University of Minnesota professor comments on BJU home school science textbook

I’d have to see the page number and verify it to believe it.
There are some mysteries involved, but…. and I wonder what comes after the part he supposedly excerpted.

[Textbook] Electricity is a mystery. No one has ever observed it or heard it or felt it..

I have felt it. It hurts. I’m pretty sure I have seen it and heard it as well.
And I’m pretty sure they know where it comes from.

Sure hope this is a hoax. But if not, let’s all remember how often editors “jazz” things up against the will of the authors. No scientist wrote that article, creationist or evolutionist.

Glad I use Apologia.

I have felt it. It hurts.

I don’t know anything about this particular textbook, but isn’t the point that you can’t feel electricity like you can feel a piece of ice or a wool blanket? There’s no tactile sensation to it, is there? I imagine that is not that you can’t feel the effects of electricity in your body, but you can’t really reach out and touch it like you can a pet, or a pizza.

I’m pretty sure I have seen it

What did it look like?

[Larry]

I have felt it. It hurts.

I don’t know anything about this particular textbook, but isn’t the point that you can’t feel electricity like you can feel a piece of ice or a wool blanket? There’s no tactile sensation to it, is there? I imagine that is not that you can’t feel the effects of electricity in your body, but you can’t really reach out and touch it like you can a pet, or a pizza.

I’m pretty sure I have seen it

What did it look like?

When I was a young child, I pushed a table knife into an electrical outlet. I definitely felt electricity. Every time I see lightning, I see electricity.

I suspect that this is either a hoax or a science text that BJU Press published long, long ago.

It may be poorly written, but what I’d like to know is which edition and grade level is the textbook.

See comment 119

[Pilgrm777] The BJU Press textbook featured in the OP is an old edition. It was substantially revised in 2008, and the statements you all objected to were replaced by more empirical ideas that are consistent with the ability of any fourth-grader to understand electricity. I’m not apologizing for what was written in the earlier editions.

If you folks actually looked into how informed Christians understand science, you would realize that we view empirically-based science very much like secular people do (though for different philosophical reasons). These hypotheses can be tested in the here-and-now and have produced wonderful advances in beneficial technologies. Then there is historical science, where questions of origins are dealt with. This is where secular, naturalistic theories run up against what the Bible says. The inferences of historical science are directly based on the presuppositions of one’s worldview. It is not surprising that different interpretations result from Christian vis-a-vis atheistic, secular worldviews.

Now you can disparage the Bible all you want. That is your privilege and, frankly, it is nothing new and we are used to it. But just remember that, in spite of what you learned in public schools, there is no valid scientific method that can prove the age of the earth, the origin of the moon, the evolution of life or any other assertion of naturalistic scientism. The scientific data that is shoe-horned into evolutionary or neocatastrophism interpretations fits a biblical creationary interpretation far better. See Occam’s Razor.

I definitely felt electricity. Every time I see lightning, I see electricity.

Assuming your understanding of “feel” is correct, are you feeling electricity? Or the effects of electricity? And lightning is an electrical discharge, right? Are we seeing actual electricity? Or the discharge of it? I think, technically, there’s a difference isn’t there?

As I understand it, the category of “electricity” is pretty broad, and sometimes contradictory. Look up “electricity” and see the definitions in various places—both dictionary and technical. There are some interesting facets of this topic, and it’s a bit more complex than perhaps we might think at first.

I suppose my curiosities are a bit off topic of this post, however, so I will cease.

Maybe they could check out public school history texts while they’re at it.

http://www.textbookreviews.org/index.html?content=nl_11_02.htm

Durning’s point is worth emphasizing… there’s probably a text dept and an artwork department that writes “captions” for photos. So it may be a case of poor workflow… the science-trained folks not getting a good look at the photo captions. Just guessing, but seems like one likely scenario. (Or maybe the science editor just overlooked it when the graphics people passed it to him for review?)

Another point worth mentioning: I’ll bet inaccuracies of a much more important nature (ie worldview) occur in the books this critic would accept and in much larger numbers! (Not saying getting electricity right is unimportant but if you have to choose your errors, I’d take electrical confusion over “Who am I and how did I get here and why do I exist?” confusion any day)

[Rick Franklin] See comment 119

Thanks for that, Rick. Helpful… but wow, you made it through 119 posts in that thread? You must have an amazing frustration threshold!

[Aaron Blumer]
Thanks for that, Rick. Helpful… but wow, you made it through 119 posts in that thread? You must have an amazing frustration threshold!

Didn’t actually read through to #119—was scanning/skimming somewhere beyond it, saw some quoted text and found my way back up to it.

Early on Tuesday, BJU grad-turned-PhD Microbiologist has posted an even more thorough response at Comment #287:

[BJUMicroPhD]
A little bit of very critical information is missing from this. First of all, what is the title of the textbook? What is the page number of this paragraph? What is the context of the information? What is the grade level to which it is written?

It’s clear that this is written to young children and is not intended to be a in depth analysis of what is known about electricity. The point that it makes, however, is very valid: we really don’t know all that much about electricity. We FEEL like we know a lot compared to our ancestors, but in the big picture we really don’t.

I am a graduate of the BJU science department and completed my MS and PhD in Microbiology at a large southeastern university. I am now a postdoctoral fellow at a medical school as an immunologist. While I’m not a physicist and can’t speak to the details of electricity with great knowledge, I can speak about Immunology and Cell Biology. We know a good bit about the cell. We’ve uncovered countless molecules and pathways and have answered a great number of questions. However, as I am frequently reminded when doing literature searches in PubMed, we really don’t know much at all. In fact, that was one overarching theme that I encountered time and time again at the recent American Society of Immunologists meeting in Baltimore: we’ve learned a good bit, but we’ve barely even uncovered the tip of the iceberg. I spoke with a non-Christian cell biologist recently and he echoed those sentiments, that in spite of everything we’ve learned about the cell, we really don’t know what’s going on. His exact words were: we don’t know anything. It is a very naive person who feels like we know a lot (and a person who hasn’t studied much science). One of the oldest rules in studying science is that when you answer one question, you uncover 100 other questions. We can talk A LOT about the little bit we do know and we can trick ourselves into thinking we’ve got it all quite figured out…as long as we neatly avoid the innumerable molecules and pathways that we don’t have a clue about. Immunology is an even bigger mess. I wouldn’t presume to think that the realm of Physics is any less complex than that of Immunology or Cell Biology.

This is a very sad, lame and weak attack by someone who clearly has an axe to grind with God, Christianity, creationism/ists, or BJU (or all of the above). If you can’t distinguish between what might be written about electricity in an elementary school book and what is taught at the university level, then you probably aren’t that bright to begin with. Further, I can assure you that I could pick up any science textbook written to a comparable age level and present the material as absurdity.

In any event, I’ll do you one better. “An Introduction to Genetic Analysis” by Griffiths et al is a very commonly used, secular, college level textbook. On page 472 in chapter 15 (7th edition), which discusses genetic mutations the authors make the following quote: “Because mutation events introduce random genetic changes, most of the time they result in loss of function. The mutation events are like bullets being fired at a complex machine; most of the time they will inactivate it. However, it is conceivable that in rare cases a bullet will strike the machine in such a way that it produces some new function.” Keep in mind that the authors are/were professors at the University of British Columbia, UCLA and Harvard. This is an absurd statement in every way imaginable and even if I were an evolutionist, I would blush with embarassment. This is what some of the best scientists have to say about the role of mutations in evolution??? If I had the time and desire, I could dig out my copies of “Molecular Biology of the Cell” by Bruce Alberts et al and give similarly absurd statements.

Unlike the authors in the quote I cited in the above paragraph, the authors of the elementary textbook published by BJU are not even attempting to explain electricity. You are trying to use it in that way, but it’s clearly not what the text was being written for. They merely use electricity to reveal the complexity of nature and demonstrate how little we really know about the world around us. The reality is they could have used countless examples from every scientific discipline. Griffiths et al, however, are attempting to describe to a college level audience the complexities of mutations and how they might contribute to evolution. And the above quote is the best they could muster. Pretty sad if you ask me.

Evolutionists (and the University of Minnesota, Morris) must really be scraping the bottom of the barrel these days.

[Larry]

I definitely felt electricity…

Assuming your understanding of “feel” is correct, are you feeling electricity? Or the effects of electricity?

Larry, I don’t know if you know this, but I am blind. I can’t see a thing.

Sometimes, though, photons enter my eye. They tickle rods and cones, which cause my optic nerve to signal my brain, which interprets the tickling sensation and converts it into images in my brain. But I don’t know that what I see in my brain is anything like the images you seeing folks perceive. ;)