Teach the controversy: Difference between revisions
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Revision as of 19:05, 12 March 2012
Teach the controversy is a political movement started by the Discovery Institute that aims to convince public schools and local Boards of Education in the United States to discuss the "non-scientific problems" religionists have found with the theory of evolution. Of course, when it comes to evolution, there isn't actually a "controversy" at all. It exists only in the minds of intelligent design proponents and creationists.
For years creationists have tried to have creationism taught in science classes. When the Supreme Court ruled that teaching creationism was unconstitutional, creationists pushed to have creationism taught alongside evolution in the name of balance and fairness, claiming evolution and the textbooks are biased. The truth is the science class is biased, it only teaches SCIENCE. There is a major flaw of the process that creationists want to teach creationism. If any subject wants to be taught here is the process it has to go through:
Scientific procedure
First you make an observation and create a hypothesis. Second, you must experiment and repeat it constantly. Next, it must be submitted for peer review. Third, you revise your claim. Fourth, you retest it to resubmit it with a 10% chance of being published. If it is published, other scientists become vultures. The scientists (hoping to disprove) analyze your results for years, seeing if they get inconsistent results. After many years, and many trials, the scientific community may accept it. Then finally, it becomes a theory.
A theory is made of facts. It’s is an analysis of how reality works, but every theory has holes in it and no theory is complete. That’s why science must remain objective. For example, expanding planet theory addresses some compelling points which plate tectonics does not adequately account for. But it also calls for assumptions that can’t be justified, it’s refuted by definite observations that are only supportive of plate tectonics, and it can’t explain everything that tectonics does. But remember also that the man who first proposed the theory of plate tectonics was ridiculed for it until the day he died, though his theory has since gained universal acceptance.
Creationist procedure
For creationism, all that has to be done is the following: Read the Bible Claim God said it. Believe it. Then that settles it. Hypothesis proven. Directly inserted in the school curriculum and taught as fact and all other explanations are false.
No branch of creationism has ever met even one of the criteria required of a theory. They can’t because science demands both accuracy and accountability. So there has to be a way to detect and correct any errors in a given explanation, and determine for certain whether it’s wrong in whole or in part, or whether any of it is true to any degree at all.
Reality
Surely the problem seems obvious with that from a logical and an intellectual standpoint. The creationist process is the exact opposite of fair. Evolution and many other scientific theories have to go through a long and rigorous path, but the creationists get to jump in front just because it is different? That is absurd, and by all means, the least fair.
One main reason why teaching creationism is a bad thing, not just because it is untrue. In response, creationists try to paint evolution as a theory "in crisis." the truth about evolution is there is no controversy what-so-ever in the scientific community about it. The creationists just want it to appear that there is a major controversy to the theory of evolution, but the truth is that there is none at all. There are four times more history writers who deny the Holocaust than scientists approve of creationism.
Bad education
By allowing creationism to slide into the science rooms, we are not just failing to teach our children, we are teaching them the wrong thing, and that is a major problem. The last thing that is wrong about teaching creationism is that is shameful to let the children decide, that is an awful idea. You are foregoing your intellect in favor of fanaticism and things that are not supported by any shred of evidence, and you are not just raising a nation that is utterly ignorant about science, but why would you let the children decide? Do you let your children decide on when to go to bed? Do you let your kids decide on when to drink beer? No, you are the adult, you are supposed to be educated enough to think and to use reason and make a fair judgment that is not based on fanaticism or anything like that. You owe it to the kids to not teach them that and to decide for them what I reasonable and what is not. To teach them creationism and things like that, you are utterly failing them.
Intelligent design
When all attempts failed, they tried to push for the teaching of another theory, like Intelligent Design, which is another form of creationism just trying to dance around the Supreme Court ruling that creationism violates the establishment of religion. The problem is there is no other scientific theory alternate to evolution. Creationists only ever had a few hypotheses, and all of them were utterly refuted; although they’ll never accept that. They’re still trying to revive old arguments that have been already proven wrong at least a century ago, such as Paley's Watch argument and First Cause. Evolution with natural selection is the only explanation of biodiversity with either evidentiary support or scientific validity. There has only ever been one alternative theory against it, and it was an earlier version of evolution: Lamarckism.
Going beyond "Teach the Controversy"
If you allow creationism to be taught alongside evolution in biology classes, then you can go further. Imagine if schools started teaching our future doctors faith healing, dowsing, exorcisms, and such? How about instead of teaching astronomy, schools teach astrology as an authentic alternative. How about schools teaching the earth is flat and is the center of the universe? Alchemy taught alongside chemistry and pharmacology alongside neuroscience. In mathematics, pi is no longer 3.14, it is just 3 (as said in 1 Kings 7:23-26) [1]
See also
