Evolution Disclaimer Supported

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 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.

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."

Your authority for applying this to slavery?

Why shouldn't it apply to slavery? An action was allowed in Leviticus and later condemned by Christ.

True, Christ never condemned slavery specifically. On the other hand he ordered us to "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you."

I don't want to be a slave. I don't want to be mistreated by my boss. I don't want to be abused by a government functionary.

On the other hand, I'm not going to be quick to judge others in history. What would you have done if you were born on a plantation in 1750 Virginia and inherited slaves? Would you have had the strength and courage to free them? Right now we have a nation which justifies what has now been objectively revealed to be the murder of unborn children. What are you doing about that?

Please understand that I know where you are coming from.

That actuallly kind of comforts me. The one thing you said which upset me a bit was when you implied the God of the Bible was somehow evil. He is not. An evil God would not command you to love, or forgive or be merciful. The God of the Bible commands these things.

I believe we have the responsibility to put religious teachings to the test of our inner light, even when this contradicts the literal word of the Bible.

I would never condemn someone for thinking that Genesis is an allegory. My concern is that evolution is being used to undermine those parts of the Bible which must be taken literally.

Pope Pius II called slavery a "great crime" in 1462 and popes forbid the enslavement of Indians in 1537, 1639 and 1741. Note the three orders. It seems popes aren't as quick to be obeyed as commonly thought.

OK, Pius II gets some points, as do Christians in general, because I do give Christianity credit for bringing some consistency to morality.

But the time frame still troubles me. Instead of 1860 years, we still have 1462 years. That's a lot of years. It still seems to me that morality evolves, and that new justifications emerge that were never explicity written down. If you believe that God exists outside of time, it seems odd that the most fundamental rules of behavior would apply only at certain places and certain times. It's like trying to operate a complex and dangerous machine with a manual that only reveals itself one page every few hundred years.

Perhaps you would be more persuaded if the sound waves found in the cosmic background radiation, played back in reverse, actually said something like “Let there be light” in ancient language?

I'd probably still have serious reservations. As the argument from apparent design does not prove the existence of a designer, so the argument of the primal shout does not prove the existence of the shouter. There are lots of possible reasons why there might have been a compressive wave disturbance in the inflationary era, just as there are lots of reasons why there might be disruptions in, say, the perfectly smooth cyclone action you might see in a perfectly circular sink containing perfectly still water when you open the drain. Consider Bode's law of planetary formation: the universe does not guarantee that that which is placidly homogeneous will stay placidly homogenous, even in closed, uniform, homogenous systems in dynamic equilibrium.

". . . so [Hitler] claimed portions of [Christianity] . . . "

What? And he put his ideology under the banner of creationism? I think not.

Get real. Are you claiming that pure Aryan blood is polluted with that of Jews, blacks, Slavs and other inferior races? (as both the Bible and Darwinism claim?).

AFAIK, which isn't much, Hitler was a pagan creationist

You didn't reply to 2457 . .

I'll go back and check it out. The shotgun approach of your posts, however, and the fact that they are rife with both factual and logical errors, makes it a tedious affair to address them as they should be. Call it a "Paine" if you will, and I am not here to be "Pained."

Hey fester, forget it. -- It's no disgrace for you to cave on responding to the tough posts, tedious as they are. Stick with the lightweight stuff. - You do well on bible quotes, for instance.

Okay Mr. Pain. It's time to address your post 2457. Let's take it a step at a time. When we're finished with one portion we'll move on to the next, okay?

-------

ME:"When it comes to existence and how things came to be the way they are right now, however, there are only TWO possibilities I know of. One of them has been - for reasons unknown to common sense - utterly squelched from the public school system for nearly a century. 2106 -FC-

YOU:'Unknown' Fester? We have a tradition, -- separation of church & state. If we must have state supported schools, they must avoid teaching religious theory.

------

First of all, you've never answered the question as to whether there are more than two possibilities with respect to the universe as we experience it, namely 1.) it exists by accident, and 2.) it exists by design. While you were waiting for me to "concede" I was waiting for you to answer this simple question. Would you care to answer it now? What other possiblities are there?

Then you launch into an assumption as yet unknown to American history, namely that our forefathers merely paid lip service in using words like "God," Creator," "Divine Providence" and so forth, as if they were intent on castrating every notion of religion from the public arena.

Would you care to back that up with some references?

Please address this small portion of your shotgun, knee-jerk reasoning, and then we can press "ahead" to the further digressions you've soiled yourself and this thread with via your infamous post 2457.

I would never condemn someone for thinking that Genesis is an allegory...

Some here would say you are on a slippery slope.

By the way, I do not think God is evil. I think, however, it is a great sin to assume that a book is responsible for defining good and evil. Consider a thought experiment: What if, in your heart, you came to believe that the author of evil is really more powerful than the author of good. Which side do you take, the losing side which you believe is good, or the winning side?

I think this is at the heart of morality, because temptation always presents itself in the guise of power and convenience. Even some who post on these threads seem to assert that the main justification for faith is the promise of eternal reward. So my central question is, do you follow the path of morality because you believe in it in your heart, or because of a divine promise of rewards and punishments?

Moving on from morality to truth -- do you follow waht you believe to be the best path for aquiring truth, or do you follow a path based on threats and promises?

Yep. He practiced what he believed, and what he believed was ultimately inspired by Darwin. Lysenkoism was his fig leaf, and by extension now it is yours.

What a fine exercise in stretching an argument to the breaking point.

By the same token, may I assume that, since you engage in diety worship, that I can consider you practically the same thing as a devil-worshipper?--hiding behind a fig-leaf of cristianity?

Lysenkoism is not, by any conceivable stretch of the imagination, sharing closet-space with darwinian evolutionary theory. Darwinian evolutionary theory was officially rejected by the communist regime in Russia, with extreme prejudice. Ask your local high school history student if you are having trouble grasping this concept.

That's a lot of years. It still seems to me that morality evolves, and that new justifications emerge that were never explicity written down. If you believe that God exists outside of time, it seems odd that the most fundamental rules of behavior would apply only at certain places and certain times. It's like trying to operate a complex and dangerous machine with a manual that only reveals itself one page every few hundred years.

Here's a cut & paste from the Bible that kind of sums it up for me:

The Parable of the Weeds ( Matt 13:24-29)

24Jesus told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field.
25But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away.
26When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.
27"The owner's servants came to him and said, 'Sir, didn't you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?'
28" 'An enemy did this,' he replied.
"The servants asked him, 'Do you want us to go and pull them up?' 29" 'No,' he answered, 'because while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them.
30Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.' "

There are evil people in this world. It's very hard to tell who they are most of the time. Jefferson and Washington owned slaves. I think they were basically on the side of good. John Newton was a slave trader. He went on to write the hymn "Amazing Grace" and became an outspoken and effective abolitionist. Bernard Nathanson -- who co-founded NARAL -- and Norma McCorvey are outspoke pro-lifers.

It's impossible for us to know who is supposed to go to Hell.

"I'm still waiting for a satisfactory discussion of why slavery is sanctioned in Leviticus. I'm not convinced of his prowess in Bible quotes."

You've posted a couple times lately, and I am not sure if you really meant them for me. One of them started with a quote from another poster. I think it was Tribune7.

If you want me to discuss slavery, evolution, creation and the Bible I will be happy to do that, but it is a part of the thread I've only given cursory reading to this point.

Go ahead and whip up some questions for me if you wish, and I'll try to work through them with you. On the other hand, if you weary of the prospect I will not hold it against you should you refrain.

Thanks. You've had some truly thought-provoking posts.

Donh, my point is that - completely independent of anything that the Intelligent Design movement (Dembski, Behe, et al) might offer as testable claims - the information theory and mathematical efforts broaching molecular biology will debunk the randomness pillar of natural selection. The presence of algorithm from inception is proof of intelligent design.

It took me a while to digest your post--I aplogize for the delay. I fail to see why the existence of "algorithm from inception" makes a compelling case for ID, should we turn one up. What Wolfram has demonstrated, if anything, should argue against such a claim. If we, like Wolfram, set up contained domains of discourse with simple elements and constrained axiomatic generational rules, and discover, as he did, that it seems to be remarkably easy to see spontaneous organization and apparently inhomogenous, regular structure evolving therein, this only argues that abundant order from simple rules and constraints is inherent in the nature of things.

This is science and it can be proven to be not true (Popperian falsification) by showing that there are no such algorithms or information content or that such algorithms and information content can arise from null.

I'm not so sure I am following at this point, but I'll presume you are trying to suggest that if self-organizing and self-sustaining entities evolving in simple systems, such as Wolfram's examples, were to be discovered at the base of our DNA organization then a scientific case is made for ID. If so, I fail to see why, it seems like the opposite argument is thereby confirmed.

...

I'm not sure what the randomness piller of natural selection is. if you mean the notion that junk amino acids whopped themselves spontaneously into prokariotes, I think this was in the toilet before Wolfram or Penrose came along. If you are referring to the problem of too much evolution too fast, then I agree it's a problem, but I do not agree that Wolfram is likely onto the solution. If you'll be more specific, I'll try to be as well.

whether or not such information content could arise by random chance.

I've been following these arguments for some little time now, and while a do think something could come of it, nothing has as yet. Confining the argument to junk DNA, I do not think the dragon will be slain if we do decrypt something legible in the junk DNA.

For my part, I need more than that. When you want to bust a fundamental scientific paradigm that's been working pretty well so far, it requires evidence of the dramatic incisiveness of the burning bush. Hunting around in the junk DNA for signatures, unless you come up with something painfully obvious and incontrovertable, is subject to the problems we've alluded to already in this discussion with Design and Shout. Clever DNA could only suggest (and, I continue to aver, not force the conclusion) that what built DNA was clever--it doesn't force the conclusion that such beings weren't biological, or biological-like themselves.

Some here would say you are on a slippery slope.

People can say what they want.

Consider a thought experiment: What if, in your heart, you came to believe that the author of evil is really more powerful than the author of good. Which side do you take, the losing side which you believe is good, or the winning side?

The good person, of course, would take the side of good. But I'm not a good person so I'm kind of glad God drafted me onto the winning side.

So my central question is, do you follow the path of morality because you believe in it in your heart, or because of a divine promise of rewards and punishments?

I've been thinking of this question for a bit. When I first read Revelation I remember thinking that it was pretty cool, that the bad guys were going to get what they deserved. Then I realized that some of those "bad guys" were my friends. That I realized that some of those "bad guys" were me. I guess the reason that I follow the path of morality is because I believe that Jesus is who he claims to be.

Here's an interesting link about a doctor's experiences with near death experiences.

Moving on from morality to truth -- do you follow waht you believe to be the best path for aquiring truth, or do you follow a path based on threats and promises?

This answer is obviously subjective but I think I'm attempting to seek absolute truth.

My posts are open to anyone who has something to contribute. I am not trying to be malicious towards the Bible. I am, however, giving my reasons why I consider it a guide rather than an authority. I believe the bible represents the best attempts of the people in their time to understand God. I think that refusing to continue the search is a sin.

My harping on the question of slavery is not meant to discredit the Bible or the church. It is meant to underscore my belief that we have to find the underlying ideas of our predecessors and try to advance them, not to assume that every literal word of the Bible is true in our current sense of the words. (This is secret code language meaning I believe the Bible is composed of some history, some allegory, some fable, some parable, and some Miss Manners.)

I am dead serious when I ask if you would side with the Good, even in the absence of carrots and sticks. There are lots of folks out there claiming to have the One True Word Of God. Who can decide for us what the truth is? Perhaps I am weeds, as the parable says, but I am compelled to follow my weedy inner light to wherever it leads.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.