Evolution vs. creationism

Kansas School Board chairman Steve Abrams said the hearings are less about religion than they are about seeking the best possible education for the state's children.

"If students... do not understand the weaknesses of evolutionary theory as well as the strengths, a grave injustice is being done to them," Abrams said.

No, this is a real argument.

If you want to show science's flaws, then explain them to children. Teaching them that it is equal to believe in something that cannot be proven one way or the other is no way to teach them logic.

I did not say teach them as equaly true, though just as creationism is absolutely rediculous (and I believe so) Evolution is yet to be proven as fact.

So IPJ, do you believe in science then ?

What does Shakespeare have to do anything? Your literature teachers tried to teach Shakespeare as an alternate to science?

Shakespeare is part of some cultures heritages, its also fictitous. It doesnt get taught as an alternative to science, but as a reason for it.  Sure science can tell us what happened, and even tell us partially how, but it cant tell us whay, or what it is supposed to mean to us.

We need culture to be taught concurrently with science, at the very least so kids can find some sort of human context to fit the scientifc facts into. So they can think of reason to use science at all.

Without teaching kids who they are, where they come from, what values and customs they inherited from their ancestors and why, then science is meaningless. Teaching shakespeare has such a role in education, not to replace science, but to give it a purpose. Shakespeare is a comparitivley recent aspect of the fiction that builds up culture, mythology such as religous creation stories are an older aspect of our heritage and should be taught, like shakespeare not to replace science, but to give us a reason for caring about science in the first place.

Shakespeare is taught because of the beauty and relevance (even after all this time) of his explorations of the human condition.

"In earlier days people believed that humans were created by god... But modern scientists have come to adopt the theory of evolution because... However, this theory..."

all this crap about how is a 7 year old supposed to understand

What the fuck has Shakespeare got to do with science?

I agree with what you say in the rest of this paragraph. Kids are resilient and absorb all kinds of things and at some stage (I have now noticed the "eventually" in your original post) develop their own opinions. Of course. I was imagining Creationism and Evolution being presented in parallel and the kids being told to compare them in not more than 1000 words and please have the answers in by Friday 

do you have a link where I could read up on creationism in the sense that you mean it? I think I lack some of the knowlegde there.

I just think that everything has its place, why should one be sacraficed for the other. By being taught this range of subjects I think the child will automatically see that everything they are taught is not an absolute.

April 01, 2005

Okay, We Give Up
We feel so ashamed
By The Editors

There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.

In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details.

Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.

Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICBM defense system that can't work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars and imperil national security, you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that's not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science either-so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science. And it will start on April Fools' Day.

Creationism in a christian sense is basically saying that god created everything, and the bible is a history book. They believe the world is 12,000 years old, as they added up all the ages in the bible and came to that figure. They do not believe in dinosaurs. I would love to meet someone who actually did believe in this theory, but I think they generally live in the bible belt in the US of A.

people used to believe these kinds of stories, and that is why they did certain things.

IPJ, absolutely agree, therefore I believe in not FEEDING knowledge to the kids, rather than present it to them and allow them to UNDERSTAND. And I think that is best when they understand is to give a general outline (to a 7 year old) of how it came along:
"In earlier days people believed that humans were created by god... But modern scientists have come to adopt the theory of evolution because... However, this theory..."