Mission to Mars
Posted on 01/20/2005 10:22:21 AM PST by Tamar1973
As previously reported, US District Judge Clarence Cooper handed down (last week) the much-anticipated ruling in the case of Selman v. Cobb County School District, in which parents challenged a school board decision to place evolution disclaimer stickers in the front cover of some high-school biology textbooks in Cobb County, Georgia, USA.
Contained within the judge’s 44-page ruling was the answer to the question everyone in the Atlanta area seemed to ask: “Would the sticker stick?” Did this 33-word disclaimer, which cautioned students about evolution, violate the US Constitution by “establishing religion”?
Yes, the stickers are an unconstitutional endorsement of religion, said Judge Cooper in his ruling. Therefore, the stickers must be removed from the textbooks.
In an Associated Press article (January 13) that was immediately picked up by dozens of news outlets from South Africa to South Dakota, Judge Cooper explained his decision in the following statement:
By denigrating evolution, the school board appears to be endorsing the well-known prevailing alternative theory, creationism or variations thereof, even though the sticker does not specifically reference any alternative theories [emphasis added].
That was last week. This week, it’s a different story. On January 17, the school board decided to appeal Judge Cooper’s decision, choosing to take the case to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. School board attorney Glenn Brock said he will request a delay in complying with the judge’s order to remove the stickers. As a result of the court’s bizarre ruling (including its comment that expressed concern about not wanting to upset those who hold evolutionary beliefs), the sticker, which features the following words, must be removed from the Cobb County high school biology textbooks:
This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.
Judge Cooper ruled that the stickers went against the First Amendment because they “convey a message of endorsement of religion.”
Jeffrey Selman, a parent of a Cobb County student, filed the suit (along with the American Civil Liberties Union) against the school board. (On the other hand, it should be noted that some 2,300 parents had petitioned in favor of the stickers as a way to help counter the nearly $8 million worth of new curricula that pushed Darwinism unchallenged). Mr. Selman told the Toronto Star that he “was not prepared to live in a theocracy where the views of a militant minority are foisted on everyone.”
Mr. Selman went on to say, “I was terrified about the future of the country I have to live in and my child has to live in. From the Bush White House to the evangelicals on the school board, they were taking away our freedoms.”
Michael Manely, the lawyer representing the parents who were against the stickers, told the Toronto Star, “This is a great day in history and a great day for freedom in our nation.” He added that Cobb County students will now “be permitted to learn science unadulterated by religious dogma.”
But was the judge’s decision really a setback for those who support open discussion of evolution and alternative explanations? One might think so based on some of the headlines from newspapers across the world (even a newspaper in the United Arab Emirates is reporting on this court case).
Dr. John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research, refuses to see this as a setback, telling the Toronto Star that this case reveals that “evolutionists are just very insecure.”
“That sticker did not teach creation or the biblical view of things. It just encouraged students to know that this is not an open-and-shut case,” Morris said.
Ken Ham, president of AiG-USA, commented: “This ruling by Judge Cooper is absolutely preposterous. Here you have a sticker that doesn’t mention God, prayer, the Bible, creation ...and it’s considered religious because the people behind it believe in God.”
Ham added: “So, even when you leave God out, leave creation out, and just have a sticker that talks about evolution, a judge considers that to be religious because the people that came up with it have a religious belief. Do you see the inconsistency here?”
Determining whether the sticker violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment presented Judge Cooper with many things to consider. First, Judge Cooper ruled back on March 31, 2004, that the sticker passed the first prong of the Lemon test, a method used to analyze whether an act of government is constitutional by meeting three criteria: 1) the act has a primarily secular purpose; 2) the primary effect of the act does not promote religion over nonreligion, or promote one religion over another or somehow serve as a government endorsement of religion; and 3) the act does not result in an excessive entanglement between church and state—last week’s ruling pertained to only the last two prongs of the Lemon test.
Yet the stickers were found to be unconstitutional despite a ruling that they are also “fostering critical thinking” about evolution and serve “a clearly secular purpose” (with the judge agreeing that the Cobb County school district had secular, not religious, reasons for adopting the sticker).
Mr. Seth Cooper, an attorney and legal analyst with the Discovery Institute, an Intelligent Design think tank, faulted the lead counsel for the school district, Linwood Gunn, for putting up “an incompetent defense.”5 During the November 2004 trial, the Institute issued a statement noting that Gunn decided not to have any scientists serve as rebuttal witnesses, despite the fact that dozens of Georgia scientists had submitted a “friend of the court” brief defending the district.5 (On a related note, in a brief submitted to the court last spring, the ACLU made the false claim that there are no scientists who dispute evolution and that those who dispute evolution do so only for religious purposes.)
“A vigorous defense of the sticker’s constitutionality would have focused upon the growing number of scientists who have raised scientific criticisms of aspects of neo-Darwinian and chemical evolutionary theories,” said Cooper.
Ham agreed, asking the question, “Is evolution so weak that it has to be legislated in order to protect it?”
Ham said he believes the battle in the public schools ultimately comes down to a spiritual and emotional issue, where there is no such thing as neutrality.
He explained, “When the public school says you have to teach every aspect of reality without any acknowledgement of God or the Bible, you’re saying that God has nothing to do with reality. This is not a neutral position towards religion. It’s actually a religious position that says that everything can be explained without God.”
Ham concluded with the general observation that the Bible tells us there is no such thing as being neutral. Luke 11:23 says a person is either for Christ or against Him. Thus the battle in America’s public schools is really a clash of worldviews—one explains life with God; and one, without God.
We will keep you posted on the progress of the appeal of the judge’s decision.
"militant minority" of atheists who want to force their anti-G-d doctrinesI'll bet somewhere there's a devout Muslim sitting in jail somewhere because he forgot to add "(saw)" or "(pbuh)" after writing the name "Mohammed".Amazing. Simply amazing. Apparently, not putting "God did it" on everything is an act of militant atheism.
The AG noted that the only problem with the disclaimer was that it singled out evolution from among the myriads of other scientific theories covered in textbooks for special qualification, and that it was evident the only reason for such particularity was a religious motivation. If the disclaimer referred to scientific theory in general there would be no problem with it.
Needless to say anti-evolutionists in Texas never took up the suggestion of a general disclaimer. The fact is they couldn't care less about opposing "dogmatism" in science. That's just a pretext and their only real goal is targeting those particular theories they happen to disagree with.
Let's not kid ourselves that these disclaimers have anything to do with a general principle.
Where is the science behind the idea that intelligent agents (there is no requirement that they be God) CANNOT have played any role in the development of life on Earth?
There is indeed no requirement that they be God, but I doubt that any ID advocate actually believes that, particularly in light of Johnson's very public statements that ID is a "wedge strategy". In any case, the real problem is somewhat more mundane - as science, ID sucks crap harder than a shop vac in a septic tank. There's no positive statement by science that designers can't have done it - the problem is that there's no serious scientific evidence that they did do it.
Science does not do "default explanations". By that I mean that in order for ID to replace the theory of evolution, it must present a better explanation for the diversity of life on earth than does the theory of evolution. So far, it's done nothing of the sort, because the bulk - and by "bulk" I mean 99.98% - of ID theory consists of attacks on what are perceived to be holes in evolution. All well and good, but you don't build your own theory by wrecking the other guy's - you have to present an affirmative case for your own theory that withstands explanation better than the other affirmative explanation. So far, ID has done nothing of the sort, and the attempts that have been made are generally abysmal in quality - Dembski's attempts to define "specified complexity" and formalize a method to recognize design are, quite frankly, garbage. Behe's attempts to discover impossible-to-evolve biological structures have, thus far, been completely unsuccessful, although they at least have the effect of promoting the study of poorly-understood pathways for evolution - the problem is, once those studies are done, his "impossibilities" don't look quite so impossible after all.
In a nutshell, that's why ID can't get through the gate - not because the gatekeepers are predisposed to keep designers out, but because they're predisposed to keep bad science out. If/when ID has something to offer in terms of science, it may be time to re-evaluate it, but as it stands now, there's no place for it.
> Is it a proven FACT?
Yep. As proven as the germ theory of disease.
> And of course, there's all that scientific work going on about how the chemicals and cells spontaneously came into being from the primordial soup.
Again with the factual incorrectness.
1) Chemicals increasing in complexity to the point of forming primitive life is NOT biological evolution. If it ain;t alive, it ain't biological
2) The only people who believe that cells spontaneously come into being are Creationists.
So, we remain left with the lies in the sticker.
Sounds like he's been having meeting with Newdow.
Two reasons:
1. It would make Jesus Christ a liar.
2. It would make the Bible errant.
Jesus said:
Mat 19:4-5
4 And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made [them] at the beginning made them male and female,
5 And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?
Quoting from the supposed mythological story in the Book of Genesis:
Gen 1:27 So God created man in his [own] image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
And:
Gen 2:24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
This is not an overly "literal" reading. Jesus Christ's confirmation assures us of the truth and accuracy of the Genesis account. Who better to make such a confirmation. Or who worse to disregard.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.-
No Creator, no unalienable rights.
See where this is leading? Government giveth, government taketh away
These are the grown ups who, as children, siezed upon "one of these things is not like the other" on Sesame Street and took it to the extreme.
There is no scientific theory so lazy as the Theory of Evolution. In fact, I hate to use the word "scientific" in connection with it, insofar as the Theory has never produced an observable case of speciation. It is a theory into which one can squeeze evidence like a ball of Play-Doh; it is the ideological equivalent of Silly Putty.
But, by God or no god, the kids really need to know this stuff. Yessirree. It is the basis for the future of all scientific endeavor, quantum physics be damned. And if we don't keep it septically parted from ID it will be forever tarnished as something less than science. GASP!!!!!!
He wasn't the first; he won't be the last.
Molded and kneaded Placemarker
When someone finds the remains of a halfman- half monkey, I'll consider evolution.
Mission to Mars
That isn't evolutionary theory. 'all forms of reproducing life suddenly burst forward with male and female copies' is creationism.
The odds of that happening even once is a kabillion zillion to one, but happening thousands of times over?
How did you determine the odds?
> Intellgent design does not necessarily mean God.
Actually, ID is either All About God or All About Evolution. If you think of ID in the Raelian sense that life on Earth was created by some alien race, you still haven't gotten to the truth of it... because where did *they* come from?
However, be honest. Read the innumerable postings in favor of ID here on FR. Eventually, damn near everyone who argues against Evolution makes it quite clear that they are Creationists. For all intents and purposes, ID *does* mean God.
Were others looked at? If not, then this doesn't matter.
Note that all Y chromosomes can be traced to a single source too. That source lived at a different time from the mitochondrial source.
Both of these are an artifact of the fact that a person has at most one mother (or father) but may have more than one daughter (or son.) Thus the function "mother of" is a contraction mapping (there are always fewer mothers than daughters going backwards.) A contraction mapping of this generally shrinks to a single individual. The same thing happens with Chinese names (or other cultures too, but the other cultures are newer.)
Someone doesn't like Oslo?
The "David Copperfield is God" school. "I don't know how that could have happened. It must be magic"
So, to prove your case that speciation does not occur, you are asking your opposition to do your homework for you, and firnd evidence that, because it doesn't exist proves your case, but if found would prove your case.
Separated at birth? 
Wow, they burned each other at the stake in disputes over the music. I never knew that. ;)
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