Posted on 06/16/2005 5:43:16 AM PDT by Non-Sequitur
TOPEKA — The vote may not come for months, but six of the 10 Kansas Board of Education members clearly are prepared to inject criticism of evolution into curriculum standards.
Also apparent is that the ongoing debate has frayed relationships between the board’s conservative and moderate wings. At a board meeting Wednesday, a heated debate over the teaching of evolution centered on personalities as much as science education.
The six conservative members said they supported including criticism of evolution because they believe there is a valid scientific controversy surrounding it.
The four moderate members said the school board is not qualified to render scientific judgments, and they accused the others of mingling faith with public school standards. They called recent hearings into the teaching of evolution a sham.
The vote is expected to fall along the 6-4 split when the board votes on the standards, probably at its August or September meeting. Before that, the proposed standards must go back to another curriculum committee for review.
Even though the board vote is seen as a foregone conclusion, the debate did not ease Wednesday.
“It’s difficult for emotions not to run high when you’re being personally attacked,” said board member Janet Waugh of Kansas City, Kan.
Board member Bill Wagnon of Topeka opposes the proposed standards and called board members who support them “dupes” for the intelligent design movement.
Intelligent design is the idea that some features of the world can be explained only as the work of a creator. It is a belief held by most of the scientists and educators who testified against evolution at recent hearings.
“I have moved beyond being indignant to being extremely saddened,” Wagnon said. “You have fallen into the trap of attacking science based on a whole lot of misinformation. … The sad thing is you’ve allowed yourselves to be manipulated.”
Board member Connie Morris of St. Francis accused Wagnon of arrogance and dismissed the criticism and the three other moderates because they did not attend the evolution hearings. She said the hearings proved evolution to be false.
“You did not take the time and the sacrifice, nor did you live up to your duty to your constituents,” she said.
Board member Sue Gamble of Shawnee said that while religious doctrines like intelligent design are not mandated in the proposed guidelines, “the concepts of ID are embedded.”
Morris demanded that Gamble list the page numbers of the 100-plus page document that included any references to intelligent design. That touched off a heated exchange between Morris and Gamble. At one point, Gamble spoke without being recognized by chairman Steve Abrams. She caught herself and said, “I apologize. I am out of order.”
Morris’ response: “You certainly are, ma’am.”
Gamble said she does not think elected board members know enough about science to change science standards written by scientists and educators.
“I question your qualifications,” she told Abrams. Abrams, a veterinarian, said he has had a “huge” amount of science education.
Moderates also criticized a recent constituent newsletter from Morris that singled out three of the four moderates for what they called personal political attacks. They asked the board’s policy committee to see whether the newsletter violated any rules on board decorum, and they asked that a new set of board standards be written up.
In the newsletter, Morris said she takes biblical creation accounts literally and that evolution is an impossible “fairy tale.” She called Gamble “continually disruptive and rude.”
The state picks up most of the tab for board member correspondence. Morris recently submitted a request for compensation in the amount of $166. The targets of Morris’ newsletter said tax dollars should not pay for political attacks.
“It clearly breaches a wall between partisan politics and basic constituent services,” said Wagnon, who characterized it as “character assassination.”
Morris acknowledged that the newsletter contained attacks but said she did nothing wrong.
“There were attacks,” she conceded. “But that’s part of the game, isn’t it?”
He was calling me.
I knew I was good for something: I can be a bad example.
You have to understand Kansas. We have three political parties here: Democrats, Conservative Republicans, and Moderate Republicans. As it happens 9 members of the board were elected as Republicans and only 1 as a Democrat. And the Democrat isn't a creationist.
HE!!!
(Let's see... is it the RED or the Blue scope I'm supposed to use??)
That just wouldn't be right.....
NIV Proverbs 24:17-18
17. Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when he stumbles, do not let your heart rejoice,
18. or the LORD will see and disapprove and turn his wrath away from him.
Why over the top?
(When ya gotta turn on a light, to get the audience to applaud, what does that say about the performance?)
Don't forget our hard working waitresses and bar staff!
I'll be here the rest of the week. Try the veal!
There's a bit of a difference. The major evolutionary biologists in the country did not take junkets to Germany to help Hitler with his racial policies. Most of them, in fact, abhorred Hitler and rejected whatever attempts he made to tie evolution to Nazi racial policies. On the other hand, we've seen prima facie evidence of the major honchos at the Institute for Creation Research making multiple trips to Turkey to try to help the Islamists there suppress the teaching of evolution. Turkey, incidentally, is at an important tipping point between its nearly a century of secularism, and a possible Islamist future. Anyone who contributes to the latter will likely be costing American soldiers their lives 10 years down the line.
Tax money.
The board initially allocated $40,000 for travel expenses of witnesses -- $20,000 for each side. Since the invited scientists turned down the invitations to participate, the board called on Topeka lawyer Pedro Irigonegaray to represent evolution's side in the debate.
Irigonegaray says his first step was to find out what the Kansas scientific community thought -- was there really a controversy about evolution? He got an emphatic no from the scientists he contacted.
"My interest focused then on why are we going through this?" he says. "What's the purpose here, and who's paying for this?"
Irigonegaray says he was stunned to learn that the board had set aside $40,000 to pay for the anticipated travel expenses of witnesses -- $20,000 for each side. "At a time when our children's education is at stake because we don't even have a budget, our board was going to spend $40,000 to conduct a debate without a purpose," he says. "So I objected."
The board reacted by lowering the amount of travel funds to $5,000 for each side, but Irigonegaray says he won't spend any of the money allotted to his side. "I won't take a penny that I think is stealing from Kansas children."
[C]ontemporary Muslim intellectuals like Harun Yahya put great emphasis on the case against materialism and its main pillar, Darwinism.[snip]
And recently they [intellectual Christians] have initiated a bold movement — a “wedge” as they call it — to split the foundations of materialism.
This “wedge” is the code name for the Intelligent Design Movement, formed in the early 1990s by Christian scientists and intellectuals. The leader of the movement is Phillip E. Johnson, a prominent professor of law from the University of California, Berkeley. During a sabbatical year in London in 1987, Dr. Johnson read about Darwinism and noticed that Darwinian ideologues like Richard Dawkins use deceptive arguments to sell their unsubstantiated story. He decided to dedicate the rest of life to unravel this sophisticated fallacy. His first book, Darwin on Trial (1991), annoyed the Darwinist establishment terribly, but it was just a beginning. In the following years, serious scientists like Michael Behe from Lehigh University, William Dembski from Baylor University, and Paul Nelson from the University of Chicago joined the ranks of the movement.
Today the movement, headed by the Discovery Institute in Seattle and the Intelligent Design Network in Kansas, is leading a great battle first to free school textbooks and then the whole of society from the Darwinist dogma and the materialist philosophy it supports.
Intelligent Design (ID) is a term that implies creation. The universe and life are not products of blind forces of nature, ID holds, but show evidence that they were designed by an intelligence. The ID Movement has deliberately chosen not to specify the identity of the Designer. Through science you can demonstrate convincingly that there is a designer, but you can’t go further without invoking theology. Everybody has the right to believe in a Designer according his own theology. What makes the movement effective is its emphasis on solid scientific evidence.
[snip]
Muslims should also note the great similarity between the arguments of the Intelligent Design Movement and Islamic sources. Hundreds of verses in the Qur’an call people to examine the natural world and see in it the evidence of God. Great Islamic scholars like Ghazali wrote large volumes about design in animals, plants, and the human body. What Intelligent Design theorists like Behe or Dembski do today is to refine the same argument with the findings of modern science.
In short, Intelligent Design is not alien to Islam. It is very much our cause, and we should do everything we can to support it.
Didn't like the questions, huh.?..
You protest too much..
THE INTERNATIONAL ISLAMIC-CREATIONISM ALLIANCE [snip]
Commendable work. An exceptionally valuable set of links.
Nor do I. Read something. Get a clue. Andd stop lecturing scientists, at least until you get some approximate idea about what you're talking about. Tree rings go back 10K years; ice cores a few hundred thousands.
I've never met so little information mixed with so much arrogance in my life.
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