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 cannot possibly eliminate anything and everything that would cause some people to stumble.
Slept through the last 200 posts, placemarker.
There is no difference between Liberal Political Correctness and Consevative. Our extremists employ the same emotive driven strategies and arguments as the lefts.
What?
You cannot be serious?
Copernicus? Galileo? How about THE ENTIRE DARK AGES? That is why they are called the Dark Ages. Religion and politics al but killed Western Science.
You cannot be serious?
In addition, for the milionth time, Most believers in evolution DO BELIVE IN and Intelligent Designer, ie; God. We also believe in evolution and not in a 6000 yr old earth.
Ignores the problem of the items that Mr. Malicious Editor routinely and righteously leaves out of his presentation.
Evidently, yes. And it was in at least two places.
Evolution is a Fact and a Theory. [Laurence Moran]
Evolution as Fact and Theory. [Stephen Jay Gould]
Yes. His so-called documentation only documents what every Southack thread turns into: some group of rational people trying to sledgehammer a few elementary facts and snippets of logic into the head of a Stone Deaf type ...
... and eventually (being rational) giving it up.
I'm referring to evidence that the resistant trait *already* existed in the population.If your version would be true and the trait 'already existed', the bacteria would have to have (1) accuired a susceptibility after we isolated the first bacterium and tested its descendants on the antibiotic, and then (2) reverted back to its pre-existent resistant form when we started the main part of the experiment. The bacteria would, in other words, have evolved twice between two known forms.
For that matter, there's nothing to the whole IC thing anyway.
Marcus Tullius Cicero Wise men are instructed by reason; men of less understanding, by experience; the most ignorant, by necessity; the beasts, by nature.
again....give me one. Not just google sites.
read "Soul of Science " by Nancy Pearcey. You are so misinformed.
Are you actually telling me that there have NOT been scientific discoveries of theories that were unpopular at the time of their discovery?
Why not tell me what you mean instead of posting such an obscure, flippant cop out?
You know what creationist sites do to scientific quotes (I know you do, because you've been on these threads forever). If they are that dishonest with quotes, what gives me any hope they'd treat articles any differently? By their fruits you will know them.
That is belied by the statement of strategy published on the Discovery Institute web site, and since removed, that described what it called the "wedge" strategy. This wedge strategy was to get science to accept ID in order to make people comfortable with the idea that some kind of supernatural was an established scientific fact. Then they would spring Christianty out of that base (or whatever the Moonies are, the DI was founded by a moonie).
Discovery Institute's "Wedge Project" Circulates Online
On March 3, 1999, an anonymous person obtained an internal white paper from the CRSC entitled "The Wedge Project," which detailed the Center's ambitious long-term strategy to replace "materialistic science" with intelligent design. The paper describes the CRSC's mission with a sense of urgency:
"The social consequences of materialism have been devastating. As symptoms, those consequences are certainly worth treating. However, we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a "wedge" that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The very beginning of this strategy, the "thin edge of the wedge," was Phillip Johnson's critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. Michael Behe's highly successful Darwin's Black Box followed Johnson's work. We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."
The white paper created quite a buzz among many skeptics after it was widely circulated on the Internet. However, CRSC Senior Fellow and Director of Program Development Jay Richards said that the mission statement and goals had been posted on the CRSC's web site since 1996. Richards also said, "the general concept of the 'Wedge' is described in Phillip Johnson's book Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds." Richards neither confirmed nor denied the authenticity of the document, but he believed that the paper was an "older, summary overview of the 'Wedge' program." Much of the boilerplate content of the paper is posted on the CRSC's web site.
Other Resources:
Forrest, B. (2001). The wedge at work: How intelligent design creationism is wedging its way into the cultural and academic mainstream. MIT Press. Retrieved January 23, 2005, from http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/barbara_forrest/wedge.html
The wedge strategy: Center for the renewal of science & culture. Antievolution.org: The critic's resource. Retrieved January 23, 2005 from http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html
Given what Behe claimed (in a speech that I attended) that IC is, IC is no barrier to evolution, it is a consequence thereof. I think that Behe has changed his definition ove the last few months.
"In brief, it is mathematically impossible, given the 17 billion years in age of our universe, for unaided processes to precisely sequence data longer than a few scores."
What do monkeys randomly slapping keys have to do with evolution? There is nothing random about evolution, other than the random mutations during transcription. So he is talking about the origin of life, in which case, he is making statistics on something we don't even understand yet?
"In other words, if you can't fault his math with math of your own, then any attempt to fault his conclusion would be itself unsupported."
Ok, take his conclusion for one monkey, then you have to multpliy it by the billions of planets. On each planet there would by trillions and trillions of different places for these tiny proteins to come together. His example was the chance for one spot on earth to spontaneously create life, it does nto work like that, if it did, he would have used the life, not monkeys. Comparing proteins 'randomly' coming together, which they don't, with monkeys hitting keyboards is just stupid and misleading.
Sounds more like this explanation on probabilities and miracles:
http://www.thesupernaturalworld.co.uk/index.php?act=main&code=01&type=00&topic_id=1630
Looking at the edge of sciecne and saying it "must be god" has been going on for millenia. From fire to lightning all the way up to evolution, science has displaced these argments for god. What makes you think this would be any different? Since we do not currently understand how it works, it must be god?
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