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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.
Define catastrophic. Local floods and subsequent mudslides do occur.
"Such deposits may yet be found in polar regions. If they are, I'm sure those who take the biblical texts for what they say and mean will use such a discovery as evidence to support a global flood, while those who consider the biblical texts to be mere fairly tales or products of human invention will dismiss them as an anomaly, or perhaps the product of billions of years of glacial activity or some such.
Continents are measurably moving. Climates change. Only if you insist that all of the mechanisms of global change currently observed did not exist in the past and the physical laws governing their current action were completely different in the past can you ignore those observations.
If it is truly your belief that in the past the laws of the physical universe were different enough to enable a global flood while still leaving contrary evidence, and those differences in the laws leave no discernible telltale evidence then what is the purpose in trying to determine history? Perhaps those changes were as recent as yesterday and all that we have putatively experienced as 'the past' is just a figment of our minds churning away in some weird unknowable plane of existence (or pre-existence)?
That depends upon the total number/kinds of physical forces in play. It has been noted, for example, that the principle of superposition does not always apply under catastrophic conditions, even if there may be no proximate sign of shift.
I do not have to claim these things "did not exist" in the past. But I can reasonably speculate that these physical processes may have occurred on a wider scale than typically observed, and may have been preceded by a planet with drastically different features than presently observed. Nor do I have to be a solipsist to recognize that the greater parts of the fossil record, as well as the geological makeup of this planet, was laid down through historically liquescent phenomena.
I was addressing P-Marlowe's hypothetical world at 1359 where there are two "jars" of specimens, one looking like Helen Hunt and another looking like Helen Thomas. The question posed by P-Marlowe:
Now, are they a different "species" because they don't want to mate?
IOW, that subsequent generations look increasingly more like Helen Hunt is not an accidental result of an undirected process but rather the Helen Hunt likeness would be the result of an "intelligent cause".
Fester, how do you account for the fact that there are no fossil fish in the Burgess formation, or for that matter in any Cambrian fossil bed?
According to the ToE, none will ever be found.
It seems to me that under a flood scenario, one would expect to find fish in every stratum.
It seems to me that fish, of all living creatures, should be the most capable of escaping death by flood. Doubtless there are cases where fish were suddenly buried under sediment. Do fish fossils exist in all parts of the world? I understand whale bones have been found in the desert.
The Burgess shale, in particular, contains the fossils of all sorts of worms, arthropods, sponges, etc. The way they are positioned in the rock indicates that they were caught in an underea mudslide.
There are no fish bones, scales, teeth, or any other indications of fish.
Why?
Why is this true in all lower and middle Cambrian formations?
Why are fish found in all later marine formations?
In fact, in the Burgess shale, there are no indications of any vertebtrate animal. No fish, no whales, no sea snakes, no sea turtles, no birds, no otters, nothing.
And you guys wonder why I won't join your church?
Why do you ask questions when you have no intention of responding honestly to the answer? In the first place, by asking elementary questions you expose yourself as pathetically ignorant.
That's all right by itself, because all of us are ignorant in varying ways and degrees.
But your questions are personally and intellectually dishonest. You don't know the answer, and you have no intention of being informed by the answer.
Ouch! LOL
The Burgess Shale species could swim.
Fish fossils are found below terrestrial animal fossils.
The order of fossils indicates a slow progression from smaller to larger fossils, aquatic to terrestrial, terrestrial to airborne; fish to amphibian, amphibian to reptile, reptile to mammal and bird. There is no sorting by size, weight, length of leg, running ability or the ability to tread water for a really really long time.
No unnecessarily absurd hypothesis can explain this sorting in light of a world wide flood.
The fossil record does not match a world wide flood.
Fool! They died according to their sinfulness. Those simple creatures that were most innocent died first, so that they wouldn't suffer. The most evil creatures had to die last, to be aware of the horror that was unleashed upon them. This accounts for the sorting effect you see.
</creationism mode>
Ah! Now I get it!
No, it's an ipsilateral al gore rhythm.
LOL! I didn't get it until just now! That's the best one yet!!!!
"Ah! Now I get it!"
Just imagine how organized each species must have been to so uniformly performed the same level of sin. Do you think God handed out 'score cards' to the leader of each species? Perhaps God just used a point system. Hmmm.
God knows all...
Yes. Maybe a point system. You mean like golf. Above and below par and a handicap? Or maybe there was one sin associated with each species. And there was ranking involved. There is some interesting theory on Ranking and Selection that might apply here.
It recursively compresses itself bi-literally no doubt.
Recursively or incursively contra-literally! But did it invent the Internet?
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