"Umm, I made life and stuff. Hehe." Might explain the backwards kneecaps on cranes. And it has as much scientific validation as ID.
Posted on 01/19/2005 8:52:24 AM PST by FeeinTennessee
Pa. Students Learn 'Intelligent Design' By MARTHA RAFFAELE The Associated Press
HARRISBURG, Pa. - High school students heard about "intelligent design" for the first time Tuesday in a school district that attracted national attention by requiring students to be made aware of it as an alternative to the theory of evolution.
Administrators in the Dover Area School District read a statement to three biology classes Tuesday and were expected to read it to other classes on Wednesday, according to a statement from the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., which was speaking on the district's behalf.
The district is believed to be the only one in the nation to require students to hear about intelligent design - a concept that holds that the universe is so complex, it had to be created by an unspecified guiding force.
"The revolution in evolution has begun," said Richard Thompson, the law center's president and chief counsel. "This is the first step in which students will be given an honest scientific evaluation of the theory of evolution and its problems."
The case represents the newest chapter in a history of evolution lawsuits dating back to the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee nearly 80 years ago. In Georgia, a suburban Atlanta school district plans to challenge a federal judge's order to remove stickers in science textbooks that call evolution "a theory, not a fact."
The law center is defending the Dover district against a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of eight families by two civil-liberties groups that alleged intelligent design is merely a secular variation of creationism, the biblical-based view that regards God as the creator of life. They maintain that the Dover district's curriculum mandate may violate the constitutional separation of church and state.
"Students who sat in the classroom were taught material which is religious in content, not scientific, and I think it's unfortunate that has occurred," said Eric Rothschild, a Philadelphia attorney representing the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit.
Biology teacher Jennifer Miller said although she was able to make a smooth transition to her evolution lesson after the statement was read, some students were upset that administrators would not entertain any questions about intelligent design.
"They were told that if you have any questions, to take it home," Miller said.
The district allowed students whose parents objected to the policy to be excused from hearing the statement at the beginning of class and science teachers who opposed the requirement to be exempted from reading the statement. About 15 of 170 ninth-graders asked to be excused from class, Thompson said.
A federal judge has scheduled a trial in the lawsuit for Sept. 26.
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Dover Area School District: http://www.dover.k12.pa.us
Thomas More Law Center: http://www.thomasmore.org
January 18, 2005 6:44 PM
You're this ignorant on science, yet you are homeschooling your kids? Perhaps they'll make good car mechanics. No, wait, there are too many digital thingies in cars now.
The amazing thing about Evolution is that it was proposed well before discoveries in DNA and cellular structure. Yet DNA studies fully support and even enhance our understanding of Evolution.
You need to stop reading Genesis litterally. There are serious flaws in it that we have discussed on other threads. Genesis is quite obviously not an exact history of the creation, and attempting to make it so will only prove you wrong.
That doesn't make the Bible invalid. There are 4 gospels, each telling a slightly different story about the exact same events. If you want to take the word-for-word meaning of the Bible litterally, then you must pick one gospel and throw the other three out as heresey. But you don't do that, and similarly the two different creation stories in Genesis should demonstrate that neither are exact historical texts. And even if they were, there's only a few hundred words in Genesis, which is not nearly enough words to convey the complexity of the creation of the universe.
There is no conflict between science and religion, except in some people's interpretation of the Bible.
Thanks for the ping!
ping
Shryke, comment was directed specifically to you, but to any posting here who feel compelled to tell intelligent Christian people they're fools. We're not and we don't go on blind faith -- any truth has fact to back it up and Christians are no exception to that. I suggest to those who want to call Christians and their beliefs names that you haven't really done your homework...cause if you had, you couldn't get away from the volumes of evidence to prove the Bible is true.
But I digress. The point of this post is to ask folks who don't believe in Creationism to stop calling those who do names. Thank you.
AIEE! Shryke, the comment should have read it was NOT directed to you specifically.
No doubt...
And authored by a fervent religious believer, and thoroughly debunked.
My statistical problem:
You have an organism which supposedly "evolved" from a different organism. Take any one organ, system, etc... and look at the differences between the two. On the surface, they look pretty similar. The new one is slightly improved. That's what Darwin saw. For just one small improvement to arise by chance would be feasable. But modern science will tell us that there is more than one change, one piece of DNA, one protein different in the "new" species. In one organ alone, there is a vast number of changes, all of which had to take place by chance. And that's only in one organ. Multiply that by all of the structural, cellular, biochemical, behavioral, etc... changes that have to occur to evolve from one species to another, even given hundreds of thousands of years for them to happen gradually, the odds of this working out are astronomical. Apply Occam's Razor - this is not the best explanation for the diversity of life.
I wouldn't knock either one myself, they're both in search of the meaning of life. know one can fully prove or discredit either at this point. I hold no claim to being so wise.
So, what do you call people who are wrong?
Teaching biology students both evolution and 'intelligent design' makes about as much sense as teaching astrophysics students to calculate planetary orbits using both a Copernican (heliocentric) model and a Ptolemaic (geocentric) model.
If anti-evolutionists would be refrain from being smug with long debunked arguments then there would be no problem.
For example, if a anti-evolutionist wrote something like "I heard that evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics and has been proved statistically impossible - could you comment on these?", I doubt there would be any rude or condescending responses
Instead something like this is written, "If you want to see an evolutionist stammer ask him about how evolution violates the three laws of thermodynamics." That was posted earlier in this thread.
I was once on the other side in these type discussions years ago and I always thought the evolutionists were pretty rude too. Looking back at it, many of them were in fact asses, but I can also understand their tone as well because they were perpetually peppered by false arguments in a very authoritative tone. The above quote is a good example.
Evolution, like all science can be very simple on the surface and then more and more complex as the details are delved into.
Scientists know a LOT about volcanoes but there is still a lot they don't know. The Yellowstone super volcano is still somewhat in dispute - some feel the volcano is dead while some feel that it is way overdue for an eruption. This doesn't mean that volcanology is a fraud and "just a hole ridden theory that requires a lot of faith than just believing in a fire god".
"Umm, I made life and stuff. Hehe." Might explain the backwards kneecaps on cranes. And it has as much scientific validation as ID.
"You're this ignorant on science, yet you are homeschooling your kids? Perhaps they'll make good car mechanics. No, wait, there are too many digital thingies in cars now."
Oh, now that's just mean. I have a PhD in Developmental Psychobiology (i.e. the science of early brain development)and choose to homeschool because I want to give my kids a better education than the government gives and teach them to think for themselves rather than just swallow the party line. Why don't you try reading some of the books mentioned and then make an informed decision on this issue? And as I already mentioned, I don't take Genesis literally - this is a scientific issue for me, not a religious one.
Your problem is several problems. (1) the selection component of evolution is ignored and just left up to chance and (2) your problem involves one member of a species - evolution occurs in a parallel fashion, that is, thousands if not millions members of a species would be taking part in the process.
These two issues alone drastically reduce the time needed.
And examine the statistics of the time it takes for one "species" to evolve into another. If that takes a million years (which it probably doesn't), then after 1 million years you have two species. After 2 million years, you have 4. After 3 million you have 8.
At 8 million years, you have 256 species. At 16 million years, you have 64 thousand species. The earth is a couple orders of magnitude older than that, need I go on?
The number of species grows exponentially, and any problem you have with the statistics goes away.
Trust me, this has been looked into by serious folks who have researched this completly, and there is no statistical problem with Evolution.
You have been misinformed by people who have agendas. Sorry.
Oops, that should read "Your problem has several issues"
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