Posted on 12/17/2008 9:59:16 AM PST by GodGunsGuts
Expel the Creationists
Dec 16, 2008 — Apparently Eugenie Scott of the NCSE is feeling no remorse from her appearance in Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, where she defended the actions of those who ruined careers, denied tenure, and deprived students and teachers of their academic freedom because they dared to question Darwin. Her latest piece in Scientific American is as adamant as ever: the creationists, ever morphing their tactics by a kind of sinister evolution, need to be eradicated.
With co-author Glenn Branch, Eugenie Scott summarized the history of creationism and the court cases that have stymied them. Using the projection theme of a crook “donning a fake mustache” to hide his identity, Scott portrayed a shape-shifting bogeyman that can be shown no mercy but must be expelled. The subtitle reads, “Creationists who want religious ideas taught as scientific fact in public schools continue to adapt to courtroom defeats by hiding their true aims under ever changing guises.” After thoroughly discrediting the motives of creationists in Louisiana and Georgia who merely requested that students use critical thinking when exploring evolution, she explained why these apparently innocent requests deserved to be defeated...
(Excerpt) Read more at creationsafaris.com ...
ping!
dont you love it when scientist confuse theory with facts! what a joke this lady is
Is her name REALLY Eugenics Cott?
;^)
You know, the evolution crowd would have a lot more credibility if they’d quit doing things like ruining the careers of those that dare to disagree with them.
Pardon me. HIS name... I think.
You must conform to Goodthink or Big Brother will not be amused!
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Yup- their motto is “We can’t explain away the impossibilities of Macroevolution, so we’ll defend our Darwinian religion by attackign htose that don;’t drink our kool-aid, and dare to expose the ugly side of Macroevolution with scientific FACTS” Brilliant defense- ignore the FACTS and just spend all their time engaging in ad hominem attacks- Really undermines their credibility- Sad they can’t see htis though.
Creationism’s EvolutionCreationists have long battled against the teaching of evolution in U.S. public schools, and their strategies have evolved in reaction to legal setbacks. In the 1920s they attempted to ban the teaching of evolution outright, with laws such as Tennessee’s Butler Act, under which teacher John T. Scopes was prosecuted in 1925. It was not until 1968 that such laws were ruled to be unconstitutional, in the Supreme Court case Epperson v. Arkansas. No longer able to keep evolution out of the science classrooms of the public schools, creationists began to portray creationism as a scientifically credible alternative, dubbing it creation science or scientific creationism. By the early 1980s legislation calling for equal time for creation science had been introduced in no fewer than 27 states, including Louisiana. There, in 1981, the legislature passed the Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science in Public School Instruction Act, which required teachers to teach creation science if they taught evolution.
The Louisiana Balanced Treatment Act was based on a model bill circulated across the country by creationists working at the grassroots level. Obviously inspired by a particular literal interpretation of the book of Genesis, the model bill defined creation science as including creation ex nihilo (“from nothing”), a worldwide flood, a “relatively recent inception” of the earth, and a rejection of the common ancestry of humans and apes. In Arkansas, such a bill was enacted earlier in 1981 and promptly challenged in court as unconstitutional. So when the Louisiana Balanced Treatment Act was still under consideration by the state legislature, supporters, anticipating a similar challenge, immediately purged the bill’s definition of creation science of specifics, leaving only “the scientific evidences for creation and inferences from those scientific evidences.” But this tactical vagueness failed to render the law constitutional, and in 1987 the Supreme Court ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard that the Balanced Treatment Act violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution, because the act “impermissibly endorses religion by advancing the religious belief that a supernatural being created humankind.”
Creationism adapts quickly. Just two years later a new label for creationism—“intelligent design”—was introduced in the supplementary textbook Of Pandas and People, produced by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, which styles itself a Christian think tank. Continuing the Louisiana Balanced Treatment Act’s strategy of reducing overt religious content, intelligent design is advertised as not based on any sacred texts and as not requiring any appeal to the supernatural. The designer, the proponents say, might be God, but it might be space aliens or time-traveling cell biologists from the future. Mindful that teaching creationism in the public schools is unconstitutional, they vociferously reject any characterization of intelligent design as a form of creationism. Yet on careful inspection, intelligent design proves to be a rebranding of creationism—silent on a number of creation science’s distinctive claims (such as the young age of the earth and the historicity of Noah’s flood) but otherwise riddled with the same scientific errors and entangled with the same religious doctrines.
Such a careful inspection occurred in a federal courtroom in 2005, in the trial of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. At issue was a policy in a local school district in Pennsylvania requiring a disclaimer to be read aloud in the classroom alleging that evolution is a “Theory...not a fact,” that “gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence,” and that intelligent design as presented in Of Pandas and People is a credible scientific alternative to evolution. Eleven local parents filed suit in federal district court, arguing that the policy was unconstitutional. After a trial that spanned a biblical 40 days, the judge agreed, ruling that the policy violated the Establishment Clause and writing, “In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether [intelligent design] is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that [intelligent design] cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.” The expert witness testimony presented in the Kitzmiller trial was devastating for intelligent design’s scientific pretensions. Intelligent design was established to be creationism lite: at the trial philosopher Barbara Forrest, co-author of Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, revealed that references to creationism in Of Pandas and People drafts were replaced with references to design shortly after the 1987 Edwards decision striking down Louisiana’s Balanced Treatment Act was issued. She even found a transitional form, where the replacement of “creationists” by “design proponents” was incomplete—“cdesign proponentsists” was the awkward result. More important, intelligent design was also established to be scientifically bankrupt: one of the expert witnesses in the trial, biochemist Michael Behe, testified that no articles have been published in the scientific research literature that “provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred”—and he was testifying in defense of the school board’s policy.
“Eugenie Scott summarized the history of creationism..”
6,000 - 10,000 years ago God said “Let there be Light.” So the history of creationism goes back to the beginning of creation. Interesting. Hey Eugenie, God’s smarter than you.
RE “Ms. Scott, we sincerely believe, on scientific and philosophical grounds, that Darwinism is deeply flawed. Can we have equal time to present alternatives? NO!” (FROM LINK).
Ok, I am listening, what alternative do you want to teach?
gee, what a surprise, continued attacks on critical thinking and critical analysis of the man made religion of evolutionism....
yawwwwwn.
“Of course, believing in God is laughable in scientific circles today. But atheism is NOT science - its an ideology masquerading as science”
We have to conclude that all of the wonders of this earth were created, were the result of a “cosmic accident” (no less incredible than creation) or we are hurling through space, in a habitat cylinder, and this is all an illusion ... how would we know?
Speaking of alternative theories maybe this could be in science class, or history class:
“When Christians hear Mormons refer to the Garden of Eden they may incorrectly assume that the LDS believe it was by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Joseph Smith, however, claimed by revelation that the Garden of Eden was in western Missouri. This would throw off the entire first part of Genesis. Noah would have left in the ark from Missouri and sailed to some location in the Middle East.
LDS Apostle John A. Widtsoe explained:
“Latter-day Saints know, through modern revelation, that the Garden of Eden was on the North American continent and that Adam and Eve began their conquest of the earth in the upper part of what is now the state of Missouri. It seems very probable that the children of our first earthly parents moved down along the fertile, pleasant lands of the Mississippi valley.” (John A. Widtsoe, Evidences and Reconciliations, three volumes in one, Salt Lake City: Bookcraft 1960, p. 127)
http://www.utlm.org/onlineresources/gardenofeden.htm
Belief in God is the majority opinion in scientific circles in the USA. There is no atheist majority among scientists. The vast majority of scientists have no interest in either “proving” or “disproving” God, and know that Science is a particularly ill suited mechanism for either.
“You know, the evolution crowd would have a lot more credibility if they’d quit doing things like ruining the careers of those that dare to disagree with them.”
It’s not a struggle between evolution and creationism. It’s really a struggle between fundamentalist Christianity and non-fundamentalist Christianity.
The “evolution crowd” as somehow being a homogeneous group is as ridiculous as claiming all creationists are the same, but I do note your grouping of all folks who believe in evolution as one does little to add to your own personal credibility in debating this topic.
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