Should Creationism be taught in classrooms?

[otseng]

Should Creationism be taught in classrooms (as science)?
More specifically, should it be taught in public schools?
If so, how should it be taught as a science?

[gluadys]

Sidebar, sorry: Has anyone else stopped getting email notifications of threads they're watching? If so, can somebody tell me how to fix that?

I am getting notifications. If you are not, better check with a mod.

[otseng]

As we have said before in this thread, the challenge is to figure out how to teach creation as science, using the methods of science.

Yes, I agree with this. And I think this is what it all boils down to.

Most creationists say they want equal time for creation and evolution in science class.

I would not count myself in that camp. Equal time is not required.

This leaves us with an agreement between evolutionary scientists and creationists - that evolution should be taught in science classes.

I would agree with this.

That leaves for the creationists to prove that creationism is science - Unfortunately, we have yet to see any examples of it being demonstrably true as opposed to evolution.

I do not think the goal is to demonstrate that it is true, but is reasonable and logical.

Is creationism science if they're working outward from an assumption, bending laws as they become unfit for this assumption?

That is why I encourage people not to use the Bible as primary evidence for creationism.

Sidebar, sorry: Has anyone else stopped getting email notifications of threads they're watching? If so, can somebody tell me how to fix that?

It's working for me too. If you want to see which topics you are subscribed to, click on Watched Topics on the top of the index page. To see which subforums you are watching, go to the subforum and look at what it says in the bottom left hand corner. If it says "Stop watching this subforum", then you are subscribed to it. BTW, if you subscribe to both a subforum and a topic, you will get two notifications. They are two separate mods that allows this feature and they don't check the other.

[mrmufin]

Sidebar, sorry: Has anyone else stopped getting email notifications of threads they're watching? If so, can somebody tell me how to fix that?

It's working for me too. If you want to see which topics you are subscribed to, click on Watched Topics on the top of the index page. To see which subforums you are watching, go to the subforum and look at what it says in the bottom left hand corner. If it says "Stop watching this subforum", then you are subscribed to it. BTW, if you subscribe to both a subforum and a topic, you will get two notifications. They are two separate mods that allows this feature and they don't check the other.

I am not subscribed to this subforum, but I am subscribed to this topic and I've not gotten any notifications for this topic in the past few days. I know for sure that did I not receive a notification for your last post, otseng. I can't say with great certainty at what point I stopped receiving notifications, since I generally check the forums before I check my email. (As well, I generally delete DC&R email notifications as soon as I read 'em.)

Are our allegations of not getting notifications consistent with any other data, such as the HTTPD log file, or a dead.letter file (common on some flavors of *nix)? Thus far, I am aware of three instances of users not getting email notes to subscribed threads: mine, Yarr's, and a while back, Icarus. Of those three occassions, all were reported late in the thread. I'm not sure if that helps any; but it's the only trend that I've noticed.

Regards,
mrmufin

[otseng]

I have set up a Notify Test thread. Anyone that wants to test and see if it is working for you, post a message there and subscribe to it, then I'll post a message to trigger a notification.

[mrmufin]

I have set up a Notify Test thread. Anyone that wants to test and see if it is working for you, post a message there and subscribe to it, then I'll post a message to trigger a notification.

After doing a bit of testing on my end, I determined that the problem that I was experiencing a few days ago was an issue with my email provider...

Regards,
mrmufin

[fire_of_Jesus]

jose dont u mean evolutionism shouldnt be taught in class? i believe that the teacher should teach how God created the world and the history according to the biblical history, dont u? i hope u feel this way since u are a christian. why cant we agree on atleast one topic? where soposed to be friends right? but how can that be when we hardly agree on anything?

[Jose]

jose dont u mean evolutionism shouldnt be taught in class? i believe that the teacher should teach how God created the world and the history according to the biblical history, dont u? i hope u feel this way since u are a christian. why cant we agree on atleast one topic? where soposed to be friends right? but how can that be when we hardly agree on anything?

Friends agree on the important stuff--how to treat each other, how to treat other people, how to serve as good stewards of god's creation, etc. These are the real messages of Christianity. One can be a good Christian (in my opinion, a better Christian) if one doesn't fall into the traps set by the fundamentalists. Christian fundamentalism is little different from Islamic fundamentalism, really--both adhere to very strict, self-serving, intolerant dogma. As has been said by non-fundamentalists of both religions, it requires narrow and unrealistic interpretations of scripture to pretend that scripture supports that dogma.

So, biblical history should be taught in schools. Because it is a religious history, however, it must be taught alongside the histories proposed by other religions. Fundamentalists fear that this will undermine their children's belief in their own religion, but to me, this fear is unfounded. If the religion is valuable and true, then learning about other religions merely helps people understand what other people are like. This, in turn, leads to less conflict, greater tolerance, and peaceful acceptance.

Where biblical history should not be taught is in science classes. Why? Well, because the way science works is to gather information from the world, then think about all possible explanations for how that information came to be, then perform tests that can distinguish among those different explanations. Biblical history--i.e. Genesis--has some parts that simply cannot be tested. It also has parts that can be tested, particularly the Flood. There are several Flood threads here, which I tried to consolidate into The Flood As Science. The logic of this thread is pretty simple, really. Let's accept the Flood as a valid scientific hypothesis, or explanation, of some of the things we see in the world. What predictions does this hypothesis make? Are these predictions met? I'd be interested in hearing what you have to say about this thread, and about the information therein.

There's also that idea that the earth is only 6000 years old. This, too, can be tested. What I don't understand is why Young-Earth Creationists (YECs) insist that it must be so. The estimate of age was made hundreds of years ago by Archbishop Ussher, a mere human. He made some assumptions about the "missing years" that the bible doesn't adequately explain, and came up with creation occurring on October 26, 4004 BC. Now, since the bible itself doesn't tell us when creation occurred, and a mere, fallible human has suggested a date that simply cannot be reconciled with a vast amount of physical evidence from god's creation itself, why should we jump up and down and insist that the fallible human got the right answer?

It's the same thing with evolution. The evidence is overwhelming. There are more lines of evidence supporting evolution than there are supporting the theory that the earth is in orbit around the sun.

The bible doesn't mention evolution. It doesn't mention lots of things that we've learned since it was written, and we accept most of those things without question. Pretending that evolution is anti-biblical is unwarranted--and, in fact, most Christians don't pretend this. It's just the fundamentalists. Most people accept the fact that Genesis is metaphorical. It certainly can't be literal, as fundamentalists claim, because it contains logical impossibilities. For example: the Flood destroyed every living thing, except for those sequestered on the Ark. Yet, Noah released a dove, which came back with a living olive leaf from somewhere not on the Ark. If the part about the dove is true, then the part about destroying all living things cannot be, and vice versa. As Rev. Locke has told me, this is one of the bits of evidence that Genesis is a story, and is not meant to be a literal history. It tells us of Man's relationship to God, in a story that anyone can follow. When we're young, we think of it as historical; when we learn more, we can understand the deeper meaning, and set aside the surface-story. It's a very clever literary technique, and accounts for the persistence of the story over the millennia.

So, there's no contradiction between science and the bible unless you choose to ignore the real message of the bible, and insist on reading it like a children's story.

So why not allow biblical history to be taught in science classes alongside the history that science has led us to? Why not bring in Intelligent Design? The simple answer is that a scientific analysis of these "alternatives" shows that they are incorrect, and do not fit with god's creation. I fear that the end result would be to turn people away from Christianity. It is better to treat science and religion separately, as different ways of knowing about the world, than to force religion into the science class and thereby force teachers to prove it wrong.

[Sender]

Should Creationism be taught in classrooms (as science)?
More specifically, should it be taught in public schools?
If so, how should it be taught as a science?

Man, I wish I would have gotten here sooner. I am in a similar debate currently. My debate has 500 post in eight days. I think I would be in on the tail end of this one.

[Jose]

I dunno, upnorthfan. It's good to wake up these threads from time to time. I promise we won't keep saying "we already said that!" After all, it becomes a new conversation when you join it. I might also suggest the thread, How can we teach creationism scientifically?, which is a topic that requires an answer if we think creationism should be taught. There's also a complementary thread, How should evolution be taught differently?, which you might want to weigh in on, if you don't like the way evolution is taught now.

[Thinian]

Here's what I think we should teach in our schools:

• 1. We live in a vast complex universe some of which appears to be very old. But some of which (if Einstein was right) must be very young. The age of a particle relative to the Big Bang is entirely dependent on the speed it has been traveling.
  
  2. According to the very (very) scarce fossil record there has been an evolution of form from simpler creatures to complex creatures. Again the stress here should be on the scarcity of data. There are about 300,000 fossils in the record out of a conservative estimate of 5,000,000,000 species that may have existed. Imagine trying to decide what picture your computer is displaying when only about 1 out of every 100,000 pixels is lit.
  
  3. Modern species are exceptionally complex. There is no danger that one over stresses how complex we are. For all we've learned we still have a very fragmented understanding of how DNA works.
  
  4. There is much code reuse in life from the point of view of genetic information. It is very reasonable to use this observation as a way to categorize life forms. And it is reasonable to describe creatures with lots of similarities at a genetic level as being closely 'related' to one another. But it should be stressed aggressively that this idea of 'closeness' is a very relative term. Recently they succeeded in mapping the chimp DNA and the papers were full of comparisons with humans. 99% of the DNA is the same. If they were talking about the portion of the DNA that is replicated (and I think they were) then that’s about 300,000 base pairs that are different spread over 200,000 sites. Whether this is close enough together to expect that it is reasonable for proto-primate (the common ancestor) to become chimps and humans in the time allotted (I’m not sure how long this is meant to be) is Very much an open question. To answer it with any authority we will need a much better understanding of the exact positions of the ‘Galaxies in Morph Space’ than we have now. It is possible we will never be able to really work this out. It is a very complex problem in information technology. It is akin to asking what are all of the possible combinations of letters that form viable meaningful books over human history when you do not know all of the languages and we can’t agree on what is and isn’t meaningful. In fact it is a great deal more complicated than this. This difficulty should be stressed.
  
  5. The most difficult problem facing an evolutionary theory is NOT where does all of the diversity come from, that’s easy, the problem is where does all of the complexity come from. The second law of thermodynamics is not called a ‘law’ for no reason. The basic forces of this universe seem to actively discourage complexity. The standard evolutionary response is to say that it is a natural result of asymmetric copy combined with natural selection and varying ecological pressures. That works for diversity but it falls short of explaining why any creature should every bother to get more complex. Complexity means two things for a strand of DNA. First it takes you longer to reproduce yourself and second it means you require more energy to do it. Simplicity rules. There are a couple of ways to look at this question:
  A. Why don’t the bacteria wipe us out? They are millions and millions of times more flexible and adaptable than we are. The stock answer to this is that it is not in their interest to do so, we are hosts to them. If that is so, then why do we need immune systems, which are themselves very complex multi-part machines. I don’t mean this point to be an ‘Ah Hah!’ more just a good way to expose the whole issue of complexity verses simplicity and why one can not disregard ‘the second law’ when it comes to life.
  B. How do you put something as flexible as the simple life forms under the right kind of ecological pressure to make it have to resort to complexity to solve the problem of survival. Why not move laterally across the complexity space to find a solution.
  C. OR why not get simpler? No one ever discusses this possibility.
  
  It is vital to stress at this point that observing that we are in fact here and that it seems the biosphere got more complex over time does NOT mean that mutation and natural selection must be the motivating force behind this process. In fact I think it can just as easily be argued that those things discourage order, and that the biosphere has found a number of ingenious ways to prevent mutation and encourage a capacity for adaptation within a species.
  
  The real question is what promotes order? It can be asked of the universe itself. What defined the set of laws that transformed the ‘quantum foam’ into an ordered universe? No one has any idea. Why would life ever bother to form in the first place? And once its there why should it grow into outlandishly complex forms, unless something encourages it to do so?
  
  6. It is worth pointing out that consciousness is the only known force in the universe that does actually promote order. This is readily observable and teachable and no well-taught science class should leave out this point. Science (as well as philosophy and religion) have never produced a good explanation for what it is or how it does what it does. In my humble opinion:eyebrow:, it qualifies as a fundamental force in the universe in that it cannot be reduced or predicted by any of the other four basic forces.
  
  7. Extrapolating up (or out or back or whatever) from consciousness to a purposeful connected God is an exercise that can be left to the world’s churches and does not belong in science. But I freely admit that the above described points leave the door wide open.
  
  Does that make me a creationist?