This is in my building. I'm going. Email me if you want to meet for dinner before it starts. (That includes you, Denyse. I'm buying!)Brian Alters
Dan Brooks
This is in my building. I'm going. Email me if you want to meet for dinner before it starts. (That includes you, Denyse. I'm buying!)
9 comments :
Dr. Moran, is it pay @ the door? :O
I don't know. I'm expecting to pay at the door but if I find out differently I'll post the information.
You can buy tickets at the Center for Inquiry Ontario on Beverly St.
You can also buy tickets online via Paypal or credit card, at cfiontario.org or secularalliance.ca.
I'm going. I'm covering it for The Varsity. Watch for the article in Monday's edition under science. It'll be craptacular! =D
-Bob
Having heard Alters talk last night, I'm very much looking forward to seeing how you cover it—especially the half hour spent on attacking the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Were you at the reception before the lecture to hear our discussion of this topic?
Alters and Brooks both said we (i.e., Americans) are winning the war against Creationism because the good guys were victorious in all the court cases since Arkansas in 1982. Do you believe them?
If what we're seeing in America today is "victory" then I can't imagine what defeat must look like. The number of Americans who reject evolution hasn't changed in forty years.
In Canada, the American court decisions are completely irrelevant because we allow the teaching of religion in tax-supported schools. You can't keep Intelligent Design out of the Roman Catholic school system, for example, on the grounds that it's unconstitutional because it isn't.
If you were to believe Alters and Brooks this would imply that the issue of Intelligent Design should be much more serious in Canada than it is in the USA. This is because the door to our schools is wide open and Canadian lawyers can't block the teaching of religion. Is the problem more serious in Canada?
Yeah, but edumacation standards are set by the Ontario government, instead of local county school boards overflowing with evangelical christians. At any rate, kids in the Roman Catholic system should learn evolution the same as any other high-school student. Plus, teachers in the Roman Catholic system don't have to be Roman Catholic, nor do the students, so I sincerely doubt ID will get a foothold in Ontario.
Oh no. Pressure. I'm going to crack. XD
But I'm really not going to have the luxury to write an overly opinionated article on it. My editor gave me 600 words. And as of right now, I'm still having trouble cramming in the main points of the lecture, some provoking quotes and all the while making it interesting.
Sorry, I can't really give you an extended editorial. It will simply be a coverage, with a touch of my own bias of course. =)
-Bob
Dunbar says,
... I sincerely doubt ID will get a foothold in Ontario.
I agree with you in the sense of Intelligent Design Creationism of the sort advocated by Jonathan Wells and Bill Dembksi. Those versions are really anti-evolution screeds and not true theological positions.
However, and this is where I think Alters is making a mistake, in Canada the term "intelligent design" doesn't carry the same baggage. I've heard many Canadians talk favourably about intelligent design as though it meant the same as "theistic evolution."
They think, for example, that you can easily accept evolution but believe in an intelligent designer like the god of the Roman Catholics—the gods of Francis Collins and Ken Miller.
That's one reason why some Canadians don't see a real conflict between evolution and their version of intelligent design and it explains—in my opinion—the position of SSHRC in the Alters altercation.
Alters applied for a grant to show how the spread of intelligent design in Canada was harming the teaching of evolution. If you think of intelligent design as the standard position of those teachers who teach evolution in Roman Catholic schools, then the premise (intelligent design is hurting science) looks very strange to many Canadians. His grant was rejected, in part, because he didn't adequately explain his premise.
I think a good part of the Alters altercation is due to the fact that he (Alters) didn't understand that his Canadian audience was different than his American audience.
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