards for science education first rate. For more information on this, follow the Florida Citizen’s for Science web site.

  • How to Waste $25 Million

    A $25 million creation museum is under construction in rural Kentucky, with the intention of challenging the scientific consensus view of origins. MSNBC tells us about it in a story titled High-tech museum brings creationism to life. They quote Ken Ham, of Answers in Genesis saying,

    “If the Bible is the word of God, and its history really is true, that’s our presupposition or axiom, and we are starting there,

  • What the Greek Really Says

    There’s a moment in sermons that makes me cringe and my wife grin. She kind of enjoys seeing me squirm.

    What is this important moment? It’s when a pastor says, “What the Greek really says is . . .” Sometimes it’s worded a bit differently, but I believe that when you hear or read that phrase or something similar, the vast majority of the time you’re about to get misinformed. This week our pastor used the phrase “knowingly and with full intent” just to get the laugh out of us, which is all in good fun.

    There are several reasons for this. First, most pastors are not well enough trained in Greek or Hebrew to make such a statement with confidence. Unfortunately, this is often also true about writers who are not specialists in the language. I have found significant errors–not differences of opinion, but demonstrable errors–in books written by famous writers and published by well-known publishing houses. In one book I found a case where a Hebrew word was cited, and not only was the definition or the suggested glosses (English words suggested to translate it) questionable, but the word itself was simply not in the verse in question.

    (more…)

  • Van Till a Freethinker?

    With a hat tip to Dispatches from the Culture Wars, I’d like to call attention to the text of a speech given by Howard J. Van Till (The Fourth Day) to the Freethought Association of West Michigan. Van Till’s work on evolution in general and intelligent design in particular is amongst my favorite reading, and he provides some excellent insights into working with truth, and our view of what truth is, in the context of a religious institution.

    While I experienced some hostility as a graduate student in a Seventh-day Adventist institution, I never experienced this degree of hostility, but I did reject the idea of signing a doctrinal statement in order to be able to teach. That was one of the things that led me away from even seriously seeking work in an Adventist institution. Now as a member of the United Methodist Church, I often actually seem quite conservative.

    Readers who come from my current side of the aisle–mainstream Christianity outside the Calvinist or Catholic traditions–may find it hard to empathize with Van Till. Calvinism tends to be much more creedal, and thus to be much more explicit.

    But I am no less subject to having an ODoR (operational description of reality) than anyone else, and often being less explicit about it simply makes it harder to examine, rather than meaning that one is actually more open minded. I think Van Till has again provided some excellent insight into the nature of the controversy over creation and evolution, and the relationship of science and religion.

  • Paying for Education: Class Size

    In 2002 Florida voters approved an amendment ordering the state to reduce class size. As with so many such amendments, the state was left to look for a way to provide the teachers and pay them. The story in my home county, Escambia, and in neighboring Santa Rosa county is in today’s Pensacola News-Journal. In a fit of journalistic optimism, it’s titled New teachers filling void, but the bottom line is that the local schools have a bit of a problem filling the necessary teaching slots with qualified people.

    Some of the available solutions are good, such as providing an accelerated pathway for people with degrees, but who are not certified in education. But a great deal will have to be done to fill these classrooms with teachers who will help prepare our young people to be productive citizens.

    And that puts the burden back on the voters. Will we pay for this? It’s a good thing; we voted to mandate it. Will we be as responsible when we find out that smaller classes cost more money?

    I’m firmly convinced that the results will be worth it.

  • Honoring God with your Mind

    I’m going to write today about a neglected part of God’s creation–the human mind. It is a wonderful element of creation, one that has provoked some of the most profound philosophical and scientific writing. No, I don’t mean merely that people think with their minds and then write philosophy and science. I’m referring to writing about how the mind evolved, how it functions, what consciousness actually is, and why the mind malfunctions from time to time. Those are all interesting topics.

    My topic, however, is how Christians can choose to honor God with their minds, and why they should. (I’m addressing Christians because that’s my own faith group, not to imply that other people cannot honor God with their minds.) Sometimes it seems that every element of our faith is used against the human mind instead of in cooperation with it.

    1. Our saving faith is sometimes seen as a termination of our ethical decision making
    2. Dependence on God is often seen as dependence on him solely in a supernatural sense, what God can do for you miraculously, but not in the natural sense
    3. The inspiration of the scriptures is seen as bypassing the people involved, whether, prophets, secretaries, or readers
    4. The church offices, especially those of teacher and prophet, are seen as bypassing good thinking
    5. Laziness replaces the hard work of good thinking, as when we accept something just because we saw it in a book, and it was written by someone holy
    6. An appearance of piety can replace wisdom. When someone announces–“God said it, I believe it, that settles it!”–without being certain that God says it, that bypasses the human mind.

    It would seem that simply from observation and logic we could discover that God wants us to use our minds. He provided them. They are necessary to our survival. Even if we didn’t have scriptural statements to confirm this, it is pretty obvious from nature. But we do, in fact, have scriptural confirmation.

    How long, simple-minded folks, will you love being simple?
    How long will scoffers delight in scoffing?
    And fools hate knowledge? — Proverbs 1:22

    Now I could spend my time listing texts that back this up further, texts that talk about thinking, wisdom, using our minds, and our choice. They are a strong theme in scripture. But I’m going to assume you either know or can find the texts. I’d just like to call your attention to two texts. The first is from the words of Jesus.

    15Watch out for false prophets, who come to you dressed like sheep, but inside they are ravenous wolves. 16It’s by their fruit that you’ll recognize them. 17People don’t gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles, do they? 18A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. 19That’s why you will recognize them by their fruit. — Matthew 7:15-19

    This is a sentiment that Paul repeats in Galatians:

    7Don’t be deceived! God won’t be mocked! Whatever a person plants is what he’ll harvest! — Galatians 6:7

    These two texts make it clear that God has not abrogated the law of cause and effect in his kingdom. The law of cause and effect is one that is basic to human thinking. It’s clear that God wants you to think about the consequences of your own actions, not to mention the words and actions of others. What people think, what they say, and what they do does have consequences. (I discuss choice and the kingdom in the pamphlet Seven Kingdom Principles of Choice, and its relationship to salvation in my essay A Fruitful Faith. I believe that the twin principles of choice and fruit operate throughout the kingdom of God.)

    So how can one honor God with one’s mind? Primarily by using it!

    Our saving faith is sometimes seen as a termination of our ethical decision making

    Some may have wondered about this first point in my list of excuses above. Aren’t we saved by grace? Are we not to accept salvation as a gift? Indeed we are. But Paul noted the same problem I’m noting. My point is certainly not original with me–it’s Biblical! Paul uses most of Galatians 5 and the first several verses of Galatians 6 dealing with the possibility that some would take their salvation as permission to sin. He makes it clear that’s the point. I think the best antidote to this type of thinking is for us not to think of salvation merely as a ticket to heaven, but as spiritual healing. When we think of it like that, we might find the question rather silly. If the doctor provides you with a cure for your disease, and does not charge you (a true miracle, I know), you have received the free gift of healing. But if you go home and say, “I want the disease, I’m going to get it back,” you may well be able to make yourself sick again. You can’t then complain to the doctor that his free gift failed. You set his gift aside.

    Christians sometimes depend on Jesus to save them from sin, while at the same time they indulge themselves in destructive behavior. I’ve been working on a paraphrase or representation of the story of Susanna (Daniel 13, from the apocrypha) for my literature and fiction blog, The Jevlir Caravansary. Update: The article is now completed, Susanna: A Transformation. What struck me as I read that story is that the elders who falsely accuse Susanna do everything possible to lead themselves into sin and eventual destruction. They dwell on their temptation. They hide the fact that they are being tempted. They get as close to sin as they can. When eventually they are caught, everything that follows is inevitable. Christians are often like that. “Why won’t God free me from my addictions?” someone asks, at the same time sitting with the object of his addiction readily available. Grace opens the door, grace makes it all possible, but no number of gifts will make you rich if you throw them all away.

    Dependence on God is often seen as dependence on him solely in a supernatural sense, what God can do for you miraculously, but not in the natural sense

    In my second point I mention depending on God only supernaturally. The problem here is that Christians take actions that will bear one form of fruit while expecting God’s supernatural intervention to produce other results. I am not denying miracles, or asking anyone not to pray for them. I pray for God’s power and God’s action myself. But I also know from scripture that God normally folllows the simple law of planting and harvesting, or as Jesus said, of bearing fruit.

    God’s supernatural power is not there to provide you with a license to ignore God’s laws, whether moral or natural laws written in the fabric of the universe.

    The inspiration of the scriptures is seen as bypassing the people involved, whether, prophets, secretaries, or readers

    This laziness is generally manifested when people simply use “God said” for anything in the Bible. There are portions of the Bible that are identified as the words of God, but there are also large portions which are not. I have even heard Job’s friends quoted as what “God said,” and they are soundly condemned by God right in scripture. It takes more work to find out what God is doing when he acts in history or in our own lives than it is simply to find a phrase that says what we want it to, and then to quote it, but it also means that very often we are ignoring what God actually meant, while taking on the appearance of affirming his word.

    The church offices, especially those of teacher and prophet, are seen as bypassing good thinking

    God put prophets and teachers in the church for a purpose–to help bring his word to the people. I’m going to be brief about this, but it’s very important! Please think about it! Now that we can all enter the sanctuary with confidence (Hebrews 10:19), we have as our goal getting everyone to approach God for themselves. The goal is not to teach people to accept what we, as teachers, prophets, or leaders, say, but rather to get them to think for themselves, and to listen to God for themselves.

    For the individual, the goal is to approach God individually, and not to depend on the teacher, preacher, or even prophet. It may be harder, but it’s the right goal.

    Laziness replaces the hard work of good thinking, as when we accept something just because we saw it in a book, and it was written by someone holy

    This is the printed version of the previous point. Some people think that just because it’s in a book it must be true. Many who know that one can’t trust it just because it’s in print, will trust it because it’s in print written by someone well known. But I have a secret (not really!) to tell you. There are plenty of Christian books in print that contain misinformation. I’m not talking about differences of opinion–I’m talking about things that people from many different perspectives could agree were just factually wrong. I find, for example, that a distressingly large number of “insights” brought from Greek or Hebrew in popular books are simply wrong, while many others are at least misleading because they don’t have the proper context.

    When you get information from a book, you need to check references, and then you need to assure yourself that the references themselves are reliable. There are some facts making the rounds in Christian books that have simply been quoted so many times that everyone “knows” they are right, but nobody knows precisely where those facts came from. You need to check back to a primary source–the person who actually observed and recorded the data in the first place–whenever possible.

    You are responsible for planting seeds in your mind. You are the one who is going to bear the fruit. You need to honor God with your mind by looking up the information.

    An appearance of piety can replace wisdom. When someone announces–“God said it, I believe it, that settles it!”–without being certain that God says it, that bypasses the human mind.

    It’s easy to dishonor God while sounding extremely pious. I cannot count the number of times I have heard someone say, “I’m just doing what the Bible says,” or “That is just God’s word!” when they are not, in fact, correctly quoting the material or are taking it badly out of context. (For some help with context, see my essay Understanding Context.) What God says for a specific situation should settle it, but what God says and what people say God says may well be two very different things.

    Always remember: You will harvest what you plant, and you are the one who chooses what to plant!

  • Creation and Evolution Summer Camps

    Summer camps to indoctrinate children on creationism? Look at this article: Beliefwatch: Camping.

    I certainly have no objection to churches teaching their beliefs at summer camp, and I congratulate the Unitarian-Universalist church on having a camp on discoveries in science. What I sincerely wish we would see would be a Christian camp that would teach about the variety of views of God’s creation that are held by Christians. This could be a unity building event, letting children know that Christians disagree on how God created, but we all agree that God didcreate, and that he is the creator.

    Such classes could help ease the current atmosphere in which a Christian who is serious about his or her faith is often beaten back to the peripheries by misguided people who believe only creationists, or in some cases even young earth creationists are really Christians.

  • Arguing from Authority

    Jason Rosenhouse (EvolutionBlog) has blogged about the authority (or lack of it) of mathematicians commenting on evolutionary theory in a series of two posts. Start reading with the first one, Are Mathematicians Qualified to Discuss Evolution, Part One, and follow along from there.

    The reason I’m calling attention to this particular entry is that many people struggle with the issue of authority, especially in regard to complex areas of study. I’ve found that in church work people often ridicule the authority of people with advanced degrees, while at the same time coveting, and actually giving too much authority to people with such degrees. The many diploma mills that hand out doctoral degrees, especially in the area of Bible study and theology demonstrate the desire to put “doctor” in front of one’s name, or to have a pastor for one’s church who does.

    Rosenhouse makes an excellent and very clear statement:

    But that doesn’t mean that a mathematician (or any non-biologist) is therefore forever excluded from discussing biology. It means simply that their professional training gives them no authority for doing so. Whether you should accord any weight to their pronouncements depends entirely on the specific arguments they make in defense of their views.

    I think that statement is exceptionally clear, though some of the commenters seem to have ignored that point. My field is Biblical studies. I can comment all I want on evolution, and readers of this blog know that I do, but my comments need to be evaluated on the merits of the individual arguments. I hope that I get these comments right. None of them are original, and I can normally point you to the book by an appropriate expert, but I do lack authority in that field.

    Ordinary people have to deal with this type of issue all the time. If experts are in disagreement, how do you make a determination? How do you find your way through the evidence?

    One way, of course, is through authority. You find lists of people who support your particular position, and then you follow the crowd. And if you select people who actually are experts in that field, and find the consensus position of such experts, then you will likely not go too far wrong.

    What’s interesting in the case of evolutionary theory is that we are presented constantly with lists of authorities, and it is the minority who are primarily making the argument from authority. Further, they often confuse the areas of expertise involved, as Rosenhouse notes in his post. Any number can be made to look impressive if you create a context designed entirely for that number. (Note here that I’m a non-expert commenting on mathematics, even in a very simple form.) We see this daily in advertising. A car is advertised at a “savings of $3,000.” Another is advertised at the “low, low price of $14,995.” What is the actual savings, or value, of each vehicle? Those numbers need to be placed in context. In the grocery store you have items for $0.50 off, “buy one, get one free,” “4 for $3.00,” “20% off,” and so forth. Those numbers aren’t selected randomly. The person doing the pricing uses the number that appears most impressive.

    Thus the Discovery Institute can claim 600 scientists skeptical of evolution, but in order to evaluate that number, even assuming that one wants to use an argument from authority, one needs to know a number of things. What fields are these scientists qualified in? What percentage of the experts in that field does the number of signatories constitute? What precisely were they asked to indicate by their signature? Without those elements of context, the numbers themselves will be either meaningless or misleading.

    So as a non-expert, what do I recommend? Well, my own approach, after growing up as a young earth creationist, was to start where I did have expertise, in Genesis 1-11 and archeology. I soon discovered that the young earth position was untenable even without considering geology. It may seem strange to evolutionists who started understanding geology, but I really had no concept of the age of the earth when I first rejected creationism. I simply knew that based on material on which I was qualified to comment, the young earth position must be wrong. All I said at the time was that the earth must be substantially older than 10,000 years.

    Since I had read an abundance of creationist literature, I then started to read material from experts on evolution, emphasizing informational material. Roadside geology guides accompanied me on a number of trips in the west. As I would try to recognize formations, and would then compare what I saw with the guide, I quickly realized that this was not something I would become an expert on. So how did I evaluate it?

    Here are the major points:

    1. The real numbers-what is the expert consensus. For a non-expert to go against the consensus of experts should require a substantial body of evidence, generally gleaned from dissenting experts. For an expert, of course, what is needed is solid evidence and research.
    2. What do they say about things I do know? If they comment on a topic on which I can comment with some authority, and do so incorrectly, then I begin to question the entire work. I recall reading a work on archeology by a mathematician. Within the first few pages I realized he was proposing calculations based on a level of accuracy of measurement that was simply not possible. For example, measuring something that is a hundred meters or so in length, and whose length includes an estimated portion (thickness of the covering of a wall when the covering no longer exists), and then using the resulting figure accurate to 4 decimal places is odd, at best!
    3. How well do they represent the positions and arguments of opponents. I found that creationists in general did not decently restate the arguments of evolutionary scientists. In fact, the entire picture of evolutionary theory I learned while growing up was not an accurate representation of evolutionary theory. I tend to doubt the word of someone who misrepresents–intentionally or through ignorance–something that I can easily check.
    4. Track back everything as close to the source as you can. There are practical limits based on the libraries available, how serious your interest is, and your knowledge of the field, but it is valuable to get as close to the person who found and cataloged the data. When the story changes as you get closer to the source, you know there’s a problem.

    These are just a few suggestions.

    One final note. For those who are interested in specifically avoiding mathematical deception, try one of the following: How to Lie with Statistics or Damned Lies and Statistics. Both will help you untangle the way in which numbers can be used to deceive you.

  • Science and Religion – Can they be Allies?

    PZ Myers has responded to an interview with Ron Numbers in a post titled I’m proud to be non-human. His main point seems to be that those of us who favor evolution need to go all the way and stick totally with the scientific evidence.

    He says:

    There is a strong cultural aspect to this struggle that is independent of the facts, I won’t deny that. But calling the science “irrelevant” is throwing away the sharpest tool in our toolbox. We are going to win people to the side of science and reason by promoting, well, science and reason. Stop running away from it! Stop being ashamed of the fact that the evidence is on our side! We aren’t going to win by engaging in theological debates, or by getting the right legislation, or by winning court battles

  • Educating for Reality

    This is good stuff! Kudos to North Carolina, not because they have succeeded, but because they are trying in a number of innovative ways to solve actual problems that students are observed having. You always have to try before you can succeed. The Newsweek story is here: The Future is in Their Hands.

    The key here is that North Carolina educational authorities are looking at what their young people actually need in the workplace and organizing their education around that, rather than around some traditional idea of what they need. I think this could get much more radical, and do so to good effect. We need to look at the needs of the workplace and examine every element of the curriculum asking, “Is this helping us attain our goal?”

    Those who are planning for college can afford, and may even need some detours to round out their learning ability, but those who are going into technical jobs need specific skills.

    I hope more states and communities learn lessons from this.

    Note: Something much closer to my daily life is the education of pastors. I would love to see churches, especially the United Methodist Church, re-examine pastoral training in the light of what pastors actually do. For example, training in prayer/prayer ministry, practical advice from other pastors on working with administrative boards and staff-parish relations committees, perhaps a year working with an older, well-chosen pastor as opposed to more classroom time. These are just ideas–I’d just like to see the whole thing looked at. I have yet to work with a pastor in a parish who does not state that a good portion of his seminary training was not relevant to his work.