should creationism be taught in schools?

Evolution doesn't need to be viewed as an alternative to creation. It certainly does not conflict with the idea of creation nor with the idea of a Creator. Nor even with the idea that that Creator is YHWH (for the spelling of that name, read jar's avatar). Though it would conflict with some narrow interpretations of what "creation" must mean, especially those interpretations that make assertions about the physical universe that are contrary to fact.Do you believe that evolution conflicts with the idea of creation? Why? Since you are so absolutely sure, that must mean that you do in fact know of dating methods that support a young earth without using special pleading. Do please present them. If creationists actually some real evidence, why have they kept it hidden all this time? There is an actual creation model? Really? We've been looking for one for decades and trying to get creationists to present one for all that time.Oh please, do present it! And some of that "voluminous evidence in its favour".Why have you never presented it before? You completely missed the point there. For all these decades, the creationist approach has been to create a False Dichotomy (AKA "a 'false dilemma'") which artificially and deceptively claimed that there are two and only two mutually exclusive choices such that disproving one would automatically prove the other. Then all that the creationists would do was to attack their strawman caricature called "the evolution model" and thus claim that their own "creation model" had been proven, all without ever having to present this "creation model" or any evidence for it, or discuss their "model" or in any manner try to support it. Indeed, I have found that the surest way to anger a creationist was to take his claims at face value and try to discuss them with him and try to get him to support them. Incredible how utterly hostile they would become because somebody was trying to take them seriously.No, the point that you missed is that every model put forth must stand on its own merit. Each model must be examined and judged according to the evidence. Just because one model is eliminated does not make another model right; each model must be examined.Therefore, even if you were able to show evolution to be wrong, that would do absolutely nothing to show your "creation model" to be right. Your "creation model" would still need to be examined and tested, just like all the other models. As pointed out by philosopher of science Larry Laudan in his article that Dr. Duane Gish thought was so great, the claims of creationism have indeed been tested and they have been found to be wrong.From "Science at the Bar- Causes for Concern" by Larry Laudan, from Science, Technology and Human Values 7, no. 41 (1982):16-19, reprinted on pages 351-355 of Michael Ruse's But Is It Science. It refers to McLean v. Arkansas, the famous 1981 Creationism trial; my copy of the article provided to me by Dr. Duane Gish:

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At various key points in the Opinion, Creationism is charged with being untestable, dogmatic (and thus non-tentative), and unfalsifiable. All three charges are of dubious merit. For instance, to make the interlinked claims that Creationism is neither falsifiable nor testable is to assert that Creationism makes no empirical assertions whatever. This is surely false. Creationists make a wide range of testable assertions about empirical matters of fact. Thus, as Judge Overton himself grants (apparently without seeing its implications), the creationists say that the earth is of very recent origin (say 6,000 to 20,000 years old); they argue that most of the geological features of the earth's surface are diluvial in character (i.e., products of the postulated worldwide Noachian deluge); they are committed to a large number of factual historical claims with which the Old Testament is replete; they assert the limited variability of species. They are committed to the view that, since animals and man were created at the same time, the human fossil record must be paleontologically co-extensive with the record of lower animals. It is fair to say that no one has shown how to reconcile such claims with the available evidence- evidence which speaks persuasively to a long earth history, among other things.

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In brief, these claims are testable, they have been tested, and they have failed those tests.

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The only reason for rejecting young-earth creationism is because the claims of creationism have been tested and have been found to fail those tests. In other words, that dog won't hunt.But if you are so absolutely sure that there is a real creation model with "voluminous evidence in its favour", then do please present it.Edited by dwise1, : added reference to jar's avatarEdited by dwise1, : corrected typosEdited by dwise1, : removed extraneous sentence fragment at end.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade,
Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made,
Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand.
The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.
Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed,
The truth has left its living word for anyone to read.
So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)

So why are you allowing yourself to be distracted with making false assertions?You claimed to have that rarest of things: an actual creation model.So why don't you just present it?You claim to have a large volume of evidence for that actual creation model.So why don't you just present it?You weren't lying to us, were you? You weren't deliberately practicing a deception, were you? Christians are supposed to serve the "God of Truth". How could the God of Truth, or a god who explicitly personifies himself as "the Truth", possibly be served by lies and deception. I was taught that there is a Christian deity who is served by lies and deception, but what Christian would choose to serve that deity?Unless he were tricked into it by a false theology.So, why don't you simply present that actual creation model and the evidence for that actual creation model.Unless you know already that neither exists. Which brings us directly to the other questions.I believe that the standard Americanism is: "Put up or shut up."
Translated, that means that we're calling your bluff. It's a poker expression.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade,
Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made,
Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand.
The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.
Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed,
The truth has left its living word for anyone to read.
So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)

In the sense of how inclusion of creationism in public schools is usually pushed -- ie, as "balanced treatment" or "equal time" in the science classroom -- then the answer is clearly, "no". Creationism is not science. Creationism is even antithetical to science. And its ID incarnation even more extremely seeks to pervert science. And that's not even considering that creationism is nothing more than a pack of lies and deceptions.The effect of including creationism in the public schools would be that the teacher would need to expose the lies of creationism. While there would be some benefit to such an exercise, it would also take valuable time away from the subject matter -- time that's even more valuable because of the instruction time lost in preparing for the tests mandated by "no child left behind". Any benefit would not be seen if the teacher is not up to the task of exposing creationist lies, plus the "Gish Gallop" approach of creationist materials would lead a competent teacher to spend a lot of time countering them. Besides which, if a competent teacher were to properly counter creationist lies, then creationist students will undoubtedly complain that he's attacking their religion and move to have him disciplined.Still, creationism could serve a useful role in the science classroom. Along with the flat earth, geocentrism, spontaneous generation, Lamarckism, Piltdown and Nebraska Man, and the caloric theory of heat, it could be presented as a discarded idea and, just as with the other discarded ideas, it can be briefly examined and it can be demonstrated why it's discarded. And then the class can move on to learning some science.Edited by dwise1, : Piltdown and Nebraska

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade,
Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made,
Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand.
The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.
Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed,
The truth has left its living word for anyone to read.
So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)

Please, Beretta.You stated that you know of an actual creation model that actually exists.Please, please, please present it.Why do you refuse to present it? Were you lying to us? That is the only logical conclusion we can reach.You also stated that there exists "voluminous evidence" that supports that creation model that you also claim actually exists.Please do present some of that evidence.Why do you refuse to present any of that evidence that you claim exists? Were you lying to us about that as well?For decades, we've been hearing creationists claim to have a creation model and claim to have a large body of evidence for that model that they claim to have. And for decades we've been trying to get creationists to present that model and at least some of that evidence. And in all those decades, creationists have consistently and persistently refused to present either an actual creation model or any of the purported evidence. Instead, they just kept feeding us the same sorry string of creationist lies.Looks like you're no different.But if you think that you are different from the rest, then support your claims and present that creation model and start presenting that evidence.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade,
Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made,
Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand.
The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.
Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed,
The truth has left its living word for anyone to read.
So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)

You simply do not understand creationism, which is an American invention created for a specific purpose. As revealed in a letter by Paul Ellwanger, author of the model bill upon which the 1981 Arkansas and Lousiana "balanced treatment" laws were based, to one of his supporters:

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... -- the idea of killing evolution instead of playing these debating games that we've been playing for nigh over a decade already.

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I've read the text of the Arkansas law. It required that that ever-elusive "creation model" be taught whenever evolution is taught. However, if evolution was not being taught, then there was no requirement for creationism to be taught. So you see, the goal was not to "teach the controversy" nor to push for a "paradigm shift". The goal was to regain what they had lost a decade earlier: to ban evolution from the classroom.Circa 1924, Arkansas was one of four states to pass a "monkey law" which banned the teaching of evolution from the public schools. In that law, if any teacher were to teach evolution -- or even just mention it (as I recall) -- , then that teacher would be fired and have their teaching credential revoked and would be banned for life from teaching. The same anti-evolution movement that had gotten those laws had also pressured textbook publishers to keep evolution out of the books and maintained pressure on local school boards to keep them and their teachers afraid to teach evolution. BTW, the Scopes Trial was an attempt to get a test case of the Tennessee "monkey law" before the US Supreme Court, but that case didn't make it out of the state. The anti-evolution movement and its "monkey laws" kept evolution out of the public schools for over four decades -- they did not nor even ever wanted to change any paradigms nor have any kind of "balanced treatment" nor "equal time" nor teaching any damned controversy; they just wanted to ban evolution that that is what they had.Then after the Soviets launched Sputnik and caught the US unprepared and behind in science, we launched a campaign to close that gap (a lot of political rhetoric at that time was about closing the gaps between our capabilities and the Soviets'; a lot of the comedic dialogue in Stanley Kubrik's "Dr. Strangelove" played on that). Part of that campaign was to upgrade science education which led to rewriting textbooks, including biology textbooks. Especially with the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) series which was finally written by biologist instead of by professional textbook writers. Evolution had only been barred from the high school grades and below, not in the universities, so those scientists and professors wrote what they knew, that evolution is the cornerstone of biology and that nothing in biology makes any sense except in the light of evolution.In 1965, the school district of Little Rock, Arkansas, selected the BSCS series and required its teachers to use it. Please consider the dilemma that those teachers had just been placed into. If they taught using those books, then they would be in violation of the state's "monkey law" and they would lose both their jobs and their profession. But if they refused to use those books as they were required, they would lose their jobs and most likely not be able to teach biology again because those books would be used elsewhere. So Susan Epperson and the Arkansas Education Association filed a lawsuit against the Arkansas "monkey law", it made its way up to the US Supreme Court, and in 1968 Epperson vs Arkansas led to the striking down of the "monkey laws". No law could have a religious reason for barring the teaching of evolution.So the creationists, having lost a valuable tool, created a legalistic deception in order to circumvent the courts. They scrubbed out all overtly religious references in their materials (AKA "playing the game of 'Hide the Bible'"), called it "creation science" (AKA "scientific creationism"), and used it to claim that their opposition to evolution was purely scientific and not the least bit religious. Of course, since they were playing a delicate game of deceiving and manipulating the general public, they couldn't just call for the banning of evolution, but rather made a public show of calling instead of "equal time" and "balanced treatment", while to the church groups they made no bones about their going being to "kill evolution".The 1981 Arkansas law made the mistake of including a definition of their "creation model"; the same mistake was removed from the Lousiana bill just before it was put up for a vote. It said:

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(a) ``Creation-science'' means the scientific evidences for creation and inferences from those scientific evidences. Creation-science includes the scientific evidences and related inferences that indicate:

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1. Sudden creation of the universe, energy, and life from nothing;
2. The insufficiency of mutation and natural selection in bringing about development of all living kinds from a single organism;
3. Changes only within fixed limits of originally created kinds of plants and animals;
4. Separate ancestry for man and apes;
5. Explanation of the earth's geology by catastrophism, including the occurrence of a worldwide flood; and
6. A relatively recent inception of the earth and living kinds.

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Now, a few years earlier, creationist lawyer Wendell Bird had published a short comparison of the "biblical creation model" and of the "scientific creation model" in order to show that they were completely different. Instead they showed that the two are identical, point for point, with the sole exception of superficial cosmetic changes in the wording, AKA "playing 'Hide the Bible'". You may view them on my webpage at No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/cmodel.html, which also gives you the reference for the original article so that you can look it up and verify it for yourself (something that creationists will rarely do).After the 1981 Arkansas law was struck down and "creation science" was recognized by the courts as being religious in nature, the creationists immediately switched tactics and changed their references to "creation science" and "creationism" to "intelligent design" -- in other words, now they were playing the game of "Hide the Creationism".And from what I understand of the Wedge Document, ID's goal is not really to "teach the controversy", but rather it is to eliminate evolution and to pervert science into their own image, effectively killing science as well.You really do need to learn the history of your own side. As Sun Tsu wrote (from Scroll III, "Offensive Strategy"):

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31. Therefore I say: "Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.
32. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal.
33. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril."
(Sun Tzu The Art of War, translation by Samuel B. Griffith, Oxford University Press, 1963)

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The worst situation to be in is to not know yourself. You find yourself in that situation. You need to correct that flaw.But I'm still partial to the statement made around 1990 by the then-Governor of Mississippi, a state traditionally at the bottom of the list in education, in defense and explanation of his aggressive campaign of educational reform:

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We've already tried ignorance, so we know that it doesn't work!

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How long before you learn that ignorance doesn't work?

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade,
Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made,
Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand.
The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.
Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed,
The truth has left its living word for anyone to read.
So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)

But cutting the throat of the public school system is one of their goals. Or rather of the Religious Right.Back in the early 80's and 90's, private investigator and former Pentacostal minister Skipp Porteous (Skipp Porteous - Wikipedia) kept close tabs on Religious Right groups and obtained internal documents. He obtained the Christian Coalition's five-year plan which explicitly included the destruction of public education to be replaced by their own Christian schools. That document named their key weapon for destroying public schools, which was to use school vouchers to rob them of funding.Well, that didn't work out for them, so Bush came up with "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) that would impose stringent testing of public school students in order to identify schools that didn't meet the program's standards, then finish those schools off by cutting their funding.Now, if a school is in trouble, you need to help it correct the problems, not euthanize it. Also, my son's complaint was that the program robbed them of the opportunity to learn; he said that the teachers were so busy preparing their classes for the test that they didn't have any time to teach. And one participant on talk.origins related when NCLB hit his daughter's school. Hers was the only school that would dare to offer programs for disabled students and that caused them to lose funding when their scores weren't high enough.

But "evidence that opposes evolution" is all that creationism is. Creationism has no actual model (despite your lying to us that it does) and it most certainly has no evidence for such a model (despite your lying to us that such evidence is "voluminous"). All that creationism has is "evidence that opposes evolution". And all of it is pure crap.So when you say that you don't want creationism to be taught, just "evidence that opposes evolution", then you are yet again lying to us.For a real-world experience in what happens when "creation science" is taught in the public school classroom, read up on Ray Baird's class in Livermore, California. Fifth-graders. The "public school" creationist materials he used fed them crap and then urged them -- no, insisted emphatically -- to decide then and there between the Creator and godless evolution. That is blatant proselytizing! Some of the students became atheists because of that class, because (as a fellow student stated in the PBS documentary, Creation vs Evolution: Battle in the Classroom (KPBS-TV, aired 7 July 1982):

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Someone that I know has become an atheist because of this class, because the creationist theory was so stupid, he thought. Well, if religion requires me to believe this, then I don't want to have any part of it.

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From No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/Livermore.html:

quote:

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There is more than a little doubt that Baird gave equal time to evolution and creationism.

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"I think it's true he gave more time to evolution," says one parent. "He spent 40% of the time telling the kids why creationism is good and the other 60% telling them why evolution is bad."

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Another parent, whose child observed Baird teaching this subject three years ago, relates that while Baird succeeded in winning some converts to the creationist view, other students, including her own child, were so appalled that they completely rejected religion in their own lives. According to this mother, all the teacher really accomplished was to polarize the class into two camps, the believers and the nonbelievers. (The Independent, 7 January 1981)

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One of the mothers writes:

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The most dangerous information to the scientific creationists was the fact that the gifted students could see how bad the science was and that they were voting evolutionism which was, in the context of the course, the same as voting atheism. Some of the gifted students voted evolutionism because they could see the fallacy of the either-or approach. Some actually, in anger, did give up religious belief.

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Please note that evolution doesn't require anyone to choose between God and atheism. Science doesn't require anyone to choose between God and atheism. Neither science nor evolution state that belief in God is incompatible with accepting science.It is only creationism that teaches that God is incompatible with science. It is only creationism that forces you to choose between science and God (not God, actually, but rather its false theology).We already know what will happen if creationism is taught in the schools. And it's the same thing as teaching "evidence that opposes evolution". And ID is just a more devious's disguised form of creationism.Edited by dwise1, : Added quote from webpage

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade,
Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made,
Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand.
The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.
Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed,
The truth has left its living word for anyone to read.
So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)

What the quotes in question demonstrate is a blatant case of "Hide the Creationism".Remember? First the creationists played "Hide the Bible", but when that was exposed in court for the fraud that it is they switched to the game of "Hide the Creationism". Which was in turn exposed in court for being the fraud that it is.If you want to challenge the "Darwinian aspect of science", then do so. Honestly, please. So far we've only seen it being attempted with lies and deception. If you cannot do it honestly, then please stop. You're only destroying your own cause. Well then close it and start presenting this new "philosophy of science" and explaining how it is supposed to work. That does not follow. If you try to introduce a supernatural intelligence into the equation, then you have indeed strayed from science right in to theology. Whether certain gods exist or not, the natural world still works the way that it works. It is irrelevent whether any of those gods exist or not; the world still works the way in which it works. And that is what science studies.If you disagree and insist that science must include supernaturalistic explanations, AKA "goddidit", then please explain just how such a science is supposed to work.Seriously. That is, after all, what the Wedge Document calls for. What it lays out a decades-long public relations campaign for. To change the fundamental nature of science so that it relies on supernaturalistic explanations. So just exactly how is such a "science" supposed to operate? How is it supposed to function?We need to ask such questions because the answer will be how ID will be teaching our kids about science and about how it's supposed to work. Because the ones we observe are creationists who are trying to oppose the teaching of evolution because of their fundamentalist beliefs. It's the same anti-evolution movement from the 1920's, from the "creation science" fraud, from the "balanced treatment" state laws of the 1980's, which were struck down by the courts when the "creation science" fraud was exposed as being religious in nature, not scientific as they had been lying to the public and to the courts. So they switched their "creation science" game of "Hide the Bible" up to a new game of "Hide the Creationism". True, ID had been developed by a different crowd, but it's still the creationists who have adapted it to their creationist cause and the ID developers, as they reveal in their Wedge Document, are ready and eager to exploit their creationist friends.Oh, and the courts have also exposed ID as the same old religious {euphemism}stuff{/euphemism}.Here's a page of links to court decisions: The Talk.Origins Archive: Debates, Gatherings & Court Decisions
You'd best start reading up to find out what's really what. Nope. Read the decision for Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade,
Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made,
Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand.
The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.
Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed,
The truth has left its living word for anyone to read.
So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)