Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Evangelicals intensify calls to pull kids from public schools
(DAVID CRARY, Associated Press, September 2, 2006)

Public schools take a lot of criticism, but a growing, loosely organized movement is now moving from harsh words to action - with parents taking their own children out of public schools and exhorting other families to do the same.

Led mainly by evangelical Christians, the movement depicts public education as hostile to religious faith and claims to be behind a surge in the number of students being schooled at home.

"The courts say no creationism, no prayer in public schools," said Roger Moran, a Winfield, Mo., businessman and member of the Southern Baptist Convention executive committee. "Humanism and evolution can be taught, but everything I believe is disallowed."

The father of nine homeschooled children, Moran co-sponsored a resolution at the Southern Baptists' annual meeting in June that urged the denomination to endorse a public school pullout. It failed, as did a similar proposal before the conservative Presbyterian Church in America for members to shift their children into homeschooling or private Christian schools.

Still, the movement is very much alive, led by such groups as Exodus Mandate and the Alliance for Separation of School and State. One new campaign aims to monitor public schools for what conservatives see as pro-gay curriculum and programs; another initiative seeks to draw an additional 1 million children into homeschooling by encouraging parents already experienced at it to mentor families wanting to try it.

"Homeschoolers avoid harmful school environments where God is mocked, where destructive peer influence is the norm, where drugs, alcohol, promiscuity and homosexuality are promoted," says the California-based Considering Homeschooling Ministry.

Though the movement's rhetoric strikes public school supporters as extreme, some of its leaders are influential. They include R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who last year said the denomination needed an "exit strategy" from public schools, and the Rev. D. James Kennedy, pastor of 10,000-member Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. and host of a nationally broadcast religious program.

"The infusion of an atheistic, amoral, evolutionary, socialistic, one-world, anti-American system of education in our public schools has indeed become such that if it had been done by an enemy, it would be considered an act of war," Kennedy said in a recent commentary.

Overall, public schools are in no danger of withering away. The latest federal figures, from 2005, show their total K-12 enrollment at 48.4 million, compared to 6.3 million in private schools - most of them religious.

However, the National Center for Education Statistics said private school enrollment has grown at a faster rate than public schools since 1989, and it expects that trend to continue through 2014. Moreover, the private school figures don't include the growing ranks of homeschoolers - there were at least 1.1 million of them in 2003, according to federal figures, and perhaps more than 2 million now, according to homeschool advocates.

According to a federal survey, 72 percent of homeschooling parents say one of their primary motivations is to provide stronger moral and religious instruction.

The president of the largest teachers' union, Reg Weaver of the National Education Association, says public school critics use increasingly harsh language, "but they're not as successful as they'd like to pretend."

"The overwhelming majority of our folks," Weaver said of his union members, "are not being pulled off the agenda of great public schools for all children."

Charles Haynes of the First Amendment Center, a nonpartisan civil liberties group, said public education leaders should work harder to convince parents they aren't against religion by encouraging nonsectarian teaching about the Bible and the formation of student religious clubs.

"School leaders know they're facing the perception that public education has somehow become hostile to religion," Haynes said. "They understand there's no time to be lost."

According to a federal survey, 72 percent of homeschooling parents say one of their primary motivations is to provide stronger moral and religious instruction.

I don't know what's worse, seeing another page of posts devoted to Spendi (someone just shoot me), or knowing that if he stops posting we may not have anything to talk about.

All the while Wandel tries heroically to chum the water with selected snippets of ID and Creationist lunacy to keep the thread going. You do an amazing job Wandel, you're relentless

Excerpt from "Three Questions for America" by Ronald Dworkin (The New York Review of Books, September 2006)

Almost all religious conservatives accept that the methods of empirical science are in general well designed for the discovery of truth and that their children must be taught the reliability of those methods if they are to be prepared for their lives. They would not countenance requiring or permitting teachers to teach, even as an alternate theory, what science has established as unquestionably and beyond challenge false: that the sun orbits the earth or that radioactivity is harmless, for example.

Scientists have not yet shown to all their satisfaction how the Darwinian processes of random mutation and natural selection explain every feature of the development of plant and animal life on our planet; some features remain areas of speculation and controversy among them..............
The first of these claims is both correct and unsurprising. The details of evolutionary theory, like the phenomena it tries to explain, are enormously complex. Eminent biologists disagree in heated arguments about, for example, whether some features of developed life are best explained as accidents or byproducts of no survival value in themselves. Evolutionary biologists face other challenges and disagree in how best to meet them.

Italy
Pope keeps intelligent design off the agenda

The subject of intelligent design did not come up as Pope Benedict XVI and 39 of his former doctoral students spent the weekend pondering evolution, a participant said yesterday. Media speculation had said the meeting at Castel Gandolfo near Rome might shift Vatican policy to embrace intelligent design, which claims to prove scientifically that life could not have simply evolved. But Father Joseph Fessio said "that particular controversy did not arise". The Pope has previously stated that the Church recognises evolution as a scientific fact, but God ultimately created the world.
Reuters Paris

A clever escape for the ID "scientists" and the Catholic Church then?

Despite what was feared/hoped before:

Quote:

Italy
Pope keeps intelligent design off the agenda

Media speculation had said the meeting at Castel Gandolfo near Rome might shift Vatican policy to embrace intelligent design,

I do believe timber that in view of-

Quote:

Media speculation had said the meeting at Castel Gandolfo near Rome might shift Vatican policy to embrace intelligent design,

that those who bit at the "media speculation" are the idiots. Media plays its own game but those who are its gobsmacked followers have, once again, had the pratfall.

The Pope doesn't do "flavour of the month".

We all know what Media wants and it has nothing to do with anything except money.

You are all just that little bit more Anti-IDarian than before and --hey-- nothing happened. Ingsoc is here.

Don't you know that Mediacorps is insanely jealous of every other centre of power? And it is well into pickpocketing on a grand scale. It generates its own energy now rather than mediating.

Have you nothing to say timber on the adaptability of "life" to radioactivity which Mr Dworkin and his editor so carelessly drew our attention to?