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.
I've just added the Gould link to the List-O-Links.
The link you provided refutes your hypothesis. Thank you for providing it.
I'll be adding your "Wedge" links to the List-O-Links. Gonna take some time to reorganize things, but it's worth it.
Great map.
You mean like the tsunami?
Believe me, we went through all this the first time that junk was posted - pretty much everything said here was said there, and more, and it didn't do any good. He doesn't get it. He's never going to get it. I say this not to discourage you, but rather to keep you from being discouraged by your lack of progress in persuasion - it's not you, it's him. Really ;)
The Bible has evolved over the years, also. Some sections have been added, some have been removed, some modified in translation and some just made up during translation. There are passages in the KJV that exist nowhere else.
"Wishing I had, too." placemarker
I guess you may have some conflict with the "four corners of the earth" and that God took the "earth by the edges" and shook it.
He did not.
Matt 12:38-42
Then some of the Pharisees and teachers of the law said to him, “Teacher, we want to see a miraculous sign from you.”
He answered, “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now one greater than Jonah is here. The Queen of the South will rise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon's wisdom, and now one greater than Solomon is here.
God Himself is telling you here, that there is nothing that will ever be found in science that shows He exists, or is responsponsible for any phenomena. Science is that honest endeavor that is a result of Gen3:19,
"By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."
All that will ever be seen is, that from the ground man arose and to it he shall return. You might be surprised and disappointed in "the plain sence of what this says", but that is what you were told and that is all honest folks will ever find. The sign of the resurrection is the Holy Spirit, the Bread in the Lord's prayer. The Holy Spirit's concern is not with science, it's with Life, Love, Freedom, rights, and morals.
" The presupposition that all knowledge is obtainable through scientific inquiry is false. Even science demonstrates this possibility (e.g. uncertainty principle). Further, scientific inquiry does not form the basis of all rational thought or knowledge. "
Science is rational thought, not the other way around. Science is a rational process that seeks the truth. The unceertainty principle has nothing to do with the claim made.
"the crux of the matter is that it is inappropriate to use public schools as a bully pulpit to proclaim that my and other's interpretation of scripture is false. And that is exactly why some of us do not want evolution (as an explanation for origins of species and of man particularly) taught as a fact."
It's a science class. Scripture doesn't belong there, because it's not a science book. The cut from Gen 3 I gave you says plainly that man came from dust and will return to it. That is what science has found and you argue with it. You are also attempting to conjure up miraculous signs evident in the history of dust with ID, even though you were told they are not there. Where is the honesty and truth in that?
ID asks, "How can we calculate the odds of this poofing into existence in one step, under currently known conditions?" The ID question is not science. It is anti-science. It is hostile to inquiry. It is hostile to curiosity. It is fundamentally motivated by belief in original sin, the belief that the desire for earthly knowledge is sinful.
Science at its core is playful, inventive, imaginative and skeptical. Yes, science invents just-so stories. Yes, science publishes wild hypotheses. The difference between science and previous modes of knowing is that science puts its ideas and stories to the test. Testing is never over. Nothing is ever proved. Even great ideas like relativity and quantum theory are known to be incomplete.
But science does provide an enormous level of confidence in the reliability of its oldest ideas. And common descent via modification and natural selection are among the oldest, most studied, and most confirmed ideas in science.
That's irrelevant. Bearing false witness, such as the presentation of errors, falsehoods and advocating perpetual ignorance in the name of anything, poses serious stumbling blocks.
Not for a fanatic.
Every individual organism that contains genetic mutations, insertions, deletions or other modifications is a new form of life.
Yes. Here are the newest additions to the List-O-Links, the last three are from Junior and VadeRetro:
One Nation, Under the Designer. The true goals of the ID movement.
Discovery Institute's "Wedge Project". Replacing science with theism.
The Wedge at Work. The Discovery Institute's war against reason.
The Wedge strategy. In their own words.
ID proponents (all of them, even the literate ones) fail to understand how selection works. I'm not that science literate, but it seems to me to be just a variation of the second law argument.
Your estimate of precision is way off. It should be 99.44 followed by 1720 zeros.
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