Posted on 06/17/2008 8:57:19 AM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
A bill to overhaul the way evolution is taught in Louisiana public schools easily cleared its final legislative hurdle Monday despite threats of a lawsuit.
Opponents, mostly outside the State Capitol, contend the legislation would inject creationism and other religious themes into public schools.
However, the Senate voted 36-0 without debate to go along with the same version of the proposal that the House passed last week 94-3.
The measure, Senate Bill 733, now goes to Gov. Bobby Jindal, who is expected to sign it.
Backers said the bill is needed to give science teachers more freedom to hold discussions that challenge traditional theories, including Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
“It provides assurances to both teachers and students that academic inquiries are welcome and appropriate in the science classroom,” said Gene Mills, executive director of the Louisiana Family Forum.
Mills’ group touts itself as one that promotes traditional family values. It was called an influential mover behind the bill.
However, officials of the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana and Americans United for Separation of Church and State in Washington, D.C., said the bill represents an intrusion of religion into public schools that may warrant a lawsuit.
“It is the ACLU’s position that we intend to do whatever is necessary to keep religion out of our science classrooms.” said Marjorie R. Esman, executive director of the group in New Orleans.
The legislation is called the Louisiana Science Education Act.
It would allow science teachers to use supplemental materials, in addition to state-issued textbooks, on issues like evolution, global warming and human cloning.
The aim of such materials, the bill says, is to promote “critical thinking skills, logical analysis and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied,” including evolution.
“I just believe that it is important that supplemental scientific information be able to be brought into the school system,” state Sen. Ben Nevers, D-Bogalusa and sponsor of the bill, said after the vote.
Nevers said that, despite the rapid pace of changes in science, textbooks are only updated every seven years.
Critics said DVDs and other supplemental materials with religious themes will be added to classrooms to try to undercut widely accepted scientific views.
The bill cleared its final legislative hurdle in less than five minutes.
Nevers noted that the key change made in the House would allow the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to toss out science supplemental materials that it considers inappropriate.
Opponents contend the bill is a bid to allow the teaching of creationism and intelligent design. Christian creationism is the view that life began 6,000 years ago in a process described in the Bible’s Book of Genesis.
Intelligent design advocates believe that the universe stems from an intelligent designer rather than chance.
The Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said in a prepared statement that the bill “is clearly designed to smuggle religion into the science classroom, and that’s unwise and unconstitutional.” Joe Conn, a spokesman for the group, said attorneys will review the bill.
Lynn’s group calls itself a national watchdog organization to prevent government-backed religious teaching.
Barbara Forrest, of Holden, a member of the group’s board of trustees and a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, also criticized passage of the measure.
“I think what the Legislature has done is an embarrassment to the state in the eyes of the entire country,” Forrest said.
Nevers downplayed talk of legal action against his bill.
“I don’t think any lawsuits will be brought because of this act,” he said.
Mills predicted that the bill will survive any legal challenge.
In 1987 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a 1981 state law that required equal time on creationism when evolution was taught in public schools.
You are mixing facts and theories. They are entirely different:
Theory: a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; theories can incorporate facts and laws and tested hypotheses. Theories do not grow up to be laws. Theories explain laws.(I have a lot more definitions, as they tend to be used in science, on my FR home page.)Theory: A scientifically testable general principle or body of principles offered to explain observed phenomena. In scientific usage, a theory is distinct from a hypothesis (or conjecture) that is proposed to explain previously observed phenomena. For a hypothesis to rise to the level of theory, it must predict the existence of new phenomena that are subsequently observed. A theory can be overturned if new phenomena are observed that directly contradict the theory. [Source]
Fact: when an observation is confirmed repeatedly and by many independent and competent observers, it can become a fact.
Here is another quotation that might help to explain the difference:
Piling up facts is not science--science is facts-and-theories. Facts alone have limited use and lack meaning: a valid theory organizes them into far greater usefulness.However, I suspect you are wedded to this theory, so we will have to let the matter go there as you cannot prove evolution - nor can you disprove any of the other explanations for the origins of mankind.A powerful theory not only embraces old facts and new but also discloses unsuspected facts [Heinlein 1980:480-481].
No need to "prove" evolution. It is a science and it works on accumulation of evidence or falsification -- not proof. So far the theory of evolution has accumulated an immense amount of supporting evidence, and there is no known data to falsify it.
There is much more evidence, like it or not, for an intelligent creator than there is for the idea that everything just sort of came together.
I am aware that many follow revelation, scripture, the Bible, and a multitude of beliefs -- many of which are internally inconsistent or mutually contradictory -- among the world's ca. 4,300 religions, but I am aware of no such evidence that "proves" a creator, intelligent or otherwise. Perhaps you are confusing religious belief with scientific evidence? (Hey, that would make a great tagline!)
Evolutionists? You mean cosmologists and those other astronomy folks. Most of the folks who study evolution have no clue about those fields of science.
Or are you being a "lumper" rather than a "splitter" and using this well-known creationist definition:
“Evolutionist” is a term used by creationists to include all scientists who disagree with them. Source
OK, then, using your terminology - science is supposed to be about FACTS, not theories (using your definitions of both). To present something as FACT which has as many holes as does evolution (remember: those who have a vested interest in seeing what they wish to see will somehow “prove” it to those who are like-minded) should not be presented as “fact” in a classroom. As for confusing religion and science, that is an old, tired argument which is often used - wrongly -as if the two are in conflict. When one is talking about scientific method, they are not. When one is talking about hoaxes and jumping from one species to another without any hard evidence to link them, then I suppose they would be. I still maintain it takes much more faith to believe that mankind developed sans creator than to look around at the scientific proof which strongly suggests otherwise. (The earth being just so far from the sun - not too close, not too far — or did that just “happen”?) If, as you claim, evolutionists know nothing about the origins of the earth, then how can they possibly posit the development of mankind without a creator? It must be one or the other. Either a creator is involved, or is not. I really don’t see how one can begin with a 19th century theory, work backwards, and then claim that the origin of any species somehow doesn’t fall within their realm of expertise. Not trying to be difficult here, but I just don’t see how that could in any way be viewed as scientific. This has been an interesting discussion, but I’m prepping to leave on a trip and won’t return for about 2 weeks, so have to sign off now. I’ll try to remember to check this thread when I return. Have a good evening.
Umm, let there be light?
I don’t understand why you answered my simple question with all that stuff about hoaxes and the Big Bang. You assert, quite strongly, that transitional fossils have not been found. All I’m asking is how we’ll know a transitional fossil if we find one. How can you deny they exist if you can’t even say what one is?
Sure, light first, the heavens and the Earth and all that. That was the first day. The sun was created on the fourth day.
So the first three “days” were without a Sun.
MUST have been exactly 24 hours!/s
More than anything, that shows the lack of understanding of the people who wrote those scrolls, what a day was, in the astronomical sense.
Wasn’t the earth flat, then?
And with the Earth coming before the sun, I wonder who gave the “push” to the Earth to make it spin around this “newly appearing” sun, all of a sudden, from random motion.
Deal with this the way Alexander solved the problem of the Gordian Knot:
Get government out of the education business.
Problem solved.
Not that the federal courts or the federal government have any jurisdiction over such matters anyway, according to the First and the Tenth amendments.
It's pretty depressing that on a conservative forum this is not the solution touted by both the "creationists" and the "evolutionists".
I hear ya.
It’s so ridiculous when you think about it: The ministers [servants] of the sovereign body of the people claiming jurisdiction over the minds and beliefs of their employers.
It’s far past time that they were put back in their place.
It seems like your position is an extreme minority viewpoint.
(Where's Keyes in the primary battle, eh? Or are you still waiting for the late returns to come in?)
Oh well.
God still has a veto, no matter the human odds.
And once He exercises it, there isn't a single thing you or any other man can do about it.
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the rest is in the hands of God." - George Washington
Not only must you believe in unproved and unprovable assumptions, the very fact that they are unproved and unprovable is counted as a reason to believe them by Darwinians. As in, P is unprovable; but science can't prove anything anyway; therefore you might as well pretend P is true. This is a mode of reasoning you have no doubt noticed.
Aside from the unproved and unprovable assertions (such as the ones about the aesthetic preferences of insects and birds) we are also supposed to believe false suppositions, such as "every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers" which, false as it is, happens to be the very engine that supposedly drives natural selection.
Actually the second law says nothing about time at all.
On earth, for example, we have external energies acting upon the earth constantly... we are far from being in an isolated system.
Yes, and so what?
Really? Tell that to Rudolf Clausius who wrote that in as a fundamental part of his equation when formulating the law. 
(open system)
(closed system)
where S is the entropy and t is time.
Yes, and so what?
Simply put, because the law makes a different if the system is an open or closed system because you are introducing outside energy. Furthermore, the concept of entropy in thermodynamics is not identical to the common notion of "disorder". For example, a thermodynamically closed system of certain solutions will eventually transform from a cloudy liquid to a clear solution containing large "orderly" crystals. Most people would characterize the former state as having "more disorder" than the latter state. However, in a purely thermodynamic sense, the entropy has increased in this system, not decreased. The units of measure of entropy in thermodynamics are "units of energy per unit of temperature". Whether a human perceives one state of a system as "more orderly" than another has no bearing on the calculation of this quantity. The common notion that entropy in thermodynamics is equivalent to a popular conception of "disorder" has caused many non-physicists to completely misinterpret what the second law of thermodynamics is really about.
Equation 2 should read dS >= 0, not dS/dt >= 0. But you're getting this from wikipedia.
Simply put, because the law makes a different if the system is an open or closed system because you are introducing outside energy.
Yes, and so what is your point?
Furthermore, the concept of entropy in thermodynamics is not identical to the common notion of "disorder".
I have said nothing about order or disorder.
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