Posted on 02/15/2006 12:53:18 AM PST by jennyp
COLUMBUS - The Ohio school board voted Tuesday to eliminate a passage in the state's science standards that critics said opened the door to the teaching of intelligent design.
The Ohio Board of Education decided 11-4 to delete material encouraging students to seek evidence for and against evolution.
The 2002 science standards say students should be able to ``describe how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory.'' It includes a disclaimer that the standards do not require the teaching of intelligent design.
The vote is the latest setback for the intelligent design movement, which holds that life is so complex, it must have been created by a higher authority.
In December, a federal judge barred the school system in Dover, Pa., from teaching intelligent design alongside evolution in high school biology classes. The judge said that intelligent design is religion masquerading as science and that teaching it alongside evolution violates the separation of church and state.
On Tuesday, the Ohio Board of Education directed a committee to study whether a replacement lesson is needed for the deleted material.
The vote was a reversal of a 9-8 decision a month ago to keep the lesson plan. But three board members who voted in January to keep the plan were absent Tuesday. Supporters of the plan pledged to force a new vote to return the material soon.
``We'll do this forever, I guess,'' said board member Michael Cochran, a Columbus lawyer and supporter of the lesson plan.
Board member Martha Wise, who pushed to eliminate the material, said the board took the correct action to avoid problems, including a possible lawsuit.
``It is deeply unfair to the children of this state to mislead them about science,'' said Wise, an elected board member representing northern Ohio.
In approving Wise's motion, the board rejected a competing plan to request a legal opinion from the attorney general on the constitutionality of the science standards.
The state's science lesson plan, approved in 2004, is optional for schools to use in teaching the state's science standards, which are the basis for Ohio's graduation test. Although schools are not required to teach the standards, districts that do not follow the standards put students at risk of not passing that part of the Ohio graduation test.
The Pennsylvania court decision against teaching intelligent design does not apply in Ohio, but critics of state standards say it invites a similar challenge.
Wise said other events since the ruling made removing the standards even more important. Earlier this month, for example, Gov. Bob Taft recommended a legal review of the standards.
In addition, members of a committee that advised state education officials on Ohio's science curriculum said the standards improperly single out the theory of evolution and could lead to the teaching of religion.
Board member Deborah Owens Fink, who voted against eliminating the lesson plan, said it is unfair to deny students the chance to use logic to question a scientific theory. She said scientists who oppose the material are worried that their views won't be supported.
``We respect diversity of opinion in every other arena,'' said Owens Fink, an elected board member from Akron.
I just wonder why creationists want their beliefs put to the test in science class. If they insist on subjecting belief to the test of evidence, then science classes will study flood geology and such.
Critical thinking does not end at the door of commonn descent.
Greater and greater numbers of scientists are joining the ID movement, which is why we keep referring to the same three year after year. From "The Quixotic Message"
;^)
They are fighting the wrong battle. They should be concentrating on Allah not Darwin. They will blow their energy on Evolution, lose big because the average American is smart enough to see that science and technology is what powers daily events in this country (whether they like evolution or not), and be wimps when the real challenge comes
Wow! Well that just proves it! About as relevant as saying "Some children from the ghetto wind up graduating magna cum laude, so that proves ghettos are great places to raise children."
The statement was that anyone who send their kids to public schools is a total loser. A single counterexample is sufficient to counter a general rule.
In fact, in this city, the public schools are educationally superior, in terms of facilities, course offerings and quality of teachers, to the two private religious school, which are small and attract students almost entirely for religious and not educational reasons.
I've always thought that this is one of the stupidest analogies used by creationists; i.e., drawing a distinction between rocks in a desert and a watch to indicate signs of "created-ness," since according to the creationist position, the rocks in the desert were created as well.
Very well said.
It's part of the program.
IDers hide behind man (or space aliens) as an intelligent designer so they don't have to say who the real designer is and let the cat (that ID is a religious ploy) out of the bag.
But in doing so they equate space aliens, man and God. To me that is demeaning to God. Here, the Vatican had it right.
Previous posters and I already have been through this.
Only Jehovah's Witnesses go into such a deal about the Bible writers thinking the earth was like a ball. But, when you actually look at the quotes we know they thought the earth was flat like a circle or square.
Well only because you are being denser than the pile of rocks. Obviously the comparsison is not of the materials they both are composed of. Duh?
You obviously haven't been following the parts of the thread where we discuss the Greeks knowing about the sphericity of the Earth 200 years before Christ.
Ok, I'll try this again, and I'll try to use smaller words so that you can understand.
Creationists like to draw a distinction between the created and the non-created by comparing a watch to desert sands. With me so far?
The inference that listeners (or readers) are supposed to draw from this analogy is that it is obvious from the appearance (or look) of the sands and the appearance (or look) of the watch, that the watch is created. Still following?
The problem with this analogy, from a creationist perspective, is that according to the creationist position, the sands were created as well.
Ok, now here's the tricky part for you...because, according to the creationist, the sands were also created, the analogy is fatally flawed in that there is no way to tell from appearance or look whether a thing, such as sands or a watch, is a created thing as opposed to a non-created thing.
Hope that cleared things up for you. Duh.
The Dover case was the result of a creationist group (either DI or ICR, I forget) that spent several years trying to recruit a school board to take actions that they knew would result in a court case. The purpose was to generate media, and they succeeded.
They lost the case, but they've definitely gotten media, and I'm sure that brought them considerable money in the form of donations from people with more money than scientific knowledge.
You're right Jr. I stand corrected.
I'm sure there are Democrat trolls at this very moment trying to sucker some stupid Republican into supporting ID. Creationism is a losing position. If you haven't noticed, even conservatives on this forum can't, and will never agree on it, so you think this is a good issue to present to generic voters which include Democrats?
You did notice, didn't you, that the entire school board in Dover Pa was voted out of office after they started this ID stupidity.
Mea Culpa.
No big deal. The Greeks, generally, had it right. Bright folks.
Thanks for the ping!
I would just love to sit on a panel with all the evolutionists and atheists of the world and have them explain to me the origin of such a thing as the allusion in the brain of depth perception through the spacing of two eyes without any intelligence whatsoever formulating such an absolute miraculous, unbelievable accomplishment of mechanical, mental, and organic chemical processes!
Would either of you care to comment on the "PURPOSE, HARMONY, BEAUTY, INTELLIGENCE" and "absolute miraculous, unbelievable accomplishment of mechanical, mental, and organic chemical processes" involved in the following (which might be considered examples of a rather mischievous, if not downright malevolent, designer):
The astounding number of, and adaptability of, parasitic, viral, and bacterial diseases;
The human back, with its rather appalling record of longevity and its predilection to failure;
The human digestive tract, with its ridiculous force fit and predilection to blockage and scirrhous, encephaloid, colloid, and cylindrical-celled epitheliomas;
The miraculous propensity of the human eye to function sub optimally (ever wonder whether God has bestowed special blessings on optometrists, opthamologists, and eye-glass manufacturers?) and to fail outright due to cataracts, glaucoma, and about two dozen other relatively common disorders.
If that was true then there would be no problem, as the members wanting this language would have long ago changed it some manner thus:
``describe how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects ofevolutionaryscientific or biological theory.''
Which would be accepted with no problem.
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