Sanity Evolves - Pennsylvania School Board Ousted
From Reuters
Voters on Tuesday ousted a Pennsylvania local school board that promoted an "intelligent-design" alternative to teaching evolution, and elected a new slate of candidates who promised to remove the concept from science classes.
The board of Dover Area School District in south-central Pennsylvania lost eight of its nine incumbents in an upset election that surprised even the challengers, who had been hoping for a bare majority to take control of the board.
Bryan Rehm, one of the winning board members and a former teacher at Dover High School, said the new board will hold a public meeting to decide the precise future of the policy. He said intelligent design will no longer be a part of the science curriculum, regardless of how the court rules.
It would seem from the above that sanity is breaking out all over. The dramatic turn around on the Dover Area School District board shows that at least in some areas of the US the rational study of science will be allowed to continue without the presence of God to explain any gaps in our knowledge.
Personally I’m still looking forward to the verdict of the court – but at least in one small corner of Pennsylvania it won’t really matter. I can’t help wondering that alongside the Vatican pronouncement on the proof for Evolution if this is the beginning of the end for so-called ‘Intelligent Design’. Maybe it is. I do hope so.
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13 comments:
It seems to go in waves. The people pushing ID now were the same people pushing creation-science in the 70's and 80's. Here's a pretty good article that goes into that:
The "Intelligent Design" Hoax
Thanks for the link.
Informative.
The article linked above states that '"Intelligent design" is a derivative of "creation-science,"' that isn't strictly true. It is fairer to say that some Creationists have hijacked the concept of ID to further their own agenda. ID does not require an all powerful deity, neither does it attempt to falsify evolution. What the Creationists are doing here is misrepresenting ID.
That said, neither ID nor Creationism have any place in a science class.
I recommend some reading on anthropic principle and cosmic coincidences for an idea of how one could approach ID without bringing supreme beings into it.
(I'm not an advocate of any of this, I just read a lot and find it interesting)
reason36 said: ID does not require an all powerful deity, neither does it attempt to falsify evolution.
Though not explicitly mentioning God per se it does talk of a 'designer' that sounds and acts very much like you would expect a creator deity to sound like & behave. I don't think that ID has been 'hi-jacked' by Christians but is just a slightly smarter, more savy version of an old idea.
reason36 also said: I recommend some reading on anthropic principle
I've read a bit about that and am highly sceptical. This does seem (on the face of it) just another way of putting forward a deist creed & attempting to put us back on centre stage in the Universe. The reason that the Universe can appear 'designed' for us is that we are here in a Universe capable of supporting our kind of life. If the Universal Constants were slightly different then we wouldn't be here - and slime creatures from the planet Zog would be convinced that the Universe was 'designed' for them instead. It's not much of an argument really...
I personally like to believe that there was a Creator for our world. Regardless of what I "believe," religion does not belong in public, secular schools. Save it for the reglious schools. I'm a firm believer in separation of church and state.
I thought the teaching of religion was illegal in Americcan Schools?
I think it is (in Public school - or what we call State School) - which is why 'they' wanted to teach ID in science class, which is what the whole Dover trail was about. The ID'ers trying to pass off a blatently religious subject as a scientific one - hence attempting to get around the law.
The real question is whether this is a real moment of clarity, or just a brief lucid moment in an otherwise mad country!
the belief corporal punishment is an inegral part of child rearing comes from an obscure bible verse that the King James version translates as "he who spanketh not his child hateth him" or something to that effect. Most other versions translate tha verse as chastise. However, since the KJ is the translation of chice for fundamentalists..
you mean "spare the rod, spoil the child"?
http://www.hawking.org.uk/text/physics/quantum.html
Physics Colloquiums - Quantum Cosmology, M-theory and the Anthropic Principle (January '99), Professor Stephen Hawking.
I will describe what I see as the framework for quantum cosmology, on the basis of M theory. I shall adopt the no boundary proposal, and shall argue that the Anthropic Principle is essential, if one is to pick out a solution to represent our universe, from the whole zoo of solutions allowed by M theory.
1:44 PM
Teaching religion in schools is supposed to be illegal, but it still happens. In addition to my experiences recently with my kids' education, when I was in high school in 1981, I ended being stuck in a bible study class in a public high school when I dropped trig near the beginning of the semester. I asked at the time if it was legal to be teaching that in a public school, I was told it's an elective and not required, so it's okay. Oh and as for the paddling in public schools, I found this research when I went to check the Arkansas schools my kids used to attend: http://www.neverhitachild.org/Arkansas/ACP02_03.html
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