[Pelham]

Evidently your ability to think about the subject begins and ends with textbooks. The Epistemology of Textbooks as the Akashic Records.

So if textbooks don’t discuss the arcana of Augustine’s evolutionary view of Creation (they won’t), it can’t be germane to the discussion of the intellectual history of evolution, because, you know, textbooks are the summation of and arbiters of all knowledge.

I’m curious: do you read any serious books outside of textbooks, school assignments?

[Heartlander]

Frankly you are wasting your time and mine - I am not your enemy nor am I trying to score points. I stated that evolution is not taught as you discribed. Here is another example if you decide to read it - https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/opinion/sunday/god-darwin-and-my-college-biology-class.html

And yes, of course I read many books - here are other authors/teachers:

• Hobbes - thoughts can in principle be explained in terms of one thing and one thing only: matter in motion in the brain.

• Dawkins - we are merely lumbering robots doing the bidding of selfish genes created by a blind watchmaker in a universe of blind pitiless indifference without good or evil.

• Rosenberg – we have an illusion that thoughts really are about stuff in the world - we live with the myths that we have purposes that give our actions and lives meaning - and that there is a person “in there” steering our body.

• Provine - no ultimate foundation for ethics exists - no ultimate meaning in life exists – and human free will is nonexistent.

• Pinker - brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth

• Dennett - Darwinism is like “a universal acid; it eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view.

• Ruse - ethics is an illusion created by our genes to deceive us – morality is an adaptation.

• Harris - Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making…. You will do whatever it is you do, and it is meaningless to assert that you could have done otherwise.

• Coyne - You are robots made out of meat - behavior is absolutely determined by the laws of physics… That is the infinite regress and the sort of annoying thing about determinism. It’s turtles all the way down.

  FYI - http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/