Ohio ID Network boss Roddy Bullock claims:
Kansas (of all places) became the first state to officially impose on public school students an atheistic definition of science
This is either false or meaningless. The Kansas standards do not promote atheism, and if that is the sense of the term, then this is false.
If, on the other hand, the claim is that the Kansas standards do not include references to any gods, then the same criticism could be applied to the definition of any topic taught in public schools. The reading standards explain that "'Reads' is broadly defined and includes receptive communication. Receptive communication is the processing of a message mediated
through one or more of the senses." No god involved. Those horrible, horrible, godless reading standards!
- Log in to post comments
How dare they! I'm going to petition the KBOE to change the reading standards. Kansas kids need to know about intelligent mediation, the kind of receptive communication that is not mediated through the senses. Teach the controversy!
Even if one accepts Bullock's false premise that limiting science to natural explanations is equivalent to promoting atheism, his statement is still false.
The science curriculum standards in Massachusetts, adpoted in October 2006, have already defined science as being limited to natural explanations:
What Bullock fails to acknowledge is that it was the Discovery Institute and the Intelligent Design Network that forced these definitions of science to become more explicit. After all, they are the ones who have been trying to alter the definition of science and wrongly asserting that science can be used investigate non-natural (aka supernatural) explanations.
Some creationists have complained that Kansas' science standards define science as a method for exploring the physical world and developing natural explanations for what they see. This they call atheistic. It is not. It is non-theistic and the only possible way science *can* proceed.
Creationists point to many states whose science standards do *not* define science in this way, implying that "atheists" in Kansas have forced their godless definition of science into the standards. In fact, we can thank creationists for making it necessary for Kansas (and I believe more than a dozen other states where they've pushed to teach creationism) to more clearly define science as a naturalistic enterprise. The attemps of IDers and YECs to change the definition of science to include supernatural explanations have forced those states to strengthen their definitions of science as a method that deals only with nature and natural explanations.
So thanks, DI and AiG!
The whole article is a bunch of Bullock.