The mother had it right in her question. "Should I talk to my child's teacher about the prayer", is what she asked. Of course the teacher should not be leading the kids in a lunch prayer, but the mom should go to the teacher first. If the teacher refuses to stop, then go the administration. When Ms. Rogers suggests that the mom go straight to the school to complain, it is a lack of respect for the teacher. She may be young and new and had not thought out the legal consequences of her actions. It is always best to follow the chain of command. As it is, it is also what the Bible says - to go to the person first.

Anyone may pray any prayer they wish, anywhere, silently.
I would hope that states can adopt a moment of silence in schools for the meditation or contemplation of anyones choice and would pray that no one tries to make it something other than simply that. I would hope that this could be followed by a long moment of SCIENCE.

"Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the,"wall of separation of church and state," therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society."
~Thomas Jefferson: Author of the Declaration of Independence; Third president of the United States of America; Co-Framer of the United States Constitution..........

For the protection of the faith shared by an abundance of US citizens, James Madison, Father of Our Constitution, Author of the Bill of Rights, wrote, "Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects? " ~Memorial and Remonstrance~

This issue of prayer in government owned and operated schools shows the need to abolish so-called "public" schools. Education is inherently religious. Children need explicit instruction in their own religion especially before reaching their teen years. They should be shown how religion permeates all aspects of life. Supposedly neutral or secular (defined as not overtly religious) leaves a vacuum that is filled with the assumption in the child's mind that their religion is not important. The way some who are hyper concerned about equality or fear establishing a state church deal with this issue end up giving children (and adults) the message that their religion is similar to going to the bathroom--a shameful activity best done in secret behind closed doors.

A voucher system or a purely private system along with home schooling would solve these conflicts that constantly arise with government schools. Of course, the de facto religion of the United States as well as Europe has been and should be Christianity.

Reply to Achilles
You are free to send your children to the school of your choice. I think it would great if they provided you with vouchers to do so, but the dismantling of our public school system would put this Nation back in the caves in a generation. Your belief exemplifies the very need for the strictest separation of church and state. Your plan would be the greatest imposition by the state on my Christian beliefs.
Blessings, Joseph

"The absolute surest way for creationist to disprove "Darwin's Theory," bring evolution to a grinding halt and impede the advancement of mankind is by homeschooling generations of their children."
~Joseph Cassles~

"May we please have a moment of science, for those poor souls that cannot understand evolution as God's scientific method."
~Joseph Cassles~

Thanks for your critique of my proposal for dealing with conflicts over religion in public education, Joseph. First, I am surprised to hear you say that privatizing education would return us "to the caves." I would respond by saying that continuing with our current government-run educational monopoly is more likely to produce the results that you fear. There are numerous studies that reveal that the quality of government schools at the elementary and secondary level in the United States entered a free fall in 1970 from which they have yet to recover. So, if we continue down the our present path in our educational system, we are committing ourselves to a perpetual decline.

Conversely, private alternatives to the state run educational system have proven to be quite successful. Cities and states that have enacted a voucher system have found that the bulk of students show improvement in their academic performance. These gains are especially notable among minority students. Harvard University has conducted several studies documenting these gains in achievement. Private schools in general outperform public schools and have for some time. See books and articles by sociologist James Coleman that clearly show the superiority of private education across the board. For example, see his *High School Achievement: Public, Catholic and Private Schools Compared* (1982).

Homeschoolers far surpass their peers in public schools. They rank 30-37 percentile points higher than public school students across a broad range of subjects. There is little reason to fear academic or personal failing of those who are home schooled if one cares to take a look at the evidence.

There is no reason to think that religious liberty is threatened by a voucher system or by homeschooling. Perhaps, one might believe that indirectly funding private religious schools will somehow run afoul of the "Establishment Clause" of the First Amendment. Recent court decisions such as Zelman v. Simmons-Harris and Mueller v. Allen confirm that there is no such conflict between a voucher system that includes religious schools and the First Amendment. If you reflect for a moment on the issue, why would students receiving government grants for a college education such as the G.I. Bill violate the First Amendment when recipients pay tuition at Baylor or Notre Dame or BYU? Such concerns seem to be frivolous in light of years of experience with such programs at the college level.

Finally, I do not see how Darwinism could be considered compatible with Christianity or any theistic religion. A central tenet of Christianity views God as Creator and Sovereign who acts rationally and with purpose. Darwinism denies purpose or rationality in nature. This debate supersedes and predates Darwinism. Atomists such as Democritus and Lucretius argued that all of nature is the result of random bumps and movements of atoms falling in a plenum. There is no inherent rhyme or reason to anything. Such an irrationalist view contrasted with the teleology of Plato and Aristotle. Christians must side with the teleologists in order to maintain the doctrine of Providence. How would you reconcile these seemingly contradictory positions? There are other problems as well in trying to harmonize Darwinism with Christianity such as the origin of death and suffering without human free will.

In conclusion, I posted similar comments last night, but they were not posted. I am leaving out links in this post that I included in my original post thinking that the links might have triggered some defense against spam in the Baptist Standard website. In any case, my original comments have still not posted. I would recommend to anyone considering posting comments here to make a copy of their post until they see it on the website or risk having to type out their comments again as I have just done.

There is no such thing as Darwinism. I think you are talking about Evolutionary Sciences of which there are thousands of contributors and Darwin was one. That's a little like referring to modern Astronomy as Galileoism. Creationism, however is religious belief, an element of faith and a theology, not a science. Sounds like a wonderful subject for home schooling. NOT SCIENCE CLASS! The Pope has found evolution to be completely compatible with a monotheistic creator God. That's because his interpretation of scripture is apparently different from yours. Science cannot be held sway by any theological interpretation of scripture. Furthermore there are always those in science that disagree with the mainstream accepted science, but they rarely are honored in the classroom for their adherence to a flat earth position.
St. Augustine wrote that when science runs contrary to the interpretation of scripture, the scripture should be re-examined.

"Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?" ~James Madison: Father of the US Constitution

"May we please have a moment of science, for those poor souls that cannot understand evolution as God's scientific method."
~Ned~

Dear Joseph,
Below are some links that might be helpful to look over in regard to the philosophy of science. I am accepting the views of Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Popper in seeing science as inherently "theory laden," as Popper puts it. I am clearly rejecting the positivist account that I believe you are simply assuming to be true according to your most recent comments. I shall reply to your comments more particularly as soon as I can.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#ProDem

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vienna-circle/#OveDoc

Here is a list of references for the claims that I made above on education:

http://www.schoolchoices.org/roo/academic.htm

http://www.schoolchoices.org/roo/cleveland1.htm

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=130478

http://www.hslda.org/docs/study/comp2001/HomeSchoolAchievement.pdf

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/28/us/supreme-court-school-tuition-supreme-court-5-4-upholds-voucher-system-that-pays.html

Joseph, I hope you have had a chance to look over the articles that I provided links to above. I think that they will make what I am about to say more understandable if you are not familiar with controversies common in philosophy of science that you and I are running into in discussing theories in biology.

In any case, as I said above, I reject the notion that science is value neutral and simply based upon untainted observations of scientists. I also reject the view that one scientific theory builds on another so that over time we have a more complete picture of the universe.

Rather, I agree with Kuhn and Feyerabend that all observable facts are identified and made sense of within a broader conceptual framework or 'paradigm' that includes all sorts of assumptions that may include philosophical, cultural, political, or theological presuppositions. As I said above quoting Karl Popper, all facts are theory-laden.

So, yes, in the case we are discussing and any other discussion of a scientific theory, there are competing paradigms that can be traced to an individual(s) who articulated the theory. We can speak of Keynesian economics in contrast to Marxian economics or Austrian economics or neo-classical economics rather than the science of economics simpliciter. We can speak of Freudian psychoanalysis, behaviorism, evolutionary psychology, existentialist psychology and other schools of thought in the field of psychology rather than the science of psychology simpliciter. We can see the so-called hard sciences are not immune from competing paradigms framing facts differently in light of alternative conceptual analysis. Physics most notably has Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics. They are really conceptually different. The same is the current situation in so-called evolutionary sciences--"When discussing organic evolution the only point of agreement seems to be: "It happened." Thereafter, there is little consensus, which at first sight must seem rather odd. -(Simon Conway Morris, [palaeontologist, Department of Earth Sciences, Cambridge University, UK], "Evolution: Bringing Molecules into the Fold," Cell, Vol. 100, pp.1-11, January 7, 2000, p.11. Or

"If it is true that an influx of doubt and uncertainty actually marks periods of healthy growth in a science, then evolutionary biology is flourishing today as it seldom has flourished in the past. For biologists collectively are less agreed upon the details of evolutionary mechanics than they were a scant decade ago. Superficially, it seems as if we know less about evolution than we did in 1959, the centennial year of Darwin's on the Origin of Species." - Niles Eldredge, "Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1985, p.14[42]

Another problem with simply saying there is evolutionary science and not Darwinianism is that 'evolution' is an ambiguous term. First, other theorists pre-dating Darwin put forward hypotheses about one type of animal morphing into another. Darwin, as I am sure you know, was the first to propose natural selection, which he adapted from economic theory, as the mechanism for the evolutionary process. Second, there are all sorts of philosophical and religious assumptions built into Darwin's theory that were not always part of other evolutionary theories such as naturalism, materialism, reductionism, and randomness (and yes these are philosophical positions since they cannot be falsified by empirical testing). Third, when people speak of 'evolution,' they can refer to very different sorts of things. One source of confusion is when some refer to variation within species as evolution and then slip on the term to refer to one type or kind of organism morphing into a seemingly unrelated kind. There is no question there are variations within species and there is no question that related species can develop or interbreed. It is highly doubtful, however, that new kinds arise from other kinds of organisms.

Now we come to the acid test for any scientific theory, and that is testability or falsifiability as Popper observed. Please consider the following:

"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils...We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study." Stephen Jay Gould "Evolution's Erratic Pace," *Natural History,* May 1977, pp. 12-16.

"[Darwin] was embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn't look the way he predicted it would .... Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin, and knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. ... [W]e have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time." - David M. Raup, "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin 50 (January 1979): 22-23, 24-25.

"But fossil species remain unchanged throughout most of their history and the record fails to contain a single example of a significant transition." David Woodruff, Science, 1980, p. 716.

“The 'Cambrian Explosion' is an evolutionary conundrum. Fossils of animals found in Cambrian rock assessed as 500-600 million years old seem to have appeared suddenly. They have no fossil ancestors, and they have no different body plans to animals existing today.” Scientific American, November, 1992 p:52-59

"Darwin’s prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservation.. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record." (Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p. 48.)

So, Joseph, there is overwhelming clear and convincing evidence that the predictions made by Darwin deduced from his hypothesis of common descent is falsified. As Popper insists, this consideration alone should remove the hypothesis from being considered by scientists. Of course, they do not give up so easily as Phlogiston theorists did not give up so easily after being refuted by Lavoisier's experiments. The anomalies will have to accumulate and strike at the heart of hypothesis in such a way that scientists can no longer ignore them or offer a string of ad hoc hypotheses to account for the refuting evidence. But, as Kuhn observed, in time, a crisis will occur when the dominant paradigm is junked out of necessity. This process is not necessarily rational, nor is it pretty, but science, in practice, is fraught with human frailty. There is certainly good reason to reject the logical positivist's over reliance on science that has become scientism. We must be on guard not to deify a particular scientific theory or exalt science above all other human ways of knowing.