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Author Topic:   should creationism be taught in schools?
subbie
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Posts: 3509
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Message 242 of 301 (436116)
11-24-2007 1:51 PM
Reply to: Message 233 by Beretta
11-24-2007 11:45 AM


Right, but for the wrong reasons
Kids need to know why evolution is accepted and that it happens to be the consensus -for the moment -but they also need to know why it is not necessarily the truth and why some don't accept it despite the general acceptance.It's called a paradigm shift....
I agree with much of this, although for reasons that I suspect are quite different from yours.
Kids do need to know why evolution is accepted. It's accepted because it presents a unified, coherent explanation for what we see in the history of life on the planet, and it has withstood 150 years of challenges. It makes predictions that can be and have been confirmed repeatedly. There is no evidence that is inconsistent with the ToE including the details that our investigation of natural history on Earth has disclosed to date.
All of this, of course, also shows why science rejected creationism/ID. Creationism does not present a unified theory. It is an ad hoc collection of misguided objections to what the ToE says, or more often, what cdesign proponentists claim that the ToE says. It was once the predominant paradigm for investigating natural history, but science abandoned it more than 150 years ago after Darwin developed a superior theory that explains more evidence. Creationism makes no predictions that can be empirically verified. There is abundant evidence found in the history of life that is inconsistent with every different version of creationism/ID that anyone has proffered.
I also have no problem with kids being told that it's not necessarily the truth. In fact, kids need to be told that nothing in science is necessarily the truth. The list of scientific theories that have been nearly universally accepted as being accurate that were later supplanted is long and celebrated. No scientist would ever claim that the ToE has been established as absolute truth that will stand for all time.
I also think it's important for kids to understand why some don't accept it. The history of science is replete with examples where people let their faith get in the way of the evidence and refused to accept scientific theories because they (apparently) conflicted with some mythology or other. The fact that this is still happening is probably an important lesson for kids to learn. Science is, after all, a human activity. Scientists are in many ways no different from real people. As individuals, they can be swayed by the same kinds of prejudices and blind spots as anyone else. That illustrates the importance of the self-checking procedures that science has developed; peer review and reproducibility.
As far as the reasons for it not being accepted now being due to paradigm shift, you're off by a century and a half and you're one paradigm shift behind. The paradigm shift occurred when science abandoned creationism in favor of evolution. The fact that microscopic percentage of scientists of a particular religious persuasion have not caught up with that shift should not be taken as evidence that a new shift is taking place. All of the reasons why science abandoned creationism 150 years ago are still as valid as they were then, plus a few thousand more examples have been added.

Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin
We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

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 Message 233 by Beretta, posted 11-24-2007 11:45 AM Beretta has not replied

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