A new pro-creation education bill that passed the Tennessee Senate 24-8 last month and 70-23 in the House last year is on the governor’s desk. Many think it likely that this bill will be signed into state law by governor Bill Haslam today (April 10, 2012).
“These bills sound very innocent,” said Eugenie Scott, executive director of theNationalCenterfor Science Education. That’s intentional, she said. The legislation has been crafted to be legally bulletproof.
TheTennesseebill hijacks language from scientists and skeptics: Teachers are allowed to promote “critical thinking” in areas where there’s “debate and disputation.” …
The summary says that schools cannot prohibit “any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught, such as evolution and global warming.”
NCSE’s Scott has been fighting antievolution legislation for 25 years, so she has seen creationism in many guises. The problem with academic freedom bills like this latest one is that if creationism is not prohibited, teachers will teach it as science. In national surveys, she said, about 25 or 30 percent of teachers say they’d like to teach both evolution and creationism or intelligent design. [emphasis added]
Intelligent design, she said, lost credibility and power in the 2005 trial in Dover, Pa., when a Republican-appointed federal judge ruled against teaching it in public school on the grounds that it was a religious idea and not a scientific one [see video below]. Read More…
It is interesting to me that a higher percentage of public school teachers (25-30%) actually want to teach about creation and/or intelligent design in their classrooms, but are being prevented from doing so while very few if any science teachers in some of our “Adventist” schools (like La Sierra University) want to discuss anything beyond neo-Darwinism. [Emphasis supplied] More: ===>
Advent Life 
This law turns the clock back nearly 100 years here in the seemingly unprogressive South and is simply embarrassing. There is no argument against the Theory of Evolution other than that of religious doctrine. The Monkey Law only opens the door for fanatic Christianity to creep its way back into our classrooms. You can see my visual response as a Tennessean to this absurd law on my artist’s blog at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2012/04/pulpit-in-classroom-biblical-agenda-in.html with some evolutionary art and a little bit of simple logic.
By: Brandt Hardin (@DREGstudios) on April 12, 2012
at 1:29 am
Brandt,
I have to disagree! The available evidence is inconclusive. There is no hard scientific evidence for the theory of common descent. Life forms seem to evolve within fixed limits instead of going back to the original single cell ameba.
Creationists do not have a monopoly on fanaticism. What creationists are demanding is the unbiased presentation of scientific evidence both in favor and against the current understanding of evolution. Children are entitled to the right of making up their own minds based on all the available scientific evidence which has been discovered so far.
Nic Samojluk
By: adventlife on April 26, 2012
at 7:00 pm
It is quite evident that the large contingent of evolution ‘believers’ within the scientific community are extremely biased, in terms of their specious belief system, which they rather presumptuously propagate and arrogantly pass off as genuine, whilst claiming that their non-empirical sci-fi evolution beliefs warrant a justifiable place in the public school arena, or any other school curriculum for that matter. In other words, the non-empirical off-the-wall beliefs of evolutionists are accepted by many individuals and governments as science – on the dodgy basis that because evolution theory rejects God, it falls on the state side of the church-state divide and therefore qualifies as science: and NOT because of any observable, reproducible or concrete evidence which can be scientifically supported, without entering the realms of some sort of faith based speculation.
Evolution theory may qualify as non-God and secular but it is nonetheless faith based speculative theory at best and therefore has no place in the evidence based empirical science arena. They get away with this by ‘pulling the wool’ over the eyes of many (even the courts and society) through their orchestrated manipulation of the system and – to make matters worse – adding to this great deception, by citing genuine scientific advancement and the benefits of modern science as proof of evolution theory being the Real McCoy. So their non-god trump card is flaunted as ‘evidence’ of being legitimate science yet all masked well in the grand illusion of the church-state divide.
Take for example the Dr. Dino (Dr. Kent Hovind of Creation Science Evangelism), which is a real travesty of justice, as case in point: The state, probably incited by the evolutionist camp, hunted him down via the IRS in order to silence his rather colourful preaching against the teaching of evolution in schools and for his protest against the funding of it by tax-payers money for which he, together with his dear wife, was jailed. Here is a link to an article showing the other side of the story:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi143.html
(Just shows how easy it is for Uncle Sam’s legal eagle’s and state organs to muscle their way into every nook and cranny of the church side of the church-state divide using bad laws which evolutionists have capitalised on for so long). There is no real church-state divide when the state controls the church: It is just but an illusion – and my opinion of course…
By: Trevor Hammond on April 12, 2012
at 9:59 pm
Can I pile on here as well? See if you can tell me who it was that penned this statement: “A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question; and this is here impossible.”
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This was Darwin – it was written as a prelude to his theory and it shows quite succinctly that he was not nearly as hostile or set in his belief as are his present day contemporaries who have used what he did not to create an anti-Christian agenda. Especially in light of what the electron microscope reveals, which, if Darwin were alive today would convert him to at least knowing that it takes a lot more faith to believe that time is god than to believe that God created it.
-Gary Kimes
By: garyroxene on April 22, 2012
at 4:25 am