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.
You are proposing that these putative outcomes are the result of teaching evolutionary theory? Oh puh-leeze.
You need to refresh your memory on logical fallacies. Especially the one called post hoc ergo propter hoc.
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA! That's the funniest line I've seen all day.
Sorry dude.
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA! That's the funniest line I've seen all day.
Ghost of G3k returns?
That one ranks up there with:
"1720" is a really big number"Wildly elliptical" planetary orbits
"a circle is not an ellipse"
"infrared light causes sunburn"
The more things change, the more it's like the good old days. Who knows; maybe the Tedster will reappear momentarily to recount yet again his tale of Saturn hovering over the North Pole diminishing the "felt effect of gravity".....
I'm waiting for someone to insist that the earth really must be the immovable center of the universe, because if we were moving, as the blasphemous solar system theory claims -- remember, it's only a theory! -- we'd obviously leave the moon behind. (That really was a common belief in the days before Isaac Newton.)
Besides, he's still hanging in there, acting the lunatic over on LP.
In the first place, the Creationists are in the minority. Actually, the numbers I have seen make it a slight minority - its basically 50/50.
Second, if 90% of Americans said the world was flat would that make it so???
Scientific evidence does not require consensus. It has often been in opposition of consensus.
Nice to know he's got plenty of company....
Why not make all science classes optional? Not sense confusing the masses with intellectual honesty.
No, God told me He was the Creator? What did He tell you?
Few here are arguing that God does not exists or that he is not the creator.
He told me that this was one of his earlier attempts and that he has gone on to bigger and better things and is happy with us just going about our daily lives as long as we don't interfere with his.
You are not open to other possibilities? How narrow-minded.
Would you believe that She told me you were a looney?
Why do you think God is a female? Because they are smarter than males?
Duh! Evolution is the only theory being taught. You need to pay attention to the argument here.
The theory of relativity is also being taught but no one is challenging that.
You mean there are no other scientific theories being taught in school?
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