Posted on 11/13/2007 1:40:53 PM PST by yoe
A packet for educators issued by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in conjunction with the NOVA program "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" encourages teaching practices that are probably unconstitutional, a conservative organization stated on Tuesday.
"The NOVA/PBS teaching guide encourages the injection of religion into classroom teaching about evolution in a way that likely would violate current Supreme Court precedents about the First Amendment's Establishment Clause," said John West, vice president for public policy and legal affairs at the Discovery Institute, in a news release.
The 22-page document is a companion piece to the two-hour NOVA docudrama, "Judgment Day," airing on most network affiliates Tuesday night. The film is about a trial concerning intelligent design that took place in Dover, Pa., in 2005.
The guide claims to provide teachers with "easily digestible information to guide and support you in facing challenges to evolution."
In the booklet, teachers are instructed to use such discussion questions as: "Can you accept evolution and still believe in religion?" The answer to that query is provided as: "Yes. The common view that evolution is inherently antireligious is simply false."
"This statement is simplistic and not neutral among different religions, and in that sense arguably inconsistent with Supreme Court teachings concerning neutrality," said attorney Casey Luskin, program officer for public policy and legal affairs at the institute.
"The Supreme Court ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas that the government must maintain 'neutrality between religion and religion,'" said Randal Wenger, a Pennsylvania attorney who filed amicus briefs in the Kitzmiller v. Dover School District case.
"Because the briefing packet only promotes religious viewpoints that are friendly towards evolution, this is not neutral, and PBS is encouraging teachers to violate the First Amendment's Establishment Clause," Wenger added.
In its news release, the Discovery Institute indicates that it has enlisted more than a dozen attorneys and legal scholars, including Wenger, to review the PBS teaching guide with an eye to its constitutionality.
"The PBS materials, in suggesting that students need not be concerned that evolution violates their religion, ironically equip public school teachers to violate our current conception of the First Amendment by explicitly teaching students concerning matters of religious belief," Wenger said.
"The irony is that discussing intelligent design would not teach any student about any religious belief - the PBS materials, on the other hand, will," he said.
Luskin noted that the teaching guide also presents false information about the theory of intelligent design.
"The teaching guide is also riddled with factual errors that misrepresent both the standard definition of intelligent design and the beliefs of those scientists and scholars who support the theory," the attorney added.
As a result, the institute is providing its own guide for educators, "The Theory of Intelligent Design," which will help teachers better understand the debate between Darwinian evolution and intelligent design.
Cybercast News Service previously reported that in December 2004, parents in Dover filed the first-ever challenge to intelligent design being taught in public schools, claiming it violated their religious liberty by promoting particular religious beliefs to their children under the guise of science education.
Just over a year later, U.S. District Judge John Jones III ruled that the school system may not include intelligent design in its science curriculum because intelligent design is not a scientific concept.
Telephone calls and e-mails seeking a response from the Public Broadcasting System were not returned by press time. However, on the PBS Web site, the program is described as capturing "the turmoil that tore apart the community of Dover, Pa., in one of the latest battles over teaching evolution in public schools."
"Featuring trial reenactments based on court transcripts and interviews with key participants - including expert scientists and Dover parents, teachers and town officials - 'Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial' follows the celebrated federal case of Kitzmiller v. Dover School District," the site states.
"In 2004, the Dover school board ordered science teachers to read a statement to high school biology students suggesting that there is an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution called intelligent design - the idea that life is too complex to have evolved naturally and therefore must have been designed by an intelligent agent," the Web site says.
"The teachers refused to comply," it adds.
"'Judgment Day' captures on film a landmark court case with a powerful scientific message at its core," said Paula Apsell, NOVA's senior executive producer. "Evolution is one of the most essential, yet - for many people - least understood of all scientific theories, the foundation of biological science."
"We felt it was important for NOVA to do this program to heighten the public understanding of what constitutes science and what does not and, therefore, what is acceptable for inclusion in the science curriculum in our public schools," Apsell said.
Nevertheless, Discovery Institute attorney Casey Luskin disagreed that the program is just about science.
"PBS gives a false definition of intelligent design that is a complete straw man argument," Luskin said. "Scientists who support intelligent design seek evidence of design in nature, and argue that such evidence points to intelligent design, based on our historical knowledge of cause and effect."
"So intelligent design theory is not an argument based on what we don't know, but rather an argument about what we do know," he said.
This is pure opinion, and is, therefore, religious in nature. It is not in the purview of a teacher to be teaching this.
For my part, evolution is inherently antireligious. Richard Dawkins agrees with me. I am a strong conservative, evangelical Christian. Dawkins is a world-famous atheistic evolutionist.
Me either......
5700 year or whatever old earth... yep pretty scared of them.
How does Christ have a a dog in the fight between stupidity and his way other than pulling for the people that pull his way and being there for those that go astray?
Christ said something about a mote or something didn’t he?
Wink.
Dawkins.... I am going to ask your permission to post something about him.
May I? Please.
Pretty Please?
anything you wish, but you don’t need my permission
Sorry, I should’ve included the sarcasm tag.
Still waiting for scientific evidence against evolution, and/or scientific evidence supporting ID....
Neither is evolution.
It is, and always has been, bad theory that has had to change course so many times you could use it as an electric fan.
They had the judge on WPHT radio (1210 AM) here in Philadelphia yesterday. The judge had absolutely no clue was constituted "science", but he did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
“Albert Einstein also believed that Natural Selection was the theory that best explained Biological evolution, and he was certainly a lot smarter than any of the Science haters at the Dyscovery Institut”
Natural Selection is great for explaining changes within a specie. It’s pure speculation and fantasy to use it to explain differences between species.
Prenatal vitamins for starters. The use of steroids in our meat products can be correlated to “larger” children by giving the roids by proxy.
Haven't asked him, but that would seem to be likely. He also believes in evolution. Note that the two beliefs don't seem to be mutually incompatible.
The evidence is presented, among other places, in a book called “The Edge of Evolution” by Michael Behe. Before you claim that Behe has been refuted you better be able to point to one concrete example of stepwise evolution of a complex biological mechanism or system. Sometimes the reason we can’t find something is because it does not exist, i.e. mutations leading to improved organisms that came into existence by teeny changes accumulated over time.
The theory of Darwinian Evolution does not allow for accumulated changes. Each change must be “macro” enough to be tested by natural selection and “micro” enough to represent a single mutation. The statistical likelihood of such a thing happening within the time frame of 18 billion years and a universe of 10 to the 80th particles makes a miracle seem like a sure thing. And if evolution requires miracles how is it natural?
They quote a letter that Einstein wrote, dated March 24, 1954.
The letter was in response to a letter Einstein had received from an admiring atheist, who had read in an article that Einstein was devoutly religious. The writer was skeptical of that, and wanted to know the truth. Additionally, he mailed Einstein a check for Einstein to give to the charity of his choice.
Nonsense.
More nonsense. Believing in ID is one thing. Lying about it and pretending it's not religious based is another. The ID political radicals are selling their soul on this one (and their credibility). We see right through you.
Nonsense. By this inane "logic", having an army is not neutral because it gives preference to religions that accept that war is sometimes necessary over those that take an absolute pacifist stand.
There are some religions that are OK with violence under certain conditions, and others that reject it totally. Ergo, fighting wars or even having a military is unconsitutional.
Since this line of argument leads to obvious absurdities, it must be rejected as invalid.
Nonsense. It is established fact, 100% proven by finding even one person who believes in both evolution and religion (which is trivially easy to do).
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