Friday, April 14, 2006

Evolution and faith in schools?

From a Christian worldview, the evolution and schools debate is pretty easy to describe.
- Since we now know that evolution is a theory, but not a science (science can produce evidence, test for repeatability, and answer for conflicting evidence), evolution should simply be taught as a theory -- rather than an unchallengable truth. Scientists usually agree that theories should be taught as theories..
- Evolutionary theorists should also be identified by that title, and not as "scientists" in school literature. Why mislead teachers and children?
- Textbooks should be updated to remove the false evolutionary claims that have stacked up and been propogated for decades, despite evidence to the contrary (e.g. "Piltdown man," and "tails and gills during the early weeks of human gestation")
- Textbooks and curriculums should simply acknowledge that there is no true "evolutionary" path demonstrated for any animal, of any kind. Instead, simply explain the scientific evidence that there is a "sudden appearance" in the fossil record of complete, finished species - and no fossil evolutionary trail of how one "kind" mutated into another. Cats have always been cats; slugs, slugs; birds, birds; reptiles, reptiles, etc.
- Have the public debate acknowledge "irreducible complexity," that the "simple cell" is actually a high-tech factory of complexity; and that no molecular biologist today actually believes a cell could come into being by chance - without the equally complex building blocks of amino acids and proteins...which need cells to produce them. A scientist would ask, "how could you generate the first cell, if you need that cell to produce the components that combine to make it?"
- Why censor experts and textbooks that disagree with evolution? We don't censor magazines and internet sites in school libraries, and yet we censor intelligent arguments about evolution...

In the end, evolution in schools isn't really about what Christians think the Bible says about it - none of the problems with evolution that I noted above require belief in God - it just points out that evolution is faulty science (actually not really "science" at all, by definition).
Let's call evolution what it really is: theory - or better yet, faith...believing in something that you can't see or prove. At least in that, evolution has a lot in common with Christianity...

What do you believe?

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