Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

I wonder whats next from their bag of tricks.

Judge Backs UC On Admissions Requirements
(By Angelica Donallo, Daily Californian, April 2, 2008)

A federal judge ruled in favor of University of California officials last week after a Christian high school challenged university policies that determine which high school courses fulfill admission requirements.

The Association of Christian Schools International, Calvary Chapel Christian School and a handful of students filed a suit in 2005, claiming that the university and its officials violated their First Amendment freedoms in not approving several of the religious high school's course offerings.

Judge S. James Otero of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California determined that the university's overall a-g requirement policies for course approval do not reflect unconstitutional discrimination. However, the court has not decided whether or not the university's decision in this particular instance demonstrates discrimination.

The a-g requirements classify types of high school courses that will be accepted for admissions and are considered among other factors when determining admissions for new students.

"In the light most favorable to Defendants, the course-review process at worst symbolically disapproves of the academic value of Plaintiffs' beliefs," said the ruling from the court. "In light most favorable to Plaintiffs, the course-review process burdens students who must take additional tests to demonstrate proficiency in the A-G Subjects."

Attorneys for the plaintiffs said the court will likely rule on the issue within a year.

The Christian school offers 43 courses that have been approved by UC as a-g courses, but some courses in subjects such as biology and history were not approved.

UC officials said the ruling demonstrates that their approval procedures, as they stand, do not discriminate by religion.

"The decision is important because it affirms the University's ability to set reasonable admissions standards that apply equally to all applicants and all schools," read a statement from the university.

Ken Smitherman, president of the Christian schools association, said the university should approve courses that are taught at the high school, even if there are inherent religious biases.

"We believe there has been exhibited viewpoint discrimination," he said. "We believe that our schools, if they choose ... to have a religious bias in particular courses ... are being discriminated against because of that viewpoint."

However, university officials said the courses were evaluated according to their instructional value. One literature course at the high school, for example, was not approved because its primary text was an anthology rather than a full text.

"The University has declined to approve courses that use as their primary source the books named in the case, not because they have religious content, but because they fail to meet the university's standards for effectively teaching the required subject matter," read the university statement.

University policy states that students planning to apply to the university may seek alternatives when meeting the university's a-g requirements by taking courses at community colleges or through standardized tests.

Although many students who are plaintiffs in the case were granted admission to the university, attorneys for the plaintiffs said problems with course approval at the high school will likely continue.

"If the courses are continually denied then it will have a greater impact on the ability for students to attend UC in the future," said Jennifer Monk, legal counsel for the plaintiffs.

"If the courses are continually denied then it will have a greater impact on the ability for students to attend UC in the future," said Jennifer Monk, legal counsel for the plaintiffs.

Jesus told me.

Show me why AIDs-ers are not, by logic, pessimists and communists. I did a post about pessimism on which you failed to comment. I wasn't calling AIDs-ers pessimists and communists because I had run out of ideas. It was because they are pessimists and communists. And their totalitarianism sticks out like a bandaged thumb on a parade drill.

My comments were reserved in entirety for the opinion rendered by the 9th Fed District.

In a full blown atheist materialist society, having no residual Christianity,

That's a very silly hypothetical, spendi. There's no imaginable universe where we (western society) might become such a thing. It is about as helpful or revelatory as musing about how we might look if the germanic family of languages had never evolved or what it would look like if we set out to remove all trace of them.

An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.

National scientists push for including evolution lessons
(By KAREN AYRES SMITH, The Dallas Morning News, April 2, 2008)

Texas students must receive a strong science education that includes important lessons on evolution if they are to be prepared to compete in the global economy, top national science leaders said Tuesday during a visit to Southern Methodist University.

Three scientists from the National Academies, a coalition of science advisory groups, said years of scientific research have consistently supported evolution, the biological theory that humans and other species evolved from lower forms of life.

Their comments came amid an ongoing review of the state's public school science curriculum that has sparked controversy about the best way to present evolution to students.

"I think parents really want their children exposed to different points of view," said Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences. "But the fact is there is no scientific controversy."

The scientists came to SMU for a speech about the need for more young people to study science so the U.S. can be more competitive with other countries. Before their remarks, the group spoke with The Dallas Morning News about the need for secondary teachers to present evidence-based science to students - including evolution.

Many conservatives, including the State Board of Education chairman, have long pushed for teachers to present what some groups say are weaknesses in the theory of evolution. For example, some argue that it can't explain the development of complex cells.

Many skeptics of evolution say they aren't calling for schools to teach creationism or intelligent design, a theory that says certain features of the universe are so complex that they are best explained by an intelligent cause. But others argue that raising questions about evolution amounts to slipping God into the classroom.

Harvey Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine, one of the National Academies, said that parents and students need to understand that people can support religion and evolution.

"Belief in religion and conviction about God is utterly in keeping with evolution," said Dr. Fineberg, a former provost at Harvard. "They are not incompatible."

The current Texas science curriculum, which was approved in 1998, dictates that students should understand the theory of evolution. But elsewhere in the rules it also stipulates that students should analyze any strengths and weaknesses of all theories.

Disputes over that curriculum have caused controversy for years. In November, the state's science director, Chris Comer, said she was forced to resign over allegations that she had inappropriately endorsed evolution. Texas Education Agency officials pointed to other infractions.

Since then, science teachers and professors from across the state have started to meet in groups to redraft the curriculum standards, which must be approved by the State Board of Education.

the saintliest man I have ever known.

the impersonal power of artistic impression having blessed and educated us all.

Nowadays a Catholic who is ignorant of Einstein is as incomplete as a thirteenth-century Dominican ignorant of Aristotle.....Religion without science is mere smallmindedness.

Science meant two things to Shaw. In its derogatory manifestation it was the algebraic hocus-pocus that had befuddled him at school and hypnotized so many adults. The codes and rituals of this superstitious system formed a second network of philistine defence after the Bible-smashing advance of Darwinism. There were scientists on both sides of the warfare, and the battle lines teemed with spies and fifth-column agents. Speedily replacing eternity with infinity, astrophysicists were flinging "millions of eons about in the most lordy manner" (Shaw) or mystically descanting on the "incredible smallness of the atom" and other fairy tales. Shaw viewed these priests of science as an elite corps of idealists who had corrupted physics and biology, and ingeniously substituted illusory progress for real progress. Using misplaced religious devotion, they had strengthened the philistine's citadel with inflexible scientific axioms and given it a brilliant technological facade. Shaw classed these renegade scientists with clairvoyants, diviners, hand readers and slate writers--all "marvel mongers whose credulity would have dissolved the Middle Ages in a roar of sceptical merriment".

I am getting a bit cheesed about scientists giving in to the "compatibility between science and religion story". If the fraternity needs to market science as "non threatening to your precious beliefs" even though facts dont lie and religion raises lying to a high art, maybe we leave the science to the Chinese.

. "But the fact is there is no scientific controversy."

facts dont lie and religion raises lying to a high art

Stein stumps for state education law change
(Chad Livengood, Springfield News-Leader, April 4, 2008)

Call Ben Stein the conservative Michael Moore.

Instead of taking on President Bush and the automotive, health care and gun industries, Stein is taking on the vast world of academia in a new documentary. It challenges Charles Darwin's theory of evolution with intelligent design, the belief that the world and man were created by an intelligent designer -- God.

"We've been troubled by the stranglehold Darwinism has had on academic pursuits," Stein said Thursday at a news conference in the state Capitol.

On Wednesday, Stein gave lawmakers a special preview of his new film, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," which will debut in 1,000 theaters across the country on April 18.

Stein said college professors who question Darwinism lose their jobs and research grants. He said the practice in academia runs amok with America's founding principles of "free speech and freedom of inquiry."

"They did not give their lives for one certain dogma to have a stranglehold on academic pursuits and everything else be expelled, so to speak," said Stein, the famous monotone teacher in the 1986 film "Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Stein also came to Missouri to lobby for state Rep. Jane Cunningham's Emily Brooker Higher Education Sunshine Act, a bill named after a former Missouri State University student who sued the school in October 2006 because she felt her Christian viewpoint was discriminated against. Cunningham's attempt to get similar legislation passed last year failed.

Brooker, 24, of Springfield, spoke at Stein's press conference. In Springfield, she had refused during her senior year to sign a document endorsing homosexual adoption as part of a classroom assignment. The social work department sanctioned Brooker for what she says was failure to adopt the ideology of her professors. She settled her case with MSU out of court and the social work department has since been restructured, with many of her former professors being reassigned to other areas of the university.

Stein called Brooker's story "appalling."

"It's very discouraging about the human nature," Stein said.

Brooker said MSU is making "positive changes," but the problem of professors forcing their beliefs upon students is "widespread ... across the entire university."

"I've had students after students come up to me and say, 'you know, I've had to compromise in my class, too,'" said Brooker, who is now a foster care caseworker for the state's Children's Division. "That is robbing us of our education. When are we going to stop pigeonholing ideas into student's heads in order for people to get a degree?"

Cunningham's legislation, House Bill 1315, would require public universities in Missouri to submit an annual report about steps they've taken to protect "intellectual diversity."

"We have a problem that needs to be fixed," said Cunningham, a Republican from suburban St. Louis.

Asked whether he thought state legislatures should punish state universities for incidents such as Brooker's, Stein replied: "...I don't want them taken out to the woodshed and spanked. But I would like to see that it not happen again."

Stein said Darwin's 19th century theory of evolution is a "brilliant theory" about the microevolution of different specifies. But he contends evolution should not be the only theory taught in public schools and researched in public universities.

In the movie, Stein's producers interview proponents of Darwinism -- scientists from the country's biggest universities -- about the theory of creation and pose questions about intelligent design, the assertion that the world and living organisms were created by an "intelligent cause" or God and not by natural selection, the basis of Darwin's theory.

"When it comes to asking the basic questions of where did life come from ... they have no answers," Stein said.

"I had always been extremely dubious about Darwinism, because Darwinism is linked to Social Darwinism," said Stein, who also has been a game show host, law professor and Wall Street pundit since being a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon. "This is explicitly one of the problems of the Holocaust, which killed 6 million of my fellow Jews."