All concepts are imaginary as they are formed in the mind.
Next, I assume you will produce a sketch or a description of something that has no "real" parts.
Your wish is my command.
Posted on 12/11/2002 6:28:08 AM PST by A2J
By WILL SENTELL
wsentell@theadvocate.com
Capitol news bureau
High school biology textbooks would include a disclaimer that evolution is only a theory under a change approved Tuesday by a committee of the state's top school board.
If the disclaimer wins final approval, it would apparently make Louisiana just the second state in the nation with such a provision. The other is Alabama, which is the model for the disclaimer backers want in Louisiana.
Alabama approved its policy six or seven years ago after extensive controversy that included questions over the religious overtones of the issue.
The change approved Tuesday requires Louisiana education officials to check on details for getting publishers to add the disclaimer to biology textbooks.
It won approval in the board's Student and School Standards/ Instruction Committee after a sometimes contentious session.
"I don't believe I evolved from some primate," said Jim Stafford, a board member from Monroe. Stafford said evolution should be offered as a theory, not fact.
Whether the proposal will win approval by the full state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education on Thursday is unclear.
Paul Pastorek of New Orleans, president of the board, said he will oppose the addition.
"I am not prepared to go back to the Dark Ages," Pastorek said.
"I don't think state boards should dictate editorial content of school textbooks," he said. "We shouldn't be involved with that."
Donna Contois of Metairie, chairwoman of the committee that approved the change, said afterward she could not say whether it will win approval by the full board.
The disclaimer under consideration says the theory of evolution "still leaves many unanswered questions about the origin of life.
"Study hard and keep an open mind," it says. "Someday you may contribute to the theories of how living things appeared on earth."
Backers say the addition would be inserted in the front of biology textbooks used by students in grades 9-12, possibly next fall.
The issue surfaced when a committee of the board prepared to approve dozens of textbooks used by both public and nonpublic schools. The list was recommended by a separate panel that reviews textbooks every seven years.
A handful of citizens, one armed with a copy of Charles Darwin's "Origin of the Species," complained that biology textbooks used now are one-sided in promoting evolution uncritically and are riddled with factual errors.
"If we give them all the facts to make up their mind, we have educated them," Darrell White of Baton Rouge said of students. "Otherwise we have indoctrinated them."
Darwin wrote that individuals with certain characteristics enjoy an edge over their peers and life forms developed gradually millions of years ago.
Backers bristled at suggestions that they favor the teaching of creationism, which says that life began about 6,000 years ago in a process described in the Bible's Book of Genesis.
White said he is the father of seven children, including a 10th-grader at a public high school in Baton Rouge.
He said he reviewed 21 science textbooks for use by middle and high school students. White called Darwin's book "racist and sexist" and said students are entitled to know more about controversy that swirls around the theory.
"If nothing else, put a disclaimer in the front of the textbooks," White said.
John Oller Jr., a professor at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, also criticized the accuracy of science textbooks under review. Oller said he was appearing on behalf of the Louisiana Family Forum, a Christian lobbying group.
Oller said the state should force publishers to offer alternatives, correct mistakes in textbooks and fill in gaps in science teachings. "We are talking about major falsehoods that should be addressed," he said.
Linda Johnson of Plaquemine, a member of the board, said she supports the change. Johnson said the new message of evolution "will encourage students to go after the facts."
Actually, I like your reasoning better - but donh has been arguing for an imaginary existence in which case, sensory confirmation is also taken on faith.
Neither can exist unless embodied. rights are statements about relations between people. Number is a construct that begins with the counting of objects. You cannot give me an example of a truth that exists independently of examples. You can assert that it can but the moment you try to explain it you fall back on examples.
So you require that concepts be embodied? That is a strange requirement.
Not a popular concept, I agree. But behind every abstraction is experience with a class of things. And an embodied mind interacting with things.
Well, I don't know if people will accept unicorns as "real".
Next, I assume you will produce a sketch or a description of something that has no "real" parts. But it will be composed of abstractions of things experienced.
I suspect that rebellion against this was at least partly the motivation for folks like Jackson Pollack, who tried to form images with no relation to objects. This is what's known as a futile gesture. Unique objects are still objects.
All concepts are imaginary as they are formed in the mind.
Next, I assume you will produce a sketch or a description of something that has no "real" parts.
Your wish is my command.
No, then I would revert to axioms like you do. Instead, I will put up mannishness of man as my proof, and the ordered creation, and the bible. A personal infinite creator-God is consistent WITH ALL OF THESE. But you live in a dichotomy and your life is not consistent with your beliefs. That is for sure.
Democracy has a pitiful track record - it was an utter failure in ancient Greece; that is precisely why the U.S. is not a democracy. A constitutional republic has the best track record - that would be America.
Pragmatism fails also in that it is useless to predict the long run. No matter what moral system you put forth, I can and will rip it to shreds with logic (it's not that I am so brilliant - I'm not - It's that your moral systems are so easy to take apart). Since you can not find any logical or practical fault with moral absolutism, you are only left with attempting to defend your moral systems against logical attack.
Put is this way. God did not give us EXHAUSTIVE knowledge about Himself, only SUFFICIENT knowledge.
Read the bible.
Condoleeza Rice and President Bush.
Don, please, let's be honest, your interest goes a lot deeper than 'science'. Anyways, I really do not see any difference between your postings and what is normally called materialist. Please elucidate the difference, I sure can't figure it out.
The imaginer is still an intelligent being and your reality (and mine) still depends on the rules set by that intelligent being.-me-
You don't know that.
Of course I know that. To even imagine such a complex world must require a tremendous amount of intelligence. Also it is undeniable that there are certain rules in this world we live in - gravity for example - and many others. So yes, I do know that even under your supposition, this would be true.
And we've been through this before. You have no proof that the imagineer is intelligent, if intelligent, you have no indication that suggests to what level of detail the imagineer had to understand the details of what he was imagining for it to work out. You have no proof that the imagineer isn't caught in an endless loop where she imagines up something that in turn imagines her up. When you propose immaterial causes, you can't be disproved, but for the same reasons, you can't pin them down with any persuasive authority.
You are being totally ridiculous. For one thing we are definitely intelligent beings, even if we were someone's dream that person/being would have to be at least as intelligent as us. Science has also more than proven that there are definite rules in this world we live in. So even if it is the figment of someone's imagination, it does have rules.
In what manner does observing stellar incidences, and infering stellar histories, differ from observing fossils and morphologically similar modern forms and infering biological evolution? In both cases, you are pinning a theory that implies an enormous range of behaviors you have not observed on a tiny handful you have observed.
First of all, I do think that we have indeed seen some stars explode through our telescopes, so this stuff is not completely 'imagination'.
The reason you cannot infer evolution from fossils is twofold:
1. the bones show us only a very small part of what makes a species what it is. The DNA, the organs are the most important part of a species and there is no trace of that except in a handful of very special cases.
2. Homology is nonsense. There are far too many examples of totally unrelated species with similar features and what is worse, there are examples of closely related species with completely different features. Therefore homology, the only basis for paleontology is total nonsense. It's not science, it's fairy tales for atheists.
So this baby seal walks into a club... 6169 posted on 01/29/2003 9:09 PM CST by Condorman (Rim-shot... Crickets... Flee angry mob...) |
No they do not. First of all ants are eukaryotes - a completely different order of being, further apart from prokaryotes than plants are to animals. Second of all ants are multicellular - a tremendous leap requiring numerous new functions, new organs, new arrangements which also is totally impossible. Third of all ants are sexual and prokaryotes are asexual. Therefore, in the stuff that really matters biologically they are completely different. Your 'analogy' is even sillier than saying that rowboats and planes are alike because they both can get you over water without getting wet.
the scientific community concurs that instantaneous biogenesis from amino acid junk is, while not quite impossible, scientifically fruitless to consider.
Well Don, your "scientifically fruitless to consider" sounds a lot to what I said. No matter what you call it, science says its scientifically impossible.
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