Posted on 01/17/2006 11:24:31 AM PST by PatrickHenry
A rural school district agreed to stop teaching a religion-based alternative to evolution as part of a court settlement filed Tuesday, a legal group said.
Frazier Mountain High School will stop teaching a philosophy class discussing the theory of "intelligent design" this week and won't teach it in the future, said Ayesha N. Khan, legal director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Officials at the El Tejon Unified School District were not immediately available for comment.
A federal judge in Fresno had been scheduled to hold a hearing Tuesday afternoon on whether to halt the class midway through the monthlong winter term.
A group of parents sued the district last week, saying it violated the constitutional separation of church and state by offering "Philosophy of Design," a course taught by a minister's wife that advanced the theory that life is so complex it must have been created by God.
"The course was designed to advance religious theories on the origins of life, including creationism and its offshoot, 'intelligent design,'" said the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court.
In a landmark lawsuit, Americans United for Separation of Church and State had successfully blocked Dover, Pa., schools last month from teaching intelligent design in science courses. [Kitzmiller et al. v Dover Area School District et al..]
El Tejon school officials had claimed the subject was proper for a philosophy class.
The high school in the Tehachapi Mountains about 75 miles north of Los Angeles draws 500 students from a dozen small communities.
Sharon Lemburg, a social studies teacher and soccer coach who was teaching "Philosophy of Design," defended the course in a letter to the weekly Mountain Enterprise.
"I believe this is the class that the Lord wanted me to teach," she wrote.
Similar battles are being fought in Georgia and Kansas. Critics of "intelligent design" say it is biblical creationism in disguise, but defenders argue it is based on science and doesn't require adherence to any religious belief.
Actually, no.
Darwinists, however, do not seem to have a good answer as to what competitive advantage consciousness brings. On the surface, it would seem a competitive disadvantage, i.e. unnecessary overhead.
You're kidding, right? Look around you. Among other things, consciousness allows you to manipulate your environment to your liking. Consciousness is why you're tapping these messages out on a computer from your nice, comfy chair, after enjoying a nice hot meal from your stove under the cover of an artificial shelter, instead of grunting to your packmates and huddling up for warmth after dashing down to the creek to wash down your roots and berries with some water. We are the only creatures capable of reshaping the entire planet to suit us, with nearly absolute dominion over every other organism that exists anywhere on the world, but you don't see the advantage of consciousness. Kind of like the fish who doesn't notice the water any more, because he's always been swimming in it. Huh.
Now of course, my own belief is that consciousness is a gift from God, and its purpose is not to aid in survival but to demonstrate God's love and generosity.
Believe what you like, but it's not science.
4. If human consciousness has this immortal quality, it may shed light on how it confers a competitive advantage.Wow, I'm trying to wrap my mind around the concept of an immortal soul conferring a competitive advantage of some kind. When a person dies, how could the fact that their consciousness doesn't die with their physical body possibly affect how many children they have???QED
Or are you saying their soul gets to haunt their children & subtly change their minds WRT who they pursue for marriage, to an extent that the parents were never able to do while they were still alive?
(Hey Vade, I think there's a good plot for a novel here! Deborah tends to pursue boyfriends that send her domineering mother into shock. But after Mom dies suddenly of a heart attack, Deborah - without realizing it - starts to get attracted to the very nerdy men her Mom was trying to hook her up with. She almost marries an insufferable young lawyer, when a chance encounter with a part-time tarot-card reader who's studying to be an electronics engineer sets her on a desperate quest to free herself once and for all... :-)
Your plot is far too modern to deal appropriately with the primitive nature of the underlying belief. You need to drop waaaaaaay back into deeeeeeeep prehistory to deal with this one. Think about a really ignorant tribe of savages, blundering through their brutish lives, believing that they're being guided by the ever-present spirits of their departed elders. Let that scenario settle into your mind, and then you're ready to write a story about this creationist notion of the survival value of consciousness after death.
Interesting. The Mommorcist! I'm not sure Tarot cards make great theater, though. A full voodoo ritual might be better.
It isn't that they "don't like" these subjects. They simply prefer to question many of their assumtpions just as science is inlcined to do, and would prefer not to see these discplines abused in favor of an ideology.
If they "don't like these subjects" then why do some of them have degrees in astonomy, geology, etc?
I don't think you fully appreciate the truly primitive nature of this creationist notion of the survival value of consciousness which persists after death, expressed back in post 279. It's inspiring me to ponder all kinds of things.
Consider two competing tribes. One thinks it's living in a world where ghosts are ever-present, always guiding their actions. The other tribe (I'm thinking of classical Greece) has shaken off much of this worldview -- they have only a few gods (Zeus, Aphrodite, etc.), and their dead are neatly tucked away in Hades. The pagan Greek outlook, while not at all what we would go for, is a vast intellectual improvement over the really primitive "ghosts-everywhere" worldview. The Greeks have their ghosts mostly under control, which gives them room to think. They are only occasionally thwarted by the gods. The savages, on the other hand, who always look to ghostly influence, are non-rational almost all the time.
I'm a creationist and I don't just *like* science, I *love* science and got my degree in it. Nobody can make blanket statements that "Creationists don't like science" anymore that someone can say "Evolutionists are atheists".
No. They just don't happen to agree with your opinion that God is outside the purview of science, and so you feel a need to tag them as wholly atagonistic to science in general.
I also have a degree in philosophy, and, yes, philosophy departments nearly everywhere have courses in the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science, and, if anywhere, that's where ID would rightfully be taught.
I would not expect the philosophy of religion course to be one in which the science of evolution is discussed at all, why would it? It is not an issue in the philosophy of religion.
As for the philosophy of science, sure, discuss it there, but teach the science (?) of ID. Much of what I have read in the ID arena is a put-down of evolution, as though the rejection of evolution is an automatic affirmation of ID. It's not.
JMO.
LOL. When I was finishing my philosophy degree, my advisor gently hinted that continuing on to get an advanced degree in philosophy might not be the best path for me.
Even at 22, I understood what he meant.
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