I had been under the impression that this issue was dead, buried, and on its way into turning into a fossil, but apparently I was wrong. Recently a school in North Carolina decided they were going to “consider” teaching creationism in science class. Here we go again…
“It’s really a disgrace for the state school board to impose evolution on our students without teaching creationism,” county school board member Jimmy Hobbs said at Tuesday’s meeting. “The law says we can’t have Bibles in schools, but we can have evolution, of the atheists.”
I’m going to try and make this simple, because I think simple language is best suited to these discussions.
First of all, there seems to be this bizarre linkage between “evolution” and “atheism”, as though this is the only subject where science butts heads with the Bible. Take your pick between agricultural theory, anthropology, astronomy, biology, chemistry, they all contradict something in there. Evolution vs creationism is only hanging on like a barnacle because it’s the only one that can’t be directly debunked.
Secondly, you can’t “teach” creationism. There’s nothing to “teach”. What does the lesson plan involve? What could a course on creationism possibly put on its final exam?
- God created everything. []T []F
There is no science in creationism. None whatsoever. Keep in mind here I’m simply defining “science” to mean “evidence found through observation”. There is nothing involved in the concept of creationism (or its bastard cousin Intelligent Design) that is not either a weak refutation of evolution or rooted in the Bible.
By its very nature Creationism cannot be taught as science. The idea that a deity snapped his fingers and poofed everything into being precludes the ability to offer any evidence of it. We can support the theory of evolution by finding more links in the chain between the primordial ooze and all the varied life we have today, but when your theory is “there was nothing then God put stuff here”, unless you have video of things appearing out of nowhere your theory is pretty well sunk.
Creationism isn’t taught because there’s nothing to teach. It isn’t a theory, it’s a lack of a theory. Creationism says “we cannot explain X, therefore Y.” There may be no evidence of Y whatsoever, but that’s not important.
