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.
Thanks. Bachman Turner Overdrive. Don't know this Mona Lisa Overdrive but that's what Google is for. Stand By.
Uh-huh. When your wife asks how much gas you have left, do you tell her, "Half a tank" when you mean 0.5^10-1 tank?
Gee, if you could accurately say continental drift is measured in kilometers when it's actually measured in centimeters or fractions of centimeters, why didn't you say it is measured in gigameters or femtometers?
Sorry, you're not fooling anyone. When you estimate a value convention demands giving units to within at most of a factor of 10 or so of the actual value, definitely below a factor of 10^5! Saying it is accurate to say something is measured in kilometers when it is actually measured best in centimeters renders talking about anything but precise values meaningless.
Feels better now; doesn't it? ;^)
Is that a scientific conclusion of yours, Dimensio?
Scripture is fun!
Oh, yes!!!!
NIV Ezekiel 23:19-21
19. Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt.
20. There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
21. So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled.
There are so many good ones to choose from.
Worse, actually.
Life in a faith induced haze was a nice addiction. Like any addiction, it was a false existence. But nice. I recommend it, for those who can successfully deny reality for life.
Back away far enough and you see nothing and understand nothing. Stand far enough back and you can ignore your own child starving to death.
Science requires all kinds of talents, interests and abilities. It requires people who can spend their lives collecting and cataloging beetles. It requires people willing to wade through muck. It requires people who can speculate, and it requires people with the discipline to put speculations to the test.
The Einsteins of the world look, and are, brilliant, but their armchair calculations require the data provided by the plumbers of science, the guys who invent and build the instruments that acquire the data. Your aversion to plumbing is noted.
You live in a fantasy world where your imagination can erase centuries of accumulated knowledge without taking the trouble to address the beetles and the muck. What I find most interesting about creationists is their tendency to disparage creation, the tendency to describe physical reality as dirty and unworthy. Mere molecules. Pond scum. Monkies.
As if the God worshiped for being the creator is somehow equivalent to the four-year-old trying to cook a meal, and physical reality is just a big mess that will some day be cleaned up with the wave of a wand.
Yes.
They are not that stupid.
That passage does not speak to the character of Scripture itself...but it does speak to the character of the peoples that it gives a historical account of.
Eyewitness testimony is the least reliable form of evidence.
HOX gene mutations transforming lobe-finned fishes fins into arms and legs with digits.
Good one.
Can't believe no one's picked up on it yet.
You are asking the wrong person. I'm a Jew, not as Christian.
"Eyewitness testimony is the least reliable form of evidence."
It's worse than that. It's alleged eyewitness testimony.
Got any examples?
My plumber doesn't tell me how to do science.
And I do know how to unstop my toilet. It's possibly because I'm familiar with a variety of tools, not just pencils :-)
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