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."
Okay you're going to have to stop throwing terms around scattershot without regard to actual interchangability. First, you have yet to recognize the difference between value and worth. Objectively, a human being can only be said to be worth exactly as much as any other human. This idea is tacitly acknowledged every time an effort is made to "dehumanize" a group of people in order to subjugte them. If the target group qualifies as "fully human," then it stands to reason that rights apply equally. If they are somehow less than human, then there is no justification to deny them rights and privledges.
However, you may value one particular human more than another. You feel a sense of loss when a loved one dies. You do not feel that same sense of loss over the death of a stranger. Objectively they two were worth the same, but they were valued differently by different people. The value of a person is subjective, and is unequivocally in the eye of the beholder.
I know this is true of me, and I hope it is true of you as well: The existence (or not) of God has zero effect on the value I place on my friends and family.
Based in part on the worth/value discussion, I posed the following three options for the ultimate source of morality:
But don't take my word for it, just ask yourself: Is is possible for God to declare moral an immoral act?
When was slavery abolished in the Roman Empire? Both early and late bishops of the church owned slaves, and the gospels are full of rules governing the practices of slave ownership, this hardly qualifies as a writ against slavery. Slavery fell into decline in the late stages of the Empire, largely because much cheaper labor was available but I was not aware of a Roman abolition--if there was one, when was it? A brief scan with Google has not revealed it to me.
Christian church leaders have quite obviously "modified their attitudes toward slavery". The prevailing expressed attitudes of the early church founders were exactly like those of the greek thinkers that preceeded them--that it was a necessary evil without which highly civilized societies could not continue. I'm not sure they were wrong.
Try again, goober. Also, learn to spell: If they are less then human, then one is justified in denying them rights and privileges.
My knowledge of history isn't detailed enough to know about slavery in the late roman empire, or among early Christian leaders. But if the Pope addressed the issue in the 15th century, it's clear that the Biblical text doesn't explicitly forbid it. My point remains, that religious and moral thought evolves. What is obvious to us was not always obvious.
Of 1400 year old christian sentiment concerning jews brought to fruition. We've been over this already, including extensive documentation, not a bit of which did you respond to meaningfully. Don't make me spank you again. Germany was a stauchly christian country before, during, and after Hitler's reign, and Hitler's policies were historically aligned with, buffeted by, and and earned official accolades from, the german christian public.
The church provided the nazi's with birth records so jews could be sorted out, the church provided the SS with priests, the church in Slovokia packed the cattle cars, and the Catholic Pope signed a deal with Hitler to keep his trap shut about what was happening to the jews in return for, amongst numerous other goodies, Nazi financial support for catholic schools.
This has always seemed to me like one of the strangest arrows in the creationist quiver to me. Why in the world would you think that feelings of love, comradeship, loyalty, and duty wouldn't arise from natural causes? They have obvious survival advantages. And, further, why, given that, it would seem natural to throw away sentimental inclinations that make you feel good, accrue to the long term benefit of you and yours, and embed you in a community you need around you to survive? Only a sociopath would see any sense in your logic, IMHO.
I said:
Refutation is holding out for a countervailing example
Obviously, I meant "Falsification is holding out for a countervailing example"
Morality has a high survival value, it is easy to understand why it could have evolved. Some prairie dogs appoint themselves sentinals of the tribe, and draw preditors onto themselves by barking out early warnings. Why? Some wolves give up their mating priviliges during lean times so the alpha pair can get enough resources for their pups. Why?
Morality has a high survival value, it is easy to understand why it could have evolved. Some prairie dogs appoint themselves sentinals of the tribe, and draw preditors onto themselves by barking out early warnings. Why? Some wolves give up their mating priviliges during lean times so the alpha pair can get enough resources for their pups. Why?
I've seen film of a family of meerkats that nearly died of hunger rather than leave one of their number that had been wounded and was dying. And a pack of wolves has been observed mourning for six weeks after one of them was killed by a cougar.
If, by morality in its deepest sense, you mean putting the interests of others ahead of one's own, then it is common among social animals -- either by evolution or by design.
;^)
The utility for the species is undeniable. It is also quite clear that not all humans actually feel compassion or empathy (despite presidential claims to the contrary). For the non-compassionate, a bit of prodding in the form of written rules is necessary.
There may come a time, centuries from now, when many of our everyday activites are viewed with horror, just as we now look back on slavery. How will the future -- where everyone is relatively rich and works more or less as an independent contractor -- judge us with regard to hourly wages? Or the whole idea of having employees? What will they think of the practice of keeping pets? Of eating meat? Of operating slaughterhouses and cold-storage facilities for beef carcasses? Of cutting down trees for paper?
If the time ever comes when we can conveniently do away with these things, we probably will, and then we and our times will be judged (by moralistic twits of the future) as being terribly insensitive to the evils we routinely practice. But now, these things are not viewed by most of us as immoral, and religion doesn't condemn these practices (except for a few vegetarian sects, and maybe Jainism). I think slavery was once like that. We are fortunate that our economic system permits us to do without it.
The two are certainly not equally reasonable. I think the preponderance of logical reasoning coupled with sensory perception tend to tilt the balance in favor of a real universe, don't you?
No. There wouldn't be any material reason for supposing "someone imagining" and "God creating" would result in a lickspittle of detectible material difference. If so, kindly tell me what it would be? Do you think we'd look more faded and transparent if "someone imagined" us into existence? Kindly present your material evidence for believing this.
Finally, what reason do you have for believing that a mirage could produce such empirical results? I must deny my senses to believe all is an illusion, and, as a rational person, I must conclude from my 5 senses that the universe is real and is not an illusion. Mustn't you also? No honest naturalist would agree with you that the two theories (illusion vs. real universe) are equally valid, especially since empiricism and logical positivism demand that matter be real not an illusion.
No such demand exists, and no evidence that your 5 senses have access to can tell the difference between illusion and "real universe", much less between distinctions of illusion such as "God created it" or "Someone imagined it up". Your implied assumption is that an imagined up universe would be inferior in some detectible manner to a "real" universe. No evidence for this contention exists to my knowledge, if you have such, cough it up, and let's have a look.
There is no way for a naturalist to demonstrate that the universe simply "exploded" from NOTHING,
That is not what analytically accute naturalists believe, what they believe is that they have no especially keen warrant to make any suppositions about where the universe came from, limited as they are, during office hours, to having suppositions about things for which there is material evidence to work with.
Logically, nothing cannot produce anything because by definition, it is nothing.
Then where do electron/positron pairs come from? Abstract logic is a mighty thin reed to be making vast ontological claims with.
That is much more of a leap in my view than my believing that ordered complexity on the scale we have must have come from a creator. I must conclude that you have no view whatsoever on the origins of the universe, because regardless of what view you might hold, it would be a leap - wouldn't it?
I have such views, I do not mistake them for useful analytical distinctions I can put some meat on the table with. Science has no opinion about the existence of God--it has no competence in that department. It only works from evidence, to produce ideas about evidence, and evidence is one of those material sorts of things. That makes scientists naturalists; That doesn't make scientists philsophical materialists, and most aren't, last I heard.
I would argue it's more to the point that refutation is a positive disproof, or disproof by deductive reasoning. Falsification is holding out for a countervailing example. And the reason we make this distinction so loudly and often these days, is that we don't, and oughtn't, trust deductive reasoning as much as we do tangible counterexamples.
Indeed, I can see where tangible counter-examples would be preferred. Though, in some disciplines (math comes to mind) - tangible examples might be hard to come by.
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