Publicly Funded Schools That Are Allowed to Teach Creationism. | Hacker News Reader

Publicly Funded Schools That Are Allowed to Teach Creationism.

slate.com

24 pointsjoshrotenberg28 comments

A high school in Pensacola, FL, where my girlfriend studied years ago, got sued by the ACLU for forcing students to pray. Teachers defended the practice, arguing that prayer was acceptable because nearly all the students were Christian.

I wonder how those teachers' perspectives will change over time, as America's ethnic and religious demographics change. If a predominantly Muslim public school requires students to pray, will the teachers in Pensacola start citing constitutional concerns?

Teachers defended the practice, arguing that prayer was acceptable because nearly all the students were Christian

And this is a clear illustration of why you should never put minority rights up for majority vote.

^-- This is the most important thing said on this whole topic.

If a predominantly Muslim public school requires students to pray, will the teachers in Pensacola start citing constitutional concerns?

If we reach that terrible point, I suspect we will already be living under the iron hand of Sharia, and no one will dare to speak out lest they be accused of being anti-Islam and punished hard.

Yay, Islamophobia. Forced prayer should be stamped out from public schools. Period. Let's just agree on that without going to extremes like "we'll all be living under Shari'a law!!!!111"

EDIT: In other words, neither myself nor the courts give a flying f* what is popular, the law against religious establishment exists for a reason, and even if every teacher and every student except that ONE GUY supported it, that ONE GUY has a legal right that should be easily defended in court. If it isn't then we should consider that a failure of America and strive to overturn it and commit to doing better in the future.

Not Islamophobia, just a wary eye on those who would chip away at the Christian and Jewish foundations of the nation. Others are welcome, but not to destroy the foundations.

I don't get the opposition against this. There's plenty of Jewish and, especially muslim schools in the US that teach only creationism. Hell, some of them do so to the exclusion of not just biology but all science. They do so, generally, with public funding.

I don't get the position. There can only be one stance as far as I'm concerned. Either teaching kids science including evolution is mandatory and the state goes after anything different (AND checks), or they do none of that.

Those Christian schools referenced here are not a problem : they teach kids science and prepare them well for life, scientifically and otherwise. Compare that to orthodox Jewish schools or sharia-oriented schools.

I hate that nobody ever discusses the real problems. Unlike canon law (which no christians even follow), sharia law is fundamentally sexist and discriminatory, is pro-slavery ("advises against it", but has the most flexible slavery laws known to history. Islam is the only known religion, EVER[1], that allows killing slaves for fun, something not even the Romans dared to do (yes, gladiators were personally compensated, they and their families, and had to agree (to a similar degree as one "agrees" to a job, right. Legally you have a choice. In practice, saying no may have unacceptable consequences, generally the mines or a galley). Only people in the arena that didn't at one point legally chose to be there were criminals convicted to death)). This is being taught, both to small kids and adults. Why isn't it outlawed to teach this, completely ?

My point is: there are far worse things taught in public education to kids than skipping a small part of biology, while keeping science education generally intact (as much as one can reasonably expect from a public school at least). Why is this thing a focus of anyone ? Why is it allowed to teach people to kill other in response to what any American would consider freedom of speech ? To teach people to follow slavery laws and so on. I mean, given that that is not just being done, but growing. I feel that creationism is the least of anyone's religious education problems.

[1] Only law that comes close is from imperial Japan, the honor law, or Kiri-sute gomen, "cut down and walk"

1) Those other religious schools are private and not publicly funded. The US has a separation of church and state, so no tax money should be used to fund a preference to one religion (or any) over another. 2) Evolution is the cornerstone of biology, it is not a small part. If you don't understand how organisms became to be then it's much harder to understand how they work now.

1) Not true : e.g. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2870195/posts

2) Get real, it kind of is. I've studied AI, and studied a lot of evolution to get a better understanding of it's mechanics and, well, let's just say that what's taught in schools is so extremely inaccurate it's not funny (run a genetic algorithm to write a program and you'll see the limitations of evolution for yourself, and you'll understand that it's a learning algorithm that's really only good for one thing, and that just isn't what evolution's trying to do anymore, so it no longer uses that algorithm). The idea of species change through mutation + natural selection is flat-out wrong. What would students miss if they don't know it ? I think it'd be an actual improvement.

As for the idea that originally led to the teaching of evolution theory, that really did happen with the intent to replace God with the state. Now I may not necessarily be pro-God, but compared with the state, the American one, but especially compared to the states that originally pushed evolution, God is a saint.

When reading this thread, I get the distinct impression that's still the intention. Replace God with the state. That is NOT a honorable intention I can find myself in at all. Hell, those kids will be far better off believing God will take care of them than if they believe the state will do that.

This has been happening for a long time, and resulted in the Pastafarian movement: venganza.org

Why is slate doing this? Shouldn't we be teaching every point of view the students are going to encounter objectively instead of censoring "unwanted things"?

No, because anybody who believes in creationism is a completely backward person and incapable of rational, critical thought. Even on the off-chance they somehow come up with something that makes sense on another topic, anything they say is suspect.

So, no, we shouldn't be teaching every point of view, because that'd be stupid.

Similarly, I've flagged this article, because it's just another "ho ho ho look how superior we are to those backwards Southerners yes...."

> anybody who believes in creationism is a completely backward person and incapable of rational, critical thought.

Was that meant to be sarcastic? Because that's rather bigoted. I think that creationism is irrational, but it's a very large jump to say that a person is therefore incapable of critical thought.

My entire post was sarcasm, though reading back through it it is rather dry and non-obvious.

Ah, my bad.

Choosing only to teach actual science in science class doesn't exactly equate to censorship. There are all sorts of non-scientific beliefs that aren't covered in science class. Phrenology isn't part of biology. Continental drift isn't part of geology, but nobody calls those omissions censorship.

In science class, we teach science. Creationism is religion and belongs in religious studies.

If the students themselves or the parents "want" creationism to be taught, they may elect to take a religious studies program.

Also of note, anyone's inability or unwillingness to accept reality doesn't make reality any less real.

"Shouldn't we be teaching 'EVERY' point of view the students are going to encounter...." Why stop at Creationism then? By that logic, there should be classes for Hinduism, Scientology, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, Deepak Chopra, Mormonism... and the list goes on.

So wait ... we will be preventing students from hearing about religious dogma by ... imposing our own dogma ? Wtf ?

The Soviet union, incidentally, did exactly that. Here's one of the initially funny consequences of forcing scientific views on everyone, currently referred to as Lysenkoism [1]. It's only funny until you realize just how many people this affected and what was done to enforce this.

Short list of people executed as direct result of attempts to enforce scientific socialist/soviet dogma:

Isaak Agol

Solomon Levit

Grigorii Levitskii

Georgii Karpechenko

Georgii Nadson

Is scientific dogma really any better than religious dogma ? I would argue that the vast majority of Christian schools teach both creationism and evolution. What is wrong with that ?

Incidentally, like the things it's describing, there's quite a bit of evolution in evolution itself. So much, that what most people were taught as evolution is no longer considered true.

I also love the naivite in this position. As if this pushing of evolution is being done to advance scientific knowledge. It is being done for the same reason that the French revolutionaries did it (another example of people who pushed scientific dogma, another example of that practice ending in mountains of corpses). They did it for a simple reason : to make people follow the state like they follow the church.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

Science class isn't about teaching "points of view", its about teaching science.

There are other contexts in which teaching non-scientific "points of view" that people might encounter could defensibly be taught.

Why is slate doing this?

Views. That's about it.

Science is all about observation and repeatable experiments. When it comes to the question of how we got here, both creationist and evolutionists have the daunting task of convincing us to believe in an extraordinary tale with very little supporting evidence on either side. Either you believe a supreme being willed the world into existence or you believe that fish turned into people -- when you boil them down, both explanations are quite implausible. It seems fair to me that teachers would tell their students "Obviously we weren't around to witness the origin of the planet, but here are a couple theories people have on how we got here..."

> Science is all about observation and repeatable experiments.

True.

> When it comes to the question of how we got here, both creationist and evolutionists have the daunting task of convincing us to believe in an extraordinary tale with very little supporting evidence on either side.

There's vast amounts of supporting evidence for both the general applicability of the mechanisms theorized to underlie the process of evolution, and the specific theories about the ways it worked in bringing about the current diversity of species.

> Either you believe a supreme being willed the world into existence or you believe that fish turned into people -- when you boil them down, both explanations are quite implausible.

Well, except that while creationism does hold that a supreme being willed the world into existence, evolution does not hold that "fish turned into people".

> It seems fair to me that teachers would tell their students "Obviously we weren't around to witness the origin of the planet, but here are a couple theories people have on how we got here..."

Creationism is a "theory" as that word is used in some non-scientific contexts, but it is not, unlike evolution, a "theory" as the term is used in scientific contexts.

In the case of creationism, you're only vapidly correct. There's a geologic record, stratigraphy, and a fossil record that have to be accounted for. Simply put, no variation on creationism can account for all of those things. I don't see how some obvious creation myth, no matter how powerful the backers, can be taught with a straight face, much less in public school.

As far as intelligent design, I'll agree to teaching that, as long as we follow up on the consequences. First, what criteria can I apply on my own to decide whether a biological feature (the vertebrate eye, for example) is irreducibly complex? Second, what does the existence of intelligent design have to say about theology and the various hagiographies? Does ID make monotheism or polytheism more likely for example? Can we determine characteristics of God or gods based on examples of Design?

There are plenty of observational sciences, astronomy and geology and economics among them. What you wrote is hackneyed and untrue.

I think you're reacting to a lot more than what I actually said. The indisputable fact is that you and I weren't there and it's impossible to prove either intelligent design or evolution because neither is reproducible.

>>it's impossible to prove either intelligent design or evolution because neither is reproducible.

I don't even know where to begin..... If that was the case science could tell us nothing about anything that isn't perfectly reproducible.

OK. I admit defeat. But explain the geological column and the fossil record in terms of something other than a specific religion's creation story.

You're focussing too much on reproducibility, as I said.

You would give theories more or less weight as supported by evidence, right.

I will wait here for supporting evidence of creationism. Patiently. For billions of years.

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