Posted on 02/28/2006 4:05:45 AM PST by PatrickHenry
House lawmakers scuttled a bill that would have required public school students to be told that evolution is not empirically proven - the latest setback for critics of evolution.
The bill's sponsor, Republican state Sen. Chris Buttars, had said it was time to rein in teachers who were teaching that man descended from apes and rattling the faith of students. The Senate earlier passed the measure 16-12.
But the bill failed in the House on a 28-46 vote Monday. The bill would have required teachers to tell students that evolution is not a fact and the state doesn't endorse the theory.
Rep. Scott Wyatt, a Republican, said he feared passing the bill would force the state to then address hundreds of other scientific theories - "from Quantum physics to Freud" - in the same manner.
"I would leave you with two questions," Wyatt said. "If we decide to weigh in on this part, are we going to begin weighing in on all the others and are we the correct body to do that?"
Buttars said he didn't believe the defeat means that most House members think Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is correct.
"I don't believe that anybody in there really wants their kids to be taught that their great-grandfather was an ape," Buttars said.
The vote represents the latest loss for critics of evolution. In December, a federal judge barred the school system in Dover, Pa., from teaching intelligent design alongside evolution in high school biology classes.
Also last year, a federal judge ordered the school system in suburban Atlanta's Cobb County to remove from biology textbooks stickers that called evolution a theory, not a fact.
Earlier this year, a rural California school district canceled an elective philosophy course on intelligent design and agreed never to promote the topic in class again.
But critics of evolution got a boost in Kansas in November when the state Board of Education adopted new science teaching standards that treat evolution as a flawed theory, defying the view of science groups.
Hallelujah!!!!
Are you sure it wasn't "Be fruitfly and multiple"?
Why do I always have to get out my dictionary!! LOL
Ipsilateral: Located on or affecting the same side of the body
Contralateral: occurring on or acting in conjunction with a part on the opposite side of the body
Contrapositive syllogism: http://www.csuchico.edu/phil/gtropea_mat/syllandvenn.html
Why did all the fun edicts have to be superseded? :-(
I think I saw a pair of nesting hierarchies in one of my oak trees last week.
I'm 'guana agree.
(But they're so clever!) LOL
A really bad pumpkin ruin your whole day.
Elsie, thank you! Genesis 19 is a precise example of why the Bible cannot be used as the only source to explain "life".
But lettuce remember the glass is half full.
That was peachy.
Conch ya be specific? Shell we? (those are conch shells, aren't they? I am naive.)
37. The older daughter had a son, and she named him Moab ; he is the father of the Moabites of today.
38. The younger daughter also had a son, and she named him Ben-Ammi ; he is the father of the Ammonites of today.
The Ammonites appear to be extinct at the moment. No doubt delayed retribution for Moab's incest.
There were some good ones in there.
The "72 Helen Thomases" post is a classic.
Percentage of sedimentary rock; I was about 5% higher than this representative estimate Sedimentary rocks cover 75% of the earth's surface, but amount to only 5% of the outer 10 km. Big deal.
Percentage of marine invertebrate fossils in relation to the total number of fossils can be very roughly estimated by what is in collections and also by their relative percentage to other species. "Invertebrate and microfossil collections are vastly larger than collections of vertebrates and plants..."
Collections in Paleontology Warren D. Allmon
The number of groups and species of invertebrates hold a dominant position not only in the kingdom Animalia but also among all life-forms on earth. According to Groombridge (1992), the described species of invertebrates (1.325 million) accounts for 96.71% of the total species of animals (1.37 million), and 76.19% of all life-forms (1.739 million).
If you don't like my numbers use your own. The fact is that the most numerous fossils are invertebrates such as animals with shells and remains of plants. If you prefer, instead of saying 95%, I can say "Invertebrate and microfossil collections are vastly larger than collections of vertebrates and plants...".
It doesn't change the substance of my argument that there are no clear transitional forms in the fossil record to account for the origin of the major phyla.
how do raindrop spatters fossilize under millions of tonnes of water?
Who says they were necessarily fossilized during the Deluge?
In addition to being vastly more numerous than other fossils I would also add that marine invertebrate fossils are also vastly more complete than many vertebrate fossils, of which we often only have bits and pieces.
Cordially,
To say that all we have are the Gospels for Jesus is false on its face. There are the other New Testament writings of Luke and Paul, etc, and other extra-Biblical sources. As for the Romans "keeping track of everything", you may as well say that Pontius Pilate didn't exist:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------People frequently ask if any record has been preserved of the report which, it is presumed, Pontius Pilate, prefect of Judea, sent to Rome concerning the trial and execution of Jesus of Nazareth. The answer is none. But let it be added at once that no official record has been preserved of any report which Pontius Pilate, or any other Roman governor of Judea, sent to Rome about anything. And only rarely has an official report from any governor of any Roman province survived. They may have sent in their reports regularly, but for the most part these reports were ephemeral documents, and in due course they disappeared. "
F. F. Bruce
link
You're not acutally asserting that Jesus did not exist, are you?
History, Archaeology and Jesus
Hard evidence from the ancient world dramatically supports the New Testament record on Jesus.
by Paul L. Maier
Mythical personalities are not involved in authentic episodes from the past. Nor do they leave hard evidence behind. In the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, however, there are many points of contact between His record in the Gospels and the surrounding history of His times. Just as the New Testament is studded with authentic geographical locations, it is also full of genuine personalities who are well known from secular sources outside of the Bible record, including some that are even hostile to Christianity.
- All of the following are Bible characters about whom we know as much, or more, from secular ancient historical records than from the New Testament.
- Roman emperors: Caesar Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius.
- Roman governors: Pontius Pilate, Serguis Paulus, Gallio, Felix, Festus.
- Local rulers: Herod the Great, Archelaus, Herod Antipas, Philip, Herod Agrippa I, Herod Agrippa II, Lysanias, Aretas IV.
- High priests: Annas, Joseph Caiaphas, Ananias.
- Prominent women: Herodias, Salome, Bernice, Drusilla.
- Prominent men: John the Baptist, James the Just.
In some cases, the additional, non-Biblical information on these personalities is immense. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (A.D. 37—100), for example, supplies about a thousand times as much data on Herod the Great as does Matthew’s Gospel.
In other cases, the secular facts are crucial. The New Testament does not tell us what became of Jesus’ half-brother, James the Just of Jerusalem, the first bishop of the Christian church (Acts 15). Josephus, however, gives us the details of his being stoned to death by the Sanhedrin in A.D. 62.
[snip]
Cordially
Ok, Ok, so I was using a little hyperbole. There are indeed esoteric industries devoted to the practice. It is true in Biblical literary criticism, too. In common parlance though, it is a rare event that I see somebody dispute the authenticity of some Aristotelian text as the basis for disputing some notion of Aristotle's.
Cordially,
Sorry, your criticisms of the way science operates are about 250-300 years out of date. Science doesn't work just by using a set of assumptions to try and interpret the data any more and hasn't for a couple of centuries. Interpretation of pre-existing observations using defined assumptions is just the starting point of framing hypotheses. There is a long road between those assumptions and observations and what scientists refer to as "theory", and in it the assumptions are thoroughly tested against reality, by predicting what we would expect to see if the assumptions and the interpretation were true. Creationists consistently ignore or are unaware of how science actually works, and constantly harp on this "interpretation" canard.
I am slightly surprised at you hawking the interpretation canard. From arguments I've seen from you in the past I'd have expected better than that. Surely you knew this already?
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