Breaking: Petition to White House to ban ID/creationism in schools gets 23,715 signatures in a week

That should read "ideology-jerk found widely in the IDM." Gregory

"What claim? That you are an ideologic materialist? I read your posts." Obviously, Barb, you don't read very well. Cite some textual evidence for your ('it just looks that way') accusation (of "ideologic[al] materialist") please, or just don't waste e-space and time with your empty charges. It is typical IDism and a sign of a person suffering from Expelled Syndrome to claim that anyone who rejects IDism simply *must* be a materialist, an atheist, a secularist, a naturalist, a reductionist, etc. IDists are victims of a (neo-)Darwinist conspiracy to suppress their Newton-like, Galileo-like, Einstein-like, 'game-changing scientific revolution' called Uppercase Intelligent Design Theory. It's not just a knee-jerk reaction, it's an ideological-jerk found widely in the IDM. Written not with strong emotion, but just based on facts and observations. Gregory

Creationists should welcome the petitions asking for results in schools on origin teaching. Watch the math here. They are saying the people can and should be noted for their opinion on origin subjects in science class in schools. AMEN. They are saying everyone should give an opinion and some effect from this opinion should take effect. AMEN. Its called democracy. It should be the people who decide what chould be banned , or nothing banned, in their schools teaching their kids. I understand 70% of Yanks agree with both sides. I won't sign the petition but will sign a petition that the principals behind petitions should be ruling on this issue in schools. Not trumped up court cases. Does President Obama know about origin subjects?? A got a hunch its on his list of NO. Robert Byers

BarbJune 22, 2013 at 2:56 pm You are pitted against many teachers all strongly pushing evolution. You need to give good science or you will be drownd out. Neth

Gregory continues,

Do tell which ‘evidence you followed where it leads’ to come up with that claim out of thin air, BS in HIM, Barb.

What claim? That you are an ideologic materialist? I read your posts.

That’s a typical example of ‘Protscience,’ which you can read about here

Using Google to find information means, according to Gregory, that I believe in ID, New Age medicine, and the use of Wikipedia. Congratulations, Gregory. That is the stupidest thing I've read all day. Using Google simply means that I look to find information on the Internet. I've told my daughter not to Wikipedia her homework, because Wikipedia isn't the most trustworthy source. But of course you don't give me credit for that, do you, Gregory? The article goes on to talk about the "devolution of scientific authority." Yes, Gregory, scientific authority has its place in my life; I respect those who try to determine the "how" of the universe. I do not, however, allow those people to tell me how to live my life. I believe that their research and knowledge, however helpful it is to humans, is limited in scope. Barb

Timaeus Rules!

The federal government has no power over school curriculum. That is a state responsibility. So the President could not ban ID from schools even if he wanted to.

That would be a perfect response for President Obama to give to those losers. Joe

“ideologic materialists such as yourself, Gregory” – Barb Do tell which ‘evidence you followed where it leads’ to come up with that claim out of thin air, BS in HIM, Barb. “Oh, and I can Google.” That’s a typical example of ‘Protscience,’ which you can read about here Gregory

Ban it everywhere! qwerty

No reason to be upset with any of this. Well over a third of the American public doesn't even believe in evolution and the vast majority believe de facto in ID. The public can be thought of as analogous to a jury. There are no education requirements that would allow jurors to resolve the technical data and arguments involved in many trials. What they do very well is detect deception. Lies and obvious exaggeration give jurors a reason(and think a good one) to ignore everything a lawyer or her client says. As Napoleon once remarked "lying is not only wrong, but worse it's a blunder." The more vocal and arrogant defenders of naturalism are actually helping ID with their ridiculous claims. That ID is the same as creationism is a lie that can easily be pointed out. And it doesn't have to be pointed out that evolution, in the sense used, is not as well established as gravity. Astronomers and physicists rarely claim that gravity is as well established as evolution. You don't need a PH'D to realize that for example Richard Dawkins wild statements are nonsense. He wrote a whole book claiming that anyone who believed in God was not only stupid, but delusional. In applying this criteria to for example: Copernicus, Descartes, Pascal, Kepler, Galileo, Hardy Leibniz, Kant, Linnaeus. Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin, Pasteur, Planck... I was astounded by the result. Poor delusional Newton wrote more on theology then he did physics. Many of the most vocal critics are doing a service to theism. carlg

If I may interject a boring practical consideration: The federal government has no power over school curriculum. That is a state responsibility. So the President could not ban ID from schools even if he wanted to. Of course, he could try to put indirect pressure on states (the way it was done with the highway speed limit change, decades ago), denying certain subsidies to states which did not change their educational policy to go along with what the federal government wanted. But the states could in principle refuse to go along with the blackmail. And if they did, there would be literally nothing the President could do. He can't act out of his jurisdiction. In any case, Obama would never do that. The Democrats have already lost massive support among religious Americans. That sort of heavy-handed action, targeting something popular among many religious Americans, would finish the Democrats in the next election, and Obama is smart enough a politician not to destroy his own party for the sake of appeasing 100,000 petitioners, most of whom are already going to vote Democrat anyway, no matter what he does. I'm sorry, but I think this petition is a non-starter. Or rather, it may be a starter, but it is a starter that will rapidly become finished. Timaeus

PS: Some initial ideas, here. (Includes a discussion of the Bloom two sigma effect.) kairosfocus

F/N: Since neither Creationism nor Intelligent Design are actually taught in science classes, and certainly not in Math ones, the claimed under-performance cannot be blamed on these. That sounds like the fallacy of waving "the children" and "our future" to whip up emotions, butliplied by the old attitude of blaming anything going wrong on those Christians, off to the lions with them. Those genuinely concerned to improve education, should be looking instead to why private and home schools so often do so much better, often on far less funding resources. I would also suggest that the Bloom two sigma problem, which shows that more interactive and more active learning strategies can credibly move a typical C student to A territory, multiplied by the opportunity of the ongoing digital revolution, further enhanced by the potential of the Tablet used productively and not just as yet another digital multimedia distraction from time on task to learn, jointly point to serious curriculum restructuring as a major way to go. Throwing technology at the problem is unlikely to succeed (similar to throwing money at it for a generation), but well done integration as part of an effective curriculum development process, can do so. But, once we hit large scale efforts, politics is a big part of programmes and projects, so we are looking -- yet again -- at the toxic politics that is taking over our civilisation as democracy is uprooted from its Judaeo-Christian soil and is turned ever more into mob rule [such as this pseudo-petition] driven by manipulation games. KF PS: The decline in SAT etc scores from the mid 1960's on running in parallel with the radical secularisation and faddism injected into education at that time (and the associated rise in social disintegration statistics), jointly point to a common causal pattern. The internal disintegration and Fall of Rome is a precedent we need to look at very soberly. kairosfocus

Gregory writes,

“our dangerously low student performances in math and science.” Is that really true? Can’t imagine that being the 2nd lowest approval rate of ‘evolution’ among ‘civilised’ countries would have anything to do with it. Blame it on LeBron!

That's quite a non sequitur you've got there.

The fate of the future generation(s) of American science is in ‘Barb’s’ hands?

Another non sequitur. Are you growing these at home, Gregory? The fate of my kids is in my hands, Gregory, nothing more.

Does Barb have a science degree, bachelors, masters or PhD?

Bachelor of science in health information management from Regis University in Denver. The science portion of my degree consisted of classes in anatomy and physiology and pharmacology. Oh, and I can Google.

Does she have expensive equipment with which she (or someone more qualified in her home-school evangelical network) could teach her children to ‘do science’?

The ironic thing is that my daughter excels in science (getting a B in chemistry last year). Oh, and she attends public school, Gregory. Do you need decaf or something? This comes across less as an amusing romp through Logical Fallacy Land and more of a personal attack. Do you have a problem with me?

Currently, 33,002 signatures. This petition should be taken seriously. Unfortunately, there are far too many IDT proponents who will not take *anything* seriously if it rejects IDism. They have swallowed the ideology wholesale and would float down a river into a maelstrom before changing their minds or hearts.

The same could be said for the ideologic materialists such as yourself, Gregory. Barb

Someone should start a petition exposing evolutionism as atheistic tripe and therefor subject to the Establishment Clause. Joe

Geez. What was once a just a "Theory in Crisis", is now a "Theory Seeking Legal Protection" warms the heart ;) Upright BiPed

OT: The Action of Mind on Brain - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t2dnfhpL6I 2011 Talk given by Dr. Henry Stapp, at the Bioethics Forum on the von Neumann interpretation and the role of the observer on the brain. Stapp received his PhD in particle physics at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Nobel Laureates Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain. While there, he was a member of the Berkeley Fundamental Fysiks Group, founded in May 1975 by Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann, which met weekly to discuss philosophy and quantum physics. Stapp moved to ETH Zurich to do post-doctoral work under Wolfgang Pauli. During this period he composed an article called "Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics," which he did not submit for publication, but which became the title of his 1993 book. When Pauli died in 1958, Stapp transferred to Munich, then in the company of Werner Heisenberg. He is retired from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, but remains a member of its scientific staff. bornagain77

"our dangerously low student performances in math and science." Is that really true? Can't imagine that being the 2nd lowest approval rate of 'evolution' among 'civilised' countries would have anything to do with it. ;) Blame it on LeBron! "I’d be happy to teach my kids ID principles at home. And, seeing as how I’m the parent, I have far more influence than a teacher would." The fate of the future generation(s) of American science is in 'Barb's' hands? Does Barb have a science degree, bachelors, masters or PhD? Does she have expensive equipment with which she (or someone more qualified in her home-school evangelical network) could teach her children to 'do science'? Currently, 33,002 signatures. This petition should be taken seriously. Unfortunately, there are far too many IDT proponents who will not take *anything* seriously if it rejects IDism. They have swallowed the ideology wholesale and would float down a river into a maelstrom before changing their minds or hearts. There is, however, an alternative to 'Intelligent Design' scientism. It's not 'Darwinism' or 'Theistic Evolution,' the IDM's top-2 enemies. But enemies and not alternatives is what the IDM thus far seems to really want. As the allies (including most Abrahamic believers) are thin and disappearing. Gregory

And darwinists have the gall to claim they're not against academic freedom. WOW. They can't refute the arguments and scientific evidence for I.D, so they wish to silence them. R.I.P science Blue_Savannah

This is not a genuine petition, on track record of too many casesit is a license for mob-driven witch hunts, media lynchings and unjustified career busting driven by toxic slanders, willful misinformation, rage fed by hostility and stereotyping misrepresentations. But already, there is a push to tyrannise on conscience that has not been seen in a very long time, and it is going to lead to an awful mess if unchecked. Plato's warning on nihilist, amoral, evolutionary materialist factions is coming true. kairosfocus

Emphasis mine on the LOL worthy terms:

Since Darwin's groundbreaking theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, scientists all around the world have found monumental amounts of evidence in favor of the theory, now treated as scientific fact by 99.9% of all scientists. However, even after 150 years after the establishment of evolution, [GASP!]some schools across the US are "teaching the controversy," including Creationism and Intelligent Design. Both of these so-called "theories" have no basis in scientific fact, and have absolutely zero evidence pointing towards these conjectures. These types of loopholes in our education [DOUBLE LOL]are partially to blame for our dangerously low student performances in math and science. Therefore, we petition the Obama Adminstration to ban the teachings of these conjectures [GASP GASP!!]that contradict Evolution.

LOL!!! JGuy

The petition says

“Both of these so-called ‘theories’ have no basis in scientific fact, and have absolutely zero evidence pointing towards these conjectures. These types of loopholes in our education are partially to blame for our dangerously low student performances in math and science,” reads the petition created by someone listed as A.J. of Vienna, Virginia. “Therefore, we petition the Obama Administration to ban the teachings of these conjectures that contradict Evolution.”

Where to begin! Let's start with "...no basis in scientific fact. (emphasis mine). Apparently this A.J. of Vienna, VA is blissfully unaware (ignorance is bliss after all)that trying to exclude ID from science on definitional grounds is highly problematic precisely because there's no widely accepted definition of science to which to appeal. Even a cursory reading of the relevant literature in the philosophy of science journals shows that one of the nastier problems in that discipline is trying to define science. Worse for AJ is the fact that most of the proffered definitions do no damage whatsoever to ID. I won't rehearse all that here, but suffice to say anyone familiar with the literature knows that's the case. Then we have "absolutely zero evidence". That language alone is a tip off that we're dealing with someone uninformed in science and how science actually works. It might be true that there is nothing that AJ personally would accept as being evidence for ID, but it doesn't follow from that there is "absolutely zero evidence". He has no definition for what is meant by that word "evidence". Clearly he has no understand how scientists actually ascribe evidential status to some observation of bit of data. AJ loses this point on both logical and definitional grounds. Then we have the "contradict evolution" part. Oops...apparently AJ is also blissfully unaware (again, the source of his, or perhaps her, bliss being ignorance of the first order) that science is supposed to be, at least on paper, a self-correcting enterprise, meaning that in practice science often go about the business of trying to falsify hypothesis. Attempting a wholesale ban on a concept because it might contradict a favored theory is about as unscientific as you can get. Apparently AJ wants the President to enforce a prescribed dogma. But then, that has been going on for a long time within science already! DonaldM

Wow, the atheists are really getting whiny, aren't they? The problem with this petition is that it won't make ID or creationism go away, which is the ultimate goal. I'd be happy to teach my kids ID principles at home. And, seeing as how I'm the parent, I have far more influence than a teacher would. Barb

Evidence is evidence, after all... right? TomG

This is going to reach 100,000 easy. What the White House will do with it is hard to predict, but should it pass in its present form, I can see it doing some considerable good. For one thing there's nothing new in it: Creationism and ID have both been excluded from schools already. For another thing, there's no definition in the petition, which means that if it's going to be enforced, the terms will have to be defined with great legal precision. That process could very easily do ID more good than harm. And finally, what definition there is in the petition suggests that it's speaking of theories for which there is "absolutely no evidence." That's really absolute language, which makes it easy to challenge, and opens the door for (a) showing that it's not true, and/or (b) finessing it by presenting evidence without mentioning ID, as for example in the first 75% or so of Darwin's Doubt. TomG