Science Wins Over Creationism In South Korea 302
ananyo writes "South Korea's government has urged textbook publishers to ignore calls to remove two examples of evolution from high-school textbooks. The move marks a change of heart for the government, which had earlier forwarded a petition from the 'Society for Textbook Revise' to publishers and told them to make their own minds up about the demands. The petition called for details about the evolution of the horse and of the avian ancestor Archaeopteryx to be removed from the books. In May, news emerged that publishers were planning to drop the offending sections, sparking outrage among some scientists. The resulting furor prompted the government to set up an 11-member panel, led by the Korean Academy of Science and Technology. On 5 September, the panel concluded that Archaeopteryx must be included in Korean science textbooks. And, while accepting that the textbooks' explanation of the evolution of the horse was too simplistic, the panel said the entry should be revised rather than removed or replaced with a different example, such as the evolution of whales."
Teach the controversy (Score:5, Funny)
which T-shirt is that? (Score:3)
I don't see any obviously Lord of the Rings images on their website:
http://controversy.wearscience.com/ [wearscience.com]
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Yea, there are as many origin stories as there are civilizations. People who advocate for such things though, only want to teach the common Christian mythos on Creationism though; as anything else is just crazy of course.
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Surely you mean the Silmarillion?
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Applies not only to religion (Score:5, Funny)
Your phone did not pop into existence by command of an almighty Creator. Instead, it evolved in over hundreds of years from insights and incremental improvements from many different people.
Silly Americans to think different(ly) (tm)
Re:Applies not only to religion (Score:5, Funny)
Your phone did not pop into existence by command of an almighty Creator. Instead,
Wrong...
I even know people who claim to have seen Steve Jobs in person. That proves he's real.
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I know people who have claimed to see Jesus in person!
Therefore, I know he is real.
Wait.. what?
Re:Applies not only to religion (Score:4, Funny)
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Perhaps there will be textbooks in 2100 that will even attribute the quote "Steve Jobs is dead" to Nietzsche then?
No, they will describe him as an 88 year old warrior-philosopher.
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An "Andromeda" reference! Glorious! A shame the show was canceled after a season and a half...
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It's a reference to this [slashdot.org]. Truth is stranger than fiction.
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Your phone didn't make itself and crawl out of a pile of parts either... It was intelligently designed. Its evolution was planned.
Re:Applies not only to religion (Score:4, Insightful)
Like it or not, there is not a single high tech product on the market that could be designed from top to bottom by a single man in effective isolation. Most (and usually almost all) of the functionality and design in even the most (apparently) original products is simply inherited from earlier generations of products, even if it's combined in an somewhat novel way on occasion.
woop woop woop (Score:5, Funny)
Christianity (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Christianity (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the Wikipedia page, Christianity came to South Korea in the 17th century. When the more obnoxious form of modern fundamentalist Christianity arrived, with anti-science creationism, I'm not sure. Or maybe that statement is a bit ridiculous, since anti-science creationism is part of the original philosophy. Does anyone have any insight into the history of this form of evangelical Christianity?
I don't know about the history of Christianity specifically in Korea, but I do know that even the term "fundamentalism" as applied to Christianity didn't exist until the early 20th century. (It's derived from The Fundamentals, a series of conservative Christian essays published between 1910 and 1915.) For most of Christian history, the Bible was interpreted metaphorically in areas where a literal interpretation would lead to absurd results. Even St. Augustine, a highly conservative Christian writing in the 4th-5th century, said that Christians should not hold up the faith to ridicule by insisting on a literal interpretation of the Bible: "Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn."
Fundamentalism is not a pre-modern ideology, but a specific reaction to modernity. The same is true of Islamic Wahabbism, which is akin to Christian Fundamentalism in many ways. They think they are "that old time religion" but they are actually nothing of the sort. A medieval Christian or Muslim would have found these ideologies both repulsive and unrecognizable.
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They think they are "that old time religion" but they are actually nothing of the sort.
Everyone wants to turn the clock back to those Good Old Days that never existed.
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I'm turning up the following in search. Many variations in exact wording, due to it being a translation:
"Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances... and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in S
Re:Christianity (Score:5, Informative)
It was a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, that most pushed for the big ban theory, which was advanced science in that day. It was the atheists that were anti-science then, with their now-debunked "Static" theory.
Actually, until 80-90 years ago no one knew that there was anything in the universe beyond our galaxy. (Hubble was the first to show the distances to objects outside our galaxy, before he showed that they were receding; Einstein's "big mistake" was made before we understood the basic nature of the universe.) Lemaître was the first to grok the implications of of an expanding universe. Religionists like to claim that scientists booed him down as a creationist, but the only scientist I have found that did that was Hoyle, who I suspect was just slinging mud in hope of defending his pet continuous-creation theory. (Which, IIRC, he was still clinging to 20 years after the big bang was obvious to everyone else.)
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To say that the "atheists" were "anti-science" in the day because they were skeptical of untested hypothesis with little evidence is ludicrous. That is part of science. The static universe hypothesis came out of Einsteins general relativity equations in the 1910's. It was then tested in the only way possible, by attempting to measure the expansion / contraction of the universe. The hypothesis was found to be flawed when it appeared that the universe was expanding. Then came the big bang theory to explain th
Neil DeGrasse quote instantly came to mind. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Neil DeGrasse quote instantly came to mind. (Score:5, Interesting)
Phillip K. Dick said "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
He thought it was an imperfect answer to a philosophical question, but he said he couldn't define it further.
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The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.
oblig xkcd: http://xkcd.com/54/ [xkcd.com]
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The good thing about God is he exists whether or not you believe in him.
Here's wondering how many other societies thought the same about their own imaginary divinities, who you dismiss as superstitions.
Re:Neil DeGrasse quote instantly came to mind. (Score:5, Insightful)
How so? The age of the universe was 13.7 billion years in 2006, now its 14.6 billion years old.
According to science, the universe has aged 900 million years in just six years.
Details of your statement aside, you have inadvertently alighted on the fundamental difference between science and religion: when new evidence comes in, science is obligated to change their theories to account for it, whereas religion is obligated to deny the evidence in order to preserve their beliefs.
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Funny how this doesn't apply to "Global Warming"
Oh, it certainly does, the experiment is in progress right now as we speak. You can be sure the science textbooks our descendants write will be updated with what we learn in the process.
What remains is whether these textbooks will reference our wisdom or our folly.
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sources ?
I think you just asked for a goatse link.
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I was actually thinking of this xkcd: http://xkcd.com/154/ [xkcd.com]
Re:Neil DeGrasse quote instantly came to mind. (Score:4, Funny)
The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.
Although it sounds like a good soundbite, it is meaningless, as any religious person could say the same about God.
Quite so.
As a more pragmatic approach you could make and compare two lists: one of all the technologies that are based on the findings of science, and another of all the technologies that are based on divine revelation.
"Society for Textbook Revise"? (Score:3)
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I think South Korea's education system may have more pressing problems...
Once they get rid of evolution, grammar's next on the hit list.
Re:"Society for Textbook Revise"? (Score:4, Funny)
Quick- add a section on the evolution of grammar, and watch their heads explode!
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They are very good on literacy in Hangul (highest rate in the world) but apparently Engrish is still causing problems.
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IMBA! (Score:5, Funny)
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That one literally got me laughing out loud at work. lol I would toss you a point if I had one. :-D Thanks for the laugh.
You can't explain that! (Score:3)
evolution of the horse
I'm sorry, but science simply cannot explain how the pegasus (equus aves) and unicorn (equus magicus) arose from the earth pony (equus terra) without intervention from the goddess Faustia.
Whole issue is grossly misunderstood (Score:5, Informative)
No Evolution in Korea?
"What STR did manage to pull off with three textbook publishers was this: STR convinced those publishers that two diagrams in their books -- one about the evolution of horses, and the other about archeopteryx -- and the text accompanying them were scientifically incorrect. Notice the claim here: the claim was not that the diagrams were against creationism. The claim was that the diagrams were scientifically incorrect."
"And you know what? Technically, they were right! The diagram above showing the evolution of horses is horribly outdated, and the pictures no longer comport with the current scientific consensus. The text accompanying archeopteryx said archeopteryx is the middle step between dinosaurs and birds, which is also technically incorrect -- archeopteryx is considered a close relative to the true ancestral birds, not itself a true ancestral bird. So the three textbook companies decided that they would drop the two diagrams in the next edition of their textbooks."
"Pay close attention to what actually happened here. What got dropped was two diagrams and the accompanying texts about evolution that were scientifically incorrect -- not the theory of evolution. It is not possible for the textbook publishers to drop the discussion about the theory of evolution, because that would violate MEST guidelines. Further, not even the decision to drop the two diagrams was final, because MEST still had to approve the new textbooks that the publishers proposed to make."
"But of course, STR nutcases thought they scored a huge victory for creationism, and started trumpeting their "victory." By and large, Korean media yawned -- exactly one national newspaper (and a relatively minor one at that) covered the story, and even that story made it quite clear that all that got dropped were diagrams. But the Nature magazine decided to run with the story, with a sensational headline that read: "South Korea surrenders to creationist demands," and here we are -- Korea is branded as a dumb country that doesn't believe in evolution."
Basically, it didn't become a problem until foreigners misunderstood what happened and trumpeted it as the beginning of creationism in Korea. The Korean government responded not because of creeping creationism but to save face in front of the international community. If anything, this whole misunderstanding may in fact work in favor of creationists in Korea because now it has drawn attention to what had been a fringe, ignored cause from other creationist movements overseas.
Re:don't you know? (Score:5, Interesting)
This might be one of the greatest arguments for the process of evolution, but by the time it becomes convincing to the fundamentalist and die-hard I.D.ers, there may no longer be the need to make that argument as the next generation would be so overwhelmingly against such anti-science.
Re:don't you know? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:don't you know? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't get elected to any national office unless you are religious (this is not a rule, but many surveys even reported here on slashdot show that a majority of people don't trust, and won't vote for, atheists).
You don't have to be religious, you just can't be overtly anti-religious and need to be respectful. That's where many get blowback from, including here.
Re:don't you know? (Score:4, Informative)
Not really, failure to bow before god will lose you an election in most of the country unless your opponent chooses to not publicly attack you on the topic for some reason.
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No, if asked what your religious beliefs are, you may not answer "atheist". Voters won't elect anyone that admits they're an atheist. They don't trust them, because they assume they have no moral code.
Which is funny, since they're the only honest ones in the room.
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I It is what the US was based off of.
Wrong. http://freethought.mbdojo.com/foundingfathers.html [mbdojo.com]
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Not a chance. I don't know if you're an American or live in the States, but my wife and I were camping in Southern Indiana last weekend, and we saw several billboards and signs in front of churches that mentioned Darwin.
Now that the religious Right thinks they have a lock on this country, their efforts to drag science behind their truck and then burn its corpse are only going to get more fervent.
I keep wavering between d
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Sometimes I wish Mexico started at the Mason-Dixon line and Missouri could just be turned into a reservation for what I refer to as the "American Civil Religion"
This is exactly the kind of thinking that leads to the persecution of Jews in Germany and Russia (Soviet Union) and Falun Gong in China and .....
My question is, why do Atheists care about proselytizing their Atheism to others? Why do they care what "religion" says at all? Why are atheists so quick to dehumanize others?
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Only if he really meant it, not as a joke. On the other hand, these [huffingtonpost.com] guys [koreaherald.com] don't seem to be joking, not unlike the old witch hunts.
I don't really care if people believe in unicorns. But then, there isn't an "Office of Unicorn-Based Programs" in the White House. Atheists tend to care i
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This might be one of the greatest arguments for the process of evolution, but by the time it becomes convincing to the fundamentalist and die-hard I.D.ers, there may no longer be the need to make that argument as the next generation would be so overwhelmingly against such anti-science.
So IDers are anti-science because they accept scientific theories but do not accept the notion that God had no hand in creating life which science currently can not explain. One of the many large hurdles with life spontaneously generating lies with amino acids, in order to from protein they all need to be left handed and only 6% right handed can be present for a protein to form. The problem is that when amino acids are generated in nature you end up with equal number of left and right handed ones. There is
Re:don't you know? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Abiogenesis is not equal to evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
Abiogenesis is definitely an unsolved problem - so far. So what? The question of how life got started is logically distinct from how it developed after that start. And evolution addresses that question comprehensively. (Even in the case of the putative examples of 'irreducible complexity' that ID'ers have advanced - e.g. the bacterial flagellum [talkdesign.org], the clotting cascade [pandasthumb.org], or the vertebrate immune system [talkorigins.org].)
(Oh, and progress is actually being made on the abiogenesis front anyway [discovermagazine.com].)
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One of the many large hurdles with life spontaneously generating lies with amino acids, in order to from protein they all need to be left handed and only 6% right handed can be present for a protein to form. The problem is that when amino acids are generated in nature you end up with equal number of left and right handed ones. There is no known natural way separate the left and right handed amino acids to get the concentration of left to 94%, currently the best natural separation method allows for a 68% left handed, these concentrations were found on a meteorite but no proteins were found.
There's no reason to expect early organisms to have the same restrictions on chirality that modern ones do. Nor reason to expect modern organisms to have the same versatility that ancient ones might and probably did have.
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Your question is easy. Origin: Mutation. The ones not having it died. Mutation prevailed.
Tell me, what good does all that reproductive rate do them if we're the ones that are sitting with our fingers on nothing more than a big red button?
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A literal reading of Genesis 1:14-17 explicitly states it:
" And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to
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As an evolutionist, engineer, and religious person, I've always found it easy to reconcile my beliefs. You just have to skip the Christianity/Islam/Hinduism bits, or any other theology that involves explicitly nutty beliefs. Granted, this is not always easy from an epistemology standpoint. There are borderline cases of useful modeling that may not be "true" in our understanding of the universe (e.g. Chi, prana, the holy spirit/ghost, the great spirit, etc.), but had enough descriptive and predictive power t
Re:This fundamentalist applauds loudly (Score:5, Funny)
There are also no "columns of the earth" that are holding up the earth.
Right. Everyone knows it's held up by elephants.
Re:This fundamentalist applauds loudly (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:This fundamentalist applauds loudly (Score:4, Informative)
The people of the day had no idea we live on a globe.
Unless your "day" means before 6th century before the alleged Jesus was born/killed, you're wrong. [wikipedia.org]
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Only these ones didn't. The Greeks and the Egyptians (there are other civilizations in history aside from these) already had the notion that the earth was round. I don't recall who, but they even calculated its circumference to an impressive degree of accuracy.
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Because they're brain-damaged. Or lead by.
Re:This fundamentalist applauds loudly (Score:4, Interesting)
Either you believe in the inerrancy of the bible, or not. I will grant that inerrancy does not necessarily mean that it is literal truth (i.e. a divinely inspired allegory is an allegory, not a historical account). However, this train of thought leads us down a number of difficult paths.
How do we know when a passage is intended to be allegorical? The only external authority has only given this one testament (or two if you want to divide between the new and old (or three if consider the teachings of Mohammad) in any case, each considers their bible to the the first and last word).
Why should such an ambiguous system be used?
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Take a literal look at the two passages below, as reported by two different writers, about what John the Baptist said.
Matthew 3:11: whose sandals I am not fit to carry
Luke 3:15: I am not worthy to tie his sandals.
Obviously they cannot both be right. Is one of our saints lying? Are they remembering as best they can? Is this really ambiguous?
The answer to me is that they original authors were getting acro
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Same thought process here.
If it's not meant to be taken literal then how do you know when it should or should not?
Seems like all the stuff science/history has proven to be false or impossible is NOT meant as literal and all the stuff that has yet or has been proven accurate is supposed to be taken literal; in which case it's just a God of the Gaps argument.
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They're not even just pushing religion into science class anymore. Now they're actually trying to censor information that contradict their dogma. Pathetic.
I think that has been the strategy all along: keep the kids ignorant so they won't abandon the religion.
And since they haven't had much luck getting creationism taught in schools, home-schooling has evolved (no pun) as an alternative means for keeping them ignorant.
Re:"Teach the controversy" my ass. (Score:4, Informative)
Many secular parents have an issue with that.
Homeschooling textbooks cater to the religious crowd so much, that secular parents basically cannot even touch the science books as they will be filled with so much nonsense.
Re:"Teach the controversy" my ass. (Score:5, Informative)
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Name three. Hell, name ONE. (Score:3)
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I think you drank too much coolaid. You've lost touch with reality.
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Let's be sure to elect someone who will do nothing but kowtow to corporate leaders his entire time in office!
It worked perfectly last time. And the time before that.
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Re:Science is (Score:5, Insightful)
Science is man's description of God's creation.
God is men's description of their own ignorance.
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On the first day, Man created God.
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Why on Earth is this even an issue ? ... As I know that I am right and they are wrong.
You answered your own question, they use the same statement.
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>You answered your own question, they use the same statement.
No. They don't use the same statement. Creationism uses false arguments (known as lies) to back up there "claims" on the world. Not an mountain of data is going to convince them about them being wrong on this. Since truth is something they do not care about at all. If it did. Creationism would not exist at all.
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So to have the illusion of absolute c
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Or we could, you know, present both possibilities and let people decide from themselves instead of trying to force one theory or the other down someone's throat. I'd imagine, when presented with the facts, most people would look to science for the answer in this debate, but I don't see the need to force one argument or the other.
So, schools should teach children *everything* we know not to be true, and let them decide for themselves which to believe?
Or only teach them the science plus one powerful group's religious beliefs?
Or, heaven forbid (no pun), we could just teach them the science and leave *everyone's* mythology out of it.
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You can also get to choose to have your brain removed. No there is no option here. You can always ask that tooth fairy and biology of trolls to be taught as science in school class.
Creationism is not an argument. This is an ideology that has only one goal. Destroy science, democracy and progress. Since they find the dark ages to be dream place.
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Because this is about science classrooms? God forbid we "force" science down their throats in a science classroom. Religion has no place in science, and creationism is nothing more than religion wearing a fake mustache and shady hat. I don't expect sunday schools to teach evolution (I'd be thrilled if they did of course) they shouldn't expect my child to sit through a lecture about how "some people think god did it" in science class.
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When you can show me some scientific evidence of creationism, then I'll agree that we can teach it in science classes and let people make up their mind.
As far as I can tell, the evidence for creationism is 'some guy said so in this book' and 'you can't explain that!' (and therefore our idea, which cannot be explained either, must somehow be right)
Oh, 'holes'. Right. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are 'holes' in General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, too. (They make conflicting predictions in conditions we can't yet test, so at least one and probably both are wrong.) But we still teach them in schools, because they are the best theories we have and they cover such a huge range of phenomena with such precision that, whatever the truth turns out to be, it'll still look a hell of a lot like GR and QM.
As Isaac Asimov put it [tufts.edu], "[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was [perfectly] spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
Newton's Laws are wrong, yes... but they are so close to right we still use them every day, and teach them in schools. Hell, NASA still uses plain old Newtonian physics to pilot their space probes, with just a few occasional relativistic fudge factors, because a full GR treatment would be prohibitively complex and add no useful accuracy.
It's the same with evolution. We know that all life is related by common descent, and that life has changed drastically over the course of 3.5 billion years, and that complex structures were built by numerous small tweaks well within the realm of chance [talkorigins.org]. Natural selection has been demonstrated now and over the fossil record.
Evolution is true [amazon.com]. Will there be further clarifications and refinements? Sure. But they won't upend evolution any more than GR and QM could possibly be 'overturned'.
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Yes, let's definitely insist that the ONLY possible explanation that's "scientific" involves pre-existent matter, pre-existent energy and pre-existent natural and physical laws...not to mention the entire "evolutionary process" having NO means to add information. That's clearly more "scientific"...
Basic creationist 'logic':
Everything requires a cause.
Therefore God must exist.
(God doesn't require a cause.)
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Basic evolutionist 'logic':
Evolution is Science! Science is always true!
Science is better than Religion because it can be questioned
(Someone cites a centuries-old fairy tale written by humans as scientific "proof".)
DON'T DO THAT!!! YOU'RE A BIGOT BACKWARDS HILLBILLY IGNORANT FOOL WHO BELIEVES IN MAGIC!
I fixed your typo. For what it was worth, you were mostly correct.
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Bullshit, the most evolutionists claims is 'this' is what we have evidence for now. In the future, we may have to revisit some of the minor points, the major points would already have counter-examples were they wrong. Evolutionists also rather think of Science and Religion as being apples and oranges, comparing them makes little sense. Leave the hillbillies out of it, they probably don't have an opinion.
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"scientific" (which rhymes with "science")
o.O
So the "fic" is silent?
Holy cow, have I been saying it wrong all these years! Why did no one say anything!!
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Christians already have their own class that they can take, it's called going to church on Sunday.
... but you are not obliged to go to church by law.
While you are obliged by law to go to school.
Anyway, in certain countries like Italy, they have Catholic religion course in school. From 6 to 18. They can opt out, since few years now.
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...include examples of devolution.
Here [wikipedia.org] you go! We're through being cool.
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There's also the myth that evolution has an overall direction, for example from single celled life to humans. While humans migh
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Old fairy tales aren't evidence, folks. The bible can't "prove itself". When you come up with a way to turn your "alternative views" into something a little more concrete than "this book is true, cause the funny dressed man in the old building told me so", let me know, cause, like, I'd really love to be Christian. I really would. The problem is that, sans lobotomy, I'll never be