Should Creationism be Taught in Schools?

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Another thing wrong with this argument is that evolution does not always lead to improvement and higher complexity. An organism is either well suited to its environment or it’s not. Some organisms have even evolved too many complexities, called over-specialization, and have gone extinct as a result. Evolution is merely an autonomous system that is driven by variation and environmental/natural selection.

“Evolution as a whole seems to explain variation of life, but it doesn’t explain where the first living thing came from!” Yes that’s absolutely true. Evolution does not explain where living things originated. It’s not supposed to. Evolution explains how living organisms have changed over the course of time. The origins of life on Earth from non-life are in a separate field of study called Abiogenesis. Abiogenesis is still merely a hypothesis and has not yet reached the status of a scientific theory such as evolution has. It could have started from self-replicating RNA, or amino acids, or proteins, or Yahweh, or Allah, or Zeus, or Panspermia, or aliens. We do not have the evidence yet to say how life originally started. Scientists have been on the search for evidence to show how life began.
The fact that Abiogenesis is a separate field of study than Evolution should incline creationists to be more amenable to having evolution taught in schools. In fact, this was one of the main arguments of the plaintiffs in the aforementioned Kansas Board of Education hearings used in order to justify the teaching of evolution in the science curriculum. Mr. Irigonegaray stated in his closing statement, “Draft 2 accurately represents science as neutral in respect to the nature of spiritual reality.” (7) This means that science is not on a mission...

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...they want people to do is allow them to cheat and give them a shortcut around this rigorous process. That would be very bad scientific policy and would be even worse in terms of educational policy.

Education policy does not allow for this cheating in any of its other curriculums. Let’s say I believed that 2+2=5. I have every right to believe that. I can teach that to my children at home. No matter what others think. However, the one thing I can’t do is put it into a math curriculum. Should a teacher say that if you want you can believe a triangle has four sides or that 2+2=5? Should an English teach say that if you want you can say the phrase “I brang my books to class.” instead of “I brought my books to class.”? These ideas seem preposterous to us, yet many are willing to allow religious privilege to take precedence over educational policy in the case of science.

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