Butteville school board exploring intelligent design
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By Jeff Knebel
Mount Shasta Area Newspapers
Wed Aug 20, 2008, 01:49 PM PDT
Weed, Calif. -
Butteville Union Elementary School District trustees, as well as school administrators, are considering adding “intelligent design” to the school’s seventh-grade science curriculum.
In a discussion on an information/action agenda item, “Evolution versus Intelligent Design Taught in the Classroom,” during the district’s board meeting last Wednesday, trustees agreed to seek legal counsel regarding the issue.
“I think this will be a big issue in the Supreme Court before long,” said board president Stephen Darger, a practicing attorney and former police officer. “Maybe it will be with this school.”
Intelligent design is a theory which posits that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by an “unspecified higher power.”
Court cases in recent years involving the teaching of intelligent design in public schools, including two highly publicized California cases, have resulted in lawsuits against the schools and loss of government funding.
In a 2006 landmark lawsuit, a Dover, Penn., school was successfully blocked by Americans United from teaching intelligent design alongside evolution in high school biology classes. The court ruled that intelligent design was religion shrouded as science and that it cannot be taught as an alternative to evolution in public school science classes.
The following month, two rural California public high schools contended that the Pennsylvania ruling by Judge John E. Jones, an appointee of President Bush, opened the door to the possibility of teaching intelligent design in philosophy or religion classes
But the new strategy was immediately struck down when a high school in Lebec, Calif., a rural town north of Los Angeles, terminated one such course as part of a court settlement involving 11 law suits. As a result, a hearing scheduled before a federal judge in upcoming days was cancelled.
In a similar case just days later Frazier Mountain High, a rural school district outside of Fresno, with pressure from lawsuits and Americans United, settled the issue with the agreement to halt its intelligent design course and to never again offer a class that promotes creationism.
Darger said that in order to legally teach intelligent design in a public school the subject would have to remain entirely secular and only offer possible explanations for what evolution cannot explain.
He cited a decision nearly 20 years ago in the case of Edwards v. Aguillar, where the Supreme Court concluded that “teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to school children might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction.”
In recent years many scientists have developed issues surrounding Darwinism and are uncovering evidence that is contradicting certain aspects of the widely accepted theory, Darger said
“The key problem is that [intelligent design] isn’t viewed as an accepted scientific theory,” he said. “This isn’t an issue of creation versus evolution, and it’s not pointed toward religion. Intelligent design can help explain the problems with Darwinism and introduce ideas about life’s origins beyond evolution.”
College of the Siskiyous biology instructor Dave Clarke said he views intelligent design as a veiled attempt to impose creationism, a biblical-based view that credits God for the origin of life, on public schoolchildren. Public schools are required to teach evolution as the theory of how life originated - life forms have developed over millions of years on Earth, which is billions of years old.
Clarke said he respects creationism and intelligent design and that he doesn’t disregard their possibilities, but that it is not a viable science and has no place being taught along side of evolutionary biology.
“It’s a belief system, not a science,” he said. “Science is a process of inquiry - you have a question and you test it. Science doesn’t prove truth it disproves claims; a scientist starts with a hypothesis, tries to disprove it, and then either accepts or rejects it. Intelligent design offers no falsifying facts, nothing can be disproved.”
Clarke explained that many of the claims intelligent design supporters hold simply cannot be tested because of science’s inability to do so.
“Intelligent design is used to defend fallacies,” said Clarke. “Supporters say there is a lack of evidence for evolution, but a lack of evidence for one thing is not evidence for another.”
One major aspect that separates intelligent design from science, according to Clarke, is that science starts with a question that needs supporting answers, whereas intelligent design starts with an answer that needs supporting questions.
“Intelligent design states that because of the complexity of the universe it must have been created by an ”unspecified’ higher power,” Clarke said. “This leaves the possibilities wide open for what the intelligent designer could be - aliens, multiple Gods....anything.”
BUESD trustee Steve Hart reported during the meeting that the subject would only be applied to the seventh-grade curriculum because it is the grade level at which Darwinian evolution is introduced.
“What we would like to do is include [in the curriculum] a way for students to look at evolution with critical minds and become aware of things (in evolution) that are no longer accepted,” said Hart, who proposed the idea. “Science has always excluded supernatural phenomenon. Although there are risks, this is something that would benefit the entire school.”
Hart also reported that he has been in contact with an attorney from Redding and suggested that board members seek advise as to legal ramifications. It was also reported that school funds could not fund either legal counsel or the proposed program.
School principal and superintendent Cynthia McConnell reported that teachers would not be legally required to teach intelligent design, or anything other than state education requirements.
Edited by Admin, : Double space the paragraphs.
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