Posted on 08/20/2003 6:24:57 PM PDT by new cruelty
The debate continues over what information Texas biology books should present.
The Texas Board of Education is looking to pick the best science book for students.
Members of a campaign called "Stand Up For Science'' said it's meant to protect the accurate teaching of evolution in Texas high school biology textbooks.
The push was unveiled on Wednesday by some religious leaders, scientists and parents. It comes as the state Board of Education prepares to adopt new biology textbooks this fall.
Terry Maxwell, a professor of biology at Angelo State University, doesn't believe creationism should be in biology textbooks.
"Science uses evidentiary reasoning and it uses no other approach," he said.
Creationists generally believe earth was formed supernaturally by God.
Reverend Tom Hegar said while he believes in God's powers, those ideas need to stay at home or in the church.
"Faith and science are complimentary. Don't use faith to build your science. Don't use science to try to destroy or shrink my faith," he said.
Seattle-based Discovery Institute believes the theory of intelligent design should be in Texas biology books. According to the Institute, intelligent design is the hypothesis that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
Science backers say that's the same thing as creationism.
"Textbooks should fix embarrassing factual errors and tell students about the scientific weakness of neo-Darwinism as well as its strengths," Discovery Institute officials stated in a faxed memo.
Maxwell said two different ideologies make it harder for students to learn science.
"If you interject ways of knowing other than the way science is practiced by mainstream science you confuse children," he said.
Austin biology teacher Amanda Walker said evolution is the cornerstone for understanding the living world, and influences medicine such as prostate cancer, heart disease and AIDS.
The evolution proponents also criticized what they said are attempts to teach creationist theories.
The Board of Education can reject books because of errors or failure to follow the state curriculum.
The board will make its final decision on the biology textbooks in November.
People have until Thursday, Aug. 21, to sign up to speak at the final public hearing Sept. 10.
In July, the first public hearing brought 42 speakers who offered their opinions at the public hearing on biology, but only half of them were familiar with the particular books.
Board member Gail Lowe said then she was disappointed that many of the people who testified for or against certain textbooks hadn't actually read them.
"They seem to be here to express a viewpoint, but it doesn't seem to relate to the textbooks we're actually considering," she said.
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein, "Science, Philosophy and Religion: a Symposium", 1941
I had to drive my kids to the publc schools of our choice; two kids times twelve years. I don't kow or care whether it was strictly legal, but the schools never complained because they are funded according to enrollment and attendance.
At least Alchemy laid the foundations of intellectual inquiry for actual Chemistry. In that respect, it had some worth.
Precisely.
The biggest conflict between the creationists and the evolutionists seems (to me) to come from whether you believe that God has to micromanage the universe, or was simply infinite in His wisdom to just "let it run on its own" so to speak.
I was taught biology by a nun (St. Joseph brand) that taught the latter explanation. She realized that the Bible was written more than a thousand years ago using the beliefs and understandings of the people at the time. The wonder and understanding of the people at the time of the writing of the Bible produced text that was as accurate as they could make it. How literally one takes these writings should surely be put into the context of the time in which it was written. Surely, the same revelations and miracles, if done today, would produce a distinctly different Bible (also if written today). And it would probably be considered as archaic or metaphorical, if you will, a thousand years from today.
Therefore, I say there is no real conflict between the two conceptualizations, merely differences in timeframe. The real lessons of the Bible are morality and decency, not whether the Earth was created in 6 days or 6 billion years. They both describe the same event in different ways seen through different eyes. Someday, maybe soon, maybe never, we will have the true and most accurate story, but I, for one, am not going to waste my time worrying about it. The Earth is here, the dinosaurs aren't, and nothing we argue about here will change that.
There are bigger dragons to slay, and they be called Clintons and the Democrats. These are evils that can be dealt with in real time. Let's devote our energies to keeping that scourge out of power.
Evolutionary hypothesis says life began under conditions that cannot be reproduced. If it cannot be reproduced, then it cannot be demonstrated. That means it (evolutionary hypothesis) is unscientific.
The fact is, it takes more faith to believe in evolution than to believe in God.
You may want to look at the work of Urey and Miller in 1953 for starters, and do some Google searches for more recent works, such as http://www.origins.rpi.edu/chem.html. That will be a good starting place for you. Your first sentence and following statements would have been accurate in the mid to late 1800s versus.
In discussions like this, we should be careful about our terminology, so that we're all using words in the same way. I've posted this before, but not for at least 6 months, and I think it's useful:
One can "believe" in the existence of the tooth fairy, but one does not -- in the same sense of the word -- "believe" in the existence of his own mother. Belief in the first proposition (tooth fairy) requires faith, which is the belief in something for which there is no evidence or logical proof. The second proposition (mother) is the kind of knowledge which follows from sensory evidence. There is also that kind of knowledge (like the Pythagorean theorem) which follows from logical proof. In either case, that is, belief in things evidenced by sensory evidence or demonstrated by logical proof, there is no need for faith.
In between mother and the Pythagorean theorem are those propositions we provisionally accept (or in common usage "believe"), like relativity and evolution, because they are scientific theories -- logical and falsifiable explanations of the available data (which data is knowledge obtained via sensory evidence).
Useful website in this context: Do You Believe in Evolution?.
The Nation of Islam believes that the white race is the result of an alien scientist's experiment gone awry. Shall we include that one?
It doesn't have much value. We need to harden up our managerial attitudes like Ahnold in California. This is the situation; where do we go from here.
And, evolution is still nothing more than an hypothesis, i.e., a guess.
In The Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, (1960, pp.6,7) W.R. Thompson points out that "Modern Darwinism palaeontologists are obliged, just like their predecessors and like Darwin, to water down the facts with subsidiary hypothesis, which, however plausible, are in the nature of things, unverifiable.....This situation, where scientific men rally to the defence of a doctrine they are unable to define scientifically, much less demonstrate with scientific rigour, attempting to maintain its credit with the public by the suppression of criticism and the elimination of difficulties, is abnormal and undesirable in science."
I repeat, I stand by what I said.
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