Posted on 12/19/2006 2:19:29 PM PST by Sopater
ATLANTA — A suburban school board that put stickers in high school science books saying evolution is "a theory, not a fact" abandoned its legal battle to keep them Tuesday after four years.
The Cobb County board agreed in federal court never to use a similar sticker or to undermine the teaching of evolution in science classes.
In return, the parents who sued over the stickers agreed to drop all legal action.
"We certainly think that it's a win not just for our clients but for all students in Cobb County and, really, all residents of Georgia," said Beth Littrell of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia.
The school board placed the stickers inside the front cover of biology books in 2002 after a group of parents complained that evolution was being taught to the exclusion of other theories, including a literal reading of the biblical story of creation.
The stickers read: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."
A federal judge ordered the stickers removed in 2005, saying they amount to an unconstitutional government endorsement of religion. The school board appealed, but a federal appeals court sent the case back, saying it did not have enough information.
"We faced the distraction and expense of starting all over with more legal actions and another trial," said board chairwoman Teresa Plenge. "With this agreement, it is done and we now have a clean slate for the new year."
School board attorney Linwood Gunn said the agreement is not an admission that the stickers were unconstitutional. "The school board attempted to reach what they thought was a reasonable compromise," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
You don't understand what science is and what it is not. I have never advocated teaching religion in the place of science. I have repeatedly said that science is proper within its self-imposed bounds of naturalism.
When science wanders outside those bounds and attempts to answer questions it is not equipped to answer; it is functioning as a belief system, not as science. It is proper to point out that science is functioning as a belief system in those situtations.
You misrepresent me in order to have an argument. Is that how 'science' works?
>>As I pointed out earlier. Science will follow a theory even when 96% of the substance required to produce the required effects is invisible.
OTOH, you will follow a philosophy as truth when 100% of the substance required to produce the required effects is invisible!
Forget the pitstops to drop off penguins at the South Pole or marsupials in Australia. Just do that for 40 days. I won't even require them to find room for the dinosaurs.
Are you admitting that science is a philosophy then when it proposes a 'theory' that is 96% invisible?
That would be a tremendous first-step toward understanding what science can do and what it cannot.
>>You don't understand what science is and what it is not. I have never advocated teaching religion in the place of science. I have repeatedly said that science is proper within its self-imposed bounds of naturalism.
Good. And all this time I thought you wanted science to try to explain the supernatural. After all, when science can explain a 'supernatural' it becomes the natural!
Sort of like how people once thought that Angels carried the sun around the earth. That was the supernatural explanation. Now we have the natural, scientific explanation.
>>Are you admitting that science is a philosophy then when it proposes a 'theory' that is 96% invisible?
I have no idea what you are talking about!
No, you have it backwards again.
That is the weakness of science. Science pretends to be able to answer the supernatural vs natural creation question when it is strictly limited to naturalistic methodologies. This makes it inherently unable to answer that question.
You continue to misunderstand and misrepresent what science is and what it is not.
>>Now that evolution is the strong man at the school, evolution cannot tolerate any room for anyone else at all. Not even a little sticker in a book that says "It's just a theory, not a fact."
Strawman argument.
>>That is the weakness of science. Science pretends to be able to answer the supernatural vs natural creation question when it is strictly limited to naturalistic methodologies. This makes it inherently unable to answer that question.
I think you are just terribly unsure of your ability to cope with scientific advancements. You never did answer if you were a member of the flat earth society.
Actually, you don't. You have a 'belief' masquerading as science.
Many learned men have realized that there is no proof of a heliocentric solar system. Some of them include:
Sir Fred Hoyle (Nicholas Corpenicus, 1973) wrote:
"The relation of the two pictures [geocentricity and heliocentricity] is reduced to a mere coordinate transformation and it is the main tenet of the Einstein theory that any two ways of looking at the world which are related to each other by a coordinate transformation are entirely equivalent from a physical point of view ... . Today we cannot say that the Copernican theory is "right" and the Ptolemaic theory "wrong" in any meaningful physical sense."
Max Born wrote:
"...Thus we may return to Ptolemy's point of view of a 'motionless earth'...One has to show that the transformed metric can be regarded as produced according to Einstein's field equations, by distant rotating masses. This has been done by Thirring. He calculated a field due to a rotating, hollow, thick-walled sphere and proved that inside the cavity it behaved as though there were centrifugal and other inertial forces usually attributed to absolute space. Thus from Einstein's point of view, Ptolemy and Corpenicus are equally right."
"Einstein's Theory of Relativity",Dover Publications,1962, pgs 344 & 345
and
Einstein himself also said:
"The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either CS could be used with equal justification. The two sentences, 'the sun is at rest and the earth moves,' or 'the sun moves and the earth is at rest,' would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS. -- Einstein and Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, p.212 (p.248 in original 1938 ed.)"
Again, you simply don't understand what science can and cannot say. As a result, you believe many things are 'scientific' when they are not. This is not good.
You fear science.
Unless you can get everyone to agree that it gets trumped by whatever miracles you believe occur, it's one scary line of human inquiry.
Unless we can all agree that God created a world 6,000 years ago that appears to be billions of years old, and that He tricked the scientists, and will continue to trick them in the future, then to hell with science.
Science is completely incapable of dealing with magical acts, that is true.
You prefer magic. You believe in magic. Magic is more important than testable reality. Your belief is more important than the Super Bowl.
WE HEARD YOU.
Again, which version of naturalism?
It seems to be a word you bandie about, yet you never explain it.
I'm not misrepresenting you, just trying to understand why you condone religious dogma being taught in science classes?
If you want to believe that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around the earth, be my guest.
LOL! No, I'm not a believer in a flat earth and I am fully capable of coping with scientific advancement. I am much more aware of what is scientific and what is not than you are.
You think science has 'proved' many things that it is not equipped to prove and for which no confirming evidence exists.
That is not good.
Uh, what new data has come out of Creationists other "God did it, its a miracle?"
Science comes up with discoveries all the time about evolution, some disprove other ideas, some support existing data, and some are new all together.
Religion has no place in a public school science class.
>>LOL! No, I'm not a believer in a flat earth and I am fully capable of coping with scientific advancement. I am much more aware of what is scientific and what is not than you are.
Are you sure? Don't you realize that one uses a level to ensure that a line is straight, true and horizontal?
>>You think science has 'proved' many things that it is not equipped to prove and for which no confirming evidence exists. That is not good.
Your post indicates your ignorance of science. That is not good.
I don't fear science at all. But I do understand why you feel you need to characterize me as such. It is the only way you can deal with what I am saying to you.
"Unless we can all agree that God created a world 6,000 years ago that appears to be billions of years old, and that He tricked the scientists, and will continue to trick them in the future, then to hell with science."
Nope, I'm not even telling you that. What I'm telling you is that science is going to come up with a naturalistic explanation. That is a requirement of the philosophy (and science as naturalism is a philosophy).
"You prefer magic. You believe in magic. Magic is more important than testable reality. Your belief is more important than the Super Bowl."
Again, I have nothing to do with magic or the Super Bowl.
What I do care about is that people not be deceived about what science can say and what it cannot.
I do understand why you must demonize that which you do not understand. It threatens your paradigm and demonizing your opponent is the only effective option that you have at your disposal.
>> A federal judge ordered the stickers removed in 2005, saying they amount to an unconstitutional government endorsement of religion.
So the theory of evolution cannot be stated as something that is a theory, nor is it something that can be approached with an open mind...
... I think we finally found the missing link.
>>Uh, what new data has come out of Creationists other "God did it, its a miracle?"
Haven't yo seen the museum where the dinosaurs have saddles on them! Definitely an major advancement in the knowledge about our forefathers.
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