Posted on 02/17/2011 1:12:35 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
America needs a Plan B, in case God flakes.
President Barack Obama agrees, stressing science’s pivotal role in securing America’s future, and so do the courts, which consistently find the teaching of Creationism in public schools unconstitutional.
But a recent poll found that only 28 percent of public school biology teachers present the theory of evolution as scientific fact — the rest endorse Genesis or teach it alongside other “theories that frankly don’t hold up,” as the President once put it.
If Obama cannot prevent Evangelicals and abetting Republican leaders like Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin from tunneling under the wall of separation between church and state, then America is going to have bigger problems on its hands than outsmarting the Chinese. When enough people are ill-equipped to distinguish between a good idea and a bad one, democracy is compromised.
And if democracy is compromised, well, I think you get the point.
According to an international education test, American 15-year-olds rank 23rd in the world in science and 31st in math. According to a national assessment, less than half of students are proficient in science. It’s no wonder then why so many people reject the theory of evolution: they just don’t understand it.
Take Republican Congressman Jack Kingston on Real Time, for example: “I don’t believe a creature crawled out of the sea and became a human being one day.” Or Sarah Palin in Going Rogue: “I [don’t] believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originate from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea.” Even the flying spaghetti monster on Futurama: “You seriously believe I’m descended from some kind of flightless manicotti?”
Too many Americans have Darwin confused with Pokemon.
To be sure, the stunningly gullible and the helplessly indoctrinated are the victims of a plot. If you want proof of the insincerity of many Biblical literalists, look no further than the so-called Museum of Creation in Kentucky, where there are exhibits of dinosaurs saddled like horses.
Evangelicals once denied the existence of dinosaurs, dismissing them as an atheist’s lie or the devil’s hoax, until they realized that little kids tend to like dinosaurs more than they like Jesus.
It’s cool to deliberately mislead children when you’re saving souls, right?
Evangelicals fear their children learning about evolution because they suspect that such knowledge would serve as the gateway drug to critical thinking and eventually –– gasp –– skepticism.
In a fundamental way, they’re right: Even if science cannot prove negatives like the nonexistence of God, it does provide an alternative framework for understanding the universe that doesn’t require divine inspiration.
That’s not to say that advocates of science cannot also be religious, or that the two are entirely incompatible. Rather, as Obama told a Christian group back in 2006: “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason.”
He went on to say: “Now, I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons. But if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I can’t simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will; I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.”
The inconvenient truth is that many Americans aren’t as responsible about their faith as the President is: they can’t distinguish between the logical and the fantastical. And they don’t seem to mind much, either.
It is a troubling trend in America: a cultural aversion to thinking and a celebration of intellectual mediocrity. In many circles, going with your gut is better than using your brain, ‘common sense’ is code for ‘the first thing that pops into your mind,’ and Sarah Palin is a folk hero.
Which may explain why only 12 percent of Americans insist that evolution should be the only theory of life taught in biology class, even though it’s the only theory accepted by reputable scientists, and even though religious education in public schools is unequivocally in conflict with the Constitution.
Of course, this has not stopped the eager-to-please pragmatists from suggesting: “Why not teach both? Or simply: ‘teach the controversy’ surrounding evolution? Surely there’s no harm in presenting both sides.”
Biologist Richard Dawkins has a good retort: “Why not teach the stork theory of reproduction, too?”
It’s one thing to underfund public education, which America does. It’s quite another to subvert education — to mock and distrust it, as many Evangelicals and Republicans do — when evolution is of the most essential tools for understanding, interpreting and interacting with the world. It underlies the scientific method that underlies our common reality.
No student should be coerced into accepting evolution — people have the freedom to believe whatever they want. But everybody should at least have honest and open access to the theory, even if, in the end, they choose to reject it.
Access to education is America’s only hope for salvation, so to speak.
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Cody Gault is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He may be reached at cgault@cornellsun.com
To say evolution does not teach that we came from something like a fish or pond scum is nothing but a lie.
That's not because - God forbid! - creationism is being taught, it is rather that classroom hours are spent on self-esteem and multicultural and race and gender topics.
Makes no difference. Once you accept random chance as the starting point with mutation and survival of the fittest as the method it's all the same. In fact, sticking to strict rules like reptile first, mammal next, shows an alarming lack of survival ability. Everything interesting is happening at the edges of the herd, not in the middle where everyone is walking along in one anthers' mammal dung.
It takes an alarming lack of faith in survival of the fittest to preach it as the main factor in bringing mankind this far and then being afraid it will go off track if you allow people to hear alternatives. The priesthood of Random Chance is doomed because people now know that those who predicted it would corrupt society were right. It leads to a self-proclaimed nobility telling the masses when their grannies are shovel ready and that their children are inconvenient tissue masses.
Suicide isn't a survival enhancing trait, whether you trace it through pond scum or reptile then mammal. More money for the self-proclaimed nobility is the real issue, not what gets taught. What gets taught is an issue because it drives the Random Chance faithful into a frenzy of resistance to change even though they insist random change is the driving force behind evolution. So, they want more money to ensure that what they teach as critical doesn't actually happen.
I’m mystified why non-believers have such an obsession with believers. If more people believe in creationism, will inflation, unemployment, crime, etc., etc. rise? I can’t recall being taught anything about creationism in school so, like others have pointed out, it’s not like any time is being taken up with religion during classes.
As for the argument that all the scientists that matter believe in evolution, we’re we just told that all the scientists that matter believe in man-made global warming? Forgive me if I’m skeptical.
Finally, doesn’t Dawkins claim that genetic mutations that add information to the genome are caused by natural selection? I read that somewhere but it’s seems too absurd for a scientist to suggest such a thing so I don’t know if it’s an authentic Dawkins stance.
>> I’m mystified why non-believers have such an obsession with believers.
Atheism is a religion and it requires faith — LOTS of faith. (Contrary to what atheists portray, they don’t know everything and they know they don’t know.) We believers shake the atheist faith to its core. So they can’t just let us alone to worship God — they have to try to remove Him from our lives so we don’t constantly remind them of the risk they’re taking that they *might* be wrong.
Of course this is no mystery to the Almighty, since He is the one who put the need for Him in everyone. :-)
Dawkins is (to borrow from the Bible) a fool. (the fool has said in his heart there is no God) And if Dawkins is a fool those who believe in him are fools as well. IMO in the Founding Era men understood that there is no competition between Science and religion..as James Wilson taught from Philly the two are twin sisters.When any tries to say the created (science) is greater than the Creator (religion) they are bound to fail.
Dawkins is (to borrow from the Bible) a fool. (the fool has said in his heart there is no God) And if Dawkins is a fool those who believe in him are fools as well. IMO in the Founding Era men understood that there is no competition between Science and religion..as James Wilson taught from Philly the two are twin sisters.When any tries to say the created (science) is greater than the Creator (religion) they are bound to fail.
As you stated, “I’m mystified why non-believers have such an obsession with believers. “
Answer: The non-believers wish to destroy the faith of the children of the believers.
Answer: The very goal of the government temples of indoctrination ( misnamed “schools”) is to separate children from their parents.
Macro evolution is important in science to **ONLY** ( yes! ONLY) those handful who are actually working in that branch of science. How many could that be? ...At best a few hundred?
The rest of science has **NOTHING** to do with macro evolution in its day to day processes or even in the training it takes to work in one’s field of science.
I have a doctorate in a health field. Honestly, no time whatsoever was spent on evolution in high school, about 1/2 hour on the undergraduate level, and NO TIME AT ALL was given to macro evolution on the graduate school level! NONE!
Geeze! How did my patients manage to live? How did this nation ever manage to invent plastic, develop ICU care, or build the Golden Gate Bridge? /s
The same is true for my husband who has a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and who worked **intimately** with biochemical human processes for an entire career. No time in high school, 1/2 hour in college, and **NO** time whatsoever on the graduate level was devoted to macro evolution.
It leads to a self-proclaimed nobility telling the masses when their grannies are shovel ready and that their children are inconvenient tissue masses.
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Exactly!
The belief system and worldview makes all the difference.
Cody Gault: If Obama cannot prevent Evangelicals and abetting Republican leaders like Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin from tunneling under the wall of separation between church and state, then America is going to have bigger problems on its hands than outsmarting the Chinese. When enough people are ill-equipped to distinguish between a good idea and a bad one, democracy is compromised.If Obama can't prevent that, it'll be almost as if there's a First Amendment -- even for idiotic a-holes like Cody Gault.
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