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 like the part where one kind of recurring thing that doesn't happen damages a repair mechanism for that thing that doesn't happen and the organism which doesn't have that mechanism rapidly and reliably gets lots more of that thing that doesn't happen.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. [Gen 1:3]
This verse implies that God created light (let there be ... and there was).
Intelligent Designers, if they were curious, might be interested in whether and why some parts of the genome mutate at different rates. It would make an interesting research project.
No. Since I have repeatedly stated the contrary, why do you persist in implying that I said such nonsense.
I think some IDers accept some kinds of evolution. What they absolutely oppose is natural selection. The alternative is some sort of mechanism that "knows" what kind of change is needed for changing conditions and productes the targeted change.
The first task of ID is to demonstrate it is possible to predict the expression of allele changes and to predict the consequences in terms of reproductive success.
Sounds impossible to me, but at least it would be science.
Just because you don't know how to read the Bible and still rely on some man's Sunday School level of interpretation doesn't mean that you are right ...
OK. Again. There is nothing to reconcile since I don't believe your Sunday School interpretation of the Bible taught to you when you were 5 years old by some women that reached her academic peak when she graduated from the 8th grade.
He made the sun on day one. That verse is reiterating that he made the sun and the moon and also, now the starts and placed them in the firmanent. When all was done it was the end of day 4. It doesn't mean that all that was done in one day. It just means that by the end of day 4 all of that was accomplished.
No. It states the acts of putting the sun and moon and stars in the firmanent was completed on day 4. The sun was created on day one.
Do you really believe the earth was made before the sun and stars?
yes, I believe the account of Genesis and in six literal days of creation. JM
That is exactly why we don't want to put religion into the science class.
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