Need help with my weekly discussion posting. Please review attachment
Need help with my weekly discussion posting. Please review attachment
and answer in detail after reading the article. This is not an essay but I need help answering the questioms.Please REFERENCE all answers in APA format
Talking Point: Evolution and CreationismQuestions (to answer after reading the articlesbelow):1.Where do you stand on the issues described?2.What should we be teaching in our schools?3.What were your experiences in high school?4.Do you know what the educational policy is inyour home state?( CA or Alabama)5.In the DoD schools?6.What are your children being taught aboutevolution?__________________________________________________________Talking Point: Evolution and Creationism (Part 1 of 2)Author:Peter BowenWhat follows is in the first chapter from Niles Eldredge’s most recent book,The Triumph ofEvolution (and the Failure of Creationism)(W.H. Freeman and Company, 2000). Eldredge is acurator in the Department of Invertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of NaturalHistory, and best known in biological circles for his proposal (with the late Stephen Jay Gould)of the evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium.*****In the Beginning:Religion, Science.… and PoliticsThat the United States and the rest of the modern world are fundamentally a secular,technologically based society (albeit one generally committed to the free and unfettered practiceof religion) is nicely brought out by the Y2Kdoomsday myth so widely adopted as weapproached the recent millennial date: January 1, 2000. The dark scenario of widespreadshortages and other societal malfunctions born of computer glitches, after all, was universallyseen as delivered not by a vengeful, wrathful God, but rather by us humans.
Early programmers had assumed (if they thought about it all) that their shorthand, two-digitsystem of keeping track of yearly dates would long since have changed by the year 2000. Insharp contrast, previous millennial myths saw doom and destruction as God’s payback for oursins – still our fault, of course, but with punishment meted out by God, not by errant machines.Likewise, we thanked the techno-fixers – not a merciful God – that the worst of the Y2K problemwas handily cut off at the pass. That we were able to blame computer programmers, and not God,for what seemed to so many as impending doom and still manage to concoct a millennialscenario of darkest catastrophe just as all our forebears crossing the previous millennial dividedid, shows us how far we have – and haven’t – come.But if the doomsday scenario this time was completely secularized, nonetheless the advent of theMillennium has intensified contact between science and religion – much of it in the spirit ofconciliation, though some of it with continued mistrust and hostility. Currently more than severalhundred college courses specifically address “science and religion.” The Templeton Foundationannually awards a sum in excess of that carried by a Nobel Prize in recognition of thefurtherance of closer ties between science and religion. In 1999, for example, the award was$1.24 million compared to the more modest $978,000 handed out by the Nobel Committee in1998 (though in fairness it must be said that there is only one Templeton Prize, whereas there areseveral Nobel Prizes). Numerous colloquia on science and religion have been held – somesponsored by religious institutions, such as the Vatican, and some by decidedly secularinstitutions, such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Television showsand, of course, many books and articles have been in full cry as well.I see several distinct ways in which science and religion are variously engaged either inpotentially fruitful dialogue, or at daggers drawn or simply as ships passing in the night. Thelatter relationship is simply stated: in most nations – technologically advanced or impoverished,agrarian Third World alike – there is little day-to-day contact between the realms of science andreligion. That is as true of the United States as it is of most of the nations of Europe, SouthAmerica, Asia, and Africa. In countries where forms of Christianity predominate, for example,the overwhelming mainstream has, for well over a century, viewed the relation of science andreligion as essentially neutral: each constitutes an important sector of society, but each does avastly different job.From this perspective, the role of religion is spiritual, moral, and social. Science, on the otherhand, is there to discover the workings of the universe – and to lead to technological advance.This is why so many scientists (such as my friend and colleague, paleontologist Stephen JayGould) advocate a polite going of separate ways – a sort of benign acknowledgment that eachexists, but can and should have little to do with one another. That is the general stance that Imyself have adopted in my earlier works on creationism in American society – a sort of“rendering unto Caesar” division of labor that would minimize conflict but at the same time notlook for any particular dose resonance between the two domains.But others insist that there is either resonance – or inherent conflict between the domains ofscience and religion. I believe my colleague Margaret Wertheim is right when she says that, inWestern culture, historically speaking, the supposed warfare between science and religion hasbeen greatly exaggerated. Indeed, most of the formative figures in the emergence of modernscience were deeply religious and thought (as Wertheim has observed) that they were discoveringthe “mind of God” every bit as much as some modem physicists appear to think they are. Yet it isundoubtedly true that with the Darwinian revolution of the mid-nineteenth century – with thecertain knowledge gained by some newer branches of science that the Earth is very old, has had a
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