The Minority Report at the Kansas Hearings

The MSM, as usual, gets it wrong about the Minority Report at the Kansas Hearings. This just in from Angus Menuge, Ph.D., DCA, Author of Agents Under Fire (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), Professor of Philosophy, Associate Director of The Cranach Institute, Concordia University Wisconsin in Mequon, WI. He has been testifying at the hearings:

The minority report was prepared to make some very minor criticisms of the currently proposed Kansas science standards as regarding the teaching of scientific origins.

The report has been widely misrepresented as a Bible/Science issue, an attempt to inject religion in the public schools etc.

None of this is true. As can be seen by actually reading the minority report, the proposals are simply:

(1) to allow evidence for and against the neo-Darwinian account of evolution to be presented;

(2) *not* to mandate, but to allow a teacher to present an alternative theory if they think it is sufficiently well supported;

(3) to eliminate language that commits Kansas to embracing methodological naturalism, which means that the only evidence that can ever be presented is that evidence that favors the idea that the apparent design in nature is an illusion, and so prevent neo-Darwinism's central claim from being criticized, regardless of the evidence;

(4) to prevent Kansas from teaching in such a way that it favors non-theistic religions over theistic religions in its presentation of evidence, thereby violating the constitutionally required neutrality of the state, as further explained in the No Child Left Behind Act and the National Assessment Governing Board statements that require education to be "secular" (in the strict sense of neither favoring nor disfavoring any religion) and "neutral and non-ideological" in the sense of not advocating a single perspective on a controversial issue.

You can read the proposals for yourself.

Thank you, Dr. Menuge!