Six out of ten Kansas school board members think kids should be taught pseudoscience as if it were real science.
TOPEKA, Kansas (AP) — At the risk of re-igniting the same heated nationwide debate it sparked six years ago, the Kansas Board of Education approved new public school science standards Tuesday that cast doubt on the theory of evolution.
The 6-4 vote was a victory for “intelligent design” advocates who helped draft the standards. Intelligent design holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power.
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All six of those who voted for the standards were Republicans. Two Republicans and two Democrats voted against them.
“This is a sad day. We’re becoming a laughingstock of not only the nation, but of the world, and I hate that,” said board member Janet Waugh, a Kansas City Democrat.
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In addition, the board rewrote the definition of science, so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena.
This must be great news, not just for the ID movement, but for astrology as well!
Astrology would be considered a scientific theory if judged by the same criteria used by a well-known advocate of Intelligent Design to justify his claim that ID is science, a landmark US trial heard on Tuesday.
Under cross examination, ID proponent Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, admitted his definition of “theory” was so broad it would also include astrology.
Which is funny, because as Phil Plait explains…
Astrology is far more of a science than ID is! Astrology makes predictions, and can be falsified. In fact, astrology’s predictions always fail, and it has been falsified repeatedly. I’m not saying astrology is science (and I am saying it’s wrong), just that astrology has some characteristics of science. That’s why people call it a pseudoscience.
ID is not science at all. It is argument from incredulity and argument from ignorance, pure and simple; trying to find things that are not yet explained by evolution and saying “a designer must have done it”. That’s foolish; science tends to fill such gaps. Eventually they narrow down to nothing. ID’s toehold over such a gap is tenuous indeed.