Day 81 of 1000
As many already know, Kelly and Christian take a “writing” class at the community college where the dear leader of the class lectures on the evils of all things Christian, the beauty of communism and atheism, and the righteousness of drug legalization and abortion. Today’s topic was Christianity. He said he spoke about Christianity because we live in Raleigh. He would have made his outrageous, silly arguments about Hindu if we lived in India. Kelly read up a little over at the Wintery Knight blog to prepare and got a nice response after she tweeted Mr. Wintery Knight himself.
The “good” professor went on for about a half an hour about the evil’s of the organized church, for which the kids would have had a great deal sympathy if it were not for the his smuggness and arrogance. Like all stories, that of the organized church has two sides. He mentioned nothing about universities, hospitals, scientific method, the printing press, and all the other great foundings and inventions inspired by Christianity.
At the point when he made the claim that Adam and Eve could not have existed because of the scientific evidence for evolution, Christian raised his hand and said, “There is just as much scientific evidence against macroevolution as there is for it.”
“You don’t believe in evolution!” exclaimed the professor incredulously with a look of disdain and horror.
“We DO believe in microevolution. It is grossly arrogant for you NOT to question your own beliefs when it comes to evolution” said Kelly. “That is what you are demanding from us.”
The professor said, “Evolution is established scientific fact” and used several of the standard canards (fossil record, etc.) to establish his point.
Then they were off to the races. Fortunately, during homeschool, Christian and Kelly had read books like The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success by Rodney Stark, Understanding Intelligent Design: Everything You Need to Know in Plain Language by William Dembski and Sean McDowell, Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions by Greg Koukl, and Intellectuals by Paul Johnson. The professor was armed with shibboleths about the truth of macroevolution and quotes from John Shelby Spong about the virgin birth. John Shelby Spong!?!! You have to be WILDLY out of touch with both current scholarship and reality if you quote John Shelby Spong about virtually anything. He quotes the losers like Noam Chomsky and Bertrand Russell, too.
It is frustrating. Here is a writing a professor who fervently believes he is making students question their beliefs through these profoundly silly arguments. The subject matter is objectionable, but this guy’s incompetence is even more objectionable. He does not appear to understand the difference between scientific method and historic method (very important in discussion of the resurrection). Neither does he understand that it is impossible to argue for the primacy of scientific method without consideration of its philosophical underpinings. I guess I should be grateful he is incompetent with respect to his arguments–he does nothing to get the kids to question their faith or worldview. Still, a lot of taxpayer money is wasted on professors like this throughout the land.
I pre-ordered William Dembski’s new book, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information a few weeks back and it arrived today. I am really looking forward to reading it but I am still only part way into John R. Pierce’s Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise. Christian convinced me to read the Pierce book so I could have a better background to understand the Dembski book. I love the quote that came on the “Thank you for your pre-order!” card. Part of it says:
