Posted on 06/06/2005 2:49:58 PM PDT by CHARLITE
A new front has opened up in the debate over evolution and creationism in Utah, with a proposal to require the teaching of divine design in public schools.
State Senator Chris Buttars (R-West Jordan) has agreed to take the lead in pushing new legislation on the teaching of divine design, also known as intelligent design, in conjunction with evolution in schools.
Buttars is supported by a strong conservative lobby, headed by the Eagle Forum, which has previously sought the inclusion of divine design in the public school science curriculum.
School officials argue that any laws requiring the teaching of divine design could be found in violation of the separation of church and state under the First Amendment.
Supporters of the proposal contend, however, that divine design is not the same as creationism. Unlike creationism, divine design simply acknowledges that the world is so complex, its development must have been guided by some higher power. Proponents do not specify who that higher power is.
Currently, public schools in Utah are required to teach evolution, but not alternative theories. Some teachers have independently chosen to introduce the topics of creationism or divine design in their classrooms.
The issue of what to teach in schools regarding evolution has been an ongoing debate. Recent cases have gained nationwide attention.
In May, the Kansas Board of Education held hearings to decide on new science standards. A three-member committee heard arguments from proponents of intelligent design and evolution. Last week, written arguments from both sides were submitted to the Board. The Board is expected to decide on new standards by the end of the summer.
One of the most publicized cases last year concerned evolution disclaimer stickers that were placed on the cover of ninth grade science books in Atlanta, Georgia. The stickers said that “evolution is a theory, not a fact,” and warned students that “material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.”
Six parents filed a suit against the Cobb County School District, charging that the stickers violated the separation of church and state. The school district argued that the stickers were meant to open up discussion on the topic of evolution and alternative theories of the origin of life.
In January, a federal judge ordered the stickers to be removed. The school district began removing stickers from over 30,000 books in May, although an appeal is pending on the judge’s ruling.
The new proposal in Utah is yet another iteration of the creation-evolution debate. The issue is expected to be brought up when the next legislative session begins in January.
Comments: susan@christianpost.com
Dr. Crick co-discovered the structure of DNA. Science already knew about DNA, just not its structure.
Dr. Crick was being somewhat flippant and somewhat speculative when he made that statement. He did not seriously consider it to be true. He certainly did not develop it into a theory. BTW panspermia has been considered for a long time.
Imperfect chemical self replication, with natural selection. No need for all that 'genetic information' at the start.
Therefore meteorology, being treated as purely naturalistic subject with no role for the supernatural being accorded (or even asked for by fundamentalists) likewise denies God by pby's logic.
I weigh a lot more than a duck, so maybe I'm safe...
I can GUARANTEE you that evolution could NOT have produced teh essential amino acids necessary for life. These were produced by pre-biotic processes (whether natural or supernatural, I don't want to get into this argument). Pre-biotic processes are by definition not evolution, since evolution relies on the natural selection of variation in living creatures.
How about a basic understanding of the claims actually made by evolution and not some cartoon version of it you enjoy knocking down at will?
This is what REALLY gets me about this whole thing. I have followed these Threads and watched interviews with the leaders of the Creationist movement. For instance, 2-3 weeks ago C-SPAN had an interesting one hour discussion between the President of the DISCOVERY INSTITUTE and a scientist. Again and again and again, when a Creationist is finally pinned down they give the explanation (or lie, as the case may be) that, "Creationism has NOTHING to do with Religion. Creationism has to do with the questioning of the Theory of Evolution and the proposal of an alternate Scientific Theory".
I take people like the President of the DISCOVERY INSTITUTE and the Crevos that inhabit FreeRepublic at their word: "Creationism has NOTHING to do with Religion. Creationism has to do with the questioning of the Theory of Evolution and the proposal of an alternate Scientific Theory".
I therefore am not ridiculing Religion and can't understand how someone could misconstrue my intentions. I am ridiculing Ignorance.
So is Creationism about interjecting Religion into Science, or not? Which is it? Get your story straight before you attempt to destroy and discredit Conservatism and impugn religious-Conservatives as Anti-Religious.
Yes
"Archaeopteryx is listed as a transitional fossil on a University of Ill. website. Archaeopteryx was determined to be an extinct bird by Stephen Jay Gould and a sinificant portion of the scientific community some time ago!"
No, it was classified as a bird because Linnaeus did not make a separate classification for transitional fossils. Because of this, Archy had to be classified as either a bird or a reptile.
Gould and the rest of science have considered Archy a transitional for a long time.
Gould did believe that Archaeopteryx was a transitional form. See:
Gould, S. J. 1980. "The Tell-tale Wishbone" in The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History, pp 267-277. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (Originally published in the November, 1977 edition of Natural History)
" The rest of the fossils are explained with verbiage like "may" or "probably"."
Many disciplines other than math and some physics use that terminology in their theories to signify the possibility of correction or falsification. It takes nothing away from the significance of the hypotheses within the theory or the evidence.
"The quotes I liked best were "traces are so fragmentary that actual ancestors can't be identified" and "few or none of the speciation events are present.""
And these statements about one collection of fossils means that all fossils are in this situation? You are using your selective vision extremely well to see only those passages. Or is it your habit to cherry pick?
" Again, please provide direct and accepted evidence of vertical evolution from the fossil record."
Go to http://www.talkorigins.org/ and look around for a while. You might be surprised at what you find.
Wouldn't he find it awful darn boring to go around in circles constantly?
Gee. That sounds just like us. Always on the merry-go-round of crevos.
Very generally speaking, science is the set of all statements which could theoretically be shown to be false by physical evidence. By that definition, there's no scientific way to determine whether God created the world, since no matter what you observe you cannot conclude that God didn't create the world. Even the entire mountain of evidence in favor of evolution does not falsify the notion that God created the world in six literal days 10000 years ago. It's possible that God created the world 10000 years ago and put all the evidence for evolution in place for whatever reason of His own. There is no possible observation that cannot be explained by reference to an omnipotent God, so any idea that involves an omnipotent God cannot be falsified, and hence does not belong to science.
Did I hit a nerve?
You are a religious zealot. You have established yourself firmly as an unrepentant religious kook who will fabricate claims in order to support your position. Absolutely nothing that you say can be trusted.
As you see, two can play that ad hominum game, ace. As usual - when you see you've lost the argument, you give up trying to defend your religion by changing the subject to personalities. Who, other than some other confused mentality incapable of critical thought, will you be able to fool?
You're out of your league, ace. You can't win. Hahahaha
Nope. Just trying to point out the inconsistencies and lies of the Creationists for the overall record.
From http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/archaeopteryx/info.html#protoavis
Protoavis
Some people like to claim that the finding of a fossil bird from the Triassic of Texas (Protavis) proves that Archae cannot be transitional between dinosaurs and birds because Protoavis predates Archae by 75 million years. This is, of course, errant nonsense, mainly because no one is claiming that Archae is the transitional species between dinosaurs and birds, merely that Archae represents a grade of organisation which the proposed lineage went through to get from dinosaurs to birds. Archae is, I'm sorry to say, out on a limb, evolutionarily speaking. It represents a side branch, useful for comparative purposes, but not in the thick of things. So even if there were birds in the Triassic, that fact would not diminish Archae's importance as an indicator that "yes, birds could have evolved from dinosaurs."
However, notice the "if" in the previous sentence. There are major problems with Protoavis. On the Chatterjee (1991) interpretation, Ostrom (1991) has this to say [my paraphrase]: The only published material from the fossil is a monograph in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. However, this only describes the head. This is badly crushed and all the pieces have been extracted from the matrix, rendering precise placement of the pieces open to question. The description is done from an avian viewpoint, with no counterview (e.g. is this a dinosaur?) used. The skull is so badly crushed that diagnostic features are not preserved. Therefore the published material does not support the view that this is a bird. Indeed a viewing of the fossil by Ostrom (in admittedly less than ideal surroundings) showed that the diagnostic features which could identify the fossil either way are badly crushed and it is doubtful whether any definitive statement could be supported by the fossil. It may be a bird, it may not.
Please note that this questioning of Protoavis as a bird is no "it can't be a bird because it predates Archae" evilutionist backlash. As has been pointed out, even if it is a bird, it does not detract from the evolutionary importance of Archae.
Also please note that feathered dinosaur fossils have been found that would, in the past, have caused them to be questionably classified as birds. Because of the poor condition of the Protoavis fossil and the level of dis-articulation, some paleontologists now believe Protoavis to be another dino with birdlike features. What can be discerned from the fossil show Protoavis to be closer to dino than modern birds.
"In 1984 an international Archaeoptyrex conference was held in Eichstatt, Bavaria to evaluate the official status of the fossil. The consensus of the evolutionary scientists present was that Archaeoptyrex was a bird that could fly, but not necassrily the ancestor for modern birds."
You need to 'bone' up on your knowledge of what constitutes a transitional. A transitional shares diagnostic features with one organism and other diagnostic features with a different organism. Although flying isn't diagnostic, it still fits in with the shared features.
And as I mention in another post, taxonomy has no place for transitionals so they had to place Archy in either bird or reptile and because of the ability to fly and the feathers, placing within 'bird' was more sensible. That does not mean that it is and only is a bird.
The whole Intelligent Design argument is that the world is too complex to not have been designed by a supernatural being. That leaves open the question that if the universe is too complex to have come about by "natural" means, then how did the supernatural being come to be? Which is easier, imagining a supernatural being coming to exist by "chance", or imagining the life we see around us coming to exist by "chance"?
The whole question revolves around whether we understand God to be a part of the "natural" universe. Or whether we understand God to be some distant being that occasionally see's fit to deal with us in a supernatural way.
Since there is no daily demonstration of the "supernatural" existence of God (if there were, it would then be defined as "natural") then I believe that God is all around us all the time. Therefore I believe that "God created me", even though I know there were some birds and bees going on sometime in the mid 50's.
I believe that God helped raise the sun this morning, even though science explains this by mass in motion and orbital mechanics. I also believe that God created evolution, because we see massive amounts of evidence for it in Gods creation itself. That Genesis doesn't mention it is irrelevant. Genesis is a few hundred word super summary description of a very huge creation. Genesis doesn't mention lots of stuff like gravity, electron theory or the existence of Mars. If Genesis had attempted to describe evolution, then the whole Bible would be titled "The Origin of Species" and where would all that stuff about salvation be?
Granted, many Christians have a very rigid idea of what God is and what God does, and unfortunately that idea doesn't square much with what we observe. I have no idea how God takes us to heaven. We cannot observe it, there is no science to describe it, and the Bible only gives hints. I merely have faith that it will happen. Faith is all we can have. Humans, using the tool we call "science" cannot show God to us. If it could, then there would be no reason to need "faith".
If an animal has feathers, it is arguably a bird, and nothing else, by Linnnaean definition.
When it comes done to it, that is the basis for all Creationist claims that "Archaeoptyrex was just a bird", becsuase anything other view would mean accepting transitional forms, and evolution.
You on the phone with Bill Clinton?
That looks pretty darn convincing but then, when you stop and think about it, mearly everything the anti-evo's post is a fabrication to some degree.
No. Yes. No.
ID "points out" there's this (nudge, nudge, wink, wink), Intelligent Designer. Without any evidence or proof of same, except empty statements about how things are 'way too fancy to have just happened that way. It's neither scientific nor logical.
I suppose a college level "Stuff We Don't Know (Ingnorance 405)" might be of some value, but teachers are having enough trouble trying to teach high school kids things we do know.
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