For your consideration, I offer George W. Bush.
I just moved to Cobb County three months ago, right before the first came up. I’m guessing that the members of the Board of Education know it doesn’t make sense, but are too unprincipled to be willing to piss off all the religious fanatics that call Cobb County home. I imagine it’ll end up in the courts.
When counties and states have done this – it was state law in Louisiana as recently as the 1980’s, if I recall – how does it work in the classroom? Does a science teacher explaining “Scientific Creationism” actually stand in front of a blackboard diagram and say, “Now at this point, God takes a hand…”
Actually, it might be beneficial to make students analyze the “theory” of Creationism using logic. (Although I’m afraid the schools aren’t doing a very good job of teaching the essential skill of critical thinking.)
Why do people with antiquated tastes in science always pick on Biology class? Why don’t they insist on teaching the “alternative theory” of phlogiston in Chemistry, or the Hollow Earth theory in Geology?
I’ve never gotten the microevolution response, but I stopped trying after the first few to avoid having a frustration induced aneurism.
I think if I could figure out a way to show them the fluidity of biological classification and how diverging to the point where it is reasonable to classify the populations as different species, or “kinds”, is possible.
Somedays I wish knowledge from books could be absorbed by rapid collision with said book. Then we could just beat fundies with books by Dawkins and Gould until they get it. If this worked it would also have the side effect of making education less painful for students.
And of course “God-schmod I want my monkey man!”
That should have been “Like Mr. Muir said years ago”. Jeesh, the older I get the easier it is to just lose a “year”. . . .
Heh heh.
DaLovin’ Dj
D’oh. Dammit. Wrong thread, multiple browser windows, but more here later . . .
Well, now…
Epistemology is what’s at stake here. Where do you get your data?
It is not impossible that some omnipotent being might have created the universe one fine Sunday afternoon in October, 4004 BC, planted a huge amount of evidence in it that suggests to all objective observers that its age is in the billions of years and that the planet we live on is about 4.6 billion years of age, then caused the account of what he actually did to be written up in myth form and inserted at the beginning of a collection of legends, history, and laws that he commanded a pharaoh’s adoptive grandson to write down.
And it’s equally not impossible that the entire thing is a practical joke played on humanity by the short gray humanoids of Zeta Reticuli, who have invented FTL travel and use it for nefarious purposes such as that pratical joke.
There is a human need, strong in many people, for certitude, and many of them found that necessity in deifying the Bible, making of it an infallible leatherbound god.
And if it contains the verbatim truth about life, the universe, and everything, then obviously the inductive logic used to conclude that the Big Bang is the answer to cosmological questions and that Darwinian evolution is the answer to questions of phylogenesis must be wrong.
Such a god, however, would be the ultimate in trickster deities, making Coyote, Loki, and their ilk into relatively compassionate and honest folk by comparison.
And it is completely beyond me why anyone would ever be interested in worshipping such a god, other than the obvious concept that he demands their worship, under penalty of infinite torture if they don’t.
On the other hand, if one reads Genesis as myth, and accepts the theories of science as the best answers available to the questions of how things came to be, while seeing the idea that God for His own purposes created things that way as the answer to why they came to be, there is no conflict between religion and science.
Of course, this requires some constructive and intelligent thought and the rejection of simplistic conclusions on the infallibility of the Bible – and therefore a rejection of that need for certitude and a willingness to let the truth lead where it will, trusting in a God who works through this complex and amazing world to make it all come out all right in the end.
Perhaps that last is why the fundamentalists adhere to literalism – they don’t have enough faith in God!
And God belongs anywhere in the classroom… how, exactly?
Esprix
In my high school, biology was part of the basic curriculum, and thus everyone had to take it in some form. If someone feared physics or AP biology or chemistry would endanger his or her immortal soul, all they had to do was not sign up for it.
Would it be possible for a school to create a special biology class that taught creationism, rather than require it for all classes? That way, creationist parents and students could opt into learning their version of the truth, and everyone else in the school would have an endless source of amusement.
Just for the record, Fionn’s post count was 666 when he made that last suggestion.
Well, if He is indeed omnipresent, it would be rather hard to define a way of keeping Him out.
A mandate for teaching the fundamentalists’ opinions about God, on the other hand… 
I won’t be satisfied until our nation’s children are taught to live in proper fear of the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief.
Isn’t that what used to be called…you know…Sunday School?
Hey, if a mayor of Podunk could make a law banning Satan, why not?
What I like to do is ask them: “Do you believe that the child is different from the parent? That is, are your children different from you, in weight, height, eye/hair color, possibly even sex?” When they answer yes, as they must, I ten tell them that they have just defined evolution:
that the child is different from the parent
You just can’t argue that evolution doesn’t exist! At least not rationally and sanely. Argue all you want about the mechanisms (as you should), but you just can’t argue that evolution doesn’t exist.
But then, there are still people who fervently believe that the earth is flat…
I have a suggestion: but first we must find an immovable object…
or something, hmmm…
The following “memo” was popular in Kansas when we went through our very own evolution debate. As a devout Christian who thinks that so-called “creationism” has no place in a science class,(after all, who’s creation is it gonna be?) I thought it was a hoot!
She.
It’s time these school boards took a lesson from the SCOTUS. I’m not talking the constitutionality of what they do, I’m talking about the standards that even a bunch of judges who know nothing of science have to follow. It’s called the Daubert factors, Daubert v. Merrell, 509 U.S. 579. #3 on that list is testability. If it isn’t testable, it isn’t science. At least that’s what our Supreme Court says. And I’m sure that’s what CSICOP would say.
Only testable hypotheses should be presented in a science class. “Big Bang” is testable, there are proportions of lower elements it predicts. “Macroevolution” is testable, there are various results that can be predicted to have occured if that is indeed the way human life came to be.
Judeo-Christian creationism cannot be tested, because it is of the divine, which it’s adherents admit does not function causally. Anything not postulated to function causally cannot be tested, that’s the nature of the scientific method (take that, Sheldrake and your morphogenic fields.) So creationism doesn’t belong in any context in classrooms.
Learn something new every day, I guess.
Maybe it’s just me but if this kid really thinks science is about “absolute truth” and not “A process to understand how reality works” then he really needs to study more science but that’s just me. I mean seriously the whole point is that anything in science is updateable and subject to revision.
Unfortunately, everytime you say, “science changes” then they jump up and down and yell, “AHA! you’re changing your story! Everything you said before is wrong and you have to believe my version of things now! I’ve never changed my story therefore I am more reliable!”