Springboro School Board member Kelly Kohls, who also leads the Warren County Tea Party, began a vocal push for the new class in late July. She made appearances on local TV stations and spoke to The Dayton Daily News on Aug. 1 about her concerns that America was “eliminating God from our public lives” and how it’s important to recognize creationism as a valid theory.
But the effort came to a screeching halt after Springboro schools received a letter from the ACLU’s Ohio chapter on Aug. 4 that advised the board about the legal quagmire they were about to enter if the class was implemented.
Mike Brickner, an ACLU of Ohio spokesman, told CityBeat that his office received a call from Springboro Superintendent Gene Lolli within days of sending the letter, to say that the issue wouldn’t be pursued.
Now no one at Springboro schools wants to discuss the matter. Neither Lolli nor school board members responded to CityBeat’s interview requests.
(Kohls, who poses as a fiscal conservative, later told the Daily News that parents should have the choice of using state vouchers to send their children to other schools if they want to learn about creationism and intelligent design.)
Creationism is the belief that humans were created by God in their present form and didn’t evolve from other species of animals. Generally, the concept is tied to the biblical account in Genesis, making it distinctly Judeo-Christian in origin and outlook, and states the Earth is a mere 10,000 years old — not 4.54 billion years old, which is the accepted view in mainstream science.
Although public opinion has been divided on the teaching of creationism, according to most polls, U.S. courts repeatedly have ruled that the First Amendment forbids the teaching of religion in public schools.
“I think what the other side tried to claim was that there are some pseudo-scientists out there who try and say it actually is a scientific theory, which really, all credible scientists have shut down,” Brickner says.
“Then they would say that it is not sectarian, that you don’t have to believe in the Judeo-Christian god to subscribe to ‘intelligent design.’ But we would say it is still a way to get religion in the door in our classrooms.”
It’s difficult to tell whether attempts like this one are increasing, says Josh Rosenau, programs and policy director of The National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a not-for-profit organization that works to defend and promote evolution education in public schools.
“If they make a lot of noise about it, it makes the papers, then we find out about it,” Rosenau says. “Another district may be doing it silently or a reporter may not be covering the school board meeting that day and, all of a sudden, a policy gets passed and no one really knows about it. Or an individual teacher could decide to teach creationism and as long as no one complains, nothing happens about it.”
Reported incidents of creationism finding its way into public classrooms are distributed fairly evenly across the nation, Rosenau says, but polls indicate it’s occurring more often along the Bible Belt and in rural areas. And an anonymous, 2008 Pennsylvania State University survey of high school biology teachers around the nation found that a full 13 percent champion offering creationism in the classroom.
The last major legal challenge testing the waters for creationist thought in schools occurred in Dover, Pa., in 2005. A group of parents sued the school district after they found out that the book Of Pandas and People, which advocates for intelligent design, had been introduced into the curriculum a year earlier.
A conservative U.S. District Court judge ruled against the district, and the school board members who led the push for intelligent design were all defeated in the next election.
Rebranding creationism as intelligent design, Rosenau says, is an intentional attempt by creationists to find a more palatable way to teach it in public schools. The history of the movement is a political one, marked by “workarounds” — when one attempt is shot down in court, creationists try again with something new.
In 2003, schools in Texas drew up new standards for science text books.
“There was a line that said that students should learn the strengths and weaknesses of scientific models,” Rosenau says. “When it came time for textbook adoption in 2003, the only theory they wanted to talk about having strengths and weaknesses was evolution.”
Dr. John Silvius taught biology for more than three decades at Cedarville University, a fundamentalist Christian campus near Yellow Springs, Ohio, about 65 miles north of Cincinnati. Silvius taught evolution alongside creationism, helping his students understand why evolution is incorrect and why intelligent design makes sense. Silvius is a “young Earth” creationist who believes the Earth only is about 10,000 years old.
“My argument is from a presuppositional philosophy,” Silvius says. “My presupposition for what I call truth is I’m going to allow a revelational input into that to combine with what I observe in nature. In nature, the problem is this huge jump from inanimate matter to complex, living forms. Could that have come about by undirected natural causes? And maybe it could have, but no one has demonstrated that.”
Silvius references the creationist standard of the watch found on the beach, that its existence implies a watchmaker. But he doesn’t rely on this.
“The argument is not between God and evolution, but on what can matter do?” he says. “The question has to come up in the classroom, ‘How did we get here?’ ”
Silvius speaks thoughtfully, outlining what to some people might sound like a well-structured argument. And, if you’re coming to the debate with the same presupposition as he does, it makes a lot of sense. Moreover, at a privately funded university like Cedarville, it’s perfectly appropriate.
The problem with this, as with any creationist education, is that it must start with a religious presupposition that’s in conflict with the foundations of the scientific method. This is why teaching creationism is wildly inappropriate in public schools. Brickman offered that sometimes creationism is packaged as a broad study of creation stories across cultures.
“But they’re not pushing for this to be
taught, they’re pushing for a Judeo-Christian belief to be taught,”
Brickman says. “You can’t include a non-scientific ideology in a science
classroom.”
Most people haven't got a clue as to just how complex and highly explanatory current thinking about evolution is and should think twice before listening to the poor logic, bad science and make-believe coming from creationist organizations.
Most people reject apriori special creation and the possibility of a Creator. What do they offer in place of that? Time matter energy chance = all that there is today. And they say our position if faith-based!
The face and the mermaid on Mars were plausible ID theories until technology gave us a closer look at the evidence to establish that they were just natural rock formations like faces in the clouds. This was the expected result of the investigations but the bigger question is, “Did we bother to take a closer look to find out?”… and the answer is, HECK YES!
So the question of whether or not ID can be classified as science is a matter of evidence, and there are a number of highly reputable atheist theoretical physicists who are on record saying that the evidence for ID is so strong that it requires extreme and unestablished speculative science to explain it away, for example.
So the question becomes, “Should we take a look to find out?… since we know that ID is promoted by people from a politically right winged American think tank who think that the ID is god.
Well, Georges Lemaître thought that the big bang was evidence for the literal interpretation of Genesis, so what?
In other words, it is only fanatics and ideologues on both sides who kill plausible science in the name of their sacred culture war between the two religions… Copernicanism vs. Creationism.
Both are equally motivated by anything but honest science.
"So the question of whether or not ID can be classified as science is a matter of evidence, and there are a number of highly reputable atheist theoretical physicists who are on record saying that the evidence for ID is so strong that it requires extreme and unestablished speculative science to explain it away, for example."
The only "scientists" that fit this bill are creationists who purposefully choose to ignore actual science.
RRyals is exactly right: there are high level scientists who support ID.
"Intelligent design, as one sees it from a scientific point of view, seems to be quite real. This is a very special universe: it's remarkable that it came out just this way. If the laws of physics weren't just the way they are, we couldn't be here at all. The sun couldn't be there, the laws of gravity and nuclear laws and magnetic theory, quantum mechanics, and so on have to be just the way they are for us to be here. Some scientists argue that "well, there's an enormous number of universes and each one is a little different. This one just happened to turn out right." Well, that's a postulate, and it's a pretty fantastic postulate -- it assumes there really are an enormous number of universes and that the laws could be different for each of them. The other possibility is that ours was planned, and that's why it has come out so specially."
("Explore as much as we can': Nobel Prize winner Charles Townes on evolution, intelligent design, and the meaning of life")
p.s. the "right wing think tank" RRyals mentions, Discovery Institute, is just a boogeyman that ID-critics raise to dismiss the argument. Anyways, Discovery is NOT young earth creationist so this is NOT a stalking horse for creationism. These are all leftist-conspiracy theories used to keep minds CLOSED!
Physicists are as qualified to discuss evolution as cab drivers and cops. I prefer the consensus of biologists.
Primewonk inaccurately claims:
"The only "scientists" that fit this bill are creationists who purposefully choose to ignore actual science."
No that willfully ignorant statement is patently false, but the fact that you conveniently don't know facts that don't support your position is highly telling. You must think that I'm a rookie at this... ;)
For example, in his interview with Amanda Geftner concerning his new book, strong atheist theoretical physicist, Leonard Susskind, (the "father" of string theory), candidly admitted that "we will be hardpressed to answer the IDists if his version of the theoretically speculative multiverse isn't real, (which we don't have without a complete theory to justify it), because "the appearance of design, (the observational evidence), is undeniable". Surely Lenny believes that his multiverse exists, but that's just religion until or unless the above repeated criterion for calling it science are met, aka... he's practicing Copernicanism in the face of evidence to the contrary, just like the rest of the liberal activist scientists commonly do.
FYI, I take full credit for Amanda's prompt, since I was there when she was prodding physicist for questions to ask Lenny, and suggested to her that Lenny is an IDist by default, (since we may never have a multiverse without a complete theory to scientifically justify the assumption of something that will always be unobservable).
Now, you are invited go and educate yourself accurately for a nice unbiased change of scenery:
http://knol.google.com/k/the-anthropic-principle#
Right, you don't have the first clue what cosmological ID is, nor how it works, but you have an opinion anyway, I get that. And just an FYI, but science doesn't care what kind of science that you like.
Some parts of intelligent design can be comatible with evolution, like natural selection for instance. What isn't compatible is the genetic aspect of it. And genetics has way more credibility in my opinion. Oh yeah and it actually is scientifically sutdied and widly accepted, so there's that.