News out of Florida: Polk School Board leans toward Intelligent Design

Do the words "Establishment of Religion" mean anything to these people?

"A majority of Polk County School Board members say they support teaching intelligent design in addition to evolution in public schools.

Board members Tim Harris, Margaret Lofton and Hazel Sellers said they oppose proposed science standards for Florida schools that lists evolution and biological diversity as one of the "big ideas" that students need to know for a well-grounded science education.

Board member Kay Fields said last week she wants intelligent design, which is promoted by some Christian groups, taught in science classes in addition to evolution.

The board's majority opinion is at odds with many in Florida's scientific community who strongly support the new, more rigorous science standards, and say intelligent design lacks scientific credibility."

http://www.theledger.com/article/20071120/NEWS/711200414/1004

Belief and conjecture are for church............science and fact are for schools.

Science is not fact... It is a study into the unknown for plausible answers.. And most of those answers come in the form of a statistical compilation.. So, there is a factor in the analysis that says that this may not be true...

Please, do me a favor don't say fact and science in the same sentence... otherwise, the world would still be flat and the sun would revolve around the earth... Oh and if you fell off your flat world, their were monsters waiting for you in the abyss.

on related issues... Everything is theoretical.. If you want to think outside the box... Math is a theory... Tell me when does 2+2 not equal 4?

Math isn't theory. It is self-defining and deductively true. Knowledge a priori.

Science isn't. It makes assumptions and uses inductive reasoning (as opposed to deductive reasoning) based on empirical knowledge.

"Science is not fact..."

I belive science is the search for fact in the broadest sense.

it functions and how to keep it functioning.. DNA is amazing... Its not the same stuff you were taught in school if you've been out for a while.. Math becomes theoretical at a point... When I was in Physical Oceanography the waves don't work out. COS/ SIN/ TAN... Its junk.. Physics is junk.. its all theoretical... it works to a point and then has to be tweaked.. Base 10 number system is crap.. absolute crap. Infinity is a concept that goes beyond.. and takes us into different dimentions and beyond our limited perceptions...

Would be amazing to think that something was sitting beside me in an alternate dimension that I was unable to see because I didn't have the conceptual perseption to do so... Intrigues the hell out of me.. I wouldn't put anything past anything... Perhaps their is an Intelligent Design.... But then Bush being born kind of throws that one out doesn't it...

science is constantly being tweaked. Physics is theoretical, which is why lab experiments in physics don't work the way the book says they will. People really should read Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in physics. He was a dreamer and a scientist, too.

Biology is my field and it keeps changing, too. No one can keep up with all the sciences anymore, everything is happening too fast in all of them.

they have yet to wake up yet.... Perhaps... Perception is key... A solid is just another form of matter in another state....

Makes for great discoveries of the unknown... I'm not an A,B, C type of person.. I like my stuff outside the box.. otherwise I would still be beat over the head and dragged in by my caveman husband.

And that's kind of an intellectually dangerous thing to do.

The scientific method stemmed from centuries of philosophical thought and debate.

Because if you had, you'd understand that it teaches the skill of what's called "critical thinking"- encompassing all logic and reason- which certainly, one would think, would be useful in studying the vague subject that you would call "science."

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you're referring to the scientific method- which is CLEARLY an offshoot of western philosphy, a philosophy in itself. Some might say it has come to the status of religion.

Des Cartes only entertained those ideas for epistemological reasons- he wasn't anywhere near serious.

To bad they can't explain intelligent design. Hey idiot lurker fundies - look up natural selection and replace God with Mother Nature. :eyes:

oughta be a law against evildoers who religionize public schools.

back in the previous century.

design be taught in public school science class when its base is religious teachings.

I don't do dogma..but it seems to me that if there were a "GOD" that he/she could have created EVOLUTION just as bloody well. Can't he/she do anything?

Logic has no place in religion.

bucks and huge hypocricy does. So many suckers..so little time.

That's where it belongs. Teach the real science in the public schools and let the children decide for themselves.

Parents who don't like that are welcome to put their kids in private school or homeschool.

in a decade or two, "Intelligent design" doesn't look like it's THAT intelligent...

Au contraire... It's more like "Stupid design" than "Intelligent design" to moi.

Brandon, Lakeland, Orlando, and Daytona. Big time fundie thumper territory, and needless to say they elect some real "winners" to office.

:puke:

who don't think just like you?

I never imagined there were so many "liberals" with so many prejudices until I started reading DU in 2001.

"Ignorant" simply seems someone hasn't learned a particular thing; it is not synonymous with "stupid."
"Opinionated" is true of anyone who thinks about anything. You're as opinionated as the people you deplore; you just have opinions that differ from theirs. "Religious" should not be an insulting term, but it usually is at DU. DUers who engage in the assumption that all religious people are right-wing should know better. "Hicks" is an insult applied to people who live in rural areas, or anyone a liberal disagrees with. You may as well call someone a "nigger," the term is meant to be just as insulting. There are no doubt a lot of people in Polk County who are conservative. I have known that part of Florida all my life.

But conservative is not synonymous with "hick" or with "religious" or with "ignorant." There are atheist conservatives with Ph.D.s teaching at colleges and universities in big cities.

We will never win elections in this country as long as we go around insulting people. It's a self-defeating behavior. Instead of insulting people, we should be trying to convince them that our ideas are better than GOP ideas.

On this particular issue, we should simply point out that religious education doesn't belong in science classes. Intelligent design can be acknowledged as a possibility; students should be taught the truth: that science cannot neither prove God exists nor prove God doesn't exist. Most scientists aren't interested in the question because it's not a question science is supposed to address.

If God exists, why shouldn't He have created the process of evolution? That's what I always told my biology students who asked me how I could believe in God and "believe in" evolution. The occurence of evolution neither disproves God's existence nor disproves it.

I don't hate them individually but as a group? Yes.
I've tried that "Changing their mind with kindness and logic" ....and they still buy the lies that the Churches tell ...

No..I don't like or believe in Religion, God or Nonsense.
I Do believe people who believe in spirits, Ghosts or Gods are going to Doom the Human Race.
They live in a land and reality I want nothing to do with....

Turn about is fair play.

Wonder what they'd say about that.

Here they are. It is a deeply fundamentalist area.

Central Florida School Board says don't teach evolution alone.

actually could be Constitutional. The Constitution says there shall be no established religion.

To say "It is possible that God started the process of evolution" would not be an establishment of religion at all.

To the question "Whose God?" the obvious answer is "We have no way of knowing since we have no way of knowing that God started the process of evolution. All we can say is that it is a possibility and that science does not say there is no God. Science can neither prove that God exists nor prove that God doesn't exist."

"No, we won't discuss this any more because that gets into religious beliefs and this is a science class."

Then move on from there.

You can not teach ID in science if you want to teach factual things.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/judge.html

"It is unconstitutional to teach intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom" - Judge John Jones

uguu

disregard the science standards.

Cooler heads usually prevail in these cases. And new board members are found. :)

The ID folks got their asses handed to them, but they never give up trying to feed the shit formerly known as Creationism to all of the students.

ID is pseudoscience fantasy bullshit and everyone knows it. ID is not even worthy opposition to Evolution; which Evolution has all the evidence to work in its favor, while ID has ZERO evidence to support its claim.

After all, if they're going to teach the pure, unadulterated bullshit that is "intelligent design," they might as well toss in some cryptozoology for good measure, right? :sarcasm:

With any luck the school board members who are pushing ID will suffer the same fate as the Dover school board members who tried to force their teachers to teach that nonsense: they'll get voted out of office. Here's hoping.