Arkansas Act 590 Research Paper

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Recommended: The influence of religion on science

The Arkansas Act 590 is an act that requires balanced treatment of creation-science and evolution-science in public schools, in order to protect academic freedom by providing the student a choice. (State of Arkansas 1981). If one was to look deeper into the Arkansas Act, they would find that not only was it set to protect academic freedom, but also established to guarantee freedom of belief and speech, as well as to prevent the establishment of religion. During a legal case, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenged the Act by trying to define the status of creation-science. They did not agree that creation-science was a genuine science. Due to this belief, they seeked to remove the teaching of creation-science from public schools, and label it not as a science. …show more content…

During these times, Scientists try to define what a science is and how it should be observed. Some philosophers even created a set of criteria to judge if a so called science could be considered genuine. Creation-science lacked in many of the already set criteria, due to the nature of the creation; that is, the world was already created, and could not be created again in order to test it. Hence, creation-science did not actually fit what the current definition of science was. The ACLU believed that creation-science was nothing more than a religion. A religion formed from taking the Bible literally. This created a controversy within the Act, because the act also stated that it was created to prevent the establishment of religion. With the claim that creation-science is is not science at all but religion, the Act would disagree with itself. The two issues with creation-science were its inability to be proved as a genuine-science, and its appearance of a

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