Howard

In South Carolina, as is true in many US states, there is an ongoing battle to include some form of creationism in the public school curriculum. Given the highly conservative and religious nature of the majority of South Carolinians, there is a good possibility that this will one day come to pass.

To help prevent such an educational tragedy, I have been working very hard to get our local secular humanist group, which is both sizeable and active, involved in the debate. However, after bringing up the subject up at a recent meeting, I was very discouraged by the lack of knowledge of our members, most of whom have college degrees

The questions I asked the group (of about twenty five or so) were:
Do you know that evolution is both a body of facts and a theory that explains the facts? No one did.
Do you know what the facts and the theory of evolution are? Several people tried but weren’t really close
Do you know the difference between abiogenesis and evolution? No one did
Do you know what Creationism is? Everyone did, at least Biblical creationism.

Needless to say I was very discouraged. So they asked me to do a talk at our meeting on March 18. It will be something like “Evolution for Dummies�? (Someone else’s suggestion, not mine.) Like many people here I have no formal training in biology, so I read a lot more that I post. However, over the past couple of years I have read extensively, on this forum, at talkorigins and several other places on the web. And while I'm no expert, I seem to know a hell of a lot more than anyone else in our group.

I plan to discuss the following. I only have about 30 minutes to talk. The rest is for questions
- The basic tenets of evolution as both fact and theory
- The difference between evolution and abiogenesis
- How Creationists misrepresent the ideas of evolution and abiogenesis
- How the Creationists’ main objection to evolution, namely that the cellular structures of living organisms are far too complex to have come about by natural means, can easily be shown to be false
- How there is no single coherent Creationist theory
- How all the various Creationist theories do not advance human knowledge nor do they stand up to scientific scrutiny

Without getting into the meat of the topics (which I’ll bring up in future posts) what do y’all think of the outline?

Thanks in advance for your input.

Godless Wonder

That seems a lot of ground to cover in 30 minutes. Have you done much public speaking? (I haven't, but I recall from my public speaking class in college that the time really flies by much faster than a novice speaker is typically expecting it to.)

I guess I would say practice what you're going to say, and time yourself. I suspect 30 minutes may not be enough time to cover all that, but I could be wrong.

Plognark

That sounds like a pretty kick ass outline, in spite of 30 minutes being pretty brief :thumbs:

THe Q&A time period may be where you get your best chance to share information.

Howard

G/W,
I’ve done quite a bit of public speaking and have spoken to our group on other occasions. They enjoy my talks because I’m very animated and throw in some humor.

I realize it’s a lot to cover and I know I can’t do much in depth, but I figure if I touch on several topics it will be more entertaining than a few topics in depth. It’s always a tough call but, as Plognark says, there’s a half hour for Q and A so I’ll be able to go into more detail on the subjects of most interest.

Crowley

There is a quote by Darwin that Creationists/Christians love to throw out when the topic of evolution is being discussed. I can't remember it exactly but it goes something like this:

The human eye alone is so complex that its existance is proof enough that a divine creator was involved.

I realize it is a total bastardization of the quote, but you get the idea. I just wanted you to be aware of it and be able to research it so you would not be caught unprepared. It is one of their primary defenses. In their minds, it debunks the originator of the theory of evolution thereby debunking the theory itself.

Nice outline, by the way. Good luck cramming all that in 30 minutes. I am a very verbose speaker and would have a hard time with a 30 minute limit.

DMB

IIRC that Darwin remark is immediately followed by explanation of how an eye could evolve. Some of Dawkins's books deal with the evolution of eyes, including, I think, Climbing Mount Improbable.

I may be trying to teach my granny to suck eggs here, but when I try to get across anything a bit complicated I usually prepare slides with bullet-point summaries (all the better if you can dress them up with cartoons). It gives the audience something to focus on other than the head of the speaker and it also gives them a visual as well as an audio input.

Godless Wonder

It's especially funny when a creationist goes on about "something so perfect as the eye" while he's wearing glasses.

marvin4mars

There is an excellent article in the lateset edition of Skeptical Inquirer magazine (Vol. 29, No 2, March/April 2005). It is by Dennis R. Trumble and covers this problem very well. I recommend picking up a copy and reading it over.

Good luck and your doing the lord's work, brother ;-)

-Marv

NotQuite

Howard,

It seems to me like you ought to focus more on explaining evolution. I think a good place to start would be explaining how mutation changes the allele frequncies of a population and how then selection ignores the organisms that are better suited for the enviroment (perhaps Industrial Melanism would be a nice example)

Take care and good luck with your speach.-NQ-

Sensei Meela

Crowded as it already is, perhaps you could add a point explaining that evolution is not atheism, and how evolution and creationism are compatible.