The suggested separation between church and state in contemporary America is not what the framers of our constitution and our country had in mind as they wrote the words “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” After deconstructing the words, the most insignificant adjective “an,” tells us that the framers wanted to restrain Congress from installing any one religion as the official religion of the state. Those immortal words say nothing about religion informing congress or society on policy, education, or progress. I maintain that the first amendment’s establishment clause regarding religion was to protect citizens’ free exercise of religion from state interests and not to protect state interests from religion. So while the idea of separation between church and state is aged, it is also radically inaccurate and a misinterpretation of the first amendment. In fact the assumed existence and enactment of such a radical ideal has caused a violation of the ninth amendment as well which states, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” I ascertain that restriction in education against material because of its source, intelligent design’s (ID) link to creationism in this case, is a violation of the first amendment’s free speech clause and further misinterpretation of the first amendment to exclude material because of its arguably religious source is a violation of the ninth amendment. For these reasons in this document I am going to assess popular evolutionary theory versus the ID argument to expose both as religious worldviews that should be taught not in science class but...
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In cases having to do with constitutionality, the issue of the separation of church and state arises with marked frequency. This battle, which has raged since the nation?s founding, touches the very heart of the United States public, and pits two of the country's most important influences of public opinion against one another. Although some material containing religious content has found its way into many of the nation's public schools, its inclusion stems from its contextual and historical importance, which is heavily supported by material evidence and documentation. It often results from a teacher?s own decision, rather than from a decision handed down from above by a higher power. The proposal of the Dover Area School District to include instruction of intelligent design in biology classes violates the United States Constitution by promoting an excessive religious presence in public schools.
The concept of creationism has a strong religious history and very deep religious overtones, and the constitutionality of teaching the subject in a public school immediately was questioned. Called to preside over the resulting legal case was U.S. District Judge William Overton. Thu...
“Life has no meaning. Jesus gives our life meaning, we must accept him to give meaning to our life. It futile to ask about the meaning of life when you are the answer.”
Justice Felix Frankfurter stated in his opinion in McCollum v. Board of Education, "We have staked the very existence of our country on the faith that complete separation between the state and religion is best for the state and best for religion. If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, good fences make good neighbors." (Moore 1) For the last century in America and ideological war has been fought in our legislatures, courts, and schools. Some parts of the fundamentalist Christian movement have tried repeatedly to prevent the teaching of the Darwinian theory of evolution in public schools because they see it as a threat to their religious beliefs. Darwin's theory posits that species evolve over eons of time, changing in ancestor-descendant relationships from one species to another. This is often perceived as standing in direct conflict with the Bible account of the creation of the world as told in Genesis, which states that the world is only a few millennia old and that god created man and all of the species of animals in a single epoch. The latest battle in this conflict is over the theory of Intelligent Design (ID). Robert Weitzel states that "IDers maintain that life is too complex to have developed solely by evolutionary mechanisms. They believe this complexity could only have been engineered by an intelligent designer. Strategically, they refrain from identifying the nature of the designer. This tactic is designed to give their notion of creation a patina of scientific credibility and protection from First Amendment challenges" (1). Intelligent Design advocates have pushed forward on many fronts to try and introduce it into school curricula all over the country and they are meeting with a measure of success and a good deal of popular support. While the ID movement enjoys wide support from the populace, especially in traditionally conservative areas, it is imperative that the teaching of Intelligent Design is kept out of public school curricula because of the separation that must be maintained between religion and state.
Wellman, Jack. "Teaching Intelligent Design Is Not a Separation of Church and State." Gale Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Elm4you, 2012. Web. 12 Nov. 2013.
environments. Evolution is the idea that while organisms exhibit certain traits, they are not fixed and are able to be altered through progressive adaptation. Adaptation occurs through the passing of traits from an organism pa...
After reading the preceding two sentences, we can come to the conclusion that the creation - evolution debate is really a matter of faith, either there is a Creator or there is no Creator. However, at the same time the main battle of the debate is over what is taught in our public schools. This creates a problem, particularly for creationists, because separation of church and state keeps religious criticism to evolutionary theory away from the classroom. The Kansas Board of Education decision to eliminate evolution and the Big Bang Theory from statewide tests reflects the resulting pressure on school officials to chose between what many have come to view as two mutu...
Who or what really is our greatest of great ancestors? Most major religions and early groups of people have an answer to this common question. The Greek myths declare that only Geia (the Earth) and a great sea of Chaos were in the beginning, and in a soap opera fashion the gods eventually came forth, who eventually created humans (Bierlein 47-8). The Chippewa/Algonquin Native Americans believe that the great Earth Mother had two sons, a good one and a bad one that ended up creating the plants, animals, and humans (61).
Since the time that teaching evolution in public schools was banned as heresy and taboo for contradicting the Bible, most public school systems today take an opposite approach in which creationism is seldom ta...
Today many scientists would have people to believe that evolution is the only reasonable explanation of the universe. Scientists, like Stephen Hawking, claim that they have proved that evolution is the correct answer to the origins of life and the universe, yet evolution is still a theory. This problem occurs because evolution is not the only answer. In fact, the creation theory offers a more feasible answer to the origins of the universe than the evolution theory does. Creation has the backings of the Bible, an extraordinarily credible book; where evolution provides a theory with many holes in it.
There was a Dutchman named Hugo DeVries who found something interesting one day. He found a flower that had mutated. All of the Evolutionists went crazy over this and thought that this was their big breakthrough as to how life evolved. But scientists refute this claim because they can find no incident where a mutation is good. Every mutation that they have come across has hurt or damaged the organism. They describe a process called natural selection.
The theory of evolution, as set forth by Charles Darwin in 1859, stated that all plant and animal life evolved over long periods of time from simple to more complicated forms through mutation and adaptation. He also taught that only the fittest of each species would survive. He further postulated that the first living cell evolved in a "warm warm little pond" and that it took billions of years for the present diversity of living things to evolve. At the time, it was thought that the few "missing links" in the fossil record would be soon filled.(Darwin, 1927 ). Today, however, there is today a considerable body of scientific evidence that refutes this entire theory.
Monastersky, Richard. (2004). Society Disowns Paper Attacking Darwinism. The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 51, Iss. 5, A.16.
There is a major controversy brewing in the educational field today. Scientist, teachers, professors, and many others are debating where the world and its habitats originally came from. This is the debate of Intelligent Design (ID) and Evolution. The main debating question of many scholars being, "Is the universe self-contained or does it require something beyond itself to explain its existence and internal function?".
Religious parents of students involved in the trial that occurred in Dover, Pennsylvania concerning Intelligent Design being taught in public schools, were concerned, that through evolution, God was being pushed out of the picture and their children would no longer firmly believe in their religion. Scientists used this, as well as their own opinion of the matter, to come to the conclusion that intelligent design does in fact violate the separation of church and state, and they also said that it was religion in disguise. Some scientists went as far to say that the goal of intelligent design is to “re-Christianize” society. But, the fallacy in the scientists’ decision is found through the fact that Darwin’s theory of evolution is, in all actuality just a theory, not a law. Coming off of that, other theories, such as intelligent design, should have the opportunity to be taught in schools to allow students to have a chance to form their own opinion of the matter. No one is trying to disprove Darwin, but trying to allow room for other theories other than evolution. If you drop something, and it falls upward instead of to the ground, you are going to try to find a way to explain why it fell upward, but you are not going to completely throw the theory of gravity out the window. The same instance is being used in this