In other words, if we really want to live in a pluralistic society, we have to respect others’ desire to raise their children, even if we think that their parents are teaching them harmful or absurd viewpoints. Note: I am not condoning child abuse. However, there is a wide range of beliefs that parents attempt to pass on to their children and school can be part of that transfer of beliefs. Will is saying, I think, that no one should be surprised if one group complains that the political processes governing part of the values transfer process (school) favor one group’s views over another. And, further, that a good way to eliminate some of the tension among different groups is to depoliticize the process governing schooling by allowing parents to choose schools where their values are taught.

For example, since Charles Lyell first promoted Uniformitarianism in Geology, geologists were expected to hold to a rigid version of Uniformitarianism with only very little to no Catastrophism… and geologists who strayed from this path (even a little bit) didn’t have a chance of a successful career in Geology… they were scoffed at and made fun of.

However, now that the evidence clearly shows that large-scale past catastrophic geological events did occur and had tremendous impacts on the physical makeup of the planet… (we know this for sure due to more advanced technology available today) …suddenly, having a mixture of Uniformitarianism and Catastrophism is in “vogue”!

This leads to questions… what does that tell us about the state of science in the 19th, 20th, & 21st century? Also, if geologists merely 60, 40, and even 10 or 20 years ago had the “right” beliefs (about there being a mixture), but suppressed them or were persecuted for them because these beliefs were “assumed” to be wrong at that time (due to the scientific community being “hell bent” on not giving an inch to the creationists)… how can we be so sure that more of this is not going on today?

..and it is…

As I said earlier, I can cite examples where college science professors were fired just for bringing up examples of the kind of problems with Evolution that I’ve mentioned… and they were not trying to promote creationism… they were just trying to tackle these issues!

Finally, from time to time, a leading Evolutionists scientist will “spill the beans” and explain some of these problems.

Michael Denton’s book “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis” was a “watershed” book. Denton is NOT at all a creationist. I’m fairly sure that he is an atheist. More recently, he wrote additional book(s) where he speculates on some pretty wild and unconventional theories which are at odds with BOTH creationism and Neo-Darwinism… he seems to have since “gone off the deep end”… but, to his credit, at least he is honest enough to try his best to find a way for naturalism to work without doing the things that Neo-Darwinists do where they sweep impossibilities under the rug… you see, at least Denton is intellectually honest about it. (can’t say the same for Darwinists).

Also, consider the following quotes from Stephen Jay Gould, professor of Geology and Zoology at Harvard University. (deceased in 2002) Gould was one of the few Evolutionist willing to talk candidly about these problems:

“Indeed, it is the chief frustration of the fossil record that we do not have empirical evidence for sustained trends in the evolution of most complex morphological adaptations.”
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“But how do you get from nothing to such an elaborate something if evolution must proceed through a long sequence of intermediate stages, each favored by natural selection? You can’t fly with 2% of a wing or gain much protection from an iota’s similarity with a potentially concealing piece of vegetation. How, in other words, can natural selection explain these incipient stages of structures that can only be used (as we now observe them) in much more elaborated form?”
(this point is now championed by Michael Behe in his book, “Darwin’s Black Box”)
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…and most devistating of all because this is exactly what would be expected from the evidence left behind by Creationism:

The history of most fossil species include two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:

2) Sudden appearance – in any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed’.
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Let me ask you, do you now consider Gould a religious fanatic?

Does Gould’s tenure as professor of Geology and Zoology at Harvard University make Gould not credible? …or were you expecting a professor from a small private Christian community college?

This is a two way street.

A number of years ago, the renowned biologist (and evolutionist), Sir Julian Huxley (bio), grandson of Thomas Huxley (btw, also the brother of Aldus Huxley, the author of “Brave New World”) made an interesting comment to an interviewer on a British television program. When asked why the scientific community quickly embraced evolution, Julian Huxley responded:

“I suppose the reason we leaped at The Origin of the Species, was because the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores.”

Basically, this is a common theme. Over time, there have been literally millions of college students who loved hearing that “God was dead” via Evolution. If there is not God, there are no absolutes and no eternal accountability to a Creator. Therefore, we set our own morals and we do whatever we please. I have heard such testimony and/or sentiments time and time again, both from converts to Christianity and from still-atheists (who were still delighted with their “freedom”).

But… you might be thinking, “how dare Rob try to tell us how/why/what our motivations for believing Evolution”… “Rob doesn’t know what we have learned that let us to that belief”… exactly… and likewise regarding your views about my views… no one here knows much about my religious belief or about how I discovered that Evolution was impossible.

Now, can we get back to science (for once) and off these “red herring” arguments?

And speaking of fitting science to one’s ideology… there were a series of conferences starting in the 60s and in the early 80s where the “math” and statistical models of Neo-Darwinism were discussed. These started with the 1966 Wistar Institute. Basically, during these conferences, (non-religious, BTW) statisticians and mathematicians saw that Evolution was impossible… but the biologists, paleontologists, ect. stuck to their beliefs in spite of the scientific evidence

Check out the articles present by this Google search. For example, this one.

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/thuxley.html

Listen… I know that all of your Eugenics talk was kidding around… but the parallels were too striking to let that go… and ya’ll did start sounding a lot like the “progressives” that are on display in Dostorevsky novels. They were all so excited about social engineering via the State… and these were obviously conversations that mirrored real conversations that Fyodor Dostorevsky had with real life “progressives” in his day and time… just a few years before Communistism destroyed their country.