As members of the Veritas Forum club at Cal Poly, we would like to address Nicholas Utschig’s guest commentary before potentially well-intentioned students could misrepresent our views.
On the Veritas Forum Cal Poly 2010 Facebook page, the mission statement reads as follows: “The Veritas Forum is a place where students of every worldview can come and engage in a safe, intelligent conversation about life’s hardest questions. Our goal is to introduce the relevance of Jesus Christ to those discussions and all of life.”
So yes, Jesus will be mentioned at events like “Finding God Beyond Harvard: the Quest for Veritas” or “Why a Good God Allows Suffering.” Christianity will also be mentioned at the “Origins of Life Panel Discussion.”
That panel will also include a speaker who professes to be a Christian and believes that the theory of evolution is valid, a view shared by a large portion of the Christian community. Another speaker (Dr. Rainbow) who is “often a Theistic Evolutionist, convinced through the discoveries of Evo-Devo that vertebrate evolution has happened as described, including human evolution, but harboring serious questions … ” and also believes that the theory of evolution is valid.
All three events are formatted so that the Cal Poly community can directly influence the conversation. As a planning team, we bring in well-respected scholars to initiate the conversation and give it direction while the end result of the conversation is dependent on the students who attend and voice their opinions.
Perhaps in the past four years the Veritas Forum has not been interpreted as an open dialogue. The fact is, for every Veritas Forum at Cal Poly, dating back to January of 2001, the format of every speaking engagement has been 45-minute lecture and a 45-minute question and answer session. This Q&A time is designed specifically for any and all students to ask whatever they want about the topic at hand.
For the Forum to be an open dialogue, we depend greatly on students who have world views that are not fundamentally Christian to attend and ask questions during the Q&A times of these events.
We hope you will join us because people like Nick ask excellent questions that force us all to contemplate what Truth is and how to live a true life.
Josh Ceccarelli is an aerospace engineering junior and Veritas Club president. Chelsea Morrell is a biomedical engineering senior and Veritas Club vice president. They are Mustang Daily guest columnists.
Thank you, Josh and Chelsea!
I expect discussions on evolutionary developmental biology to go straight over the heads of most students who have only a high school background. Teaching it as controversy is damaging enough.
Take religion Z, who has a beef with atoms because their book claims everything is continuous. We would fall just as far behind when religion Z’s Veritas brought in theistic physicists and atheistic chemists. How would the students follow a conversation on the nuances of Schrödinger’s equation?
Can facts, evidence, and difficult topics be fairly explained and discussed in ninety minutes? I thought my bachelors degree is just a background, but it has taken me five years.
Jesus Christ, Christianity, SLO Crusade / Campus Crusade for Christ should be mentioned on shirts, advertisements, flyers, news articles, etc.
Maybe the logo could be changed to a cross?
A microscope, through which observations are made and knowledge is gained without supernatural intervention, seems in bad taste.
Was I the only one irritated that the principles of evolution were hardly mentioned at all in the entire debate? There was I think one brief sentence-long mention about competition, mutation, and natural selection (all in the same sentence), done by the second speaker. Neither of the evolution supporters gave evidence for evolution, even though plenty exists. Dr. Rainbow did give an excellent discussion on genetics and embryology, but did not tie it into evolution at all (even though these are the foundations of evolution). He spent no time at all even describing how evolution works, apportioning what spare time he had to lecturing us on how God must be behind it all. The second speaker likewise spent the majority of his talk discussing the Bible rather than evolution, which he was supposed to be defending.
The final speaker, Dr. Rana, was obviously well-chosen in that he was good at presenting his case – although I obviously disagreed with his statements, and saw holes in most of his logic, he at least addressed the issue at hand. My question is: why did Veritas choose two defenders of evolution who seemed to have little idea of how it works, what evidence exists, and why we should believe it? Which was Veritas more concerned with: having a balanced debate or having a debate where everyone present believed in God and/or the Bible? It seems to me pretty clear where their priorities were placed.
Veritas committee members,
Last night was probably the worst Veritas event I have been to. For an open forum on “Truth”, the biases (aside from the fact this is hosted by Campus Crusade) were apparent the moment I sat in my seat–low and behold, a postcard for Dr. Rana’s book and a promotion of his ideas before the debate begins. Yet nothing else was given for the other two speakers or promoting any further reading material for their viewpoints.
Then, after being touted as an “atheistic evolutionist”, Dr. Rainbow announces he is not, in fact, an atheist. In fact, Dr. Rainbow can’t seem to decide what he is regarding religious or non-religious beliefs. “I’m a card-carrying atheist…50% of the time” (real statement when I spoke with him after the event). While I did appreciate his straight-forward honesty from the get-go, I did NOT appreciate being further mislead by the Veritas committee and I know I was not alone in this sentiment.
Your facebook page may have stated your Christian-based motives for the forum, but I don’t recall seeing a single flyer on campus express this. Do you really expect that every single student who sees your flyer also visits your FB? If you want an open forum discussing truth, I suggest the first thing you do is come out into the open on who is hosting the event and what your motives are. Why have I not seen a Veritas speaker simply have a discussion on “What is truth”?
Furthermore, if the Veritas committee wants to bring a worthy discussion of ‘truth’ to Cal Poly, why did you fill the speaking position of the “atheistic evolutionist” (who I assumed would be challenging the majority of the Veritas audience as the only non-Christian speaker on stage) with a speaker who could not seem to get a single point across clearly? The mini-lecture on evolution was a mess, with highlighted vocabulary promoting the idea of Intelligent Design that made me further doubt Dr. Rainbow’s ability to be an ‘atheistic’ contributer.
In the honest search for truth, it would be nice if you could let us know how you select your speakers. You might also want to pass out flyers days prior to each talk with objective background information or basics on the topic, so as not to waste time trying to explain them (which takes further time away from the seemingly pointless Q&A). It would also be nice if you could actually put in the effort to find speakers who WILL challenge our thoughts on the truth of the matter, as opposed to belittling the intelligence of the audience.