Posted on 01/22/2005 7:38:12 AM PST by PatrickHenry
A movement to drag the teaching of science in the United States back into the Dark Ages continues to gain momentum. So far, it's a handful of judges -- "activist judges" in the view of their critics -- who are preventing the spread of Saudi-style religious dogma into more and more of America's public-school classrooms.
The ruling this month in Georgia by Federal District Judge Clarence Cooper ordering the Cobb County School Board to remove stickers it had inserted in biology textbooks questioning Darwin's theory of evolution is being appealed by the suburban Atlanta district. Similar legal battles pitting evolution against biblical creationism are erupting across the country. Judges are conscientiously observing the constitutionally required separation of church and state, and specifically a 1987 Supreme Court ruling forbidding the teaching of creationism, a religious belief, in public schools. But seekers of scientific truth have to be unnerved by a November 2004 CBS News poll in which nearly two-thirds of Americans favored teaching creationism, the notion that God created heaven and earth in six days, alongside evolution in schools.
If this style of "science" ever took hold in U.S. schools, it is safe to say that as a nation we could well be headed for Third World status, along with everything that dire label implies. Much of the Arab world is stuck in a miasma of imam-enforced repression and non-thought. Could it happen here? Our Constitution protects creativity and dissent, but no civilization has lasted forever, and our current national leaders seem happy with the present trends.
It is the creationists, of course, who forecast doom if U.S. schools follow a secularist path. Science, however, by its nature, relies on evidence, and all the fossil and other evidence points toward an evolved human species over millions of years on a planet tens of millions of years old [ooops!] in a universe over two billion years in existence [ooops again!].
Some creationists are promoting an idea they call "intelligent design" as an alternative to Darwinism, eliminating the randomness and survival-of-the-fittest of Darwinian thought. But, again, no evidence exists to support any theory of evolution except Charles Darwin's. Science classes can only teach the scientific method or they become meaningless.
Many creationists say that teaching Darwin is tantamount to teaching atheism, but most science teachers, believers as well as non-believers, scoff at that. The Rev. Warren Eschbach, a professor at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pa., believes that "science is figuring out what God has already done" and the book of Genesis was never "meant to be a science textbook for the 21st century." Rev. Eschbach is the father of Robert Eschbach, one of the science teachers in Dover, Pa., who refused to teach a school-board-mandated statement to biology students criticizing the theory of evolution and promoting intelligent design. Last week, the school district gathered students together and the statement was read to them by an assistant superintendent.
Similar pro-creationist initiatives are underway in Texas, Wisconsin and South Carolina. And a newly elected creationist majority on the state board of education in Kansas plans to rewrite the entire state's science curriculum this spring. This means the state's public-school science teachers will have to choose between being scientists or ayatollahs -- or perhaps abandoning their students and fleeing Kansas, like academic truth-seekers in China in the 1980s or Tehran today.
Can't you koolaid drinkers speak with your own voices? All you do on these threads is post links to fatuous choirs. Just tell me your best empirical fact supporting your belief system.
Please prove your claim that abiogenesis teachings state that their is no "aid".
[Laughter subsides....]
Q. What is the maximum amount by which a star can decrease its mass by conversion to energy that is radiated away?
A.
"They [stars] are continually radiating energy into space and thereby losing mass, and, as this energy is released in nuclear reactions in the interior of the star..... This mass loss is slight, and cannot exceed 1% of the star's mass in its entire life...."Source: "The Stars: Their Structure and Evolution," R. J. Tayler; Wykeham Publications (London) Ltd, 1974
I regret to inform you that your "hypothesis" about stellar structure and energy release mechanisms is in need of modification.
Wait until some of these idiotic school board cases work their way up to the Supreme Court. Then the issue will become one of those ghastly litmus tests for appointing federal judges, just like abortion, bussing, school prayer, etc. If you thought the confirmation hearings for Bork and Clarence Thomas were nightmares, just hold on a few more years. Lunacy awaits us.
Why does Darwin look Amish
I think you incorrectly posted this to me.
I'll bet if you understood your overused source links
you could express them yourself. I'm going to take my computor apart and put it in the sun, and wait for it to assemble just by chance.
I wish I had an inkling of the dumb faith you darwinites have....
hehe
Now you know that evolution and science would NOT predict that. You are just having a little fun, right?
You think "lunacy" descibes the belief of 90% of americans.Where does that put you? Only a tiny percent of blue staters believe in darwinian materialism.
Source: Book 2, Chapter 10, Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler.
OMG! I thought I was one of the few that has actually waded through the drivel of A. Hitler.
Come on. First post have to have a little more meat that that! Take a side, make a statement and stand by for the attacks.
If you think calculating the probability of life's origin gives a precise scientific origin, guy, they sure didn't do a good job teaching it in your school.
Those crazy creationists refuse to believe things popped out of nowhere and rose up to something for nothing.
If only they would close their minds and join the darwinite minority.
"The sun HAD to be larger. It's on fire! The fire that creates the heat from our sun is burning something. Gaseous mixture ratios have to be within a certain range to burn, thus a further argument for its shrinking to maintain density equilibrium. Similarly the newest era of missles that sucks out the O^2 from the atmosphere creates suction. Review the laws of thermodynamics and physics and then we can talk again. "
The sun is a nuclear reactor and being "on fire" shows very little understanding of nuclear reactions. However, the sun has clearly lost some mass since its formation, but as a percentage of its original, it is probably very small.
AGAIN!
For a member of FR to post liberal dogma from a liberal rag, with nothing that is 'news' or not already posted hundreds of times, except for their theory of America's evolution into a Saudi-like regime, says more about the agenda of a small group of posters here who continually fly in the face of basic conservative principles.
20 or 30 of the same people posting their same arguements on each side over and over and over (ad nauseum) will not change a thing, a mind, the facts, or the faith. It's ALL unprovable. These posts get a relatively low # of views on FR and don't do a thing to advance conservative principles, except to bring out the extremists on both sides.
If you believe in God, you must believe He is sovereign over everything. Everything else is secondary. It's like arguing about whether it's better to earn a million dollars in stocks or bonds, on Nasdaq or NYSE. What's the difference?
God has a purpose for all of us. The end goal is to be with Him in heaven. Only then might we understand. If you are not of this belief, that's fine, but trying to impact people of faith on this issue without belief in God and His sovereignty is a total waste of time and bandwidth. If you are an atheist, then your credibility is no better than the 'creationist' web sites that are automatically dismissed as uncredible.
This issue seems so easily solved. Allow the teaching of evolution to be an optional class in government schools, allow The Bible to be an optional class in government schools. Let parents and students decide what to choose, what to study, what to believe, including both.
That would be the conservative approach to such a minor 'speed bump' of an issue.
Don't expect too much out of that - I suspect that someone's about to find out that sock puppets and their owners are dealt with pretty harshly by the mods.
Science isn't the realm of opinion. ID has no aspect which can be studied using the inductive methods of science. Nor does ID answer where we came from. A designer must have origins. Hence our origins are the origins of the designer, which goes unanswered. ID can be taught in theology or philosophy, but it is innappropriate for science. When the correct answer in a science class becomes "God did it" then sciecne ceases to exist and we are back to the dark ages. The U.S. will need to import more H1Bs because Americans will be too ignorant to maintain our technological advantages. Everthing will be "God did it" and no one will know how to solve anything of complexity.
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