(joking)
God poofed everything into existence because He is that cool! The fossil records are obviously just little easter eggs He put around as a test for the faithful! Haven’t you immoral heathens ever heard of anything called “character development” and “backstory”?
(/joking)
(Personally, I believe that God created. Doesn’t really matter how. He could have done it in seven 24 hour periods by way of Fiat, or He could have taken His sweet time by way of evolution. It’s supposed to be a reminder of your personal worth, purpose, and responsibility, not something that you bash into the heads of students in a public school biology class.
If your kid loses his faith over something this minor, than maybe it’s better for him to be disillusioned. You’re doing him a favor, really. Belief in God is much more encompassing than whether or not we were descended from monkeys. )
Should the Cobb County school board have put these stickers on books? No, of course not. The stickers are stupid.
Are they unconstitutional? Different question, and the one upon which this case will be decided. It’s a tricky one, too, since the stickers don’t directly endorse any religious belief.
Judge Clarence Cooper is a Democratic appointee, for what that’s worth. Don’t envy him having to sort this one out.
Again, that would be really stupid, but not unconstitutional. The remedy would be to vote the idiotic school board members out of office. Or move to a more enlightened school district.
There was some testimony yesterday which might be important. A Cobb County School Board member testified that the stickers were placed on the books with the specific intent of promoting classroom discussions about creationism. That might be enough for Judge Cooper to hang his hat on if he is inclined to strike down the stickers as an unconstitutional violation of the separation of church and state.
That evolution happens is a fact. Evolution is not a theory. The “theory” part of evolutionary biology comes in when we attempt to explain how evolution occurs. Natural selection, genetic drift, inheritance of acquired characters, common descent, &c., are all theories. The statement “this material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered” is not, and should not, be limited to evolutionary theories alone - all theories should be so approached. As such, such a statement should either be applied to all science texts, or not at all. There is no justification for singling out evolutionary theories for critical examination.
“Evolution” and “The Theory Of Evolution” are not the same thing.
Evolution = What happens.
Theory Of Evolution = Why and How we think it happens.
In this sense it is possible to think critically of the theory, deny it, rethink it, or even totally disprove it. You can even make up your very own theory of evolution that says it happens because god’s goofing around. But none of this makes the slightest difference to evolution itself. It happened, and will keep on happening no matter whether your theory is right or wrong.
Unfortunately this difference will never sink in with creationists. They’re attacking a science in a manner they think it is weakest, and who cares if it’s based on nothing more than word-play and a failure to understand the terminology.
He was wrong, in a nit-picky sort of way. Evolution does not describe how life began, but how it diversified.
One of the reasons I used to be a Creationist (years ago) and why many around me still are has to do with the doctrine of Original Sin and how it brought Death (and reproduction, although this is never mentioned outright) into the world. If God used evolution to create man, then how could death be a result of sin? This would make certain quotes from Christ complete fabrications and would throw evangelical Protestant Christianity in a cocked hat.
Assuming the Supreme Court stays consistent, they seemed to have already decided this one in the previously cited case of Edwards v. Aguillar.
It’s a more conservative and theocracy-friendly Court now, but that 1987 decision seems to sum it up pretty well; there is no clear secular purpose for this action.
Actually, in the final version of Genesis, the humans are commanded to “be fruitful, and multiply” before the narrative of The Fall. What comes after the Fall is death and guilt (“and, they realized they were naked”)
No confusion in that regard. The joke was on the fact that a perfect solution is one that pisses everybody off.
Much like everyone else who has ever had a science class, I am well aware that intelligent design has no more to do with science than it does with English lit.
For those who are interested, Skeptical Inquirer magazine follows this issue closely, including frequent updates on the strategies of the IDers. Recently, they had a big article explaining the disingenuousness of the recent calls to “teach the scientific controversy”–as if there was one.
Nonetheless, I do appreciate your assumption that I am an idiot. Underestimating others only makes you vulnerable.
[nitpick]
Higgs bosons don’t have anything to do with gravity. They may have something to do with why particles have mass. But General Relativity (Einstein’s theory of warped spacetime as the origin of gravity) works just fine without the Higgs bosons. They’ve never yet been detected, BTW: they’re “just a theory”.
[Nitpick’s hijack]A really good book about the “hunt” for the Higgs Boson particle is by Nobel Prize Laureate on physics, Leon Lederman, called “The God Particle” (named because ‘goddamned particle’ might offend.) It’s pretty hilarious and his humor has been compared to Feynman’s.[/Nitpick’s hijack]
All this is the culmination of the very, very strong perceived notion that ‘evolution=atheism’. Unless these two are separated, evolution in the classroom will be fought even more vigorously.
And this perceived attitude, so explicitly said, will only serve to permanently entrench the fundamentalists beliefs, or lack of it, in regards to Evolution. Good job fighting ignorance. Yay.