Are you so ignorant of current events that you fail to note the oppostion to the notion that ID should be a part of public education. Cut the charade, pal. Like I said, you and Lysenko make good company.
Actually, what's being opposed are the attempts to *force* science teachers to teach it against their better judgment.
Any teacher who *chooses* to teach it is hardly being hunted down and thrown in the stockade. What ticks you folks off, however, is that a vanishingly small number of science teachers actually *do* choose to do so -- so you're trying to ramrod the issue through by getting school boards to make such teaching *mandatory* in their school districts. Nice try, and you look lovely in jackboots.
But just for fun, *do* please lay out for us a sample curriculum -- what, *exactly* would actually be *taught* in a science classroom in the "ID segment" of the school year? If you can actually describe some of the classroom topics, you'll be miles ahead of the big-name "ID-in-the-schools" activists, who to date have *refused* to actually provide any such materials even on a sample basis.
For all their fervor about getting ID into the classrooms, it appears they don't actually have anything to *teach*.
Here's a great recent post from the talk.origins newsgroup making the same point:
Anyone that wants to teach ID has to do one thing. Present a lesson plan for evaluation. No lesson plan, no evidence that they want anything of educational value to be taught to students. It is just that simple. The ID scam artists used to advocate teaching ID, but they gave up on the idea. There was a simple reason for this, they found out that they didn't have anything worth teaching. You never saw a lesson plan from Meyers or Dembski when they advocated teaching ID. All you ever saw were vague promises that there was something that could be taught to students.Teachers should not be placed in a position where they are forced to bash anyones religious beliefs. An honest evaluation of ID would do just that. There is nothing but bashing that can be done. If you don't believe that put up a lesson plan and try and defend it. The guys at the Discovery Institute have given up on that idea. If the scam artists have backed off, why would anyone believe that they really had anything to teach?
This guys idea of interjecting some confrontational junk into the science class would only have merit if he had some idea of how to do it without putting some students off or placing the teachers into positions that they do not want to be in. There is enough real scientific controversy that bashing someones religious beliefs doesn't have to be part of science. The fact is the only thing to teach about ID is why real science doesn't consider it to be viable any longer. We do use negative teaching tools and humor, but religion has been out of bounds for that category.
Put up the lesson plan and see how it fairs. If you support teaching ID why do you think that the scam artists at the Discovery Institute never put forward a lesson plan with ID in it? They claimed that they could teach it for years, but Ohio and more recently in Dover it was made very clear (by the scam artists themselves) that they do not support teaching ID at this time.
These guys are supposed to have PhDs and at least some of them teach classes, so what is their excuse for the lack of a lesson plan? Dembski and Meyers never put one forward, as far as I know. A lesson plan is very simple. You just outline what you want to teach, how you plan to teach it, and how you will evalutate the students on the material that you want them to learn. The scam artists have never put an ID lesson plan forward.
Just think what this guys lesson plan would be? The goals of the lesson would be to teach students the difference between bogus science and real science. ID would be used as the bogus science. No testable hypotheses, no coherent theory, no positive examples known in nature (This includes the fact that there has been a 100% failure of all ID assertions that science has been able to test. Just pick your favorite ID assertion. If it hasn't failed testing that is only because science can't test it at this time. Things like the young age of the earth and Noah's flood have already be tossed out of reasoned consideration.), and that would just be the beginning. He would probably also run down the list of deceptive tactics used by the ID contingent. It isn't hard to find examples. Deception is an integral part of modern ID for the simple reason that the science is so weak that most scientists don't even consider it to be science.
Just think about what this guy wants to teach. If you are a YEC you don't want your kids hearing about common descent being a fact of nature and part of the design, or that the designer might have diddled with life forms over 500 million years ago in the Cambrian explosion, or that the designer might have had something to do with making the flagellum billions of years ago. You definitely do not want them to find out that the most scientific explanation is that space aliens did the diddling. Wouldn't you want to see the lesson plan before you agreed to teach this? This is only part of the dishonesty of the ID contingent. They haven't told their major support base that the most supportable form of ID makes YEC look just as stupid as real science. Why would they teach the fourth or fifth best ID explanation? If you were going to teach it, you would put the best ID explanation forward, Right?
YEC creationists don't have much to worry about because the ID scam artists don't really want to teach the best ID explanation, they want to teach their favorite. That is how low the quality of science is among them. If they put forward their lesson plans this would become very apparent. Look at Ohio they found out that there wasn't a scientific theory of ID to teach so they went with the replacement "teach the controversy" scam. They still tried to teach the creationist nonsense via suggested web resources, so they showed their true colors. If ID or creationism wasn't part of the written lesson plan, why try and bring it in with web links? It just shows that "teach the controversy" is just a creationist obfuscation scam.
This kind of thing has to be very carefully thought out and implemented with care. It could easily go either to religion bashing or to teaching pseudo science as legitimate. Either option doesn't do much for science education.
So, put up your lesson plan and see if anyone wants to teach it.
Ron Okimoto
Cut the charade, pal. Like I said, you and Lysenko make good company.
Do you ever have *anything* to add to these discussions besides bitterness and bile?
I have a challenge for you -- try to actually respond to the points raised in this post, without resorting to spewing paragraphs of empty invective. Just prove to us that you can actually discuss something like a normal person for once.