Recently a friend on facebook posted some religious propaganda. I am normally not one to care if someone wants to openly express his or her belief about a particular God or religion. That would be very hypocritical of me considering I study why people believe in religion. I do, however, have a breaking point.

Case in point this is the post my friend made that prompted me to write the next few blogs.

I don't think we should be able to discuss evolution if we can't discuss faith. Evolution is just a theory.
Keep God In Schools!
The cause now has 1,380,040 members and has raised $3,957.
Their mission: Allow teacher's to discuss their faith when a student asks a question regarding said faith.


Those there are fighting words.

My response:

Evolution is not just a theory first off. It is a fact. Changes in gene frequencies over time occur and these changes result in variation among and between species. It is considered a theory because the mechanisms underlying it are constantly being tested and revised, however, evolution itself is a fact.

Someone that thinks that evolution should not be taught because it goes against their beliefs is as ridiculous as when it was illegal to read or teach anything other then the earth being the center of our solar system. If you do not want evolution taught then you should not have your children learn about pretty much most anything from the life sciences (biology, zoology, geology, chemistry, etc.) because most fields rely on evolution to help guide their theories. Also lets not forget about medicine. One of the reasons we can make antibiotics to treat people is because we have an understanding of evolution. Should you force people not to get antibiotics because the scientists who make it use evolutionary theory?

By bringing these counterarguments up I just real want to bring to light some of the many misconceptions people have about evolution. I have no problems with people who believe in God, scientology, Buddhism, whatever. What crosses the line for me is when ones religious agenda get shoved into something that should and must remain objective.

Scientists are not out to bring down religion. In fact only until very recently has science really even begun to research the why’s and how’s of religion, including myself.

The problem between science and faith (which is creationism) is when religion comes along, and it always does, and tries to hinder progression. Evolution is not the first scientific theory to go against the church and/or the bible and it will not be last. It will always eventually become widely accepted.

A very long time ago religious texts were created to help explain events that humans lacked the technology to explain. Eventually some super smart innovator comes along and discovers through observation and a strong desire to learn about the inner workings of the world a new explanation. These innovators could not be satisfied, nor should they be satisfied, through simple explanations such as God did it and therefore too complex for us mere humans to understand. Imagine the type of world we would live in if nobody ever questioned religion and the bible. Actually there is an example of this. It is known as the Dark Ages.

So historically when these innovators came along the church, in order to protect their religious doctrine, prosecuted and forced these innovators to either give up their research or go underground with their work.

The list of those who earned the wrath of the Church reads like a Who's Who of Science: Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Halley, Darwin, Hubble, even Bertrand Russell. The Church has also been on the wrong side of the social sciences for over 1,500 years, actively promoting slavery, anti-Semitism, the torture and murder of women as witches, sexual repression, censorship and the Inquisition, Crusades and other aggressive wars, and capital punishment for misdemeanors.

Eventually an innovator comes along and discovers something that goes against what the bible says (example: Galileo was one of the first scientists to argue for a non earth centered view of the solar system, in which planet revolve around the Sun and not the earth. The bible however tells us in Genesis that the Earth and the Heavens were created for man and as such everything centers around us. Actually knowledge that planets revolved around the Sun emerged as early as 3rd century BC.

1) First the Church tries to crush the “heretical view” through censorship and persecution of scientists. (Galileo under repeated threats of torture, finally renounced his beliefs. He was then placed under house arrest, and not freed even after he went blind)

2) Eventually however science prevails and evidence becomes too obvious to ignore. (It would not be until 1758 before the Church decided to drop the general prohibition of books advocating heliocentrism from the Index of Forbidden Books.

3) Church retracts early objection and then incorporates it into the religion. (Pope Pius VII approved a decree in 1822 by the Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition to allow the printing of heliocentric books in Rome)

The same will ultimately happen in the case of evolution. It took the church roughly 220 years since Galileo to openly accept the theory. And in fact there are some people today who irrational still believe the bible interpretation instead. Furthermore the theory of evolution has only been around for 151 years, give it some time.

Finally let me remind people that Creationism is not science. It can not produce any testable theories? It has no valuable information to offer science? It is illogical, going against the progression of information from so many different fields of research. It breeds narrow mindedness, lacking in intellectual creativity and freedom of discovery. What creationism does do is two things. First, it spends a large amount of time arguing against science, in particular evolution. Regurgitating the same old arguments that have been proved erroneous time and time again. Second, it tries to muddle actual science with the bible. Go to a creationist museum and see a dinosaur with a saddle on it’s back and a human riding it. Or when they use the great flood to attempt to explain the effects of millions of years of erosion of rocks. For what purpose? What can viewing the world like this, so restricted and inaccurately, possible do to progress technology. Scientists would not even begin to understand global warming, without understanding that the earth is older then a laughable 10,000 years.

Which brings me to my very last point I promise. So you want teachers in public schools to teach creationism in schools...what kind of creationism are you referring to?

1) Flat Earth creationism - God created the world with a flat surface 6,000 years ago. All that modern science says about shape, size, and age of the Earth is wrong, and evolution does not occur.

2) Modern geocentrism - God recently created a spherical world, and placed it in the center of the universe. The Sun, planets and everything else in the universe revolve around it. All scientific claims about the age of the Earth are lies; evolution does not occur.

3) Young-Earth Creationism - The belief that the Earth was created by God a few thousand years ago, literally as described in Creation according to Genesis, within the approximate time frame.

4) Old-Earth Creationism - which maintains that the physical universe was created by God, but that the creation event of Genesis is not to be taken strictly literally. This group generally believes that the Universe and the Earth are as described by astronomers and geologists, but that details of the evolutionary theory are questionable.

5) Gap creationism, also called Restitution creationism - the view that life was immediately created on a pre-existing old Earth. This group generally translates Genesis 1:2 as "The earth became without form and void," indicating a destruction of the original creation by some unspecified cataclysm.

6) Day-age creationism - the view that the "six days" of Genesis are not ordinary twenty-four-hour days, but rather much longer periods (for instance, each "day" could be the equivalent of millions of years of modern time).

7) Progressive creationism - the view that species have changed or evolved in a process continuously guided by God, with various ideas as to how the process operates. This accepts most of modern physical science including the age of the Earth, but rejects much of modern biology or looks to it for evidence that evolution by natural selection is incorrect.

8) Intelligent Design movement - "The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as [Darwinian] natural selection." Intelligent design styles itself as a philosophical approach to the origin of information. Ostensibly, intelligent design does not oppose the theory of evolution. However, the leading proponents of intelligent design are Christian theists who vociferously oppose evolution and acknowledge to their constituency their strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that they can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools.

9) Jewish creationism includes a continuum of views about creationism, on aspects including the origin of life and the role of evolution in the formation of species as debated in the creation-evolution controversy.

So which creationism “science” is your group raising money for? I guess that would depend on your particular religious beliefs. You know there is only one type of scientific methods used in all fields of science.

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