Posted on 12/11/2002 6:28:08 AM PST by A2J
By WILL SENTELL
wsentell@theadvocate.com
Capitol news bureau
High school biology textbooks would include a disclaimer that evolution is only a theory under a change approved Tuesday by a committee of the state's top school board.
If the disclaimer wins final approval, it would apparently make Louisiana just the second state in the nation with such a provision. The other is Alabama, which is the model for the disclaimer backers want in Louisiana.
Alabama approved its policy six or seven years ago after extensive controversy that included questions over the religious overtones of the issue.
The change approved Tuesday requires Louisiana education officials to check on details for getting publishers to add the disclaimer to biology textbooks.
It won approval in the board's Student and School Standards/ Instruction Committee after a sometimes contentious session.
"I don't believe I evolved from some primate," said Jim Stafford, a board member from Monroe. Stafford said evolution should be offered as a theory, not fact.
Whether the proposal will win approval by the full state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education on Thursday is unclear.
Paul Pastorek of New Orleans, president of the board, said he will oppose the addition.
"I am not prepared to go back to the Dark Ages," Pastorek said.
"I don't think state boards should dictate editorial content of school textbooks," he said. "We shouldn't be involved with that."
Donna Contois of Metairie, chairwoman of the committee that approved the change, said afterward she could not say whether it will win approval by the full board.
The disclaimer under consideration says the theory of evolution "still leaves many unanswered questions about the origin of life.
"Study hard and keep an open mind," it says. "Someday you may contribute to the theories of how living things appeared on earth."
Backers say the addition would be inserted in the front of biology textbooks used by students in grades 9-12, possibly next fall.
The issue surfaced when a committee of the board prepared to approve dozens of textbooks used by both public and nonpublic schools. The list was recommended by a separate panel that reviews textbooks every seven years.
A handful of citizens, one armed with a copy of Charles Darwin's "Origin of the Species," complained that biology textbooks used now are one-sided in promoting evolution uncritically and are riddled with factual errors.
"If we give them all the facts to make up their mind, we have educated them," Darrell White of Baton Rouge said of students. "Otherwise we have indoctrinated them."
Darwin wrote that individuals with certain characteristics enjoy an edge over their peers and life forms developed gradually millions of years ago.
Backers bristled at suggestions that they favor the teaching of creationism, which says that life began about 6,000 years ago in a process described in the Bible's Book of Genesis.
White said he is the father of seven children, including a 10th-grader at a public high school in Baton Rouge.
He said he reviewed 21 science textbooks for use by middle and high school students. White called Darwin's book "racist and sexist" and said students are entitled to know more about controversy that swirls around the theory.
"If nothing else, put a disclaimer in the front of the textbooks," White said.
John Oller Jr., a professor at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, also criticized the accuracy of science textbooks under review. Oller said he was appearing on behalf of the Louisiana Family Forum, a Christian lobbying group.
Oller said the state should force publishers to offer alternatives, correct mistakes in textbooks and fill in gaps in science teachings. "We are talking about major falsehoods that should be addressed," he said.
Linda Johnson of Plaquemine, a member of the board, said she supports the change. Johnson said the new message of evolution "will encourage students to go after the facts."
No, none of us were there to see those tools being created, but there is much we can tell from the tools themselves and the places where they were found.
"Since toolmaking is not an innate or instinctive ability and cannot propagate via genes, the only way to pass it from generation to generation is by means of cultural tradition, imitation learning, training, etc., which also presuposes some effective form of communication between master and apprentice: this can be seen as the origins of practical education and of language!"
That's why we know that g3k is a fabrication made by an evolutionist to discredit ID and creadionism.
So can the letters of the english alphabet, but we seldom find them in random distribution because such a document would be deselected.
"You ARE entitled to your opinion if it was, but keep in mind that there will come a day (soon, I expect) when believers and disbelievers will find out who was right, black or white, no gray area."
This seems to be working fabulously. All of the other creos pretend that there's nothing wrong with his posts.
They have no choice at all. It's absolutely taboo, heretical, off-limits, and verboten to interfere in any way while another servant of the Lord is fishing for souls. This is true no matter what a travesty he may be making of the endeavor, no matter how discrediting his efforts may be to the cause. They have to grin, bear it, and pretend that eau de septic tank is perfume.
There must be no cracks in the facade. Problem is, the strategy actually makes for plenty of cracks.
That's a pretty silly 'refutation" if the letters of DNA were randomly distributed then the functions of life would not be performed. It is because DNA is not random and because there is a system for translating this code into amino acids and proteins that life is possible.
Some interesting points. However, you are assuming a lot for genes in the case of the bacterial flagellum. Genes cannot change themselves. Matter cannot organize itself. A random fortuitous process can be assumed if the chances are reasonable. However when the chances are well nigh impossible then such an assumption is totally unscientific and some other explanation is more likely. The examples used by ID for irreducible complexity or for intelligent design involve systems which are almost infinitely impossible to arrive at by random chance. There are many such systems, and as I often say, yes, it's possible for something which has one chance in an almost infinite amount of chances to occur at random to happen. However, evolution requires many of these almost miraculous occurrences to happen. That makes evolution impossible particularly since no process has ever been found which would reduce the random chances needed to create these systems.
Let me also say one thing about the rocks which are said to be man made. The possibility of these rocks having been formed by some erosive process, by falling and cracking, is more likely than the examples given by intelligent design.
Also the above does not explain abiogenesis - no genes then.
Good post. It has not escaped attention that your points have been conveniently ignored.
Neither I nor the Bible says that the Earth is 6000 years old.Well then, how old is it? This question has gone unanswered by g3k since way back in post 1081. Still no answer, except for dodges, evasions, excuses, and attempts to provoke a flame war (and thus an excuse to have the thread pulled).
4081 posted on 01/09/2003 9:00 AM EST by gore3000
It can't be very difficult for someone who has surveyed all Nobel Prize winning work and has declared that it all disproves evolution. An intellect of such sweeping power should be able to give us his answer. HOW OLD IS THE EARTH?.
Hello all! I went off-line about 5 p.m. yesterday, and only checked my messages this morning, some of which were amazingly thought-provoking. Since then I’ve been running about doing my normal Saturday things, all the while composing in the background an essay under the working title, “Adventures in Consciousness.” Now I feel tasked to try to write that down.
What I want to address can be found in the above italics: The conceivability of something that has temporal, but not spatial extension, and what the ramifications of such a something would be. In particular, I think this question has the most urgent relevance for quantum theory. For the very thing that has temporal, but not physical extension, seems to me to be consciousness itself. Which to my mind seems to have direct relevance to the problem of the QM “observer.”
QM seems to want to reduce the “observer” to the status of some abstract measurement. Forgive me you physicists out there who hold with this view, but I can’t conceive what could possibly be the relevance of any measurement absent a conscious observer. (To put it another way: Absent a conscious observer, what is the point of making a measurement?)
Since it has been suggested in prior posts to this thread that whatever role consciousness has to play in the understanding of reality, nobody really knows what consciousness is – at least science has managed to elude this question so far.
I’ll be the first to tell you, I don’t know what consciousness is, as it is in itself. But I have had certain conscious experiences that seem germane to our present topic. I do not offer “conclusions” here; just want to record certain quite empirical (because actually experienced, first-hand) experiences into the record.
So let’s cut to the chase. Physicist, I’ll gladly take my opening text from you. You wrote: “what about when the song is in your head? That, of course, is the question upon which the discussion hangs, so we must stay agnostic on that...er, score.”
Well, all I can say to that is, not only can I play songs in my head, but I can play entire plays in my head.
Case in point: I used to participate in community theater. Early on in my “career”, I decided that the best way to prepare for a role was to memorize, not only my own character’s lines, music, and dance, but to memorize the whole play – that is, every other character’s lines, music, and dance, as well as the settings, the placement of props, and the position of every other character on stage in a given scene -- in sequence from opening curtain to final curtain. I chose this method of preparation because I felt that it would help me become so steeped in the play that I would never have to think about anything at all once I was on-stage (since the various contingencies had been effectively anticipated in advance) except “being” my character. (And I think I was right about this, looking at experience.) And there was a significant side benefit: If any of my fellow actors were to get in trouble – say, forget a line, or be in the wrong position on stage – then I would automatically be in a position to “draw them back into the play” in a way that was completely inside my own character. This meditative exercise gave me so much confidence, that I was completely free to just “be” my character.
To get to this point of “mastering the play” involved a meditative exercise of consciousness. Starting at least a week before opening night, every night I would “go to bed early,” then sit on my bed, and run through the entire play “in my head.” That is, in complete solitude and silence. In the case I have presently in mind (South Pacific), that would take roughly two hours each night.
Looking back at that experience, I can tell you two things: Those two hours of conscious experience do not seem to have had spatial extension; but it’s clear to me they did have temporal extension.
In the second place, even odder than that, the plays I did then are still recorded someplace “in me,” somewhere in unconscious mind (i.e., in “deep storage”), and retrievable (at least partially, given the passage of time) by active memory. Somewhere in the “deep storage” of my unconscious mind lurk in their entirety not only South Pacific, but also Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and perhaps a dozen other plays -- at least parts of any of which I can still play in my present consciousness, at will.
The immediately foregoing and other relevant things considered, I hypothesize: The scientific method is applicable to objects that have spatial extension. But it has no grip whatsoever on how to deal with “objects” that have only temporal extension.
But this is precisely where a “new kind of science is needed,” to break the cognitive impasse….
Let me give you another example from my “adventures in consciousness.” This one probably will appear not only bizarre, but insane in the minds of most readers of these lines. But I can only tell you what I’ve personally seen as truthfully as I can. The judgment is left to you.
Again, I will take my cue from Physicist, who wrote: “My view is rigidly Deistic, because for God to intervene in the universe would violate the laws of Nature, and thereby violate the Truth, clearly an impossibility.”
On the basis of my experience, I think it is possible that God may intervene in the universe in a manner that does not violate His physical laws of Nature at all. Here’s a case study:
I am fast asleep after an extraordinarily difficult and taxing day. I hear someone saying: Awake! And so I wake up, and find two “persons” standing beside me. One of them says, “You must come with us. You are expected.”
Instantly I am perplexed. For the speaker has not spoken verbally. He has spoken telepathically – “mind to mind”, so to speak. I am not afraid at all, because these unwonted strangers (only one of whom ever “speaks” to me in this entire episode) radiate love and peace and goodwill – and more than that, they implicitly convey the sense that they aren’t “there” on their own initiative.
So I get up, and let them take me wherever it is they are supposed to take me.
The next thing I know is I find myself, with my companions, in a vast, incredibly dark place. Somehow I feel that I am in an enclosed space; but I cannot see walls, or ceiling, or even floor for that matter – although assuredly I am standing on something.
I turn to the “guide” who “spoke” to me, and ask him by a look (verbal language seeming to be quite useless in this scenario): Why am I here? And he looks me in the eye, and then turns his head as if to indicate the direction in which I ought to be looking, to find my answer.
And so I follow his gaze.
I see an astounding vision: a graphical object suspended in the chamber, radiating light, pulsating with energy, with life…. I can’t adequately describe it to this day (this event happened in 1984). But it appeared to be spherical in form, consisting of innumerable bands of light, intertwined, mutually penetrating yet all the same discrete -- glowing, pulsing, corruscating, amazing to behold. I stood there, dumbfounded. I didn’t have a clue what I was looking at; all I knew was that it was extraordinarily beautiful….
It was then I got some “help” – which in retrospect I gather was the purpose of this “trip” in the first place. I heard a Voice, which said: “This is My creation.”
Time out. I need to characterize the nature of this Voice. My “guides” had been silent, communicating telepathically. This Voice was voiced -- I.e., physically audible, but in a way that set up an incredible cognitive dissonance in my perceptual apparatus, depending on which ear I was predominantly hearing the message through. Through one ear, I heard a Voice that thundered, in a way well beyond any thunder that any human person ever heard before or could possibly imagine. But through my other ear, I could hear a Voice speaking so softly, so clearly, so matter-of-factly. Somehow, I managed to receive the message.
Which was (to paraphrase in so many words): “This is My Creation. I so love My Creation and each and every created thing I ever made within it. But most of all, I love Man. And not just “Man” in the generic. I love each and every man, personally, by name. I love each and every human person, without regard to their standing in the world of created things. For each of them is the child of My Love.”
The next thing I knew, I was sitting bolt upright on my bed, crying my eyes out to relieve the sheer pain occasioned by the pressure of indescribable, ineffable, inexpressible joy….
On the basis of such “exploits,” I would tend to surmise that the problem science has with God has to do mainly with the problem of trying to “measure” or test an Entity which has temporal extension, but not spatial extension. For He certainly has had “temporal presence” in my lived reality for quite a while by now. (Not that I mean to set myself up as some kind of ultimate test of reality – I am just a part and participant of same.)
If science wants to integrate such experiences into its body of knowledge, it needs to figure out what to do with consciousness -–for that is precisely the “matrix” in which such “adventures” as I have adumbrated above occur.
If science doesn’t feel this is a question it needs to deal with, then it seems to me that the best science can do is to come up with only a partial picture of Reality. JMHO FWIW.
Sure, there was a lot of moaning and groaning going on among the creationists and they accused the evolutionists of being dishonest (and that this must have something to do with evolution; of course he was also criticized by evolutionists) but all this doesn't divert from the fact that creationism is indistinguishable from its parody.
I think some creationists are still quite embarrassed because they supported him.
Here are two threads that discuss this: Yes, I'm a troll and Message to PReece....
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