Teacher Sues Over UC Berkeley Evolution Web Site.

They are at it again and taking it to SCOTUS. :crazy:




Teacher Sues Over Evolution Site
Christian educator claims Cal's Web page violates the separation of church and state.


<<If you think dying can keep you out of court, look at Charles Darwin.

The celebrations of his 200th birthday coincide with an anti-evolution lawsuit that has just landed him on the doorstep of the U.S. Supreme Court.

A Christian schoolteacher from Roseville (Placer County) who takes the Bible literally says a UC Berkeley Web site about evolution is unconstitutional, like a cross in a public park.

The Web site, "Understanding Evolution," is supported by government funds and violates the constitutional separation of church and state, according to the suit by Jeanne Caldwell.>>


More here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/14/MNM915T5JB.DTL&tsp=1


It always amazes me that these people are so threatened by positions they do not agree with as if keeping facts out of the public eye will make them go away. :crazy:


Mz Pip

I think it is about time we impose new requirements in the schools mandating immediate termination for any of these "Born Again (twice too many times) Christians" trying to limit proven scientific values and preaching "Intelligent Design"

... that tried to put requirements on "home school teachers."

But, it was overturned or something (I don't remember exactly).

In addition to your idea that they shouldn't be teachers, I think people who believe science or atheism are religions shouldn't be allowed to have children. Also, creationists shouldn't be allowed to benefit from any of science's advancements either.

No vaccine for you!

either you believe in the sciences or you don't. If you don't, why trust what the sciences have to offer? If you literally believe in Creationism, then isn't it blasphemous to use the sciences selectively?

I'm sure they have selective arguments to those questions. Personally I don't care what they believe, nor do I want to hear about them. I'm just not interested in what I think are shallow thought processes. I only care that they not hinder the sciences by claiming it has any correlation to their organized and extreme beliefs.

here in VA, based on religious beliefs, parents can get a waiver to home school their kids even if they don't have a high school diploma.

Crazy, isn't it?

We have a major educational problem in this country. The arguments are consuming and many.

One of the worse outcomes from today's schools happens to be the lack of critical analysis and good listening skills. Being able to differentiate between bullshit, mis-representations, and deliberate lies; there is truth, facts, history and the merits of another side of an issue.

Good education is the key to many forms of freedom. You cannot gain freedoms if you are taught by the uneducated. Not by those who've already lost or never had honest critical analytic skills.

We should just invent the time machine, round up these fundy nutbags, and send them off to England circa 1080.

I taught 5th grade. I had a student in my class who transferred in from a Christian school. We had a reading series that encorporated short pieces of both fiction and non fiction writing. One piece was a science article on the Big Bang. Then mom showed up complaining that her son was uncomfortable reading the article. I politely pointed out that this was a public school and it probably wouldn't be the last time her son came into contact with ideas he disagreed with. At least she was reasonable about it and didn't push the issue.

Science is not a religion. Evolution does not require faith or belief in gods or disbelief in gods. We are surrounded by the stupid. It was fine when the stupid, who have been here for a very long time, kept to themselves and left the rest of us in peace. But every now and then the stupid get all ornery, they start wanting, like a cranky two year old, to have everything their way and to have everyone do what they say. We have suffered through three decades of the stupid, and enough is enough.

The American Taliban have been pushing religion into the public sphere so much lately that they're starting to believe their newest lies.

Where's the part about how God is UNCONDITIONAL LOVE?

Talk about disconnected thought! Maybe that's in another part of their compartmentalized brains.

They are using a new tact. It goes along with the fundy colleges graduating 'pharmicists' whose sole professional goal seems to be to win the right to interfere with women's medical care.

We could found the Church of Friggin Facts and Realities and sue them for trying to give information contrary to what WE choose to believe in. ;)

of an 800 page site.

I have this image of this person going through the site page by page, purposefully looking for something to be offended about so she could by outraged and file a lawsuit.

I only hope this nonsense isn't costing the university a lot of money. I think they have in house attorneys to deal with crap like this.

They seem to be really dedicated to destroying now and returning all of us to the dark ages.

I am thinking it's some kind of gene thing.

Last I heard Yoo is hiding out behind the Orange Curtain.http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-yoo11-2009feb11,0,619852.story

I can't imagine anyone winning any lawsuit against them. Most of the time they settle out of court if anyone suing them can hang on for the years of stonewalling they do. Then they make the person sign a statement promising to never talk to anyone anywhere about the lawsuit. I work there and know a few people who've sued them.

Before this clown, there was Jerry Falwell; before Falwell, there was Billy Sunday; before Sunday, there was Mary Baker Eddy and Joseph Smith; before them there were dozens of crackpots who wanted to worship shoes or gourds. And every one of them wanted to educate children with their message that science was hogwash and only they had the "revealed wisdom". No, there has always been religious stupidity and one can only hope that they are at an evolutionary disadvantage and will, over time, go extinct.

But they are only rarely in power as they have been since Reagan. I actually blame that fucked war criminal Nixon for unleashing and legitimizing the stupid this time 'round.

Reagan couldn't do anything but read lines handed to him. Nixon was what inspired "The Exorcist" and "The Omen" -- an evil soulless fuck that unleashed stupidity everywhere he went.

Check this out for example

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/origsoflife_04

"Living things (even ancient organisms like bacteria) are enormously complex. However, all this complexity did not leap fully-formed from the primordial soup. Instead life almost certainly originated in a series of small steps, each building upon the complexity that evolved previously: "

Everything after that first sentence is a statement of faith, it cannot be proven scientifically. Yet they pronouce this "almost certainly" even though they have no idea why some molecules replicate themselves and others do not. What they describe there does require faith. Faith that all of these things that happened in the past just happened. Proto-RNA was created by accident, it started replicating itself, just because that's what it does. It created cellular membranes (somehow, as in Step #2 "Then a miracle occurs") which gave it a huge advantage and then life was up and running and natural selection took over.

Except that part and parcel of this system is the insistence, the faith, that all of those miracles will also someday be explained away.

but a molecule that can replicate itself, as RNA does, can evolve. No 'why' is required. This page is indeed weak. It merely puts forth the RNA world hypothesis, but that hardly requires miracles. Finding the evidence for the evolution from a hypothetical RNA-world to the cellular world will indeed be very difficult, however an understanding of the evolutionary process applied to a hypothetical RNA world fully explains the evolution of cellular life without any miracles required. Absent a requirement for miracles, and given the abundant evidence for evolution of cellular life, faith is not required to accept the RNA-world hypothesis.

There is evidence of evolution everywhere. Piles and piles of evidence. And it's predictive. That is to say, we find a fossil of Creature A, and we find a fossil of similar Creature C and say "Hmmm...this one definitely eveolved from this one, but there must have been a Creature B in between, and we think Creature B must have looked like this." Then do you know what happens? We find a fossil of Creature B. And we find it in a layer of sediment between Creatures A and C. Evolution predicted a future discovery.

Then sometimes whole new sciences come along, like genetics. We start comparing the DNA of various creatures, and wouldn't you know it, the DNA evidence completely backs up the fossil record.

This isn't faith. It is science. I'm sorry if you can't understand it or refuse to accept the difference.

Fundamentalists expect us to believe in creation, something there is not a single scrap of evidence for. With the same breath, they refuse to believe in evolution, despite the mountains of evidence that support it. Sorry, but I cannot take them seriously, and will not waste anymore breath trying to explain basic science to you.

Nor was I talking about evolution. The page I linked to was about the "origin of life". Part of that site claimed that evolutionary theory was separate from the question of the origin of life, but then they included a section on it anyway. I contend that they do not have the same level of evidence for this origin theory and yet they jump right from "it could have happened this way" to "it probably did happen this way" or "it almost certainly happened this way."

"Not until the latter part of the nineteenth century was the theory of evolution able to account for the origin of species without invoking a supernatural agency. Can twentieth-century science do the same for the origin of life itself?" Elements of Biological Science Keeton/McFadden 3rd edition 1983

The purpose being to explain the origin of life without the need for a deity. Whether that is a proper scientific inquiry or not, it certainly does not seem scientific to declare victory without anything like rigorous scientific verification. There's a whole lot of faith in that "almost certainly".

There are things that we don't know (yet), and science is OK with this. You complain about a jump from "it could have happened this way" to "it almost certainly happened this way" yet you jump from "we don't understand how it happened" to "it was a miracle".

As to the origins of life, there are currently competing theories, but amino acids and RNA have been created in the laboratory from gases that existed in Earth's early atmosphere and electricity. That is take the mix of atmospheric gases, apply electricity, and you can create very basic forms of life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_experiment

But I'll give you "almost certainly happened this way" is probably unfortunate wording. I have no idea what the current consensus of the scientific community is on the subject. "Prevailing hypothesis" would have been a better choice of words.

the first definition says 1) extraordinary event attributed to some supernatural agency, but the 2nd says 2) remarkable occurence.

As in, it is amazing, it is wonderful, and it is unexplained. The possibility is still open that it was god, or an intelligent designer. Whereas the other side, the science first and science only side, seems to say "we are not sure exactly how it happened, but we are sure it was not god".

Even if it was called the 'prevailing hypothesis' that would not admit that the 'prevailing philosophy' was one of materialism. However, the faith in that philosphy still looks like a faith to me, just like the faith that a god-free explanation will be found for the origin of life.

The root problem is that the materialist philosophy is taught as the basis of science until it is believed by most that materialism is scientific. Yet even though all scientific theories in the physical sciences are materialistic, materialism is ultimately based on faith. It cannot be proven like a scientific theory. But it is taught as science=materialism=truth as contrasted with mere religion=faith. Usually not explicitly, but sort of as a backdrop that is assumed and taken for granted.

As long as science is taught as an enemy or alternative to religion, it is natural for religious people to be anti-science. Not that followers of scientism are bothered by this conflict. They look forward to the day when religion is vanquished or forgotten as a relic of the long childhood of the human species.

It could be completely mundane. Like all the UFO's that turn out to be birds. Or Venus. Completely mundane.

You seem to think scientists should accept "God did it" as a reasonable explanation. Why? Because you believe it? Because millions of people believe it? The number of people who believe it does not make it any less nonsensical. There are plenty of people who believe in Vishnu. There were plenty of people who believed in Ra. There were plenty of people who believed in Odin. Should all of these be considered alongside hypotheses that are built on decades of prior scientific research? Do we need to consider The Flying Spaghetti Monster? If I make up something about a Great Cosmic Booger that spread life throughout the galaxy, does that need to be considered as well?

There's plenty of creation stories out there (http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/CS/CSIndex.html) but they are just stories. They are attempts to explain the unknown by primitive peoples with no means of systematic learning, and in most cases no means of even writing. Yours is no better than any of the others, and not a single one of them should be considered a worthy substitute for scientific knowledge.

Lastly, science is not taught as an enemy of or alternative to religion. Science is taught as science. Science is a method by which we can learn about our universe. It is the best method we have. Plain and simple. Science has no agenda aside from finding the truth. It is always the religious who have a problem with science when scientific knowledge inevitably encroaches on sacred dogma. What's this thread about? The religious bitching about science. What's going on right here? You're bitching about science.

But I'm obviously trying to teach a pig to sing here, so I'm giving up. If somebody else wants to take over, they may.

This nutball has things bass-ackwards.

So they can turn science into a religion.

How do you have a converstion with a flat earther?

Ya don't! :)

Bad Zombie! :spank:

But ZW always posts truth!

:hide:

:loveya: Havocmom!

chasing bullshit lawsuits they have exactly zero chance to win. I hope she gets a lot of her RW friends to donate so that even more RW cash disappears down this particular black hole.

If buttercups buzz'd after the bee,
If boats were on land, churches on sea,
If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows,
And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse,
If the mamas sold their babies
To the gypsies for half a crown;
If summer were spring and the other way round,
Then all the world would be upside down.


Tradition has it that when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown (1781) the British played this tune. There is some debate as to whether that is myth or fact.

http://www.contemplator.com/england/worldtur.html

Except that me problem is with another 'scientific' theory you secular humanists have pushed off on all of us...

Gravity.

Yes, gravity.

It is everywhere.

It is pernicious.

You worship it's very existence. You claim that without it, life would not exist. You say we are all affected by it in every aspect of our being.

You are all members of a cult.

It is in my home, my place of worship, my workplace, our schools; it's in the Halls Of Congress, the Supreme Court, and even in the White House.

I reject the teachings of those of you that push your so-called 'theories' on the rest of us non-believers.

And as soon as I prove that Sir Isaac Newton was a false prophet, I'll own your asses.

So...if a school gets government money...she doesn't want them to teach science either?

At the heart of this that's what she is really trying to do...

Will she be going after school-based Geology sites next? Biology? Paleontology? Anthropology? Archeology? Etc.. (list is long)

and if she wins with the websites with that argument, it's not a great leap to go after the in-class education...

since the school (university) uses government money period.... as do all public schools

She's calling science a religion

Teaching science a violation of church and state? Scary thought.

On edit: I looked at the article and the lawsuit disputes a page on the website that says that religion and evolution can coexist in harmony. That is an interesting question. I personally think that that is bullshit, but a person of faith can believe anything they want.

--imm

I work in the administration of the museums in UC Berkeley which are all world class research museums. That's the Museum of Paleontology in the article and they have a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton set up in the lobby. I can see it from our offices. We also do the administrative services for the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and the Jepson Herbaria and quite a few Research Stations around the world

http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?_adv_prop=image&fr=moz2&va=tyrannosaurus+rex+uc+berkeley&sz=all

I wonder how the woman rationalizes that skeleton!

Their sour disposition was due to the fact that they could not reach their pee pee. LOL

Viruses evolve so much faster than the rest of the flora and fauna on our planet. Virologists observe viral evolution and plan vaccines accordingly.


I can see Berkeley from my house! :hi: (I also work there part time.) :-)

:hi: :thumbsup:

Anything they can't pull things outta their asses to refute is the Devil's work.

Frankly, I don't think cheney is old enough to have come up with half the shit they blame on him.

From the original link:

At issue is one page, out of 840 on the Web site, that says Darwin's theory and religion can co-exist. The page - titled "Misconception: 'Evolution and Religion are Incompatible' " - also features a drawing of a smiling scientist holding a skull and shaking hands with a smiling cleric holding a book with a cross on it.

Caldwell says UC's government-funded assertion contradicts a religious belief that evolution and religion are incompatible and amounts to a state position on religious doctrine.

If the description of that webpage is accurate, it seems to me that it represents an endorsement of religion -- and thus an unacceptable intrusion of religion into the public sphere.

Some people may be fine with encouraging clerics (whether smiling or not) to tack their archaic religious notions onto contemporary scientific theories, but I'm not one of them.

I get very nervous when I seen anyone proclaiming that evolution and religion are compatible. It seems a lot like Republicans sliding their tax cuts into the stimulus bill without actually taking responsibility by voting for it, but then claiming credit for the parts they like.

I prefer my evolution straight, thank you very much, and I believe that trying to retro-engineer gods or souls back into it can only hold it back and muddy its premises.

So, yes, by all means the Supreme Court should rule against that webpage. It has no business endorsing religion -- and apparently specifically Christianity -- on the site of a public university.

of religion as much as an attempt to propose that faith and science aren't mutually exclusive. Not all religions are anti-evolution.

I know quite a few scientists who are also religious although I don't know of any who are fundamentalists.

In spite of the fight against having 'In God We Trust' on money I see no benefit or detriment to either side whether those words are there or not. I'm not interested in the fight nor in the words themselves. No one is going to change their mind of the issue of religion or non religion.

And what does this woman think she's going to win with this lawsuit? The worst that will happen is they'll take the reference to religion out of the website.

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/misconceps/IVAandreligion.shtml

I understand what you're saying about the potential for religion to dilute evolution, but I don't think it follows that making the observation that not all religions see evolution as incompatible with their own belief qualifies as an endorsement of religion.

"In science, only natural causes are used to explain natural phenomena, while religion deals with beliefs that are beyond the natural world."

This is basic Cartesian dualism -- the idea that there's a world of matter, which is the domain of science, and a world of spirit, which is the domain of religion.

There were problems with Cartesian dualism from the start. It was kind of a split the baby in half move -- an attempt to resolve the conflict between science and religion by assigning them to separate and distinct spheres. Or, perhaps more accurately, an attempt to preserve a large area of authority and political power for traditional religion at a time when its actual ability to explain the world around us and the conditions of human existence was rapidly shrinking.

That particular compromise never worked very well, and it's only gotten worse -- in large part because both sides claim to be the ultimate authority where life and mind are concerned. For example, a major part of the problem with Darwinism has always been that it represented an encroachment of the "natural world" on territory that religion had confidently assumed for 200 years was its own private domain. The arguments over abortion similarly arise from the fact that the anti-abortionists believe there are things called "souls," which science will never be able to detect or study, but which they feel able to say without a doubt get implanted into each fertilized egg at precisely the moment of conception.

Beyond that, it's quite true that a lot of deeply religious people also believe in evolution. However, I have a strong suspicion that many of them do so because they see evolution as a fundamentally "spiritual" process -- an approach to Teilhard's Omega Point, if you will -- and not because they see the natural world as something separate from their religious beliefs and devoid of spiritual value. But then, such people are not dualists.

But I'd be worried if the courts started trying to keep university faculty from publishing their opinions about science and religion, even if I disagree with them.

It is a scientific theory based on facts, evidence. Jeanne Caldwell is a dangerous idiot and her lawsuit will be ridiculed. Teacher?? Geez.

n/t

Hey, they're getting government funding, therefore it's eroding the church/state barrier.

Can't have it both ways, people.

First they tried to teach creationism which eventually wound up in the USSC. The Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional because it wasn't science and it violated the establishment clause of the 1st amendment.

So....

The assclowns then took the EXACT SAME TEXT they were trying to teach as creationism, and removed the references to Jesus, God, etc. and replaced them with non specific generic references to a deity. They literally just edited a few words and that was it. Then they tried to pass off the edited text as "scientific theory" and called it "Intelligent" Design. I'm not shitting you here. This was the absolute best the Discovery Institute which is a conservative "think" tank, could come up with. Naturally ID was shot down by district court as well.

Now the assclowns are trying to turn the tables and say that actually teaching "science" violates the establishment clause. Just when you think those fuckers can't get any dog-shit dumber, they go and prove you wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_Science_Education_for_All

I'm calling bullshit on her story, (from the OP's article):



She and her husband have a history of this. She probably sought out this site as a major educational resource and looked at everything she could find for an angle to sue. No doubt if she were to be ultimately successful, (which it sounds like she won't be), she'd trumpet her victory over 1 line on 1 of 800 pages on this site as a "Supreme Court validation that evolution is a religious point of view that can't be supported in any way with taxpayer funding".

No doubt her friends at The Discovery Institute are having wet dreams over the advertising possibilities, as well as how that spin would help them at the local school board level.

These people are scheming and dangerous...

has deep pockets. I think they will be blowing a lot of money tilting at windmills. Fine by me.

Darwin was correct - that's why we call it education.


I'm not getting how a website like that violates church and state, since science isn't religion and last I heard Berkeley was a public institution... :think: :wtf:


These folks are so wacky. It's incredible. Do you see anyone challenging mathematicians in this way?

Then again, they just don't get math. Why else would they believe that tax cuts for the top 20% somehow benefit them, personally?

You've got to admit, their antics are entertaining - almost as much as seeing them get slapped down repeatedly in the courts.

I don't know about you guys, but without the religiously insane, my life would be a complete bore.

I can't believe how irrational people are, and I'm in the mental health field! :rofl:

Rather, the lawsuit is about the website's claim that evolution and religion can coexist. So it's not the case (at least with the lawsuit) that she's saying evolution is a religion.

Here's the page in question. I certainly don't see it as an endorsement of religion: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/misconceps/IVAandreligion.shtml

She has no standing to sue; she has proven no damage to herself because of this website; and the claim that "religion and evolution can coexist" is a statement not open to proof.

Not a justiciable issue. Not suitable for a court to examine.


SLAMDUNK for the Defendants!!!!


That's my not so humble legal opinion.

The latest batch of fundies seems unable to comprehend simple things like facts, evidence, testable results. They are acting like it's already the Age of Aquarius & ALL scientists are priests of the new God(dess?) I guess they might be ahead a little?

If everything done at a public university is somehow a function of the government then I'm assuming she wants all public universities immediately cease any religious studies?

Here's a nice big list of books for her to ban. http://www.ucpress.edu/books/RELMAJ.sub.php

By her logic, the publication of those books by a public university is a violation of the separation of church and state. :shrug: