Is to too
"Give 'im a drop o' rum to warm 'is belly as 'e passes over" - Robert Newton (1905-1956)
Posted on 12/06/2005 11:55:32 AM PST by MRMEAN
Andrew J. Coulson is director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute.
Supporters of the theory of human origins known as "intelligent design" want it taught alongside the theory of evolution. Opponents will do anything to keep it out of science classrooms. The disagreement is clear.
But why does everyone assume that we must settle it through an ideological death-match in the town square?
Intelligent design contends that life on Earth is too complex to have evolved naturally, and so must be the product of an unspecified intelligent designer. Most adherents of this idea would undoubtedly be happy just to have it taught to their own children, and most of my fellow evolutionists presumably believe they should have that right. So why are we fighting?
We're fighting because the institution of public schooling forces us to, by permitting only one government-sanctioned explanation of human origins. The only way for one side to have its views reflected in the official curriculum is at the expense of the other side.
This manufactured conflict serves no public good. After all, does it really matter if some Americans believe intelligent design is a valid scientific theory while others see it as a Lamb of God in sheep's clothing? Surely not. While there are certainly issues on which consensus is key — respect for the rule of law and the rights of fellow citizens, tolerance of differing viewpoints, etc. — the origin of species is not one of them.
The sad truth is that state-run schooling has created a multitude of similarly pointless battles. Nothing is gained, for instance, by compelling conformity on school prayer, random drug testing, the set of religious holidays that are worth observing, or the most appropriate forms of sex education.
Not only are these conflicts unnecessary, they are socially corrosive. Every time we fight over the official government curriculum, it breeds more resentment and animosity within our communities. These public-schooling-induced battles have done much to inflame tensions between Red and Blue America.
But while Americans bicker incessantly over pedagogical teachings, we seldom fight over theological ones. The difference, of course, is that the Bill of Rights precludes the establishment of an official religion. Our founding fathers were prescient in calling for the separation of church and state, but failed to foresee the dire social consequences of entangling education and state. Those consequences are now all too apparent.
Fortunately, there is a way to end the cycle of educational violence: parental choice. Why not reorganize our schools so that parents can easily get the sort of education they value for their own children without having to force it on their neighbors?
Doing so would not be difficult. A combination of tax relief for middle income families and financial assistance for low-income families would give everyone access to the independent education marketplace. A few strokes of the legislative pen could thus bring peace along the entire "education front" of America's culture war.
But let's be honest. At least a few Americans see our recurrent battles over the government curriculum as a price worth paying. Even in the "land of the free," there is a temptation to seize the apparatus of state schooling and use it to proselytize our neighbors with our own ideas or beliefs.
In addition to being socially divisive and utterly incompatible with American ideals, such propagandizing is also ineffectual. After generations in which evolution has been public schooling's sole explanation of human origins, only a third of Americans consider it a theory well-supported by scientific evidence. By contrast, 51 percent of Americans believe "God created human beings in their present form."
These findings should give pause not only to evolutionists but to supporters of intelligent design as well. After all, if public schooling has made such a hash of teaching evolution, why expect it to do any better with I.D.?
Admittedly, the promotion of social harmony is an unusual justification for replacing public schools with parent-driven education markets. Most arguments for parental choice rest on the private sector's superior academic performance or cost-effectiveness. But when you stop and think about it, doesn't the combination of these advantages suggest that free markets would be a far more intelligent design for American education?
This article appeared on FOXNews.com on November 18, 2005.
My Dad was a geologist, prayed on his knees and was always late. Mom said it was because he measured time in millions of years. If I ever get smart enough to be a bible translator, the geological record will be in the BuglerTex Version of Genesis where it belongs.
Huh? I don't follow. Why the inflammatory language?
Spell check is your friend when commenting on dumbing down.
Of course. How else do diamonds form from a clump of graphite in nature? There are so many obvious examples in nature (e.g. crystallization) that I cannot fathom how someone could ask this question without being disingenuous.
Mom said it was because he measured time in millions of years.
Angels personally assemble diamonds, atom by atom. At least, that would explain A) why my wife is so fascinated with them, and; B) why they're so damn expensive.
Sure, all the time. You've been given obvious examples like crystalization, but there are many others. Hydrodynamic sorting, for instance. Dump a bunch of new sand on a beach. The wave action will sort the grains non-randomly so that smaller grain move up the beach and larger grains remain down the beach, simply because the waves progressively lose energy, and therefore sediment carrying capacity, as they move up the beach. Similarly with the sand in a stream bed.
One would think. But, it doesn't appear to be anywhere even near universal. Why is that, do you suppose?
It was written 2000 years ago that the time would come when men denied even that they were created.
Where?
What is he blathering about? They certainly did.
Amendment X The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
If your nose was any different, you would not be able to taste food. Most of the taste is in the smell. That's why you can't taste food when you have that cold you were complaining about.
There fixed it. Teach ID in philosophy if you want. Or History
Ancient History
Is to too
"Give 'im a drop o' rum to warm 'is belly as 'e passes over" - Robert Newton (1905-1956)
Totally incorrect!! And, not even intelligent.
This proposal offers a solution we both can accept. You teach your children superstition such as ID or creationism (and call it anything you like) and I will teach my children science.
My children will go to MIT, Columbia, and Stanford. (OK, one already went to Columbia and one already went to Stanford).
And your children will be working as clerks in a convenience store because that is what they will be qualified for.
Works for both of us. Everybody's happy. And indeed, we need convenience store clerks when my kids need to get a late night snack.
So many factual errors in just 3 sentences.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics was not invented by Newton. It was developed by Rudolf Clausius (of the Clausius-Claperyon equation) in 1888.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics has nothing to do with "order". That is a lay term used to try to explain the 2nd law to those without a physics background. The 2nd law states that delta S >= 0, which means the entropy will remain constant (adiabatic) or increase in all thermodynamic processes. The entropy is defined as Planck's constant times Omega, where Omega is the cumulative sum of the density of states, also called the partition function.
In lay terms, the 2nd law states that nature will tend toward a more probable state from a less probable state.
Moreover, the 2nd law is derived from systems that are in a heat bath or in a system that can exchange particles in a controlled fashion. The mathematics is called a canonical ensemble.
The signficance is that the entropy can increase locally so long as it does not increase globally. This latter point is essential. Only the global entropy obeys the 2nd law. Examples abound. The engine in your car converts the heat of combustion (modest entropy) to work (meaning motion of the car) which is low entropy. This would seem to violate the 2nd law!!! But, the reason that it doesn't is that your engine also produces lower temperature heat as exhaust, which is very high entropy. The net effect is an entropy increase. But, still, work was done which converted heat to work.
Since the earth is heated by the Sun, which provides modest levels of entropy, the 2nd law is not violated at all by the decreasing entropy of life (increasing complexity).
brilliant
Ah-har!
So what if I missed the exact wording? Thing do NOT decrease in entropy over time naturally. No explosion has ever produced a laptop computer. No tornado has ever assembled a Rolls Royce. And no random combination of molecules has ever produced life. What is the minimum number of amino acid molecules required to make up the simlest virus? A few thousand? I really have no idea but for the sake of argument lets call it 1000. The number of total possible combinations is 1000! which equates to 4.023872e+2567. Do the math. Even if you could try a trillion, trillion combinations per second, your chances of coming up with a plausable, self replicating, stable virus are mathmatically ZERO even if you considered the universe a billion times older than the current claims.
The fact that you strain on a gnat while swallowing a whale tells me that you are so dedicated to making sure that your personal BELIEFS are impressed on everyone cloud your judgement to the facts that evolution CANNOT and WILL NOT ever be proven. If you had half as much belief in God as you do evolution, we would not be having this discussion.
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