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Where do you stand on having Creationism taught in public schools?

This is a hot topic Kristen and has been ever since Madeline Murray O'Haire started the movement to ban prayer in public school.

I am a Christian so I believe Creationism should be taught in school. They are teaching evolution and that cannot be proven by a reasonable doubt either. If schools cannot have both, then they should have neither being taught. It is hard for a child raised in a Christian family to be taught Creationism by their church and their parents and then go to school and have to learn about evolution.

Who are they supposed to believe? They believe that teachers are educated and so they have to be right. Kids are very impressionable and look up to their teachers as educators so how could they steer the kids wrong?

They don't know that most teachers have to follow a format, so to speak, when they teach in public schools. I mean as far as Christianity goes, they are already being taught how to say Happy Holidays instaed of Merry Christmas and even do not allow red and green decorations or paper plates for Christmas parties because of the colors' association with Christmas.

As a Christian, it was hard for me to go through certain college classes when something that was being taught was against God. For instance, in my Physical Geology class when we were taught about how the continents were all together at one point in time and then were separated, no one know how it happened. They could not come up with a driving force to move them. In my belief system, the continents were separated by God and people were scattered on them and given different languages to speak because they were trying to build a tower to get to Heaven.

Scientists, of course, thought this was hogwash and one man came up with the idea of tectonic plates shifting under the earth so they took his word as law.

However, to answer the question about what should be taught in school. I believe both should be taught and the children should be allowed to pick which one they take. It's funny but my kids went to one school and couldn't be taught anything about the Christian belief system but there was no problem teaching them about the Muslim religion. Why is that?

How about teachers? How do Christian teachers feel about teaching evolution and not Creationism and would they be fired if they mentioned Creationism or the Christian religion in public schools?

I believe separation of church and state applies to public schools. If a school district wants to offer a strictly optional elective course on religion and discuss creationism in that framework, fine.

To present it in a science classroom, it would have to be presented as a theory only and then offered side-by-side with every other religions theory of creation. THAT would be a mess.

>I am a Christian so I believe Creationism should be taught in school.

Vance, although I defend your right to teach your children Creationism, it is NOT in the same league as science. You say neither can be proved -- but scientific theory has a preponderance of evidence supporting it. It isn't "just a theory" as it is often used in laymen terms. Most people use the word theory to mean, at best, a hypothesis. Not the same thing, though.

Parents should be able to direct their children's religious education, but schools should not be doing so. Creationism, no matter how it is dressed up, is religious in nature.

When Reagan was president, I remember him saying he wanted to allow school prayer, because "children should be allowed to start their day with prayer." Yeah -- but their day starts long before they are at school. So the PARENTS who wish it should start their day with prayer, before they send their kids off to school.

Creationism, imo, falls into the same category. Teach it to your kids -- after school.

Didn't Darwin retract his own theory at the end of his life?

Ms. A I have been in a heated debate before in the Atheist forum and am not about to do that again here so just let me say that Science has not proven evolution and that is why there is a missing link. Nebraska Man that was discovered decades ago was really a pig and not a man.

If there was Evolution then why did we stop evolving in this form as we are today?

Darwin did retract his theories of evolution but did not become a Christian like people thought. He was a devout Christian until his daughter died and he blamed God and that is when he started saying there was no God and began his theories on evolution.

This thread is not about evolution as of in itself. Its about what we think should be taught in school. We can go round and round on this subject. You can give me your proofs and I can give you mine but the twain shall never meet. Meaning I doubt I will be able to change your mind and you wont be able to change mine.

I can tell you that the Chinese written language is proof of events that were written in the Bible and was created about a thousand years before the Bible was but again, if you are dead set on evolution as I am on Creationism, then there is no sense in going on any further about this touchy subject.

Vance, You know I am Christian, so am not arguaing from that standpoint - but I happen to believe that we have NOT stopped evolving.

Since I am not a geneticist,I have not proof of this; but I happen to feel very strongly that the growing number of autistic and Asperger children in our society IS our next step in evolution. I do not so much think that it is these children do not know how to communicate with us - but that we do not know how to communicate with them.

Now that many of these "children" are growing into adulthood - I imagine we will begin to see drastic strides made in the communication fields between these individuals.

I judst can't help but think of books like "Childhood's End" where the kids became soooo much more intelligent thast the rest of mankind that they could not communicate with them. (Hopefully we will have a better ending though!)

Vance, I must refute your statements about tectonic plates and the scientific method in general.

First of all, you say that one man came up with the idea of tectonic plates moving and scientists took his word as law.
True, Alfred Wegener did put forth the idea that continents move after his study of the coastlines of South America and Africa and their matching rock types, fossils, plants and glacial deposits, but his theory was rejected by the scientific community for many years.

Finally as many more scientists began to study Wegener's ideas, and new technologies like satellite mapping, SONAR and deep seismology revealed more and more about the plates and their movement, the validity of Wegener's ideas and the force that moves the plates became clearer and clearer until there was no question that the continents do move and continue to do so.

That is how science works. Someone has an idea and does experiments to test the idea. Then other scientists repeat those experiments to see if they hold true, and then they devise different experiments to shed more light on the idea until all aspects of the truth of that idea are clear. And since science is ongoing, the conclusions you learned years ago in school may have been revised many times since, the way plate tectonic theory has been.

If the idea had no validity the other scientists could not get the same results and their experments to prove the idea would fail, so the idea would be shown to be wrong. There have been several instances of this in the recent past; cold fusion and human cloning are 2 subjects that got a lot of press when they were first put forth, but nobody was able to repeat those experiments and they were proven not only wrong, but fraudulent.

That is the big difference between science and religion. Science MUST be testable and is based on proven facts; religion is based on faith in the unknowable.

Faith is good, so is science. It is good for children to learn about both, but I don't think that faith should be confused with science, or that Creationism be taught as a science.

Like I said this is becoming a lose - lose argument for everyone involved. You go ahead and believe your myths as law and I will do the same.

The point I amtrying to get across is that I feel that children should have a choice on which belief system they want to learn about at least by the 7th or 8th grade.

And there's nothing wrong with the parent exposing the child to alternative points of view... or enrolling the child in a school where this teory is taught as a primary viewpoint. But public school is not the place to teach religious perspectives as part of a required course of study.