California district to stop teaching 'intelligent design'
FRESNO, California (AP) -- Under legal pressure, a rural school district agreed Tuesday to stop offering high school students an elective philosophy course on "intelligent design," an advocacy group said.
A group of parents had sued the El Tejon school district in federal court last week, saying it violated the constitutional separation of church and state by offering "Philosophy of Design," a course taught by a minister's wife that advanced the notion that life is so complex it must have been created by some kind of higher intelligence.
El Tejon Superintendent John Wight said the subject was proper for a philosophy class. But Americans United argued the course relied almost exclusively on videos that presented religious theories as scientific ones.
Sharon Lemburg, a social studies teacher and soccer coach who taught "Philosophy of Design," defended the course in a letter to the weekly Mountain Enterprise. "I believe this is the class that the Lord wanted me to teach," she wrote.
Similar battles over intelligent design are being fought in Georgia and Kansas. - CNN.com +++++++++++++++++++++++ 01-18-06, 09:25 AM juanruiz
quote: "I believe this is the class that the Lord wanted me to teach,"
It's this sort of mindset that reveals the agenda of the ID proponents.
01-18-06, 01:16 PM philalethist Imagination Would this ID be the equivalent to, We don't know the answer so we want to teach you to use your imagination and imagine one?
Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 14:19-20 Yet in the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than 10,000 words in an unknown tongue. In the next verse, between punctuation marks we find the five words; "Be Not Children in Understanding"
01-18-06, 08:36 PM Professor Here's one reaction to the story (I'll reveal the source shortly). Want to guess where this first appeared?
quote: Remember the arguments from evolutionists as the legal battle raged in Dover, Pa.? They wanted to keep any competing view of man’s origins out of public school science classes. They said discussions of creationism and intelligent design would be OK in religion or philosophy classes but not in biology courses, because — supposedly — only evolution has a scientific basis.
That was just bait and switch. A court ruled that Dover schools’ science classes may not present material on intelligent design. And now, some of evolution’s emboldened true believers are making it clear they want no skepticism expressed about evolution, in other classrooms, either.
Parents of 13 students at a high school in Lebec, Calif., have sued to halt an elective philosophy course that examines issues surrounding evolution, intelligent design and creationism.
The appalling irony is that they are complaining that the teacher lacks "scientific" training. But wait! Evolution’s advocates were just saying that competing theories must not be taught from a scientific perspective. Which is it?
For ardent advocates of evolution, it’s neither. They will not be satisfied until discussion of only their theory is permitted in public schools — unless the goal of mentioning alternatives is to ridicule them.
Free inquiry should be the cornerstone of science, but advocates of the theory of evolution are increasingly enemies of free inquiry and free speech.
01-18-06, 09:34 PM juanruiz I'm afraid you're going to say Pat Robertson.
01-18-06, 10:40 PM Professor No, Pat's not that coherent. Smile
It was a newspaper editorial in the Chattanooga (Tennessee) Times Free Press, January 17, 2006. This is a "big-city" daily newspaper with a circulation of almost 100,000, covering an area of one-half million people, including northwest Georgia and Dayton, TN, of Scopes trial fame. This region is one of several proud claimants to the title "Buckle of the Bible Belt."
The editorial page includes a daily quotation from the New Testament. I guess this stuff sells newspapers in Chattanooga while offending few readers.
This editorial is a persuasive, shrewdly written essay that nonetheless flouts reason and evidence. What are we to make of it? This must be going on all over rural, grass-roots America. Americans seem to get most of their adult education from (a) church and (b) television, though most aren't watching the Discovery Channel. Some might also be reading stuff like this in their local newspaper or online. What do they make of it? For the religious right, it validates and reinforces their belief systems and political values, individually and collectively.
And that scares me -- today I'm a pessimist. Frown
01-19-06, 12:50 PM philalethist Vain Babblings In 1 Timothy 6:20-21 is written: Avoid profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of Sience falsely so called: Which some professing have erred concerning the faith.
Seems pretty clear that there is really not any opposition of science, or at least not supposed to be.
01-19-06, 12:58 PM juanruiz
quote: Free inquiry should be the cornerstone of science, but advocates of the theory of evolution are increasingly enemies of free inquiry and free speech.
I find myself wondering how things might be different if ID were allowed in a classroom? The CA woman who believed the Lord wanted her to teach that class. With that premise, what would happen if, when they get to the point of who the designer was, a student says "Krishna?" Something tells me his free speech would quickly be arrested.
01-20-06, 12:26 AM Mike121 I don’t believe ID should be taught in science class. ID, in my opinion, is a philosophical view and I would defend ID being offered as an elective philosophy course. But it seems it is not presented in that fashion anywhere thus far.
I think evolution theory is the best explanation we have as to how life developed on the planet. But the theory has it problems. It doesn’t explain some things very well, doesn’t explain others at all, and we practically torture it to reconcile it with some observations. We can’t replicate the conditions and evolutionary transformations of life forms are only conceptually possible through imaginary visualizations. But we seem to be okay with that because the popular idea is that the theory represents “evidence and reason” and nobody wants to be seen as ignorant or lacking reason.
Moreover, I think that most people consider the only alternative to current evolution theory to be an acquiescence to “God did it by magic”, which of course is not an answer of any substance, and I couldn’t swallow that either. Therefore, “we really don’t know for sure” or “we only have an idea” are not allowed as viable alternatives because we fear that such an admission would leave the door open to “God did it by magic”. Neither of these alternatives is intellectually palatable.
So I have come to wonder whether most of the folks in both of the opposing camps are guilty of a lack of intellectual courage and honesty that is fueled by a fear that giving an inch means giving up to the other side.
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