After months of debate over science and religion, the Kansas Board of Education has tentatively approved new state science standards that weaken the role evolution plays in teaching about the origin of life.
The 10-member board must still take a final vote, expected in either September or October, but a 6-4 vote on Tuesday that approved a draft of the standards essentially cemented a victory for conservative Christian board members who say evolution is largely unproven and can undermine religious teachings about the origins of life on earth.
"We think this is a great development ... for the academic freedom of students," said John West, senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, which supports intelligent design theory.
Intelligent design proposes that some features of the natural world are best explained as products of a considered intent as opposed to a process of natural selection.
Great. Put Kanasas school children at a competitive disadvantage
from the get-go by teaching them things that are factually incorrect.
From the American Prospect, some information on that
"Discovery Institute" and its motives:
The most eloquent documentation of ID’s religious inspiration comes in the form of a Discovery Institute strategic memo that made its way onto the Web in 1999: the “Wedge Document.” A broad attack on “scientific materialism,” the paper asserts that modern science has had “devastating” cultural consequences, such as the denial of objective moral standards and the undermining of religious belief. In contrast, the document states that ID “promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.” In order to achieve this objective, the ID movement will “function as a ‘wedge’” that will “split the trunk [of scientific materialism] … at its weakest points.”
Yeah. That pesky scientific materialism that brought us all
the technologies, medical treatments, etc. that make our way of life
possible. Hate that.
There's no doubt that accepting evolution makes a literal reading of any creation myth impossible. But how strange to assume most people of faith have ever read their holy books so literally. Most religions I know of take as a given that God is a mystery that human beings lean toward, like sunflowers toward the sun, and that the more you try to pin God down, the farther you stray. Refusing to pin God down might take the form of forbidding images -- or encouraging them, seeing in multiple images many facets of God, all of which are metaphorically true, none of which are complete or factual.
And if you don't take creation strories literally -- and many believers of all faiths do not -- why in the world would accepting evolution diminish faith? Is Weisberg just making the same assumption fundamentalists do -- that only those who have no concept of metaphor know God?
It's fascinating to watch a group of powerful people
systematically weaken our educational system AND cheapen our spiritual
life and faith simultanously. Now where have I seen this before?
Afghanistan (cough) Taliban (cough).
