This report (via Taegan Goddard, but in many other places as well) isn't very satisfying for those who are uncomfortable seeing creationism in schools. The finding that stuck out at me was that a majority of Americans could stomach seeing creationism taught alongside evolution, despite the fact that only a minority of Americans believe in creationism. The paradox here is that those who (rationally enough) reject creationism are equally at odds with science because their (dominant American) belief system is completely relativistic: even if they don't for a second believe God created the world in 6 days and downtime, they're too enlightened to reject others' worldviews outright. And unfortunately, this characteristic makes those who oppose creationism or other religiously-justified nonsense far less rhetorically/politically nimble, even though they have the big scientific artillery on their side.
August 31, 2005
Personally I would love to see creationism taught alongside evolution, ID, and Bob Smith alien genetic engineer. A competent teacher could cover ALL the creationist myths within a week, propose the theory that an alien genetic engineer called "Bob Smith" created the human race, admit that there was no evidence supporting this theory, point out that ID-ers have made it very clear that evolution doesn't explain everything while proposing absolutely no other explanations, and then spend the remainder of the semester on evolution - unfortunately, the last best hope of biologists. It would be an ideal object lesson in the difference between science and not-science. I suppose those who object to this would point out that all of this would happen in a science class, but hey, this is America, demanding that science be taught in science class is for Europeans.
Yeah, obviously that would be ideal, but I'm guessing that's not what the respondents had in mind. (Certainly I would maintain that the Christian creation mythis should be taught in literature class, since they're pretty central to western lit -- but I wouldn't have responded to that particular poll with the majority.)
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