When science and religion collide who sets curriculum?

[Stubby]

COPE: Teaching Science Violates Rights Of Christians; Courts Must Block Science Curriculum
Submitted by Brian Tashman on Friday, 10/4/2013 2:00 pm

Last week, we reported that an organization called Citizens for Objective Public Education filed a lawsuit contesting science standards in Kansas schools, arguing that lessons on evolution represent an unconstitutional establishment of religion.

John Calvert of the Intelligent Design Network, an attorney involved in the lawsuit, told conservative talk radio host Janet Mefferd today that lessons on evolution are “religious education” in violation of the rights of parents, children and taxpayers. Mefferd replied that it is “crazy” to think that public schools could teach evolution to Christian students.

The religious rights that are being promoted here are the religious rights of parents to direct the religious education of their children and a state interferes with that when it seeks to promote an atheistic worldview. The second right is the child’s right, the child has a right not to be indoctrinated by the state to accept a particular religious viewpoint, that right is being taken by the framework. The last right is the taxpayer has a right, you know I pay taxes to Kansas, real estate taxes, a good part of my real estate taxes go to fund Kansas public education and I don’t want the taxes used to promote a nontheistic worldview.

“This really is a case about the establishment of a complete worldview,” Calvert said, arguing that public schools violate the Constitution by teaching “materialistic science” and therefore courts should block the curriculum and instruction on evolution.

“We’ve asked the court to enjoin the whole package, they just need to go back to the drawing board,” Calvert told Mefferd. “In the alternative, if the court is not willing to do that, the court should at least enjoin the teaching of origin science in the primary school grades from kindergarten through the 8th grade.”

Calvert and Mefferd claimed it is only fair to teach creationism and intelligent design alongside evolution. Otherwise, Calvert claimed, schools would be teaching atheism.

“It’s clear that there are lots and lots of people who hold to the biblical account of creation or at the very least a view of intelligent design, share it as a perspective, evolution is not the only perspective out there,” Mefferd said.

Well, there are also “lots and lots of people” who believe that the sun revolves around the earth (one out of five Americans), so is it really settled science that the earth revolves around the sun and schools should teach both points of view?

Must schools also incorporate the claims that the earth is flat into lessons regarding the shape of the earth?

After all, we must keep the curriculum balanced and respect flat-earth proponents who think religion and science back up their beliefs.

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/c ... curriculum

[Schneibster]

The Campaign to Reform All Non-jebus Knowledge.

[hanelyp]

I've concluded that creationists / intelligent-designers, at least the more vocal ones, understand their bible almost as poorly as they understand science.

[Skipjack]

I just shudder at news like this. This sort of notion must not be allowed. I wonder what people would think if the same headline read: "Teaching Science Violates Rights Of Muslis; Courts Must Block Science Curriculum". That sounds a lot more frightening, hu? If you let one happen, the next will follow right on track and then we will be back in the middle ages before we know it.

[GIThruster]

I've concluded that creationists / intelligent-designers, at least the more vocal ones, understand their bible almost as poorly as they understand science.

True. If they had read their bibles a little more carefully, they would have noted that for the 3,000 plus years before they came along, everyone had already noted that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 contradict each other if you take them as factual rather than metaphorical. It's not like the ancient Jews hadn't noticed their cherished text says one thing in the very first chapter and another in the second. They understood this was metaphore and it wan't until the Creationists came along in 1961 that there was an issue here.

I would note to you that we really ought to uphold the distinction between the more modern Intelligent Design movement, and the 60's Creationist movement.

The original Creationist movement, was begun by Whitcomb and Morris in their book The Genesis Flood in 1961. In that book they argue for a young Earth model (6,000 years), and justify arguments against an older Earth, that things that make the Earth seem old are the result of God creating with an "appearance of age". I am not aware of any survivors of that very anti-scientific model, but if there are some; they are hold overs of that all but dead movement.

The recent ID movement is the opposite. They hold with an old Earth model and instead focus contention on real scientific issues. For instance, we have no evidence, nor even a cogent theory, of Biogenesis. Rather, modern micro-biology is still searching for a mechanism that can explain how the racemic production of amino acids, can be polarized and result in tens of thousands of peptide bonds all of which are composed exclusively levorotary acids with not a single dextrorotary acid between.

Modern molecular biology has no explanation for how non-living systems can isolate one set of stereoisomers as compared to another for peptide bonding. If we do ever come up with such an answer, it will certainly be because the ID folks are a thorn in the side of modern science, constantly pushing it forward by pointing out what we do not know. (The modern defense is that given enough time, chance will create such acids but this is a crazy story. the odds of thus producing even a single non-living protein are about 2 to the 10,000 power. For an amoeba, one would need to raise this power into the trillions. There is not nearly enough time in all the universe for such a thing to have happened to lead to Biogenesis. There must in fact be a mechanism we have never identified for this to happen without Intelligent design, which is the argument the ID folks maintain. They are correct, except we note most importantly that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

And just to recap, I doubt anyone takes the original Creationists seriously. They're not a force to be reckoned with. Only losers who for their own religious reasons, want to make this an issue. Atheists who are ignorant of the real science, want to prop up this straw man and pretend they're saving us all from bad science. Contrast this to the fact that the ID folk, did roundly trounce Carl Sagan and Stephen J. Gould during their debates in the '80's, and how now we thus have better science as regards Punctuated Equilibrium and Catastrophism in modern geology.

So far as I'm aware, the modern ID folk are pointing out quite rightly, that we have no notion of how a non-living system can isolate one set of stereoisomers against the other, and form it into a protein. This is a legitimate question we have to hope will one day be answered by good science.

[Stubby]

I've concluded that creationists / intelligent-designers, at least the more vocal ones, understand their bible almost as poorly as they understand science.

Please be sure to not lump them all together.
There are YECs which believe in the POOF! creation where everything started 6000 years ago.
There are OECs who believe in BANG! creation and guided ID.
There are other OEC who believe in BANG! creation and ID and evolution.

But can the government teach science that contradicts religious beliefs? because 47% of americans believe in young earth creationism so is teaching them the geological time line an infringement of their beliefs?

@GIThruster

Have you forgotten the Gallup poll showing that 47% of americans DO believe in YEC?
Viewed from that perspective, teaching YEC that the earth is 4.5 billions years old, the government IS violating one aspect of their religious beliefs.

Also the YEC predates 1961 quite a bit but really took off with that book.

And finally just because some mechanism is not known does not mean it is impossible. You (or the ID people or both) are making a classic argument from ignorance. 'We don't know' is not code speak for 'god did it'.

[Schneibster]

And finally just because some mechanism is not known does not mean it is impossible. You (or the ID people or both) are making a classic argument from ignorance. 'We don't know' is not code speak for 'god did it'.

And furthermore, in fact, we do know.

We know where the vacuum fluctuation that resulted in the part of the universe we live in happened, and we know when it happened. We even know why it happened, reasoning ex nihilo from a flat, empty, rolled up space with no flat geometry, no time, no matter, and no energy, i.e. nothing, and a nothing more absolute than empty space in our universe. Literally from nothing, and literally as a result of nothing not being stable; our universe is inevitable, along with a really huge number, something like 10^300, more with various possible Calabi-Yau geometries, all springing inevitably from nothing, like bubbles in champagne. In fact, we can see the bubbles; there are huge voids out there, billions of light years across, with nothing at all in them; in fact, most of everything is those voids. There is a thin froth of matter, and galaxies, surrounding these voids. We exist in a supercluster of galaxies called the "Virgo supercluster," which is a thin cloud of galaxies between two such voids.

You can read about this in The Cosmic Landscape by Leonard Susskind, the inventor of string theory. (Later: Well, you have to look up the great survey of galaxies, actually, but I think I recall Susskind mentioning it. Also you'll find out about the utility of computer models for generating a universe that has voids and froth just like ours; and we can furthermore see the signatures of these "bubbles" in the CMBR. There's a lot more but I probably shouldn't have left those things out.)

Or perhaps you're referring to life? Actually, it appears that life is inevitable given a universe like ours. In this universe, chemistry exists, and energy can therefore be stored and released chemically. Given this, inevitably, various chemicals will combine and generate a self-replicating structure. This has been known since the Urey experiments in the 1960s. Today, this exact same method is used to produce-- quite literally to evolve-- cleaning enzymes for laundry detergent.

You can read about this in At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman, a fellow in biology of the Santa Fe Institute, the most famous center for chaos and complexity research in the world.

Let's start there. Maybe you had a different idea of what we don't know than either of those.

Sorry, cross-edit. I made a new post below.

[Stubby]

And finally just because some mechanism is not known does not mean it is impossible. You (or the ID people or both) are making a classic argument from ignorance. 'We don't know' is not code speak for 'god did it'.

And furthermore, in fact, we do know.

We know where the vacuum fluctuation that resulted in the part of the universe we live in happened, and we know when it happened. We even know why it happened, reasoning ex nihilo from a flat, empty, rolled up space with no flat geometry, no time, no matter, and no energy, i.e. nothing, and a nothing more absolute than empty space in our universe. Literally from nothing, and literally as a result of nothing not being stable; our universe is inevitable, along with a really huge number, something like 10^300, more with various possible Calabi-Yau geometries, all springing inevitably from nothing, like bubbles in champagne. In fact, we can see the bubbles; there are huge voids out there, billions of light years across, with nothing at all in them; in fact, most of everything is those voids. There is a thin froth of matter, and galaxies, surrounding these voids. We exist in a supercluster of galaxies called the "Virgo supercluster," which is a thin cloud of galaxies between two such voids.

You can read about this in The Cosmic Landscape by Leonard Susskind, the inventor of string theory. (Later: Well, you have to look up the great survey of galaxies, actually, but I think I recall Susskind mentioning it. Also you'll find out about the utility of computer models for generating a universe that has voids and froth just like ours; and we can furthermore see the signatures of these "bubbles" in the CMBR. There's a lot more but I probably shouldn't have left those things out.)

Or perhaps you're referring to life? Actually, it appears that life is inevitable given a universe like ours. In this universe, chemistry exists, and energy can therefore be stored and released chemically. Given this, inevitably, various chemicals will combine and generate a self-replicating structure. This has been known since the Urey experiments in the 1960s. Today, this exact same method is used to produce-- quite literally to evolve-- cleaning enzymes for laundry detergent.

You can read about this in At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman, a fellow in biology of the Santa Fe Institute, the most famous center for chaos and complexity research in the world.

Let's start there. Maybe you had a different idea of what we don't know than either of those.

All that is besides the point. The validity of the evidence and the theories is irrelevant to the question in the OP.

Does teaching YECs in science class that the evidence from multiple scientific domains invalidates their religious beliefs in violation of their 1st amendment rights?
The government certainly CAN'T teach so-called 'creation science' either since that would violates other religions beliefs again violation of the 1st.

So where does the leave science education?

[GIThruster]

I'm not familiar with that Gallup poll. I'd be very surprised if it were so. My guess is, the 47% figure was whether people believed in a special creation or if they believed in evolution alone. No matter how the numbers fall however, I think we have the responsibility to teach good science. I can tell you, when I was in school, the matter was presented as "this is what science says" (in support of evolution and biogenesis) and there was no room left for discussion of any type. However, what you say (and I did say it first, go back and read what I wrote), absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because we don't have a scientific mechanism for biogenesis does not mean it is not true.

Fact is though, no matter how you play the numbers game as regards evolution, you are always left with an inductive argument. There is no way to deduce "this is what science says" as regards origins. That kind of statement is a step over the line of science. Those who believe life sprang from mindless forces are applying their faith in just the same sort of way as those who do not so believe. And matters of faith need to be respected. There should never be any effort to force someone to believe for or against a creator of any sort as this is an infringement of our rights and our Constitution.

[Schneibster]

All that is besides the point.

Well, partly, but remember our level of knowledge is far greater than it was when all the stuff about what we don't know was originally true. We know a lot more now; and most people don't, for some reason, believe it, even on of all places a fusion discussion board for cryin' out loud.

The validity of the evidence and the theories is irrelevant to the question in the OP.

Does teaching YECs in science class that the evidence from multiple scientific domains invalidates their religious beliefs in violation of their 1st amendment rights?
The government certainly CAN'T teach so-called 'creation science' either since that would violates other religions beliefs again violation of the 1st.

So where does the leave science education?

The government allows you to teach religion in church; in school, it teaches the truth. It's not the government's fault if religion turns out to be BS. Just because you're allowed to believe in it doesn't mean anyone has to pretend it's reality. They're perfectly welcome to call you a nutjob suffering psychotic delusions of an imaginary super magic daddy in the sky. In fact their right to do so supercedes everything but your right to disagree with them and wave your magic Babble at them.

We need new religion.

We need religion that doesn't try to stuff Santa Claus-like fairy tales down our kids' throats. Religion that doesn't deny reality. Religion that works with psychology, not against it. I agree with the religious in one respect: I agree we need religion. I don't see why that has to include fairy tales, or imaginary daddies in the sky, or other BS. Nor does it have any place condemning anyone's sexual practices; science does that just fine, for children, for animals, and for wearing protection and being careful. Sorry if you think some kind of sex between consenting adults is "bad;" MYOFB, nosey-parker. You don't have to marry them if it bothers you so much; but you don't get to say no one else can either, again, MYOFB.

Personally I'm in favor of group marriages; I think they're inevitable. We have to cut down on children, or we'll drown in them, and that means less than one child per couple. Say a half; then two couples can get together and have a child. Play rock/paper/scissors, pay for a custom gene tailoring at a boutique, say 25% from each parent, do it natural, or whatever. Again, not the government's problem and no business of religion, either. We can't keep making people forever when we've only got one planet. Certainly not if everyone's going to be rich. And they are; they'll insist on it. You can count on that.

[Schneibster]

Those who believe life sprang from mindless forces are applying their faith in just the same sort of way as those who do not so believe.

Actually that's not true at all. Let's start with the Urey experiments. Those are now around 50 years old.

Nowadays they're predicting novel chemicals generated by falling comets in, hmmm, the Noachian? I'd have to look it up. But pre-Cambrian, by a lot. Like a half billion years a lot. Then it all gets frozen until like the Ediacaran, anyway the end of the Cryogenian ice age, and when it heats up, bang! The Cambrian Explosion, and suddenly there's a hundred entire new phyla, tens of thousands of species.

All from comets. You really should read some modern books like maybe Kauffman or something post-1960s, you know. Soapy Sam would never have gotten over on Huxley today. We know far too much.

[kunkmiester]

So where does the leave science education?

Two or more teachers in school, the parents and student pick which course best suits them and their beliefs.

There are good religious people and bad religious people. Plenty of room for science in religion, despite what the atheists cry--only place that that doesn't work is like with the fundamental Muslims, who believe that the Koran contains all knowledge and truth and thus nothing else can exist(there are nuts on the Christian side too, they're on slightly more perilous ground). Most of the greatest thinkers in history were religious, if not Christian.

[Schneibster]

So where does the leave science education?

Two or more teachers in school, the parents and student pick which course best suits them and their beliefs.

The students won't be fit for a technical career if they don't learn reality. You'll be creating a permanent underclass, just like we have today.

There are good religious people and bad religious people. Plenty of room for science in religion, despite what the atheists cry--only place that that doesn't work is like with the fundamental Muslims, who believe that the Koran contains all knowledge and truth and thus nothing else can exist(there are nuts on the Christian side too, they're on slightly more perilous ground). Most of the greatest thinkers in history were religious, if not Christian.

Actually the biggest religionist trolls I've met have all been Catholics or Baptists, both of the fundamentalist stripes of their moieties.

On the other hand, the two smartest religionists I've met were a modern Catholic and a Sufi. Make of that what you will.

[kunkmiester]

The students won't be fit for a technical career if they don't learn reality. You'll be creating a permanent underclass, just like we have today.

Unless you're going into a field like paleontology, evolution is such a small aspect of technical biology it doesn't matter if you learn it or creationism. Vet techs and molecular biologists will still be able to do their jobs.

Ultimately, it can't be our choice if they want to be an underclass. Forcing beliefs is wrong, no matter what it is. The most we can do is do our best to make sure they are aware of the other view, and if you hold to a model of public education no matter what, each class would touch on the others enough for the students to know of the other viewpoint and be able to ask reasonable, if probably uneducated, questions about the topic.

[Stubby]

I'm not familiar with that Gallup poll. I'd be very surprised if it were so. My guess is, the 47% figure was whether people believed in a special creation or if they believed in evolution alone. No matter how the numbers fall however, I think we have the responsibility to teach good science. I can tell you, when I was in school, the matter was presented as "this is what science says" (in support of evolution and biogenesis) and there was no room left for discussion of any type. However, what you say (and I did say it first, go back and read what I wrote), absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because we don't have a scientific mechanism for biogenesis does not mean it is not true.

Fact is though, no matter how you play the numbers game as regards evolution, you are always left with an inductive argument. There is no way to deduce "this is what science says" as regards origins. That kind of statement is a step over the line of science. Those who believe life sprang from mindless forces are applying their faith in just the same sort of way as those who do not so believe. And matters of faith need to be respected. There should never be any effort to force someone to believe for or against a creator of any sort as this is an infringement of our rights and our Constitution.

Actually you are were previously informed, and previously amazed...

6000 years is often quoted by certain people as being the age for the Earth, which flies in the face of geologic and cosmological observations. If you fell into the 47% of Americans who believe the Earth is 6000-10000 years old, then your rationality would be suspect.

I'm very surprised to hear 47% of all Americans believe the earth is 6,000-10,000 years old. I'm curious where you got that figure.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=4050&p=93393&hilit=gallup+47#p93393

http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/Evolut ... esign.aspx

I knew there was a 47% poll somewhere...