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 have a hypothesis! From the guy that thought the sun was on fire!
BTW, YOUR hypothesis is on about 429 creationists' web-sites.
By mandating religious teaching in a government-funded school, thereby establishing a law that favors one religion over another.
ook-ook! "wildly elliptical planetary orbits!" ooook!
The theory of evolution is NOT established scientific fact.
I guess, to be intellectually honest, we would have to remove Christianity from the public schools, also!
But, the issue is about the science classes, NOT the religion classes and they don't teach Buddhism or use the Koran in the science class!
And exactly what would that religious teaching be? Which religion would it be establishing?
Yes, it is. It's a tested, documented theory accepted by nearly every reputable biologist on the planet.
Any of the Judeo-Christian ilk.
No it isn't.
Debunked a hundred million times. You assume that everything is totally randowm. Using your logic, we would assigne a 50/50 chance that the sun would rise tomorrow and a 50/50 chance that it would shine thus arriving at a highly likely hood that it would not be seen tomorrow.
Frankly, I've come to the point where I don't care what government schools teach. I'm sending my daughter to a homeschool. Ours.
How about something from Harvard Medical School, or Oxford's Biology Department?
I would even say that the media even winces then looks away at this point with creationist GOP politicians because its just somewhere they don't want to go right now. You can see the cringes when new earth people like Falwell boldly proclaim the young earth as gospel. But as this push to force creationism on kids gains more publicity, rest assured at some point the GOP will start getting more and more exposure on this issue and no one will like it.
Again, personally I think the creationism push is an actual threat to national security because creationism is a non-science being pushed off as science. If the creationism push were to run its full course, you will start seeing things like ineffective vaccines against biological agents, or widespread famine caused by insects because the "science" behind the vaccines or pesticides is based on creationism which is not science.
I suppose at that point, creationists would argue that the biological plague or mass American starvation was God's justice and punishment for our "sins" or something while completely denying they had anything to do with America's fall from greatness.
Judeo-Christian is not a religion.
No problem with that.
The ivy league has the last word?
The Judeo-Christian tradition encompasses all denominations of Judaism and all denominations of Christianity. Some might argue that it also encompasses Islam, but I'd rather not start that fight tonight.
Ivy League has the reputation, though I'll take something from the middle of Stufflackistan, Egypt if it can pass a peer-review and get published in a reputable journal.
You will notice it is exerpted from an article in Nature.
Then they will google and get the hundreds of creationists' web-sites with their false-science proofs against evolution. This is exactly what they want to happen. Tie it up in debate instead of learning. Teachers have to be very carefull in opening up a can of worms. Some can handle it, others can't.
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