Posted on 09/28/2009 3:00:59 PM PDT by MNDude
My teenage nephew just got back to school this month with science teacher who is nicknamed "Mr. Evolution" because of his zeal for his beliefs.
Mr. E started class saying by saying "In this class, I intend to completely dismiss and disprove many religious myths".
I think this is going a little too far. Your opinions?
There’s a fundamental assumption made by the anti-intelligent design crowd, that intelligence is inextricably tied to matter. This assumption leads to the belief that highly organized matter had to evolve first, for intelligence to become possible. Unfortunately, when pressed for evidence of where all the matter (and energy) originally came from, they fall back on wildly complex mathematical calculations that result in a conclusions like the aforementioned, that it hatched from a magic egg . . . that somehow popped in from oblivion, already endowed with this amazing capability.
I suppose he’ll need another period to disprove God.
Well, Mr. Evolution did something right. His intent is to compare ‘his religion’ with other religious myths. His is a religion class - not a science class - and he made that clear from the get go. He made a boo boo in the ‘evo’ world.
I don’t expect a debate. Frankly the topic is beyond the scope of any undergraduate level course. But the parade of lame attempts to “show” us that everything is attributable to evolution, and that any talk of “intelligent design” is just superstitious nonsense, is annoying.
The latest is an idiotic project in lab, consisting of picking a bunch of bacteria from a list and using an online service to plug in the nucleotide sequences from their 16S rRNA and have a phylogram magically pop out. Then we get to answer a series of questions designed to inevitably lead us to “realize” that our phylogram proves everything came from evolution. We’re not supposed to point out that you could play the same kind of game with operating system code from information processing devices from the late 1960s to the present and ranging from $2 handheld calculators to the most sophisticated and powerful computers, and get a “phylogram” showing how they all descended from a common ancestor.
You are not looking for opinions. You are looking for agreement.
And evolutionists wonder why the creationists are upset at public school “science teaching”.
Apparently, this teacher didn’t get the memo about how compatable God is with the religion of evolution.
The problem is that a teacher who is willing to say this openly would probably have no trouble failing a kid who gave him trouble.
I had to be very careful in my high school biology class to maintain my religious beliefs without hurting my grade.
The teacher pretty much warned me he’d be checking all my work for “religious bias”. Fortunately, I had no real problem understanding the material and answering the factual questions exactly like they were supposed to be answered.
And if I had to write a note at the bottom of my tests explaining that my answers were not what I believed, but what I was taught, it didn’t seem he had the ability to take credit off for that.
I also had an English teacher who took it upon herself to “expand our horizons” and show us that religion was just a manmade construct.
She’d have speakers from different faiths each week, including wiccans.
My year, me and a couple of my friends managed to get her to go to church with us one Sunday, so who knows — everybody is open to redemption, don’t know if she ever found the way.
Many atheists fail to understand this, thus the hypocritical double-standard they employ, thinking they can shove their belief systems (even if it be one of unbelief) down the throats of pupils attending public schools.
It could well enough be argued that case law precedent holds two edged swords, which could be used against atheistic teachers whom seek to bully & indoctrinate children into adopting their own, virulently anti-theistic beliefs.
Science, after all, is mute on the question of whether there is a supreme being, or whether there is not, regardless of how many folks attempt to use their own opinions of what the so-called scientific "evidence' means...beyond the mere repeatable and well observed "facts".
As to what various higher courts have found, investigating related matters (well enough related to help define what constitutes "religion", and other related legal considerations) a simple google search yields introductory material such as;
"...The Supreme Court reaffirmed the utility of the test set forth in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971), in McCreary, 125 S.Ct. at 2732-35. Compare Van Orden v. Perry, 125 S.Ct. 2854, 2860-61 (2005) (plurality questions continuing utility of Lemon test).
Lemon, 403 U.S. at 612-13; Books v. City of Elkhart, 235 F.3d 292, 301 (7th Cir. 2000). The Establishment Clause also prohibits the government from favoring one religion over another without a legitimate secular reason. See Linnemeir v. Bd. of Trustees of Purdue Univ., 260 F.3d 757, 759 (7th Cir. 2001); Metzl v. Leininger, 57 F.3d 618, 621 (7th Cir. 1995) (“[T]he First Amendment does not allow a state to make it easier for adherents of one faith to practice their religion than for adherents of another faith to practice their religion, unless there is a secular justification for the difference in treatment.”); Berger v. Rensselaer Cent. Sch. Corp., 982 F.2d 1160, 1168-69 (7th Cir. 1993) (“Under the Establishment Clause, the government may not aid one religion, aid all religions or favor one religion over another.”)."
And that is just for "starters"...there is more, much more along the same lines, with a great many Appellate level arrows pointing in much the same direction. The issue itself is fairly ripe for litigation. What is needed is the right circumstance, and money.
Given a detailed description of a biological, chemical, or physical process, a thermodynamic analysis can tell us whether the process violates one of the laws of thermodynamics. If it does, then the process cannot occur as described.
However, even if a process is found not to violate the laws of thermodynamics, we still cannot say for certain whether the process is feasible as described. There may be good practical reasons why the process does not occur.
In short, compatibility with the laws of thermodynamic is necessary but not sufficient for any real process to occur.
If someone proposes a process by which life may have arisen, we can perform a thermodynamic analysis to see whether it violates the laws of thermodynamics. If it does, we can safely assume that life did not originate that way. Even if the process is found to be thermodynamically feasible, however, that alone does not mean that life actually arose that way.
Suppose that someone were to work out a detailed, step-by-step procedure by which living cells could have formed spontaneously from non-living matter. Further suppose that the process is found to be thermodynamically feasible. We would still be unable to say for certain that life really did originate that way.
Let's take it a step further. Suppose it could be demonstrated that the proposed process occurs at a appreciable rate in the laboratory under primordial conditions. Although that would be an impressive scientific achievement (no doubt worthy of a Nobel Prize), we still could not be certain that things happened that way.
More important, we can never say, on the basis of our analysis or experiments, whether or not God was involved in the creation of life. The tools of science are simply not adequate to answer questions regarding God and his role in creation.
Tell your nephew to let Mr. E. natter on all he wants to. Your nephew needs a good grade. Let him humor the idiot.
There is no point in being confrontational. This jerk teacher probably wants that — he wants to make a name for himself while failing kids who don’t go along with him. Screw him. Your nephew should just want to get out of his class, out of that school, in one piece.
Public school is not worth the bother. Humor the bastards and laugh.
If he persecutes Christian kids, he could be in trouble. But not likely if the Left is running his college.
Genesis does not say Cain and Abel (and later Seth) were the only three children of Adam and Eve. You are assuming Adam and Eve had no other babies. Adam was 130 years old when Seth was born. Eve surely bore more than three children in 130 years. There are no offspring of Abel. Cain killed him before the mention of any second generation. Cain married a younger sister and so did Seth, who Eve explained was appointed by God to be the replacement for Abel. Cain and Seth married their own sisters, but at that time the human body was in the original form (created to last forever, before the fall, before vast generations of degeneration) and siblings reproducing with each other was not what it would be currently.
The very best way to figure out what is in Genesis or any book of the Bible is to pray for the wisdom to discern its meaning, read it for yourself, read it all the way through, setting aside thirty minutes a day. The Living Word explains itself but you must read it all and read it for yourself and never think that a single passage can be fully appreciated strictly on its own.
That’s a great idea! And a much better use of class time, I’d think.
"at that time the human body was in the original form (created to last forever, before the fall, before vast generations of degeneration) and siblings reproducing with each other was not what it would be currently."
What empirical evidence do you have to support this assertion?
There would be little the evolutionary atheist teacher could do to counter South Park’s devastating ridicule.
It is not about empirical evidence. It is about faith. It is about spiritually discerning that which is spiritual. It is about reading the entire Bible (and not just once), not just selected passages, not just reading about the Bible, not just relying on others to tell you what is in the Bible and what it means.
My broader point was that when marstegreg said ‘I could never figure out how Cain and Able found women to marry when there shouldn’t have been any’ and thought ‘Genesis had too many holes’. He assumed that according to Genesis there were no women, but he did not understand because he had not read the whole Bible enough to get it, probably had not even read Genesis itself: I mean, he even was apparently under the impression that ‘Able’ found a woman to marry when one major tenet of the Bible is that Abel’s whole line was cut off by Cain’s killing Abel out of jealousy. I just added the part about why siblings reproducing back then would not have been the big problem it would be today and to not assume that would not have happened back then just because these days it would be a problem.
Anyway, you may not really get what reading the Bible is all about if you are wanting someone to give you empirical evidence (from observation or experiment) from the Bible.
I would read the Bible for you if I could, but that is not how it works. It is the Living Word. It is on faith.
Sounds like he needs to start taping lectures.
So you agree that your assertion is based on a religious belief with absolutely no scientific evidence to support it?
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