did you ever see the episode of "Bullsh!t" about creationism? Didnt i just ready that even the catholic church has now said that that creationism is bunk....Is there anyone here who thinks creationism should be taugh in public schools/???
A point someone made here is that UK schools are required to have religious eductaion classes therefore the creationism/intelligent design arguments can be dealt with there instead of within science lessons
I am fully aware that The Onion is a satirical newspaper and that the article was meant in that vein - the question mark was intended to suggest that there is rather too much truth in it!
I would be cool with it in that context. Ultimatly, IMHO, grade and high school is prep for college. Since Biology is a pretty clear college discipline, I would not want my daughters ability to get into a Biology program compromised by being involved in a program that has a ALMOST TOTAL rejection in the scientific community....Does anyone know of any accepted Scientific data on this topic? I hate to use someone elses words, but the religous element thought at one time that the sun went around the earth and we were the center of the universe...And heretics were condemed for saying otherwise.... I also like the distortion of the word "Theory". When the proponents of Creationism hear the word they think Perry Mason. A Scientific Theory is established when the evidence and observation support scientific statements...
I'm not sure that mandatory religious education classes are relevant to the "intelligent design" controversies. The ID argument concerns the nature of science, the question of what science is and what it should be. Science seeks to understand the universe through the use of reason and through finding regularities in repeatable objective experience. It seeks to generate explanations by restating what is mysterious in terms of what is better known. But by doing that, science is corrosive to traditional religious mythologies and cosmologies. Not only does it routinely contradict them, it implicitly teaches an attitude of skepticism towards all the ancient certainties. Our modern world, and its differences from its medieval ancestor, are in some large part a result of those intellectual changes playing themselves out in history. What the champions of 'intelligent design' theories want to do is redefine what science is. They want to legitimatize the use of pseudo-explanatory principles that by definition are far more mysterious than anything that they are being cited to explain. They want to push the scope of explanatory principles outside the world of human experience and reason into a supernatural realm that they believe private religious revelation gives them privileged access to. This dispute won't be quieted by giving religion equal time in a religion classroom. Churches are already free to teach supernaturalism and creationism to their heart's content. The point here, the fundamental issue, is the right to teach those things not as religion but as science. The battle between modernity and medievalism was never finally concluded. The modern rational secular world didn't totally replace the medieval age of faith, it just papered it over, covered it up and exiled it to the uneducated fringes. The new ideas were adopted by intellectuals and opinion leaders while the old religion-centered worldview still survived out there among the people on the street and in the countryside. And now here in America our democratic ideals have given it a new lease on life and a new voice. In a sense the dispute is about whether science should be defined from the top down by an elite (scientists!), or whether science should be defined from the bottom up by the faithful to be whatever they want it to be. That's why so much of the battle is focused on courtrooms and why so little takes place in scientific journals. "Creation science" talks a good game, but it doesn't really have any scientific successes to point to. But in reality this isn't a dispute among scientists at all, it's an insurgency by those who want to seize the authority of science for their own ends. It's telling that the medieval revival doesn't really want to destroy science. They feel its tremendous cultural prestige themselves, the awe of the white-coats. Instead, they want to seize that authority for themselves, they want science to use its stentorian voice to advance their faith-based worldview rather than the empirical generalizations of the 'atheistic' scientists. That's why it's so tremendously important to them that religion be taught to children in science classrooms.
