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"Sometime between April 16 and 23, 1957, Armageddon will sweep the world! Millions of persons will perish in its flames and the land will be scorched."
-- The Watchtower magazine
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News: Baylor: Darwin challenged, research censored
Posted on Thursday, October 04 @ 08:51:09 PDT by Virgil |
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Baylor University Professor Bob Marks, whose research could be the foundation for a major challenge to Darwin's theory of evolution, is at odds with his historically Christian employer, which ordered that his work be taken off the Internet.
Maybe it's because for so many years the logical alternative to evolution, which is grounded on principles such as random selection and survival of the fittest, has been disregarded and ridiculed by the scientific community. And intelligent design, as it is called, presumes the existence of an outside intelligence influencing life, according to a critic of the university.
Walt Ruloff, the executive producer of Premise Media, who worked with actor Ben Stein on a new project called "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," about the monopoly Darwinian beliefs hold in academia, wrote in the Baylor student newspaper about his concerns.
"As many of you have heard, Marks, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been conducting research that ultimately may challenge the foundation of Darwinian theory. In layman's terms, Marks is using highly sophisticated mathematical and computational techniques to determine if there are limits to what natural selection can do," he wrote. "At Baylor, a Christian institution, this should be pretty unremarkable stuff. I'm assuming most of the faculty, students and alumni believe in God, so wouldn't it also be safe to assume you have no problem with a professor trying to scientifically quantify the limits of a blind, undirected cause of the origin and subsequent history of life?
Click here to read the entire article
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Re: Baylor: Darwin challenged, research censored (Score: 1)
 by tom-g on Saturday, October 06 @ 10:44:46 PDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | Oh, naive man that I am, who can deliver me from this body of naivete? so then I thank the laws of private ownership and control of property; that with my scarce limited funds I serve my own personal subjectively determined ends and with the control of my employees and how my funds are to be utilized through their income I subjectively determine how my personal goals may be attained.
Needless to say, I completely support the management of Baylor in their authority in this situation.
regards,
Tom |
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Re: Baylor: Darwin challenged, research censored (Score: 1)
 by Ransom on Thursday, October 04 @ 19:23:00 PDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | Substitute hollow earth theory for "intelligent design", and Baylor doesn't look quite to insidious. Imagine an electrical engineer spreading his research that suggests that man did not walk on the moon.
Schools have the right and duty to protect their academic credibility, and there are positions that no school wants to be associated with. ID is on the fringe and, as Dr. Evans stated, is closely associated with "creation science" (as it should be). |
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- by Starlight on Thursday, October 04 @ 20:00:25 PDT
- by Ransom on Thursday, October 04 @ 20:08:40 PDT
- by EWMI on Thursday, October 04 @ 20:00:33 PDT
- by Ransom on Thursday, October 04 @ 20:04:33 PDT
- by EWMI on Thursday, October 04 @ 20:08:59 PDT
- by Ransom on Thursday, October 04 @ 20:16:00 PDT
- by EWMI on Thursday, October 04 @ 20:37:58 PDT
- by Ransom on Thursday, October 04 @ 20:41:54 PDT
- by davo on Friday, October 05 @ 00:45:42 PDT
- by Ransom on Friday, October 05 @ 04:06:35 PDT
- by davo on Friday, October 05 @ 22:29:46 PDT
Re: Baylor: Darwin challenged, research censored (Score: 1)
by Islamaphobe on Thursday, October 04 @ 19:01:30 PDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | I believe that Marks was one of the FEW Baylor faculty members who sided with William Dembski in the ill-fated Michael Polanyi Center affair, which former Baylor president Robert Sloan set up for the purpose of supporting scholarship on intelligent design. As I recall, the faculty senate voted 27 to 2 against the Sloan's proposal. Dembski did come to Baylor, but the atmosphere there proved quite hostile to him. Part of the hostility had to do with the faculty's dislike of Sloan, but MANY members of the faculty opposed having a center devoted to intelligent design because they did not consider it to be science. These professors were defenders of methodological naturalism, which rules intelligent design out of bounds by assumption. For most of them, intelligent design appears to be nothing more than a smokescreen for "creationism," which they assume to be so stupid that it does not need to be taken seriously. They are the left's equivalent of the "fundamentalists" in Tennessee who got the legislation passed that brought on the Stokes trial, only they have the media on their side. Dembski, whose father was a biology professor, was raised a Catholic and is, I believe, a practicing Baptist.
I spent forty years as a professor at state universities and had only a limited acquaintance with professors who taught at universities sponsored by evangelical Protestant churches. In my limited contacts with those professors, however, I was surprised at the extent to which they were anxious to AVOID being identified as endorsing "fundamentalism." Some of them were quite anxious to show their colleagues at secular schools that they were NOT religious conservatives. Within academia in general, there is enormous pressure to conform to a world view that does not take the Bible very seriously and excludes God as an active participant in human affairs, and that pressure definitely extends to "Christian" universities. There are exceptions, and those exceptions are gaining students.
John S. Evans
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Re: Baylor: Darwin challenged, research censored (Score: 1)
by Starlight on Thursday, October 04 @ 12:41:38 PDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | Virgil,
Thanks for posting this article. I have invested much money in Baylor University as my daughter is an alumnus receiving her undergraduate Pre Law degree there. While there she sat at the feet of some Professors who would make evangelicals unhappy, especially in some of her higher biblical studies classes. I was generally pleased with these professors as my daughter was able to explore subjects in a scholarly manner without having the evangelical dogma attached to them.
I do know that Baylor has made a concerted effort to move more into a higher academic arena and in doing so it is sad to see that they are now allowing the secular naturalist influences them more than ever. Historically Baylor has had to fight with fundamentalist over academic control but now they seem to be in bed with the secularist. I guess it’s time for my daughter and I to write a letter to someone.
Having said that I actually do not personally know how accurate this professor’s work is and that could be at the root cause of some of the concern. I believe though that his thesis is correct that pure naturalistic evolution does not have supporting mathematical statistical evidence on its side. When scientist apply statistical models to the Cambrian explosion which occurred nearly 500 million years ago they start having to come up with new methods to explain how such sudden appearance could have happened. There just doesn’t appear to be enough time to have allowed this diversity to occur. This is why Stephen J. Gould got into hot water with the hyper biologist Richard Dawkins when he presented his Punctuated equilibrium theory to explain these sudden evolutionary explosions.
Dawkins is akin to Ken Ham in that he demonizes all theories that may give comfort to an intelligent design theory. Therefore we have the same dynamics occurring within the secular biological community that we have at work in the religious community. It’s never 100% about freedom to discover and seeking truth were ever it may be found and learning to live with the realities but it’s about protecting the status quo for the times. The protected status quo is found within the science community as well as the religious community. It’s just strange to see a religious institution make such a quick move from one extreme to the other.
Norm
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