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Accidentally Recorded Conversation Leads to Resignations at La Sierra U.

June 15, 2011, 2:13 pm

Two administrators, a trustee, and a faculty member have resigned under pressure from La Sierra University, a Seventh-day Adventist institution in Riverside, Calif., following the circulation of an accidentally recorded conversation among them that included foul language, references to alcohol consumption, and disparaging remarks about university and church officials, Spectrum, a publication that covers the church, reports. The journal said Lenny Darnell, a member of the university’s Board of Trustees, had turned on a recording device on his cellphone to capture what was said during a meeting between faculty members and church officials, but then left the recorder running as he later watched a basketball game with the two administrators and a biology professor. Mr. Darnell then passed the recording on to others, unaware of the inadvertently included extra content. The biology professor, Gary Bradley, had been involved in a conflict with the church over the teaching of evolution, but a statement issued by top university officials said the resignations “have no connection to the biology controversy.”

Correction (5:25 p.m.): An earlier version of this post incorrectly described Spectrum. It is a publication that covers the church, not a church publication. The post has been updated to reflect this correction.

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  • http://arthuride.wordpress.com/ Dr. Arthur Frederick Ide

    Religion has no place in science when it attempts to dictate to science what is reality.  Religion is based on faith.  Science is based on empirical evidence that can be tested and retested, and the results confirmed and reconfirmed.  If a religious school wants to have a science department, it needs to state if that science department will be using current criteria, or criteria from the days of Ptolemy or before.  Intelligent Design is religion as the courts have ruled; it belongs in a religion class. Keep science pure and open to debate.

  • drassessment

    And so how are you going to test evolution? There is no empirical data of transitional life forms, no empirical data on how organisms were able to see, procreate, etc. before their current systems were completely in place. Dawkins even states that life on earth came about by luck. How are you going to test that?

  • drassessment

    A couple of corrections to the article. The correct spelling of the denomination’s name is Seventh-day Adventist (lower case “d”). Also, Spectrum is not a church publication. While it’s staff are predominantly (if not completely) Seventh-day Adventists, it is an independent journal neither published by nor subsidized by the church organization.

  • sgaetjens

    Sir, you are correct that “Science is based on empirical evidence that can be tested and retested, and the results confirmed and reconfirmed.”  But I think you discount the fact that the inferences applied to scientific evidence must be taken by faith.  Current red shift can be measured, but working back to the Big Bang, or parallel universes, or a singularity involves faith… and many scientists have different (scientific) faiths.

  • drangie

    An amusing irony here: you wrote to correct the spelling of the article (correctly identifying the name of the religion as Seventh-day), but made an error of your own, misusing “it’s” where “its” is required.  

  • CU_Alum

    You are conflating two different meanings of the word faith.  Faith can mean a belief in something unprovable, but it can also mean confidence.  When I say I have faith in calculations performed by my computer, I use the word in the latter sense rather than the former.  Scientists may have that kind of faith in some of their beliefs.  Those beliefs do not rest on *religious* faith. 

    The fact that one word has two different meanings — one used in religion and the other in science — does not make those two fields alike.  Computer scientists and television executives use different definitions of “programming”, and I’m sure you will agree that this does not mean their fields have much in common.  The same is true of the word “court” as used by lawyers and by tennis pros.  Given time I could think of many other examples.  The difference between the two meanings of “faith” is not as obvious, but it is just as real.

  • CU_Alum

    Every life form is transitional.  Some just change more slowly than others and at different times.  And there are plenty of fossils showing animals that fall between, say, a typical dinosaur and a typical bird, or between a typical fish and a typical amphibian. 

    Many experiments have shown evolution in action.  These experiments generally involve animals with relatively short reproductive cycles like fruit flies or guppies, which can be raised over many generations in a reasonable amount of time.

    There is also a difference in principle.  Given enough time and resources, it is possible to test evolution the way even its fiercest critics claim is not possible — by finding a number of young planets with the right conditions and then closely observing them for many millions of years.  No such method can be used to test religious faith.

  • 609zr

     Why is a Trustee watching a basketball game during a meeting?  Sounds like they fired the wrong people.  Welcome to the new communist China.

  • richardtaborgreene

    The nice thing about stupid people and stupid institutions they invent is they are so stupid that their own efforts make themselves stupider—people are their own best revenge—-the meanest thing you can do to them is leave them alone with their own selves.   

    It is nice to know that these so-called “religious” “schools” which by dictate and policy outlaw most forms of valid thought, keeping their propagandized weaklings protected from diversities, truths, and the world—are filled with hypocrits. Divine justice at work—you can build stupid belief systems and find stupid people to pretend to believe them, but most people, even stupid ones, are smart enough not to REALLY believe them. God is not non-existant afterall. Plus we all need something self destructive to feel superior to and laugh at at regular intervals. Also, the weaklings protected by such schools eventually graduate into a world they were not allowed to talk about and believe true—where they generally at age 40 turn into bitter denunciators of the decades of their lives stolen by this or that god and the propaganda that stole their own minds, foisted on them when helpless kids by “well meaning” totalitarian parents—-doing to minds in childhood what is so hard to do to minds mature—fill them with junk ideas to make the parents feel RIGHT since the parents have no chance at all of feeling powerful in life. Rightness is always the refuge of the incompetent and lazy.

  • drassessment

    drangie – you are correct. I apologize and stand corrected.

  • drassessment

    Wow! Such vitriol and bitterness. Not much of a solid argument, but lots of anger.

  • drassessment

    Transitions within species, yes, but not from one species into another. Even after a “gazillion”  generations, fruit flies and guppies are still fruit flies and guppies.

    Ah yes, we just need millions of years to observe – so how many millions do we have to go?

  • softshellcrab

    I agree. That guy has issues!   Issues that seem to go far beyond the fairly innocuous content of the article. No thinking person could read the article as suggesting they were forced out because of some science vs. religion controversy. The article makes it clear it had nothing to do with evolution, natural selection, or anything of the sort. It clearly states that the resignations “have no connection to any biology controversy” and were because they used terrible language and mocked the school leaders and the church that helps fund the school. Somehow a lot of extremists here are reading in some kind of martyrdom aspect like it was a referendum on science vs. church positons. Read the article. It makes it clear it was nothing of the sort, and those who are getting shrill here about science vs. religion are just that – shrill.

  • katisumas

    I thought this was going to be a discussion about the pitfalls of recording conversation!

    I can’t believe we are still arguing evolution in the light of all the advances in molecular biology.  If you have cancer, are you going to  go to a doctor who disregards all the advances made in that field because they are based on our ever deepening understanding of evolution?

    I still can’t  phatom how a person of faith (of one of the three Abrahamic religions) could have the hubris of claiming that a day of God is the same as a day of a mere human being.

    Most Christian denominations have  accepted evolution and also that the time spans in the bible are metaphorical because of the limitations of human perception.  The basis of this has been differentiating  “knowledge through revelation”  from  ”knowledge through reason”.   (anyone remembers the European Medieval thinker who first coined that concept and thus allowed Western science to be?  Can’t remember his name….)

    The Christians affected by the hubris of claiming that they have absolute knowledge matching that of God, this on the basis of a few words transcribing oral traditions and then translated and retranslated and in the process some of it censored for political reasons (it’s only the Medieval Church fathers who decided that Mary Magdalen was a prostitute) are mostly Evangelical Americans. 

    However there is a group of so called Catholics (“so called” because they obviously don’t believe in papal authority) who firmly believe in a geocentric unverse (a stationary earth with everything else circling around it) and that their Church was way too lenient when it decided not to burn Galileo at stake but merely condemned him to house arrest and isolation for the rest of his life.   I suspect they object to the notion of evolution as well!

    For more on that geocentric group, see the SPLC report: 

    Intelligence Report, Spring 2011, Issue Number: 141
    Geocentrism ‘Seminar’ Hosted by Radical Traditionalist Catholics

  • orwellsdisciple

    As near as I can tell, Richard’s issues are that he appears to be a thinking person.  No thinking person could characterize the contents of that article as innocuous.  And no thinking person, much less a thinking scientist, has serious doubts about the process of evolution by natural selection. 

  • orwellsdisciple

    drassessement (and others), please refer to this wikipedia article on transitional fossils.  Just to get you up to freshmen biology speed…

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils

  • CU_Alum

    Species are categories defined by man and are not inherent in nature. (The differences between species are real, but are often less clear and less significant than scientific terminology makes them seem.)  There is no reason to believe nature will respect boundaries that humans have drawn for our own ease of reference. 

    There is no experimental evidence that says evolution can’t proceed from one species into another.  Your hypothesis can be tested, but it would take just as long to test as mine since it would require the same tests.  Since the long timeframe leads you to reject my hypothesis, you should reject your own as well.

  • drassessment

    To the contrary, there are many thinking people who have serious questions/doubts regarding biological evolution and the “genius” of natural selection. It appears to some of us that while many Christians still believe in Intelligent Design, others, including evolutionary biologists, believe in unintelligent design. I am currently reading Dawkin’s book, “The God Delusion,” and am amazed at his leaps of “faith,” his logical fallacies, and his virtual “worship” of natural selection.

    According to http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/religion, one definition of religion is: “a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to
    with ardor and faith”

    By this definition, evolution is as much a “religion” as any system of “religious” faith.

    Thus I would also take issue with the comment by orwellsdisciple. I am a thinking person and I have serious issues with the so-called “facts” of evolution. I read the article recommended by orwellsdisciple and a key section reads “As noted already by Darwin, the fossil record is woefully incomplete.[1] Ideally, this list would only recursively include ‘true’ transitionals, fossils representing ancestral specie from which later groups evolved, but most, if not all, of the fossils shown here represent extinct side branches, more or less closely related to the true ancestor.[2]”

    It appears that there are still no “true” transitionals and that much of the theory is based on faith, whichever definition you prefer as shared by CU_alum.

  • CU_Alum

    Only if your definition of “definition” does not include accuracy.

  • drassessment

    Yes, and evolutionary biologists are accurate in their conclusions to the point of never having to  adjust them.

  • orwellsdisciple

    Yes, drassessment.  We are all aware that nature was not so politely helpful as to archive every life form in the fossil record.  But that doesn’t help your argument, given what little fossil record we have is *in every important feature* consistent with evolution by natural selection.

  • orwellsdisciple

    drassessment, have you stopped to consider, or have you read anything relevant to, the impact that molecular biology is having on evolutionary science?  It seems not, otherwise how could you even get near the implication that evolutionary biologists are unwilling to revise the science based on new information?

    But it’s useless.  From the tone of your posts, it is clear that you believe that rhetoric is equal to or greater in value than evidence.  It is not.

  • CU_Alum

    drassessment — All scientists, including evolutionary biologists, adjust their conclusions when the evidence calls those conclusions into question.  It is faith, not science, that refuses to adjust when faced with contrary evidence.

    Biologists have adjusted the theory of evolution in many ways as new discoveries have been made.  But you want them to *abandon* the theory, not adjust it.  They would abandon it if evidence said it was wrong.  That hasn’t happened.  They insist evolution is real because that is what the evidence shows, not because they are stubborn.

    Evidence compellingly says creationism (aka intelligent design) is wrong, but you and its other proponents refuse to acknowledge that evidence.  For you to claim evolutionists are the ones who refuse to adjust is like the proverbial pot calling the kettle black.

  • drassessment

    It appears that you are unable to detect satire. I am well aware of the fact that evolutionary biologists quite frequently need to adjust their “once solid” conclusions because new “evidence” disputes them. That’s my point. The evidence does not “prove” evolution any more than it “proves” Intelligent design (or creationism, if you prefer). Scientists once believed in spontaneous generation, that life developed from non-life. Dr. Pasteur proved that theory false and no scientist today believes it occurs. Yet all evolutionists must believe that it occurred at least once in order for this cosmic accident we call life on earth to have begun.

    I have studied evolution and have found it lacking, raising far more questions than it answers. What disturbs me is the arrogance of evolutionists who appear to believe that anyone who disputes or rejects their theory is a stupid, unthinking moron. I take issue with that stance! The theory has significant gaps and contradictions. Yet evolutionary scientists refuse to let these questions be raised in schools where evolution is taught as the only viable explanation for life on earth. I do not ask that Intelligent design be taught in public schools, but I do ask that scientific questions regarding the validity of the theory of evolution be allowed to be raised and discussed. As a contemporary of Darwin once said, “Truth can afford to be fair.” If evolution is true, then it will be able to withstand challenges to it. But as it stands today, all challenges, at least in elementary and secondary science classes, are verboten.

    Much of the discussion relates to one’s presuppositions. Presupposing intelligent design leads one to interpret the available evidence in one way. Presupposing the lack of such intelligence causes one to look for naturalistic explanations of the evidence.

    No, I don’t believe rhetoric is equal to or greater in value than evidence. I just find the evidence for evolution underwhelming.

  • drassessment

    You’re right. This thread should be about surreptitiously recording conversations. I apologize for my part in leading it astray in commenting on the first post’s rant against science, religion, and reality co-mingling.

    I have no problem with someone recording a conversation to maintain accuracy (I’ve been in a few meetings myself in which I wish I had recorded the discussion/decisions because the official record published later was blatantly incorrect).

    However, as I understand the law, all those who are being recorded should be made aware of the fact. I can sympathize with rationale the gentleman who did the recording (being somewhat familiar with the issues involved at his institution), but not with his method, especially with his 1) not taking care to stop the recording when the meeting was over, and 2) sharing the recording with others who were not at the meeting without the permission of those who were.

  • drassessment

    CU_alum – and there is the bottom line of our disagreement. I am not convinced that the evidence declares that evolution is “right,” and that intelligent design is “wrong.” I am not asking evolutionists to abandon their belief in evolution if that is how they interpret the evidence. What I am asking for is that they recognize that others may see the evidence and come to different conclusions and that this does not make them stupid or unthinking or even, horror of horrors, unscientific.

  • CU_Alum

    No one says they are stupid or unthinking, but they *are* unscientific.

  • CU_Alum

    Scientists seldom claim to have solid proof of anything.  They instead say that a particular theory is the best fit to the available evidence.  When new evidence comes to light and requires adjustments, scientists adjust the theory accordingly.  Such adjustments are how science is supposed to work.  They are not signs of dishonesty or equivocation as you seem to believe.

    Evolution fits the available evidence exceedingly well, especially since it has accurately predicted discoveries — both in the lab and in the fossil record — that had yet to be made at the time.  No other theory fits the evidence at all.

    Note that creationism/intelligent design is *not* a theory.  Theories are falsifiable, which means that they would be disproved if contrary evidence comes to light.  Creationism /I.D. does not work that way, which is but one reason it is not science.  And its proponents do not *think* that way, which is why they are not scientists.

  • jesor

    If you would like to see evidence of transitional species in current form, take a look at the data and species descriptions for the various cichlid species in Lakes Victoria, Tanganyika, and Malawi.  Victoria, a much younger lake has species that can still somewhat interbreed but show a near continuous transitional state as you move across the lake.   Tanganyika, the oldest shows the greatest variation between species with fish whose genetics have diverged to the point of not beign able to interbreed, while Malawi itself is somewhere in the middle between the two, where its species appear more coherent in their divergence, but still generally are unable to interbreed.  

    As for the alternative, based on fossil record, the only other explanation having been offered that fits the fossil record is that some thing placed those fossils there for an unknown reason and was remarkably consistent in which sedimentary layers it placed them in across the globe.

    I’m more inclined to go with evolution given those two options (unless there’s another), and I’m also inclined to think that Cardinal Newman’s take on things is a more apt understanding that takes into account both that which can be proven and that which can be neither proven nor disproven.
    “As to the Divine Design, is it not an instance of incomprehensibly and infinitely marvellous Wisdom and Design to have given certain laws to matter millions of ages ago, which have surely and precisely worked out, in the long course of those ages, those effects which He from the first proposed.”
    It’s sort of like hitting a golf ball on Mars and having it make a hole in one on the 9th hole at St. Andrews on a windy day.

  • orwellsdisciple

    But you haven’t presented any evidence, or referred us to any.  The substance of your argument, such as it is, consist of your perceptions of the shortcomings of evolution by natural selection.  You seem to want perfect proof, for instance in an above post you seem to want a complete fossil record library.  We’re very sorry that the evidence for evolution by natural selection is not in your mind 100% complete.  But in *educated and thinking* circles, the theory ranks with Newtonian mechanics in its power to explain the world around us. 

  • orwellsdisciple

    I am.

  • orwellsdisciple

    Very witty, dank.  But were you reaching for erudite or droll?

  • CU_Alum

    I stand corrected.  I meant no one in this discussion thread, which at least seemed to be true when I wrote it.

  • http://ADvindicate.com Shane Hilde

    Beach and Kaatz only resigned from their administrative positions. They are tenured faculty at LSU. Beach teaches math and Kaatz music. Bradley was on the verge of retiring and had already given up his tenure. All three were at-will employees in the positions they resigned from. Darnell was only an LSU Board member–an unpaid position.

    According to the LSU faculty handbook, drinking alcohol is forbidden while employed by the church:

    “In addition to the requirements of the law, La Sierra University adopts the temperance practices and health principles espoused by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. This means that all faculty, employees and students are expected to refrain from the use of alcohol, drugs or tobacco while enrolled or employed at the University” (Faculty Handbook 33).

    Violating this agreement can result in the following:

    “The unlawful manufacture, distribution, dispensing, possession or use of a controlled substance or the use of alcohol or tobacco is grounds for a full range of discipline up to and including dismissal from employment or school under the policy of termination of a faculty member, the policy for termination of other employees, or student disciplinary policy. Any educational treatment alternative to discipline shall be at the sole discretion of the University” (Ibid 36).

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