Exposing the children to different ideas

This crap is just plain wrong: WASHINGTON (Aug. 2) – President Bush said Monday he believes schools should discuss ”intelligent design” alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life. During a round-table interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers, Bush declined to go into detail on his personal views of the origin of … Continue reading “Exposing the children to different ideas”

This crap is just plain wrong:

WASHINGTON (Aug. 2) – President Bush said Monday he believes schools should discuss ”intelligent design” alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life.

During a round-table interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers, Bush declined to go into detail on his personal views of the origin of life. But he said students should learn about both theories, Knight Ridder Newspapers reported.

”I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought,” Bush said. ”You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.”

There are too many “different ideas” about how we came to be to teach them all, so the schools should focus on elements of the science curriculum that actually, you know, relate to science. The next thing we know they’ll be teaching Native American creation myths, Scientology, and Zen Buddhism.

This insane embrace of religiosity, which we saw in the Schiavo matter as well, will push voters to the Democrats in coming elections. I’ve personally said I’d vote for Hillary before I’d vote for a religious nut, and I meant it.

H/T Right Wing Nut House and Politburo Diktat.

UPDATE: It bears pointing out that the Democrats are no more “pro-science” than the Republicans, generally speaking. Democrats would import all sorts of ethnic creation myths into science classes in the name of multiculturalism, and they’ve already wrecked the social sciences with their gender mythology.

Science is the natural enemy of politics.

UPDATE AGAIN: Instapundit has a google of links on the subject. It’s heart-warming to see so many Republicans refusing to issue the president a free pass on this gaffe. Roger Simon is on the case too.

UPDATE SOME MORE: Jeff Goldstein is taking the side of the morons and so is Simon Says, because they fail to realize the agenda behind ID. We’ve covered this before, so please start with the Wedge Strategy document from the Discovery Institute. ID was invented by their employees in hopes of increasing the religiosity of American life. Whether you think that’s a good idea or a bad one, it’s against the law to use tax dollars to cram religion down the throats of public school children, and it better remain that way. Here are some quotes:

The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West’s greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.

Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art

The cultural consequences of this triumph of materialism were devastating. Materialists denied the existence of objective moral standards, claiming that environment dictates our behavior and beliefs. Such moral relativism was uncritically adopted by much of the social sciences, and it still undergirds much of modern economics, political science, psychology and sociology.

Materialists also undermined personal responsibility by asserting that human thoughts and behaviors are dictated by our biology and environment. The results can be seen in modern approaches to criminal justice, product liability, and welfare. In the materialist scheme of things, everyone is a victim and no one can be held accountable for his or her actions.

Finally, materialism spawned a virulent strain of utopianism. Thinking they could engineer the perfect society through the application of scientific knowledge, materialist reformers advocated coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth.

Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies. Bringing together leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences, the Center explores how new developments in biology, physics and cognitive science raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and have re-opened the case for a broadly theistic understanding of nature. The Center awards fellowships for original research, holds conferences, and briefs policymakers about the opportunities for life after materialism.

Any questions?

9 thoughts on “Exposing the children to different ideas”

  1. Democrats would import all sorts of ethnic creation myths into science classes in the name of multiculturalism

    That is, of course, a crock of you know what. Democrats MIGHT ask for something to be studied in a history class. But you woud NEVER see Democrats asking for native creation myths to be part of science curricula. And their supporters wouldn’t be backward enough to ask for it.

    And your argument exposes a logical fallacy. You seem to think that, just because you (wrongly) believe the Demos would do something, it’s ok for the GOP to do it.

    And that is foolish reasoning.

  2. Science is the natural enemy of politics, Michael, and we have plenty of history in the sociology and psychology of gender to prove that leftists are just as hostile to science as righties. Did you ever hear of T. D. Lysenko or Lenore Weitzman?

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  4. Richard –

    You know very well I’m not taking the ID side; in fact, I’m hoping that by drawing distinctions between ID and evolution, we’ll be able to teach students the difference between what is science and what is not.

    I do NOT propose that ID be given equal weight as a scientific theory. It is no such thing. Nor to I suggest giving it significant time. But I do think that it raises very interesting questions about what is the proper purview of science, and it ultimately argues against itself as science, and so belongs elsewhere, where materialism and metaphysics are on equal footing, intellectually speaking.

  5. Richard, I don’t claim to be terribly sophisticated in science and mathematics, although being a college graduate with background in mathematics, engineering, and food science, I don’t think I’m a total dummy, either.

    I agree that the excerpt you quoted above represented a political rather than a scientific view about origins. But at the end of the day any theory about origins is and will always be theory, not observed phenomena. There have been peer-reviewed books about ID (Dembski springs to mind) and a least one peer-reviewed article about it. I realize these raised a lot of controversy, but if credentialed scientists want to explore the theory of ID, the more sunshine the better. If evolution is the theory that comports better with reality it will easily withstand any assault ID or any other theory can throw at it. Every new theory ever propounded by scientists at their inceptions were out of the mainstream. Some went on to collapse under the strain of lack of evidence; some went on to become pretty much universally accepted.

    OT: did Mummon banish you from his comments? If so, a little more sunshine there would help, too.

  6. Since ID is not science, it’s interesting to think what “peer reviewed” might mean in relation to it.

  7. Adam: I don’t follow this stuff that closely, but two points come to mind:

    1) To say that ID is not science sounds like a doctrinal statement. It is a theory, the implications of which could conceivable be tested and falsified. (For instance, to mix nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and other elements in whatever proportions the “primordial soup” may have been and then subject that mix to energy addition; were it to yield a simple life form, this would falsify the theory that life forms have a “design” which requires and intelligent designer. However, our inability thus far to suceed with this experiment does not falsify evolution, because we may not yet have designed the experiment properly. So while not disproving evolution, this experiment as done so far tends to bolster ID theory.)

    2) “Peer review”: I believe (but am not positive) that Dembski’s book was published by Cambridge University, hardly a bastion of anti-scientific fundamentalism. If I am wrong on this point, I will gladly stand corrected.

  8. Jeff, you’re giving them the benefit of the doubt, and that’s unwarranted. The agenda behind ID is clear, and it’s well known that it’s not just wrong, it’s deliberately wrong. I advocate a no-tolerance policy for deliberate lying.

    Cheesehead, ID is not a scientific theory. It makes no predictions and can’t be falsified. It’s propaganda, plain and simple.

    And there are no peer-reviewed books on ID.

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