njlauren
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quote:
ORIGINAL: DesideriScuri
quote:
ORIGINAL: MsMJAY
They are not dumb. Abstinence is a philosophy based mostly in religious belief. Religion teaches you that by faith you have to believe something even if all the evidence says otherwise. This is what my Christianity teaches, its what my Bible says and it is what most people of faith adhere to.
Science teaches that verifiable outcomes cannot be rejected. As a person who loves and believes in science I realize now that if science and religion merge, neither one of them make sense.
Until I participated in this discussion I honestly could not figure out what the big deal was with teaching creationism in science class. I figured it couldn't hurt to allow it. This discussion changed my view on that. When you promote faith as science some people get to the point where they cannot tell the difference........ And they are not just different, they are polar opposites.
Do they have a complete timeline of the Evolutionary process yet? Or, are there still gaps, and assumptions involved? If it's not complete, then, it's not settled science, is it? When I was in college, the dominant theory on how a muscle contracts was explained as the "Sliding Filament Theory." It was explained that it wasn't completely known to be true, but that most people believed it was. If you can only "believe" it to be true, then it brings in some elements of faith, doesn't it? Faith and science can not co-exist, as science knows while faith doesn't.
I'm not opposed to teaching Evolution in schools. I'm also not opposed to exposing kids to Creationism or Intelligent Design as possible "other" explanations. We don't know exactly what happened at this time. And, it should be taught in that manner.
You are wrong about evolution, and the argument you are giving is how the creationists and such go about promoting their cause. In a nutshell, they argue because evolution has holes in it, gaps, that the entire thing isn't fully understood (which any scientist would tell you is true), then somehow that makes the whole idea that organisms evolved from lower creatures wrong, and that is silly. If a mechanism is not fully understood, that doesn't mean the results are not understood. With evolutionary theory, the broad outlines of it have been proven time and again, its predictions when evidence is examined has been proven time and again. The fundies used to harp on 'missing links', like between creatures in the sea moving onto land.......evolution said such animals must have existed, and predicted what they would look like , and guess what? Fairly recently, they have found fossils of the 'missing link', and it matched almost perfectly what evolution says. Human evolution likewise has been proven out, with DNA they are finding more and more that Homo Sapien (us, modern man) has strong shared DNA with the remains of early men. They just extracted the genome from a neanderthal man, and what it shows is that they have a lot of the same traits as us. On the other hand, unlike religion, science also is willing to change things as evidence works towards a new understanding. For example, it used to be thought that neanderthal man died out when cro magnon man showed up, now evidence is there that they interbred. Likewise, when man split off from chimps (which DNA evidence is saying is almost certainly true), there was interbreeding between the proto humans and the chimps for quite a while, and there is evidence to back this up.
Creationism and intelligent design are the same thing, and they basically take as a fundamental truth that there had to be an intelligent designer of life, that things couldn't evolve into what we see today, and that what the Bible said is fundamentally true, that there was God (intelligent designer is just to give it a veneer of not being religious), and it operates totally to prove that is true. The problem is that is flawed, it is not science, because science does not set out to prove something true, it sets out to test a hypothesis or theory to see if it is true, and if not, how does it fail, and what does that say? Among other things, science is not going around gathering evidence that proves something is right while ignoring that which doesn't fit, which is what ID and creationism do. The reason evolution has holes is because science acknowledges those holes, and no one in science says evolution (or any theory) is complete, the holes and questions in science are considered more valuable than what we know, wereas in ID and creationism questions and holes are considered evil since they don't acknowledge 'the truth'. ID and creationism also rely on hypothesese to back up their main point, which science would never allow. One of the main ideas backing ID/creationism is irreducible complexity, the idea that things like intelligence or man's eyes could not happen by random evolution, that it had to be designed, it was too complex; the problem is that irreducible complexity is a hypothesis (not a theory, a hypothesis), in that there is no proof of such claims. More importantly, when the ID idiots tried citing examples, like the eye, or a certain type of flagella that ended up being something else, scientists were able to show, via the fossil record, how those things evolved and could have evolved. The problem with creationism and ID is that their fundamental truth lies in the Biblical account in genesis, and their 'science' is cherry picking things that show how evolution 'cannot explain it', while they have zero proof that ID or creationism itself is true. Showing holes in a theory doesn't make another theory true; for a theory to work, you have to show evidence that it explains things, rather than the other thing does not explain it. When the big bang theory was proposed, it didn't win out because of holes in continuous creation theory, it won out because evidence massed that only the big bang could explain. With ID, they say that evolution cannot explain human intelligence, yet they also cannot come up with one shred of evidence, real proof, that it only could happen via God or a creator. Plate tectonic theory was controversial well into the 1960's, yet geologists and geophysicists amassed evidence, piece by piece, and made predictions on what they would find before it was found, that turned out to be right smack on, that proved it was true. ID has yet to make any predictions on things, they haven't predicted that hypothetically, when we examine the genome of animals, that we will find something that works like X,Y and Z, that if that is found evolution could not do that; but ID makes no predictions, because it cannot, and its whole reason is to show evolution is false, rather than showing it is true, and that is not science. Put it this way, even in front of the most conservative judges out there, every one of them has declared ID to be religious belief, not science, and thus cannot be taught as science.
I think ID and creationism should be taught, but I think they should be taught as what they are, religious belief, and they would need to be taught showing why they are not science, why judges rule the way they do, they need to be dissected on a fundamental basis and show how their claims have no backing, no proof, and that the claims they have made have been demolished by facts and evidence. Only problem is, the fundies would go apeshit if it were taught that why, they would be whining how the school was 'destroying' the kids religious beliefs, because that is what ID is, religion, whereas evolution, while not complete, have tons of evidence backing it up, including thousands of predictions that when evidence was found, in the field and in the lab, were dead spot on, whereas there isn't one shred of evidence that Yahweh created the earth in 6 days exactly the way it is today, and there are billions of pieces of evidence that say that is impossible.
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RE: End ABSTINANCE "education"! ( Since it'... - 
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