Creationism taught in science classes in British schools.
13 09 08 - 06:09 How times change. This is the first paragraph of an article from only two years ago:“The Royal Society yesterday issued a strongly worded attack on the teaching of creationism as a leading scientist compared it to the theory that babies are brought by storks.
The warning from Britain’s leading scientific academy comes amid increasing concern over the attempts by religious fundamentalists to challenge the theory of evolution in schools and colleges by teaching the idea that a god created the world, as if that were a scientific theory.”
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Yet on September 12 2008, the same Royal Society has apparantly entirely changed its tune.
“Creationism should be taught in science classes as a legitimate point of view, according to the Royal Society, putting the august science body on a collision course with the Government.
The Rev Michael Reiss, a biologist and its director of education, said it was self-defeating to dismiss as wrong or misguided the 10 per cent of pupils who believed in the literal account of God creating the Universe and all living things as related in the Bible or Koran. It would be better, he said, to treat creationism as a world view.”
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Creationism is about belief. And what many people fail to understand about science is that belief, faith, and dogmatism have no place in good science. Simple minded folk think science is just another form of belief like any other. They are wrong. Science is supposed to depend upon looking at evidence in as unbiased a manner as is humanly possible, and coming to an observation based upon that evidence.
This is the key reason why there is no place for religious belief in a science classroom.
However science itself is under threat from the increase in religious belief, accompanied by a drop in the ability of the secular public to understand the importance of evidence as opposed to faith. Even those who claim to be atheists are falling more and more for the argument that one should not challenge or offend the relgious. As Richard Dawkins says, teachers are frightened by political correctness into avoiding challenging the religious beliefs of pupils who hold that God created all living things or that the world is around six thousand years old.
The non-religious are often really more religious than they care to admit. Humanism relies to a great extent on unsubstantiated liberal dogmatism. And this respect for multiculturalism results in allowing the intolerant religious people ever more power in society, until they are on top, and those who wish to dissent from Creationism are treated with medieval brutality as a theocracy is imposed. I forsee the return of the death penalty for questioning the Creationist position. When things get to this stage in Europe the indications are that Christianity will not be to blame, since Islam is on a sharp ascendent. The Qu’ran does not go into any detail about the creation process, and there are many Muslims who agree with Darwinist explanations of evolution, but unfortunately the Muslim Creationists are the majority of their faith in Europe.
We seem doomed to have science ruined by the notion that ancient texts and modern priests can have as much weight to dictate essential facts about the world as can the scientific processes of induction and deduction, experimentation and observation. It is a strong sign of humanity’s decline that we are falling back into superstition and failing to even understand the difference between faith and independent thought.
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