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Author | Topic: Government in the US is Promoting Anti-Creationist Dogma Evolution | |||||||||||||||||||||||
tgamble Inactive Member |
quote: Creationists like to pretend that creation "science" is based on actual science. It isn't of course, but that's what they claim anyway.
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gene90 Member (Idle past 3845 days) Posts: 1610 Joined: |
Same with ID "theory". What does it explain that evolution cannot?
Also, ID theory has no mechanism! It only gives us "God did it!" and leaves no encouragement to find out how. Nevermind that God itself is non-falsifiable. For thousands of years, people have resorted to the supernatural to explain things. Where did that get them? Nowhere--because the supernatural is a "quick fix" that can "explain" anything from weather to the phases of the Moon, but cannot be tested or understood and so is of absolutely no value. We are lucky that the processes operating in our world are naturalistic and that we can understand them. We are also lucky that the "ID camp" broke its hold on culture long enough for science to develop at all.
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gene90 Member (Idle past 3845 days) Posts: 1610 Joined: |
quote: I hope this is not an issue with the Yahoo! transplantees.
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gene90 Member (Idle past 3845 days) Posts: 1610 Joined: |
quote: The difference is that abiogenesis itself has some evidence going for it. There is nothing, in principle, that prevents advanced organic compounds, including replicators, from forming from abiological compounds. Likewise there is no known cellular phenomenon that is not reducible to chemistry. Finally, we have experiments like Miller's that demonstrate that, under a wide variety of conditions, simpler compounds will form into amino acids, thus removing 2LOT based objections: as is well known, 2LOT allows "information" or "complexity" to increase in a system as long as energy is made unusable. The rest is a mix of the laws of chemistry, a lot of time, a lot of space with the reactions occuring in, and maybe a little luck. It seems probable that if you have the right compounds around, reacting for long enough, life is going to happen, IDer or not. Now, about ID. We start with a pre-supposed God, and some elements God has already made. How does God reach down from Heaven and make the molecules align to generate a living thing? Does He cast a spell? Surely not, that is sorcery, not science. How are you going to find the mechanism, and how are we going to test it empirically? Are we going to learn how to cast spells before all is done? You see...if the naturalistic version can use abiological processes to make amino acids, shouldn't the supernatural camp be asked to speak amino acids into existance, if we are going to give them equal time? Or get God to do it? I contend that ID "theories" cannot be science.
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Redwing Inactive Member |
I agree that there are teenagers who are both intelligent and mature, and I do think that youth deserve more respect than they are sometimes given. Since I'm 20, memories of teenagehood aren't that distant. But I also agree with another post that the public can be amazingly ignorant.
I think it is the worst thing that could happen for the government to dictate to schools what they should teach in thier science classes. Not only that, but the government needs to back off on standardization. Over standardizing education and tehreby restricting curriculum is the worst thing the government could do: teachers need to have freedom so they can use their gifts to inspire children to love learning. It is no wonder we have a populace that seems ill informed when some of our schools amount to little better than what I think of as "holding pens for youth". They're a place to put kids so they'll be out of the way while everyone else goes about their business. *That* is the firt thing we need to fix. Then our society will be better able to handle intellectual issues.
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gene90 Member (Idle past 3845 days) Posts: 1610 Joined: |
I disagree. I feel that teaching must be standardized to make sure that students are being taught properly. I also feel that teachers should be held more accountable to whether students are learning. And I think that evolution should be well represented in the standardized test standards, which would be upheld by Federal law and be uniform throughout all the states, and that the science portion of which should be written up by the NAS.
Sadly, the legislature does not seem to be scientifically literate and is working against the country's best interests in science education.
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gene90 Member (Idle past 3845 days) Posts: 1610 Joined: |
Incidentally, I feel that private schools should be required to submit to such testing procedures as well, and be penalized for failure to meet the standards, just as agriculture has to submit to USDA quality testing.
[This message has been edited by gene90 (edited 08-14-2001).]
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lbhandli Inactive Member |
quote: I'm not sure why natural selection is the only process you cite above. Natural selection conserves or maintains genetic diversity. Diversity is increased only through mutation. Additionally, there isn't a design theory that is scientific so I'm not sure what one is supposed to include in textbooks. Larry
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Redwing Inactive Member |
I am not saying that there should be no standardization whatsoever--I know it is valuable to have a certain amount of unity in what is taught in schools around the country. I just think that we need to be careful in diong this because we could easily go overboard and do more harm than good.
The truth is that legislaters are typically neither teachers nor scientists and while sometimes they come up with a good idea for helping our schools, sometimes they are unaware of the impact their ideas may have. (And in the case of the Kansas incident, legislature far oversteps its bounds.) We need some form of check and balance that will help schools and legislatures come up with a system of standardization that benefits both groups.
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lbhandli Inactive Member |
quote: And essentially we do. State schools are done by states--and the standards are public. Each state publishes them and so people are able to judge the quality of education in those public schools. Private schools are generally accredited by private institutions just as colleges and universities are. This has the benefit of providing the information, but also keeping state government out of the decision-making system--remember that if government is directly involved in accrediting private schools the decisions are likely to be based on electoral incentives, not the quality of education. One particular problem of a centralized system is that schools aren't tailored to meet the needs of their students. The Saint Louis Public School system has very different needs than then suburban schools systems surrounding it--nearly 14% of the students are in some sort of special ed program. A system you seem to be describing sounds similar to France where one former Minister of Education bragged that he could know what every student in the nation is doing at a particular time. This did not work well to say the least. Many times local areas have specific strengths or weaknesses and allowing those to be determined within state guidelines gives the appropriate flexibility. Did anyone see Santorum's amendment to the education bill? He wished to require all states to discuss the "controversy" surrounding evolution--this is another reason why national standards don't always work as well as we might hope. LarryLarry
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gene90 Member (Idle past 3845 days) Posts: 1610 Joined: |
Good points. I suppose my problem is that I don't trust either the legislature (state or national) or schoolboards with science education.
It's true. A national standard would poorly fit regional needs and would open the door to Creationism through political means. If only nine states teach evolution unabashedly, then evolution supporters are best off trying to resist Creationism on a state-by-state basis. Too bad the Creationists get to pick the battles, they should be fighting in the journals, not in political arenas.
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lbhandli Inactive Member |
Gene,
One thing to keep in mind is that once creationists take over a school board (except in small towns) they lose in the next election. The effort in Kansas (a state that is very conservative--the last Democrat elected to the Senate was during the Depression). While this creates a problem in the short run, creationists are primarily successful electorally when their agenda is not very public. In Ralph Reed's biography he mentions that in the San Diego case, the Christian Coalition made sure they kept the plan for introducing creationism quiet during the election since they knew it would draw attention. Larry
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gene90 Member (Idle past 3845 days) Posts: 1610 Joined: |
I hope you're right.
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Redwing Inactive Member |
I hope so too.
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John Paul Inactive Member |
gene90:
The difference is that abiogenesis itself has some evidence going for it. John Paul:Yeah, evidence shows it is as close to impossible as you can get. But I guess that is the only way you guys can say any Creationist version of biological evolution is not science because it starts from an "unnatural" beginning. Of course no one mentions abiogenesis is a big fairy tale. gene90:Now, about ID. We start with a pre-supposed God, and some elements God has already made. John Paul:ID does not start with a pre-supposed God. God is a possibility but not a necessity. ID looks at life and its specified complexity and infers an intelligent designer. The mechanism for ID would be very similar to Dr. Spetner's Non-Random Evolutionary Hypothesis which he lays out in his book Not By Chance. gene90:How does God reach down from Heaven and make the molecules align to generate a living thing? John Paul:That is what we are trying to find out. gene90:Does He cast a spell? Surely not, that is sorcery, not science. John Paul:I will put it this way, IF God did cast a spell to Create life, than any science that tries to attempt a different answer is worthless because it is not indicative of reality. gene90:How are you going to find the mechanism, and how are we going to test it empirically? John Paul:Read Spetner's book. But now I have to ask you, how do you test that procaryotes can/ did evolve into eucaryotes? gene90:You see...if the naturalistic version can use abiological processes to make amino acids, John Paul:Under controlled laboratory experiments, which is hardly natural. Not to mention the fact that the experiments also created many toxins such as tar or that the presence of water or oxygen would spell peril for any alleged early chemical reactions. Evolution starts after life appeared on Earth. Regardless of what you may believe, neither side has a viable "purely natural" method of how life first appeared. You have faith that science will someday find an answer. Origins science meanwhile has faith that Mother Nature together with Father Time can overcome just about any obstacle. Back to the point- leaving out origins the Creation model of biological evolution is just as scientifically valid as any theory that states common descent from some unknown population of single-celled organisms that just happened to have the ability to self-replicate. What Creationists need to do, is to better define what a "Kind" is.
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