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To: narby

I'll agree with you in part and disagree with you in part here. :-)

I see nothing in that passage from the Pennsylvania state constitution that would prohibit ID, unless you also hold it to ban Nativity Scenes, crosses on city seals, and the like.

You may have a good point that ID'ers wasted a good opportunity here, and that it will take a much better case than the sloppy behavior of the Dover school board to get the Supreme Court to back off on its overreach on church-state issues.

By the same token, do you think the pro-evolution forces might actually be hurting themselves with these lawsuits? It probably increases public disbelief in evolution every time a judge slams his hammer down and bans alternatives from being considered, even for a minute of school time.

If evolution is such a strong theory, which would be better for it: A) Allowing a few minutes of class discussion of an alternate idea or B) Daily news reports of the latest evolutionist lawsuit demanding that any alternate idea be banned from discussion? When "B" is constantly in the news, people start to suspect things.


219 posted on 01/08/2006 8:47:16 AM PST by puroresu (Conservatism is an observation; Liberalism is an ideology)
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To: puroresu
If evolution is such a strong theory, which would be better for it: A) Allowing a few minutes of class discussion of an alternate idea or B) Daily news reports of the latest evolutionist lawsuit demanding that any alternate idea be banned from discussion? When "B" is constantly in the news, people start to suspect things.

Your A) option was tested in a college some time ago, and you are probably correct that it would result in more acceptance of evolution than B). Not that B) will damage evolution acceptance, because I've noted even here on FR a reduction in opposition to it. But even still, option A) I think is superior at discrediting ID than B).

The way the two options were tested is probably what would actually happen in most colleges. ID was presented from some material from the Pandas book, then it was countered by evidence against the arguments in Pandas, and embellished with more affirmative evidence for evolution. The control group was merely taught evolution, with no ID argument.

The result was that the group that was taught ID overwhelmingly decided it was false and evolution was true. That's because ID was point-by-point discredited, as it deserves to be. While the group that ignored ID knew that evolution was being attacked, so took the teaching of it with a grain of salt and many refused to accept evolution at the end of the course.

The Dover case was brought by the ACLU. And I'm sure many liberal scientists believe this was a good attack against Christianity in general and supported it for that reason. While scientists who are Christian probably didn't love the idea, apparently none of them fought against the lawsuit because for once the ACLU was on the factual side of an issue. Even a stopped clock ...

221 posted on 01/08/2006 9:27:15 AM PST by narby (Hillary! The Wicked Witch of the Left)
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