<p>Here you go, emeraldkity4, page 5 of this link: <a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/02/AR2005080200899_5.html[/url]”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/02/AR2005080200899_5.html</a></p>
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<p>I’ll accept “both sides should be properly taught”.</p>
<p>Thanks for the link
It still is worrisome to me though to introduce yet another point of view into the school system.
From my vantage point I see teachers having a pretty hard time dealing with the diverse bunch of kids as well as few resources from the districts and the states to address their educational needs to have something else to cover when they can’t even cover long division or barely cover state history.
I realize that teachers are required to have blank amount of inservce hours every year for training- but can’t we get that as part of their education degree so that they are adaquately trained before they are hired?</p>
<p>( I have been in hiring commitees this summer and it is really sad who is available to be interviewed, - if I had an education degree I would push them aside and offer to do it myself-)</p>
<p>I would not object to teaching the idea of intelligent design in schools. I would object if it was taught in a science class as part of a scientific debate since it’s not science. Any debate is not a debate between two scientific ideas but between one scientific theory backed with a myriad of scientific evidence and a philosophical viewpoint that can neither be proven nor disproven. The same thing goes for creationism. It should not be taught as a scientific theory next to the scientific theory of evolution but as a religious belief based on faith in a certain interpretation of the bible. Thus it could be taught in a course on religion, etc, but not in science. Science courses should include debates, but these debates should be about scientific ideas and theories and only scientific ideas and theories.</p>
<p>Any debate is not a debate between two scientific ideas but between one scientific theory backed with a myriad of scientific evidence and a philosophical viewpoint that can neither be proven nor disproven.</p>
<p>Ah. So, you’d object to teaching string theory in physics since even its strongest proponents accept that large parts of it can’t be tested or proven? I don’t mean because we don’t have the technology. I mean because the theory itself shows it can’t be tested?</p>
<p>When you “expose” young maleable minds to ideas in a classroom it you lend it an imprimatur </p>
<p>I agree.</p>
<p>My ninth grade biology teacher told us that IF (at least he was knowledgeable enough about evolution to modify his statement with an if) evolution is true, there is no God or Creator and he of course believes it was true. Holding my breath I raised my hand and informed him, and the class, that I believed his opinion to be wrong and, in any case, only an opinion. I’ll bet good money that high school biology teachers across America are teaching that ID is a joke. </p>
<p>There is science, then there is scientism. </p>
<p>In fact, I take the opposite view: If God does not exist, then evolution cannot occur because there would have been nothing, no cause, from which the universe would have or could have mutated and evolved; no efficient cause or final cause and no order. Suffice it to say, I do not see a contradiction between intelligent design and evolution. Moreover, I think that only those with an anti-religious agenda do.</p>
<p>But intelligent design is not absurd, nor do we have any sound, rational proof against it. In fact, a large part of Darwinism depends on the order that is the essence of ID. </p>
<p>Now, before all the Darwinists who tattoo their cars with the seafood Darwin emblazoned with a sarcastic reference to the miracle of Jesus, attack me, Id like to make the point that Darwinism presupposes (yes, presupposes) intelligent design. </p>
<p>According to Darwins theory, species have descended from each other due to mutation. The survival of certain species, namely the fitness of those species to survive in their respective environments, is accounted for by natural selection, as Im sure you all know. </p>
<p>Now, the survival of the fittest presupposes the arrival of the fit, and the fit survive because of their order and harmony within their environmentand order is the central theme of intelligent design. Perhaps some of you will make the claim that the mutations were a result of chance, or that one coincidence leading to the next produced the vast array of order we see around us everyday. </p>
<p>To say that something happens because of chance is to say that it happened unpredictably, or through accidental causes, or in a way in which we did not expect; in other words, that it defied the norm. </p>
<p>Yet, the norm, the background against which we judge how we expect things to happen, is order itself. Without order there would be no chance because we would never think that anything is out of the order or more precisely, out of the ordinary.</p>
<p>For example, if you step into a crowded high school cafeteria and all the students are yelling, throwing food, running around etc, you make some sort of intuitive judgment like wow, what chaos,but you say something is chaotic by judging it against the backdrop of order, by knowing what a calm and quiet cafeteria actually should be.</p>
<p>Initially:
"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. "You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." </p>
<p>Mild, maybe even inflammable. </p>
<p>Ah, but here come the flames:
–you could have made the same apologetic answer, saying it was a reasonable position for our President, had the question been, "Should children be taught our scientific belief that Black people are inferior?"</p>
<p>–but would teaching about people who beleive the Holocaust was a hoax, that Earth is flat, that we never went to the moon </p>
<p>mmmmmmm when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail Someone has got to collect the lighters.</p>
<p>With the way people are reacting to his quote, you think Bush took a strong stand supporting something really radical like traditional marriage.</p>
<p>Wasn’t it ruled unconstitutional to teach creationism in the public school system because creationism is not considered a science? That is, creationists cannot offer any empirical evidence or testable hypothesizes to support or repudiate any claims. The same can be said about ID. If schools were to teach ID as a science, they might as well teach the pseudoscience of phrenology.</p>
<p>The implication that intelligent design is not science is FALSE. Just as you can find some promoters of intelligent design (including some who post on CC) who have no clue about rigorous science, you can certainly find many opponents of intelligent design (including some who post on CC) who are equally ignorant of science.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, many intelligent scientists accept aspects of microevolution (species change over time through mutation, etc.) but believe (based on intuition, scientific analysis, calculations, etc.) that it is scientifically unreasonable to conclude that the world as it currently exists resulted from random events with no initial intelligence or guidance along the way. A number of questions, which can ONLY be addressed using science, are quite reasonable to consider.</p>
<p>If one could show, for example, that the world as we know it is an extremely stable and robust dynamic system, such that given almost any set of initial conditions it would have evolved to what we now see, then that would be a strong argument AGAINST intelligent design.</p>
<p>On the other hand, if one could show that only an extraordinarily small set of initial conditions could account for the current universe having evolved in even 10 to 20 billion years, then this may support intelligent design.</p>
<p>One of the MOST IMPORTANT aspects of teaching students science (or the scientific method) is showing them that after they come up with a model, that it needs to be validated (i.e. shown to agree with relevant observations, tests, or experiments). </p>
<p>If one were to opine that the current universe had originated by some type of explosion billions of years ago from some arbitrarily arranged matter (i.e. no intelligent design), and that the universe has evolved following the laws of physics as we can best approximate them, then that model of the universe can be tested. How likely would it be (i.e. mathematical probability) that highly complex molecules would form, or how likely that life forms such as humans would evolve? These questions can all be addressed. In order to obtain the best answers to these types of questions, you would need to have models that are properly designed and based on reasonable assumptions. Students could be presented with results of these calculations, along with the associated assumptions on which they were based.</p>
<p>Obviously, one can make an ASSUMPTION that no intelligent design exists and then state that since, by definition, the world exists as it does and it has obviously evolved to its current state, that THEREFORE the probability of it having evolved without intelligent design is 100 percent. However, this is NOT SCIENCE. This is circular reasoning based on politics, or possibly secular religion, neither of which should be taught in a science class.</p>
<p>The following questions are FREQUENTLY discussed in science classrooms:</p>
<p>Is it possible to transform some other element into gold? (alchemy)
Is it possible to make a device that performs work and will run forever, without adding any energy? (perpetual motion machine)
Is it possible to create living things out of nothing (spontaneous generation).</p>
<p>These questions are part of SCIENCE and are demonstrated using scientific principles to have the following answer: NO. But this does not mean that they should never be discussed in a science classroom. On the contrary, the answer is actually very relevant to understanding the state of science as we currently know it.</p>
<p>If the above approach can be used to easily dismiss intelligent design, then so be it. On the other hand, this approach may make many students understand that it doesn’t make sense that our current world occurred through strictly random processes. In either case, students would be taught how to SCIENTIFICALLY assess whether a theory is reasonable, instead of using a common CC’er approach (“If George Bush believes it, then it must be false.”).</p>
<p>If God created the universe, who created God?
Pafather, with nuclear fusion isn’t it possible to turn one element into another?</p>
<p>Funny–in political arguments, I find myself standing with the liberals. In other arguments, I find myself standing with the same people I opposed in the political arguments. :-)</p>
<p>dstark–your question doesn’t mean a lot. Obviously something was here in the beginning. Either the universe was always here–or something existed that became the universe–or God was always here. Something was uncreated. You think it was matter or energy or something; others think it was God. Neither can be proven.</p>
<p>I have read widely on evolution, creationism, and ID. Creationism and ID are definitely NOT the same. Only those who have not read their materials can say that. Creationism starts with the Bible and tries to prove it. ID starts with the data and tries to see what conclusions can be drawn, using, of all things, the scientific method. Regardless of what some say, evolution can NOT be proven. Microevolution may be provable; evolution as the origin of all life on earth can NOT be proven, because we cannot go back to the start of life and see it happen. You can point to evidence for it and perhaps make a good case, but it must remain a theory, because it is not falsifiable. (That may be the wrong word; my 50+ brain loses words occasionally.) Anyway the idea is that you can’t prove it absolutely, any more than you can prove ID. You can only compare the evidence and try to come to a logical conclusion.</p>
<p>I, and many others, have no problem with evolution being taught in schools as the dominant theory for how life began and developed, as long as the shortfalls of the theory are also taught. What I do not like is the idea that it is taught as fact, and students are seldom told that it cannot explain every facet of life, or that some evidence seems to not support the theory, as currently stated. When any theory or scientific idea becomes unquestionable (not allowed to be questioned), then the scientific method is being discarded in favor of (Oh, dang, I lost that word, too!–what’s the word for something that can’t be challenged, but must just be accepted??)… Anyway, when a scientific idea cannot be questioned, it ceases to be scientific.</p>
<p>dstark,</p>
<p>“If God created the universe, who created God?”</p>
<p>Christian viewpoint: God always existed. No one created God.</p>
<p>“Pafather, with nuclear fusion isn’t it possible to turn one element into another?”</p>
<p>Both nuclear fusion and nuclear fission change one element to another. There is just not a convenient reaction for a neighboring element that can “easily” be transformed into gold. I only mentioned alchemy because it is typically mentioned in a chemistry course, as alchemy was historically the driving force behind some fundamental chemistry two or three hundred years ago (before fusion and fission were understood).</p>
<p>Dogma–that was the word I was trying to think of. If the theory of evolution cannot be questioned, it becomes dogma, which is not a scientific principle…</p>
<p>Pafather,</p>
<p>“Is it possible to create living things out of nothing (spontaneous generation).”</p>
<p>Actually according to my Campbell and Reece biology textbook, Miller and Urey were able to create organic compounds from the inorganic in 1954 in what they speculated to be an abiotic environment, before there was life on earth. The reason that you do not see so much spontaneous generation today on earth is because of the large amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere that tends to oxidize compounds. Back when there was no life on earth, it is postulated by many scientists that there was no oxygen.</p>
<p>I would not consider ID a science because it is just a body of evidence that attempts to repudiate evolution, to suggest that natural selection, genetic mutations, etc. are not enough to lead to the diversity of life today. What is not scientific is the implication that a higher being was part of the creation of life, because there is no empirical evidence to suggest this. Just because natural selection may be an insufficient explanation does not mean that you can assume that there is a higher being.</p>
<p>
Pokemaster,
Your post is filled with assumptions. “…what they speculated [assumed] to be an abiotic environment, before there was life on earth.” </p>
<p>“The reason [assumption]that you do not see so much spontaneous generation today on earth is because of the large amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere that tends to oxidize compounds. Back when there was no life on earth, it is postulated [assumed] by many scientists that there was no oxygen.” (aside: should not Mars then be a hotbed of spontaneous generation?)</p>
<p>But, beyond that, where did the inorganic compounds come from?</p>
<p>BTW, I’m not particularly religious, nor do I believe in “creationism.” However, the very basic, PH101 question of “where did it all come from” can’t exclude the notion of some sort of ID–call it God, if you’re religious, call it "The Force " if you’re a Trekkie or similar. We didn’t solve the riddle just because we reached the 20th century and created the ACLU.</p>
<p>Driver,</p>
<p>Science is based on empirical evidence. It is a fact that you cannot prove anything, except for mathematical proofs, as is shown through, for example, the various revisions of the atomic theory. The atomic theory is based on assumptions and inferences through observations resulting from testable experiments. Similarly, there is a body of scientific evidence that supports evolution through natural selection. BTW, the assumption that pre-life earth had relatively little oxygen is not pulled out of think air; it is supported by observations, i.e. empirical evidence.</p>
<p>In the case of ID, no one can provide any empirical evidence to suggest that there was a creator. I am not saying that no one should teach this in school. What I am saying is that ID should not be taught as a science.</p>
<p>“What I am saying is that ID should not be taught as a science.”
The president didn’t say that either.</p>
<p>I didn’t say he did.</p>
<p>“If God created the universe, who created God?”</p>
<p>This is a never-ending argument, since no matter who or what you determine must have created god, you could always ask the same question again and again, like Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can. At some point you have to say that either that the universe created itself, or that something/one was there from the beginning plus that same someone had to have had no beginning. </p>
<p>Is it more difficult to believe in “I am that I am”, than it is to believe that the universe created itself?</p>
<p>“I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought,” Bush said. “You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.” </p>
<p>Since when has Bush and his administration EVER encouraged the open exchange of ideas? From gag rules at women’s health facilities, to overt control of science policy publication, to complete control of “the message”. This is a trivial little bone he threw to his right wing Christian constituancy, because he’s annoyed them in other areas. Intelligent design? maybe if they taught it in art class.</p>
<p>They might as well teach tarrot card reading as well.</p>