Monday, December 10, 2007

Christian biologist fired for beliefs

Here's an interesting article that is getting some pub recently. Might I point out that it seems as if the subject of the article is a fellow mallu. Not sure how I feel about a $500k suit (including pain and suffering for unfair firing), but it's actually a fascinating case. Should a scientist who refuses to accept a theory, be fired? Or...is this a case of making a mountain out of a molehill?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071210/od_nm/evolution_lawsuit_dc

2 comments:

Joe V. said...

... not to mention the tragedy of all those poor zebrafish who will never know their true parents!

Anonymous said...

Yes. He should be fired. Here are my points.

1) In terms of scientific wording, evolution is technically a "theory" but that's only because science is overly cautious. In terms of laymen, evolution is practically a law of science with plenty of scientific evidence backing it up. It's a matter of semantics. Dismissing evolution as just a theory is inaccurate. The word "theory" in a scienctific context is equivalent to "tenet" or "law" outside of scientific context. The word "theory" outside of science is equivalent to the word "conjecture" or "belief". This is where the error lies; confusing a non-scientific meaning of the word "theory" for the scientific meaning of the word.

2. As a person who knowingly went into an area of science dependent on the 'theory' errr i mean law of evolution, he should have known that he would be assumed to work accordingly; and basing his work on evolution would be a neccessity.

3. Our Malankara Orthodox church is not a creationist/literalist church. This is typical of evangelical, protestant "Bible-worshipping" churches who take all parts of the bible as literal/historical/scientific facts. This is not the belief of our church. We do not have a problem with science. We acknowledge that some parts of the Bible are metaphorical and inconsistencies/contradictions within the Bible are due to the weak human authors. We believe the bible is divinely inspired but not written by God himself. The Bible is a spiritual textbook, not a scientific or historical one. Ask any Achan and he will tell you that the bible was created by the Church for the Church. We do not worship the literal Bible, we worship God.