Re: West Virginia Governor signed the vague creationist education bill

On 3/31/2024 12:06 PM, Mark Isaak wrote:

On 3/30/24 9:37 AM, Ron Dean wrote:

RonO wrote:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/22/west-virginia-intelligent-design-religion-teaching/367f8bba-e894-11ee-9eba-1558f848ec25_story.html
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The claim is that if a student asks a teacher about some alternative "theory" the teacher can answer that question, but there is no recommendation on what an honest and acceptable answer would be since the "theory" that they want to get into the public schools isn't a scientific theory, and should probably be labeled as to what it is in any discussion on the topic.  If the legislators believe otherwise they should have made that clear in the act, and they should have been more honest as to what they were doing.

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Considering the Intelligent design argument does not identify a designer? How should this question be answered? A student wanted to know why Intellignet Design is wrong,

 The Intelligent Design hypothesis is not necessarily wrong. What students need to know about it is, first, that it violates Occam's Razor in that it posits superfluous and unnecessary entities; second, that it requires multiple designers, some of which work at cross-purposes and some of which are inimical to humans; and third, that past explanations of natural phenomena in terms of the supernatural have a perfect record of failure.
 

The fact is that the Intelligent design hypothesis is not any type of scientific theory that can be taught as some type of legitimate alternative.  That is what any honest and informed teacher would have to convey to the students.  The ID perps understand that what they have was never a legitimate alternative or they would not have started to run the bait and switch scam over 20 years ago, and wouldn't be trying to run it on the West Virginia rubes after the fact if that wasn't the case.
Ron Okimoto