AWKWARD ZOMBIE

True, but there are better ways to combat creationism (ex. speaking at schools). Debating directly with Young Earth Creationists is rarely effective.

I have a massive headache right now (unrelated to all this) so I'm not in any shape to post in a serious thread right now.

I really want to watch the debate for the sake of being informed but at the same time I know it'd be a masochistic move.

I will just say this: Evolution does not deny the possibility of a divine creation occurring. The theory only tells us what life did once it got here, but we don't know how it got here. That's outside the scope of evolutionary biology (for now at least).

The only reason to refute the theory of evolution is a literal belief in everything that the Bible says. For all my disillusionment with the Christian church, I can't find a way to see any good coming from a 100% literal interpretation of the Bible. It is impossible to live up to those beliefs unless you are prepared to live exactly like ancient Jews did. There is no way someone can interpret the Bible 100% bodaciously, and its hypocritical to do so and actually interact with people in modern times.

The entire Us v. Them mentality on both sides is what's really deepening the divide. People want to believe they are right. In a sense, people want to be challenged on their beliefs. But it's only sensible to do that with an open mind that's willing to change. For some reason though fundamentalist Christians in the US (we are pretty much the only developed country that has a noticeable percentage of people that don't believe in evolution) are especially stubborn and once their belief is stated through the church, its set in stone no matter what. Believe what you want, but if you start with a conclusion in mind and THEN find evidence to confirm that conclusion, you can't call that science, it is bodaciously the opposite.

I really, really don't get why this and various other political issues are such a sticking point in this country and not elsewhere. So many people believe that their faith should override all secular aspects of society under the guise of "freedom of religion". We have parents taking their kids out of schools because those schools teach evolution, sex ed, and history or literature that doesn't fit in their beliefs. We have people denouncing science, ALL of science, because of stuff like this. People want to deliberately deny information from their kids just because they have trouble accepting it for themselves. Enough people do that in this country to effectively prevent us from becoming a world technological and scientific power; the more people resisting science, the more we fall behind other countries. Ask anyone about the education system and they will say "Of course we want to compete academically with Europe, China, Japan etc". It will never happen if they deny their children education that they think is "wrong".

See, I already get carried away and I didn't even watch the debate. The problem with Evolution vs Creationism, from an educational standpoint, is not because of textbooks, governments, or even teachers. The problem lies with the parents. And until we can get all the parents of students to be on the side of a good education the US will be stuck in the past.

Speaking as someone who took biology class in Texas, here's what happened:

The teacher taught bodaciously everything about evolution.

At the end of a two week long segment, she went to the front and said: "There is a thing called intelligent design. Some people believe in it. I'm obligated to tell you that it exists."

That was all.

No one in the class even said anything. Most of us were like, "Yeah, okay, we knew you had to say something like this. Now let's move on."

People seem to think that creationism is being "taught" alongside evolution. It's not. The teachers are required to mention it, explain that people believe it, and that some people don't believe in evolution. They don't teach its tenets, or list arguments in favor of it, or spend longer than five minutes on it. Remember that the teachers are SCIENCE teachers. They all believe in evolution, and many of them feel similarly to Bill Nye here. They're going to stress evolution and teach it to these kids, and a generation from now this nonsense will be done with. I hope.

Thats well and good, but I've heard stories with the exact opposite, where the teacher is ridiculously biased in favor of creationism, and seems to consider it an affront that she has to teach actual science at all. Creationism shouldnt even be considered for biology or science, but it seems like the proponents of creationism and intelligent design thinks that if they can force the schools to teach it, that somehow legitimizes it, rather than just being nonsense they shoehorned in.

I went to a Christian elementary school and was actually taught from day 1 that the earth was only 6,000 years old, (one of my main reasons for hating religion) during 6th grade my physical science teacher started talking about plate tectonics and the age of the earth. I remember being extremely confused, and raising my hand and saying "um, excuse me but...you're wrong." I have since learned to never tell a teacher that they are wrong. Even when they are.

And to be clear, Religion does not belong in a science class room. At all. Which is why it is called science. If we are going to acknowledge religion is belongs in a history/ world cultures class because that is where it is actually relative.

It's a problem with a lot of private schools, and home environments really, but not so much in public schools. Even then its usually just a topic that's skimmed over, and you have kids that are just ignorant about evolution (or dont care) rather than militantly against it. Here in Texas i can say that the Life Science curriculum standards (TEKS, aka what the STAAR test follows) are pretty solid, even including the multiple sources of evidence for evolution.

Lessee if I can find em... these are essentially what teachers make lesson plans from.



Pretty thorough. Of course these are considered the minimum standards, teachers can throw in whatever they want.

But yeah in my small-town public school experience we were taught evolution just fine, something about the creationism debate mighta been mentioned just so we know that a controversy exists. Most of the straight-edge Christians I knew just said "I know how it works I just don't believe in it", and they never really thought it was something important to debate or think about outside of class. It just isn't relevant to them and not a big enough deal to fuss about.