Posted on 11/13/2007 1:40:53 PM PST by yoe
A packet for educators issued by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in conjunction with the NOVA program "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" encourages teaching practices that are probably unconstitutional, a conservative organization stated on Tuesday.
"The NOVA/PBS teaching guide encourages the injection of religion into classroom teaching about evolution in a way that likely would violate current Supreme Court precedents about the First Amendment's Establishment Clause," said John West, vice president for public policy and legal affairs at the Discovery Institute, in a news release.
The 22-page document is a companion piece to the two-hour NOVA docudrama, "Judgment Day," airing on most network affiliates Tuesday night. The film is about a trial concerning intelligent design that took place in Dover, Pa., in 2005.
The guide claims to provide teachers with "easily digestible information to guide and support you in facing challenges to evolution."
In the booklet, teachers are instructed to use such discussion questions as: "Can you accept evolution and still believe in religion?" The answer to that query is provided as: "Yes. The common view that evolution is inherently antireligious is simply false."
"This statement is simplistic and not neutral among different religions, and in that sense arguably inconsistent with Supreme Court teachings concerning neutrality," said attorney Casey Luskin, program officer for public policy and legal affairs at the institute.
"The Supreme Court ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas that the government must maintain 'neutrality between religion and religion,'" said Randal Wenger, a Pennsylvania attorney who filed amicus briefs in the Kitzmiller v. Dover School District case.
"Because the briefing packet only promotes religious viewpoints that are friendly towards evolution, this is not neutral, and PBS is encouraging teachers to violate the First Amendment's Establishment Clause," Wenger added.
In its news release, the Discovery Institute indicates that it has enlisted more than a dozen attorneys and legal scholars, including Wenger, to review the PBS teaching guide with an eye to its constitutionality.
"The PBS materials, in suggesting that students need not be concerned that evolution violates their religion, ironically equip public school teachers to violate our current conception of the First Amendment by explicitly teaching students concerning matters of religious belief," Wenger said.
"The irony is that discussing intelligent design would not teach any student about any religious belief - the PBS materials, on the other hand, will," he said.
Luskin noted that the teaching guide also presents false information about the theory of intelligent design.
"The teaching guide is also riddled with factual errors that misrepresent both the standard definition of intelligent design and the beliefs of those scientists and scholars who support the theory," the attorney added.
As a result, the institute is providing its own guide for educators, "The Theory of Intelligent Design," which will help teachers better understand the debate between Darwinian evolution and intelligent design.
Cybercast News Service previously reported that in December 2004, parents in Dover filed the first-ever challenge to intelligent design being taught in public schools, claiming it violated their religious liberty by promoting particular religious beliefs to their children under the guise of science education.
Just over a year later, U.S. District Judge John Jones III ruled that the school system may not include intelligent design in its science curriculum because intelligent design is not a scientific concept.
Telephone calls and e-mails seeking a response from the Public Broadcasting System were not returned by press time. However, on the PBS Web site, the program is described as capturing "the turmoil that tore apart the community of Dover, Pa., in one of the latest battles over teaching evolution in public schools."
"Featuring trial reenactments based on court transcripts and interviews with key participants - including expert scientists and Dover parents, teachers and town officials - 'Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial' follows the celebrated federal case of Kitzmiller v. Dover School District," the site states.
"In 2004, the Dover school board ordered science teachers to read a statement to high school biology students suggesting that there is an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution called intelligent design - the idea that life is too complex to have evolved naturally and therefore must have been designed by an intelligent agent," the Web site says.
"The teachers refused to comply," it adds.
"'Judgment Day' captures on film a landmark court case with a powerful scientific message at its core," said Paula Apsell, NOVA's senior executive producer. "Evolution is one of the most essential, yet - for many people - least understood of all scientific theories, the foundation of biological science."
"We felt it was important for NOVA to do this program to heighten the public understanding of what constitutes science and what does not and, therefore, what is acceptable for inclusion in the science curriculum in our public schools," Apsell said.
Nevertheless, Discovery Institute attorney Casey Luskin disagreed that the program is just about science.
"PBS gives a false definition of intelligent design that is a complete straw man argument," Luskin said. "Scientists who support intelligent design seek evidence of design in nature, and argue that such evidence points to intelligent design, based on our historical knowledge of cause and effect."
"So intelligent design theory is not an argument based on what we don't know, but rather an argument about what we do know," he said.
The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. Albert Einstein Why Socialism?
Evidently, "smart" is relative.
All the fossil we have found and I still can’t find that darn missing link one for any transitional species type.
Eh? Check again.
Check the definitions on my FR home page. "Theory," "law," and other relevant terms are included.
That has got to be one of the most tendentious cartoons I’ve ever seen. It’s worse than a Chick tract.
Yeah, like that Leftist fueled 12 part crap series they had about WWII.
I don't agree with that proposition but then again I don't agree with SCOTUS either since their "establishment clause" jurisprudence is bascially incoherent.
Battling between liberal and conservative seems like useful idiot exercises.
To me its authoritarian vs. non-authoritarian. Does a policy limit my options as a citizen? So if yesterday I could own a health insurance policy and today I cannot, my options have been limited.
Socialism limits choices and its authoritarian (they call it progressive), but conservatives often want to limit my options, too. If I’m not hurting anyone, just leave me the hell alone. Ha.
Gee...I wonder how that little gem got left out of the school books.
Well, yes they're absurd (didn't they refuse to help defend ID in the Dover trial?) but in that particular sentence they have the teensy-weensiest of claims. There are religious people who think evolution can be reconciled with religions and other religious people who disagree. That statement is siding with the former against the latter and so might conceivably put a toe across the SC's neutrality standard.
Better to stick with facts that don't claim truth for one position or another. They might, for example, quote some of the many scientists like Francis Collins who've reconciled evolution with their faith. And then they could quote creationists who say these celebrated scientists just lying to themselves because the Bible must be taken literally.
LOL. It does; lots of them, but none ever quite the same or doing the same thing even right next to each other. I remember mapping in Montana and coming across a wrench faulted formation and I just had to sit and look. I sketched it and marked it on my map, but I spent more time just marveling at that little hidden, beautiful treasure high up on a lonely peak. A mule deer stumbled on me and we both woke out of our respective musings and went in opposite directions.
All the lawyers, teachers and others who embrace Darwinism and evolution in their dying moments will see one of God’s creations for themselves. It is hell.
Wrong.
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
-Albert Einstein
Source: Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman (eds) (1981). Albert Einstein, The Human Side. Princeton University Press, 43.
The Pope is going to hell?
>>Well, yes they’re absurd (didn’t they refuse to help defend ID in the Dover trial?) but in that particular sentence they have the teensy-weensiest of claims. There are religious people who think evolution can be reconciled with religions and other religious people who disagree. That statement is siding with the former against the latter and so might conceivably put a toe across the SC’s neutrality standard.<<
You have a point - there is a point here.
I’ve been a science teacher and I can tell you that kids are gonna ask questions and teachers need the freedom to answer questions that are not directly in the curriculum.
I promise that kids are gonna ask about religion in science class. I do disagree with the DI - teacher need to be able to say they do not oppose religion and that science does not oppose religion (although it is sometimes hard to tell that listening to some science types)
Anyone you’d ever want to know or spend time with will be in hell. I mean, would you want to spend eternity in the company of the anti-science crowd?
Are you kidding me? There have been thousands of transitional species discovered. Maybe you've just been asleep the last 150 years...
Wikipedia, for example, has a short list to get you started.
They're both strickly liberal media for liberal consumption.
Both media have made it pretty clear that the conservative viewpoint is not welcome.
Taxation without represention ... a possibility...
“In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views. I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”~Albert Einstein
Both media have made it pretty clear that the conservative viewpoint is not welcome.
So it is your contention that science is liberal, and conservatives shouldn't have anything to do with it?
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