quote:Originally posted by Xaposert: Creationism SHOULD be taught in science class - not as truth, as a controversy related to evolution. It's also true that taking faith over evidence can often lead to better decision making, depending on the situation and what we mean by "evidence". Are you asserting that because I hold those views, you can assume I'm stupid?
Mmm. I think not. I understand your desire to see it done this way, but I'm afraid, from my experience in science classrooms, Creatonism shouldn't rate as a topic of study at all- not in a general science class, and not for primary or even most secondary education. It's fine to include it in a course, say on the philosophy or history of science, or in a religion course, or a history or politics and government course, but "teach the controversy" is not productive in a science classroom.
From my perspective as a teacher, you need to know what your aims are in your material. You have to have outcomes of learning in mind. Teaching this controversy, without the thought of a concrete outcome, is not appropriate in a science classroom.
I'll go further on this. The most fundamental problem with Creationism in the science classroom, in any regard, is that it fulfills no useful learning aims. It can be taught for information, but to teach it in a science classroom (even to just mention it or explain it), a teacher would need to take sides in order to contextualize the concept. The lesson would have no meaning if an aim of learning was not being fulfilled. While you can teach about the idea of Creationism informationally, that would really not be useful in the context of a class on the scientific method (unless you were using creationism as an example of a poor theory).
Because, really, the inclusion of Creationism in science teaching represents a caving in to outward pressure, that is not, in its applications to an actual science curriculum, any different from a group that wants to teach the controversy of flying saucers and reflexology, or better yet, actually teach the applicable theories of those subjects. Science curriculum does change all the time, but it changes to try and incorporate useful teaching and concepts into the material, and by any reasonable measure, Creationism, or even the "controversy of creationism" doesn't have a place in general science. It can be taught, but the context of a science classroom is just wrong.
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"Do you think other people are justified in considering you stupid in general based solely on a particular political, social, or philosophical position you hold that they disagree with? "
There are certainly answers to questions that show the person giving the answer should be judged badly until other evidence shows the judgement was wrong.
As far as daily life goes, if one does not travel, I don't think it much more ridiculous that someone think the earth is flat than that person think the earth is ~6000 years old. I (and most others) would think that the former is ignorant.
Btw - in this thread, are ID and creationism being conflated?
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quote:in this thread, are ID and creationism being conflated?
I am conflating the two. If you think that they shouldn't be (and I'm thinking of some good arguments as to why they shouldn't be), would you be willing to list your reasons?
I don't think that ID or creationism should be taught in science classes-- see Orincoro's excellently reasoned post.
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quote:Mmm. I think not. I understand your desire to see it done this way, but I'm afraid, from my experience in science classrooms, Creatonism shouldn't rate as a topic of study at all- not in a general science class, and not for primary or even most secondary education. It's fine to include it in a course, say on the philosophy or history of science, or in a religion course, or a history or politics and government course, but "teach the controversy" is not productive in a science classroom.
From my perspective as a teacher, you need to know what your aims are in your material. You have to have outcomes of learning in mind. Teaching this controversy, without the thought of a concrete outcome, is not appropriate in a science classroom.
Teaching the philosophy of science, including the value of the scientific method and its limits, should be a major aim of science classrooms, though. Most public school students will not grow up to do science, but most will need to know how to evaluate scientific claims and apply them to fields beyond science. The fact that this controversy exists and is fought about in the way it is should be evidence enough that students are not being taught well enough how to apply science in the context of things like religion and politics. For instance, someone who understands the philosophy underlying science should understand exactly why people claim that Intelligent Design isn't science.
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posted
I don't think that a hot button topic like creationism needs to be foisted on students to teach the value and limits of the scientific method though, Tres.
I forget-- what does the Xap username signify?
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posted
"Teaching the philosophy of science, including the value of the scientific method and its limits, should be a major aim of science classrooms, though. "
Yes. And a good way to do that in high school is to NOT bring in emotionally charged, politically controversial but not scientifically controversial, religious topics.
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quote:Originally posted by Achilles: How about in Social Studies, or Philosophy?
Sure, but even then, you're just stripping away all the superficially sciency stuff about ID, and talking about basic philosophy. There's nothing unique about ID except that it is a philosophical standpoint rewritten into a "scientific" theory, that is not scientific, and actually not really even a theory. So even a science classroom would have no use for "ID" because the ideas already exist in a more useful form in other philosophical texts and materials. It's not a materia-non-grata, it's just not science.
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quote:in this thread, are ID and creationism being conflated?
I am conflating the two. If you think that they shouldn't be (and I'm thinking of some good arguments as to why they shouldn't be), would you be willing to list your reasons?
I don't think that ID or creationism should be taught in science classes-- see Orincoro's excellently reasoned post.
The immediately relevant one is my comment about the age of the earth in an earlier post is not relevant for IDers.
I also agree with Orincoro.
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posted
Yes. But in Social Studies you could discuss the cases in court, and how they were resolved.
It is mythological cosmology, so I think that Comparative Religions, as Philosophy course, could be another appropriate venue.
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quote:Originally posted by Achilles: How about in Social Studies, or Philosophy?
Sure, but even then, you're just stripping away all the superficially sciency stuff about ID, and talking about basic philosophy. There's nothing unique about ID except that it is a philosophical standpoint rewritten into a "scientific" theory, that is not scientific, and actually not really even a theory. So even a science classroom would have no use for "ID" because the ideas already exist in a more useful form in other philosophical texts and materials. It's not a materia-non-grata, it's just not science.
I think some of the ID arguments are reasonably clever (e.g. the 'mouse trap' argument). I think the responses to them from the evolution side are even better. I would have no problem with this debate being taught in a philosophy course.
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quote:Originally posted by Paul Goldner: "Btw - in this thread, are ID and creationism being conflated? "
I'm pretty certain that the people who came up with ID said that it was creationism with a new name and a new way of presenting itself.
The arguments and claims differ, although they share the same raison d'etre. I was curious because I was posting something that only applied to Biblical-literalist type creationists.
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quote:Originally posted by Xaposert: The fact that this controversy exists and is fought about in the way it is should be evidence enough that students are not being taught well enough how to apply science in the context of things like religion and politics. For instance, someone who understands the philosophy underlying science should understand exactly why people claim that Intelligent Design isn't science.
I get it. You get it. I think part of the problem comes from schools not employing the right teachers, teaching the right way, having the resources needed to do it, etc. Another part is our culture, and the churches who support this controversy. The media "teaches the controversy" because it exists, and the churches try, for some strange reason, to get it into science classrooms where it plainly doesn't belong, instead of relying on their own members to support them. I think it comes down to entrepreneurial snake-oil sales in the religion business- that and all the failures of actual teaching that could obviate the whole debate.
I don't know for a fact that ID in the classroom activism is fueled by certain Churches' ultimate need to grow and gain revenue and membership, but it's an almost inevitable result of success... so when you put the two things together, you can see a possible mitigating motivation for pushing ID-as-science; especially when it is so roundly rejected by every reasonable voice on the topic, from the Catholic church (reasonable in this case) to virtually every science professor in the country (as far as I know, no prominent teachers have come out in support of it).
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quote:Originally posted by Jhai: Humean, do you think something can be sexist without the knowing the motivations of the person behind it? Or are you saying that motivations just serve as a secondary indicator of whether something is sexist or not, beyond the words themselves?
Statements themselves can be sexist but whether or not a person is sexist does not necessarily depend on what they say, it depends on why they said it. For instance, there is a debate in the African American community about the word n*****, and part of that debate is whether it is fine for an African American to use the word when a white American would be severely criticized. In some sense, it seems like a hypocritical position to take, for the statement to be racist when it comes from a white person but not when it comes from an African American, but the difference is in motivation. The thinking is that this position is not hypocritical because African Americans are not prejudice and do not maintain the underlying motivation that a white American would when employing the word (the problem is not in this part of the debate, it is that African Americans can be motivated by racism but that's for another time), but in that, we can see how motivation plays a key factor in racism or sexism.
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quote: I think some of the ID arguments are reasonably clever (e.g. the 'mouse trap' argument). I think the responses to them from the evolution side are even better. I would have no problem with this debate being taught in a philosophy course.
Or a debate class. It might be more applicable in a philosophy course to throw it in with a discussion of Greek schools of dialectic and argument- sophistry in this particular case.
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quote:Originally posted by Paul Goldner: "Hm... I don't think that you should necessarily be out of the running for jobs that don't have anything to do with education. I've never been convinced that believing in creationism necessarily deducts mental capacity in areas that have nothing to do with hard science (for example, managing people). "
Any place where decision making is going to come into play, it certainly should give massive negative points. And that includes managing people, since in order to manage people effectively, from time to time you must make decisions.
I disagree, even though I agree with you that it shouldn't be taught in science class. I know a lot of people who believe in it but who are very successful people in business, and two that were among the best bosses I ever had.
I am against anyone who wants to force me to learn about their religious beliefs in a science class, but that doesn't mean I think they are stupid....just unqualified to make decisions regarding other people's education.
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quote:Originally posted by natural_mystic: Btw - in this thread, are ID and creationism being conflated?
ID is Creationism.
There's a reason, for instance, that you can't find three ID advocates willing to say publically that the world is millions of years old. Because they are Creationists, and they don't believe that the world is millions of years old.
When the founder of ID wanted to write an ID textbook, what did he do? He took a Creationist textbook, (one that couldn't be used in public schools due to SC rulings keeping Creationism out of schools) and did a global find and replace of "Creationism" with "Intellignet Design". The before and after texts show this quite plainly.
This is all in the public record, and has been since Dover, a few years ago.
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posted
Also it could have nothing to do with their mental faculties, and could be a simple case of their ideology overriding all other concerns.
Now that's a separate issue entirely from whether or not someone is inherently incapable of making smart decisions or not, even though it influences what those decisions might be. But ideology that differs from yours doesn't make someone automatically unqualified to make decisions, unless one thinks that anyone who disagrees with him is stupid regardless of the topic.
In this case, someone could be a perfectly smart individual who makes excellent decisions but has chosen to push a religious ideology on others by having creationism or ID taught in a science classroom. At that point, whether or not they thing it's science or not might be irrelevant.
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quote: I think some of the ID arguments are reasonably clever (e.g. the 'mouse trap' argument). I think the responses to them from the evolution side are even better. I would have no problem with this debate being taught in a philosophy course.
Or a debate class. It might be more applicable in a philosophy course to throw it in with a discussion of Greek schools of dialectic and argument- sophistry in this particular case.
Or an English, drama, or film class if you are studying "Inherit the Wind". Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
"In this case, someone could be a perfectly smart individual who makes excellent decisions but has chosen to push a religious ideology on others by having creationism or ID taught in a science classroom."
Sure, but they're going to have to work to convince me they're evil, and not just an idiot. And then once I'm convinced they're actually smart, but evil, I wouldn't trust them with office above pooper scooper.
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quote:Originally posted by Achilles: Neither of the Republicans matched my values, which is why I didn't like either of them as executive material. It's pretty easily understood.
My reason exactly.
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Wanting to push an ideology doesn't make someone evil. It depends on what the ideology is. And for that matter, wanting to push Christian beliefs doesn't make one evil, it depends on how one does it.
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I think the second part of the sentence ("on others by having --- taught in a science class") informs Paul's opinion on the matter. He didn't denounce all pushing of an ideology.
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quote:Originally posted by Jhai: I think the second part of the sentence ("on others by having --- taught in a science class") informs Paul's opinion on the matter. He didn't denounce all pushing of an ideology.
Fair enough, I'll be more specific, I don't think wanting creationism or ID taught in a science classroom even if the specific intent is to push an ideology is evil.
I think it's incredibly misguided and potentially harmful, but not evil.
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posted
"Alright then I'll be more specific, I don't think wanting creationism or ID taught in a science classroom even if the specific intent is to push an ideology is evil. "
And I do. *shrug* It involves forcing other people to learn as factual something that is anti-factual, is a religious belief system and not science, using the state as a beatstick. Doing so, as a side effect, teaches that science is subservient to religious belief.
I'm not sure how to turn that into something "not evil." From my moral perspective, its impossible.
Posts: 4112 | Registered: May 2001
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Honestly, my experience of politics and politicians in Alaska doesn't necessarily suggest to me that I'd be entirely happy with any Alaskan politician, of any party, rising to a high level of national office.
Short version: Alaskan politics 'dun make 'em crazy.
Longer version: There's a sort of "frontier mentality" that seems to prevade a lot of things in Alaska, and this is very much true of what I've seen of Alaskan politics: "I've cut out a space for myself here, I'm going to do things my way, and you better get the hell out of my way if you have a problem with that." I'd like to see a clear indication that those tendencies were not present in a politician before I put them in an office that would require them to build concensus (or, having failed to do so, push both parties even deeper into knee-jerk obstructionism.)
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posted
Sorry to double post but I think one key non-sexist reason for not wanting Gov. Palin to be VP is that this forum can barely handle her limited candidacy run. Four dare I say eight years would blow up this place.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: She's a woman.
That's also the punchline to my joke about why Hellen Keller was a bad driver.
It's also why you will die alone.
Seriously, be careful with that joke, it's extremely dangerous!
I once made that joke to a female college math professor in the middle of class. She made me meet in her office to talk about it. Posts: 158 | Registered: Jan 2008
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(Although I did make a joke earlier today in mixed company about manscaping, at least that's more self-deprecating and less offensive.)
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quote: I think some of the ID arguments are reasonably clever (e.g. the 'mouse trap' argument). I think the responses to them from the evolution side are even better. I would have no problem with this debate being taught in a philosophy course.
That could be a solution - except that not many public school systems have a required philosophy course. If they added a year of philosophy, that might resolve the issue.
quote:Yes. And a good way to do that in high school is to NOT bring in emotionally charged, politically controversial but not scientifically controversial, religious topics.
Schools bring in highly controversial political topics in English classes (frequently, at least given the books they assigned at my high school.) Schools bring in highly controversial political topics in History classes too. That's because (1) students are often more interested in concepts they can apply to real life topics, and (2) we are doing a disservice to students if we leave them uninformed on controversial issues they will be facing in life.
Part of the problem is that the topic comes up in science classes whether creationism is mentioned or not. Technically, in the same way that creationism doesn't belong in the science classroom, it is unscientific to teach students that evolution, as a historical theory, is true. Technically what they should be teaching if they want to strictly obey the boundaries of science is that evolution is the model under which scientists operate and that it is consistent with all the available data, but that science lacks the ability to verify it. If they stuck to that line, it would leave the issue out entirely. But my impression is that most science teachers skip over this technicality, and instead leave the students with the impression that when they learn about evolution, what they are learning is a proven factual account of what happened millions of years ago. If that is the lesson being taught, then that by itself is bringing the highly controversial topic into science classrooms by teaching one of the two controversial sides.
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quote:Schools bring in highly controversial political topics in History classes too.
Do schools teach that the Holocaust might not have happened? I don't mean teaching that some people believe that it didn't happen, but should they teach that there is a serious historical controversy about it?
quote:That's because (1) students are often more interested in concepts they can apply to real life topics, and (2) we are doing a disservice to students if we leave them uninformed on controversial issues they will be facing in life.
There is no scientific controversy about the theory of evolution at the level of high school and middle school students.
quote:Technically what they should be teaching if they want to strictly obey the boundaries of science is that evolution is the model under which scientists operate and that it is consistent with all the available data, but that science lacks the ability to verify it.
Singling out evolution, and evolution alone for this caveat is only slightly less dishonest than full-blown Creationism.
quote:But my impression is that most science teachers skip over this technicality, and instead leave the students with the impression that when they learn about evolution, what they are learning is a proven factual account of what happened millions of years ago.
Obviously, if you want someone to tell you "what I say is infalible", go to the Pope, not a science class, or anything taught by mere mortals.
But evolution appropriate for high school and middle school students is more than adequately supported by the available facts.
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
I would show the Kenneth Miller Lecture first day and say "This is why I am not teaching the Controversy about Intelligent Design, there is nothing to learn or to gain, arguing about".
Or, as I am explaining the Scientific method make side comments as to how certain failed theories like ID are not scientific because they do not follow the method.
Largely the largest reason would be that there are plenty of science teachers probably that would be given a penny and take a pound who do subscribe to ID BS and would use the greenlight of "teach the controversy" as a mandate to teach ID over Evolution. Simply banning ID is easier.
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ID should be taught in science class the same way Lamark is - a theory that seems good on the surface, but doesn't hold up to scientific scrutiny. Science isn't against guesses which happen to be wrong. It is against sticking with them when they're shown not to work.
At the same time, I'm happy if the Christian creation myth is taught in English, as long as other creation myths are taught along side it. I'm partial to the Norse myth myself, but there are lots of great ones to cover.
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Tres, high school science teachers don't "teach the controversy" about the phlogiston theory of combustion, or the theory of spontaneous generation of microbial life, or the geocentric universe either. They might briefly mention them as outmoded and disproved old ideas before going into our modern understanding of each field, but they don't pretend that these theories deserve equal time in the classroom.
An important side point: the reason that the discarded theories I mentioned above are ever mentioned by science teachers at all is that each of them, despite being demonstrably incorrect, is still more scientific than Intelligent Design. Each of the old theories at least made falsifiable predictions, thus fulfilling the most basic requirement for a truly scientific theory. In fact, their very falsifiability is why they were eventually falsified. Scientists like Galileo and Pasteur put in years of effort to test the predictions these old theories made, found that their data didn't line up with those predictions, and thus the old theories were overturned.
This is flatly impossible with Intelligent Design, because it makes no falsifiable predictions and therefore is not a scientific theory, by definition. Claiming that it should be taught in a science class is roughly akin to demanding that French classes teach trigonometry.
Evolutionary theory, on the other hand, makes all manner of testable predictions. What makes it such a darn good theory is that, despite 150 years of some of the smartest folks on the planet bashing their heads against it, not a single one of those predictions has been proven incorrect. In fact, a number of ideas Darwin proposed that were considered to be the height of implausibility in his day, such as the maintenance of characters over many generations without loss due to blending, were only shown to be possible long after Darwin's death. Far from falsifying evolution by natural selection, the modern fields of genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, and genomics have served to cement its place as the fundamental principle unifying the biological sciences.
quote:Originally posted by MightyCow: ID should be taught in science class the same way Lamark is - a theory that seems good on the surface, but doesn't hold up to scientific scrutiny. Science isn't against guesses which happen to be wrong. It is against sticking with them when they're shown not to work.
I think there's a big difference between ID and Lamarckian evolution, and it's the one I mentioned above. Lamarck was wrong, but his theory was fundamentally scientific in that it made predictions that could be tested. That Lamarck's theory was falsified once those predictions were tested does not make it any less "scientific," only incorrect.
ID and creationism make no such testable predictions, and therefore cannot be considered scientific, unless we dilute the word of all useful meaning. And since it is not scientific, it should not be taught in a science class, even as an example of a failed theory - because it wasn't a theory to begin with.
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