Personally, I’m in favor of Christmas trees in school lobbies and mangers on public squares and miss the old celebrations. I don’t think that promoting willful ignorance by inserting charlatan anti-science BS into biology textbooks as the ID mob advocates is smart way to go about changing anything. It only demeans conservatives to associate them with an anti-science attitude.
Ok...so perhaps you can show us what is particularly “willfully ignorant” and “anti-science” about this?
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As a chemist, the most fascinating issue for me revolves around the origin of life. Before life began, there was no biology, only chemistry – and chemistry is the same for all time. What works (or not) today, worked (or not) back in the beginning. So, our ideas about what happened on Earth prior to the emergence of life are eminently testable in the lab. And what we have seen thus far when the reactions are left unguided as they would be in the natural world is not much. Indeed, the decomposition reactions and competing reactions out distance the synthetic reactions by far. It is only when an intelligent agent (such as a scientist or graduate student) intervenes and “tweaks” the reactions conditions “just right” do we see any progress at all, and even then it is still quite limited and very far from where we need to get. Thus, it is the very chemistry that speaks of a need for something more than just time and chance. And whether that be simply a highly specified set of initial conditions (fine-tuning) or some form of continual guidance until life ultimately emerges is still unknown. But what we do know is the random chemical reactions are both woefully insufficient and are often working against the pathways needed to succeed. For these reasons I have serious doubts about whether the current Darwinian paradigm will ever make additional progress in this area.
Edward Peltzer
Ph.D. Oceanography, University of California, San Diego (Scripps Institute)
Associate Editor, Marine Chemistry
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Also, any luck in finding any empricical evidence of evolution taught to the exclusion of all else is making students smarter?
It's not promoting willful ignorance.
The science education in this country did fine for the several hundred years that creation was taught in public schools.
The decline in public education exactly coincides with the removal of God and Christianity from the public school system.
The decline in science education coincides with the increased teaching of evolution only in the public school system.
Home schools and private Christian schools which teach both creation and evolution consistently outperform the evolution only public schools.
There is absolutely NO evidence that teaching creation in public schools will have a negative impact on the science education public school students are receiving.
So, tpanther asked you this.....
I'd like to see some empirical evidence that students perform better in science class and for that matter, education in general, since the godless secular humanist NEA stomped Christianity out of public schools and demanded everything from "God be kept out of science class" to Christmas trees can't be set up in school lobbies. Would you happen to have any?
You wouldn't care to answer for a change, would you?