Posted on 01/19/2009 9:42:35 PM PST by Coyoteman
The new Earth and Space Science (ESS) course standards (and all other science course standards) will be up for approval before the State Board of Education (SBOE) during January 21-23. Some SBOE members--the seven who are Young Earth Creationists (YECs)--will attempt to make changes to the ESS standards in ways that will damage the scientific integrity and accuracy of the course. In particular, these SBOE members will try to negatively modify or delete the standards that require students to understand the following topics that deal with scientific topics they consider controversial: age of the Earth and universe, radiometric dating, evolution of fossil life, and the origin of life by abiotic chemical processes. These topics are the ones that YECs consider to be controversial; indeed, they are obsessed with them to the exclusion of everything else.
Continues...
(Excerpt) Read more at texscience.org ...
Is it too much to ask someone to see the obvious connection?
The teaching of evolution has maintained a stranglehold on the public school system and has not, for the decades its been enforced, resulted in any improvement of science standards or the US ranking in science in the world.
There is not one shred of evidence that not teaching creation will improve the science education kids are receiving, nor that teaching it will harm it.
On the contrary, education as a whole was much better in this country for all the years that BIble reading and prayer and teaching creation were part of the education provided in public schools.
Today, private Christian schools and homeschools still outperform the public school and virtually everyone who is teaching for religious and values reasons teach BOTH creation and evolution. I have yet to meet any homeschooler that doesn’t. Anyone who uses ABeka teaches both and that is a large number of homeschoolers and private schools.
The evolution monopoly has NOT improved science education one iota. Especially when the education level of the teachers and the error prone school textbooks are thrown into the mix. There’s simply no reason to even begin to think that evolution is being taught correctly or being understood correctly at that level.
Those who think so are only fooling themselves.
And you're sure you're right how?
Don't forget, truth is a word best avoided in science.
If you can't definitively, absolutely state that you know this to be a fact beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it is true, you can't tell someone else they are wrong.
I stand corrected. In their zeal to keep any mention of God out of the picture, they do have to misrepresent the creationist/Christian side.
It’s so much easier to get hysterical over theocracies and being burned at the stake that way.
You can ask. I'm still going to ask to see the evidence.
I didn't say that the teaching of evolution only is the reason we're falling behind other countries in science education. I'm saying that it has provided no benefit and that the claims that introducing creation will hurt it are unsubstantiated.
However, the correlation is clear. The quality of education has declined as evolution has had the monopoly, demonstrating that it offers no advantage. It has not helped science education in this country.
There are dozens of threads of evidence that all unequivocally show an old earth and an old universe. All of physics, astronomy, geology and several other sciences would have to be completely wrong if the earth were young.
They’re not.
See especially page 22 heading “Rightly Handling the Word of Truth” in the link:
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wiens.html
Evos started it with the claim that teaching creation would harm science education in public schools.
Show us the statistics for us to refute, or disprove, as you will.
"There is simply no basis for the claim that it will hurt the science education the kids are receiving. On the contrary, evolution has had a monopoly in the school system for decades and has done the science education no good. We continue to fall behind in the world."
There is the claim. Are you claiming that you believe that teaching evolution is the cause of us falling behind, or that teaching creationism instead can't possible make it any worse? If we are comparing our science education to the rest of the world, there are places in the world where creationism is taught as science we can use for comparison.
You’re projecting again...not banning, not suing, not reporting for abuse.
Run along already.
You run along. I have no interest in a self appointed attack dog with no teeth.
No, you’re going to continue ignoring the evidence.
Modeling observed biological systems does not by default mean that they can arise without an intelligent agent.
Of course not. The assertion in question was whether or not simple information patterns can, when scaled up, correlate to meta-biological processes, that's all. If you notice, I mention that this correlation does not imply causation, nor was I trying to assert that it did.
It says nothing about cause or origin aside from the fact that there is no precedent established that biological systems can form themselves and arise on their own.
Eh... this is actually an interesting point of open debate among myself and my colleagues. I can assure you that the biological mechanisms that we have modeled in the Software Ecosystem were not intentionally placed by any human being, they are instead what could be called the net affect of the intentions and will of all human innovators within the system.
So on one hand, of course, the complex information system arose from "design", in that, it arose from the actions of human beings, but it was not any form of _intentional_ design or engineering, but more an unintentional offshoot of thousands of designers all jockeying to win a finite number of computer cycles for their particular creations.
Which raises an interesting question, if an intelligent agent designs unintentionally, is it still intelligent design?
Information just does not happen. Increasing chemical complexity violates the 2nd law and is not observed to happen spontaneously within nature without a known intelligent agent behind it.
Interesting assertion. On one hand, I can give you countless examples in the computational/simulation world where purely random processes "increase information and complexity", as there as an entire field dedicated to the practice (Evolutionary Algorithmic Computation). Granted, that's still within the artificial "Created" world of binary computation, so I can see why you might dissent to that example. On the other hand you mention that "Increasing chemical complexity" is not observed to happen within nature without an "intelligent agent" behind it, I assume then that you agree that any life-form should be considered an "intelligent agent", as all biology increases chemical complexity of the immediate environment around it during it's life-cycle. Would you say that's a fair assertion or am I missing something? Thanks MetMom!
In typical liberal fashion the NEA demands God be removed from public schols with all their God-hang-ups and “separation of church and state” and “theocracy” gobbledeygook and predicatably they socialize kids instead of educate them...
then when this fact is pointed out, they try desperately to obfuscate and twist the focus off themselves by blaming creationism for their failed academics, ignoring that they stamped that out via the courts...
like typical liberals they don’t want to own their own failures, but spend all their energies blaming conservatives and Christians.
And as if that wasn’t enough they demand proof that science thrives in some other country with a creation curriculum...
I educated them that science thrived pre-NEA...you educated them that kids here do better academically when taught without multiple God-hang-ups in failed public schools...
there’s simply no reasoning with the unreasonable metmom.
They just like to hear themselves prattle on.
Typical liberals, thinking you can shut down debate.
I won’t be running along...when people don’t want to engage they just stop. That’s how it works.
I will point out NEA liberals and their endless non-arguments and projections on FR.
Now you can stand there bleeding to death telling me I have no teeth and ignoring evidence you keep demanding, bleating one projection after another, but that’s your call.
I am not interested in discussing vague claims about what anonymous “evos” have or have not said.
Not to mention your own?
But you make a good point, evos never want to claim their own ridiculous assertions, silly strawmen arguments and projections.
Somehow I think that an agent intelligent enough to create a universe and something as complex as life, would not have the human failing of creating something unintentionally.
On the other hand you mention that "Increasing chemical complexity" is not observed to happen within nature without an "intelligent agent" behind it, I assume then that you agree that any life-form should be considered an "intelligent agent", as all biology increases chemical complexity of the immediate environment around it during it's life-cycle. Would you say that's a fair assertion or am I missing something?
Not quite. I was thinking more along the lines of origins- that process up to the point of the first fully functioning, complete, living cell. There's also the fact that life is pretty fragile, and that it's more likely not to survive than it is to survive.
I'm not saying that any individual cell is the intelligent agent, but that there's an intelligent agent outside the system that accounts for that. Whether it's constant upkeep, or occasional tweaking.
The 2nd law is strong enough that deterioration sets in even before the death of the individual in that process called aging. The 2nd law couldn't be a law if it did not apply to all systems within the physical universe, therefore something in biological systems is temporarily overriding it.
You seem to think that because I've taken a side, I'm in favor of squelching the other side. I'm not. Young Earth Creationists, Flat Earthers, Bigfoot Scholars, all have every right to champion whatever worldview they like, and they have the same rights as anyone else to bring those beliefs to the school board. They should lose, and science classes should be spent teaching science.
The problem with the education system is not merely intellectual, as so many would have us believe. If it was, the education system should be skyrocketing as the amount of information in this world is increasing.
The problem that many refuse to acknowledge is that there is also the moral component and that this debate between creationists who are typically Christians and conservatives, and evolutionists/scientists who tend to be atheists and liberals, is a clash between worldviews.
The ToE is just a useful tool to bludgeon Christianity with and those who side with the ACLU are just useful idiots who go along with the game not realizing the full consequences of what they are doing. And if they do , they are complicate co-conspirators.
Go back to post 32 in this thread.
Read cm’s screeds about theocracies, the dark ages, and being burned at the stake should creation be reintroduced into schools.
If you don’t like the anonymous part, tell them to give their names so they’re not anonymous any more.
Show us how science education has improved in the United States under the monopoly evolution has had in the public school system. That should be easy to do as creation was only relatively recently been completely kicked out.
If teaching creation is so deleterious to learning science, you should be able to point out the improvements in science education and our ranking in the world should be increasing.
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