bluefugue

Right, but my point is that, if science is by its very nature deleterious to religion, then a case could be made in America that no science can be taught in public schools because it would violate First Amendment religious protection. The sheer usefulness of science has generally caused us to overlook such considerations, I think, with the glaring exception of evolution.

It'd be interesting to see how that would pan out, if the argument were pursued. We might end up with religious-centric private schools and science-centric private schools, while public schools stuck to math and English and tiptoed around the whole matter...

Doubting Didymus

What? Are you implying that evolutionary science is useless? There are a few threads you may have missed on this topic...

Edit: oh! never mind....

[ December 08, 2002: Message edited by: Doubting Didymus ]</p>

Stephen T-B

Devnet wrote: “The doctrine of creationism is a vital one for theism in general and Christianity in particular, and to undermine it is to undermine theism. Creationism is important because, like geocentrism, it places mankind at the centre, the pinnacle, of God's plan.”
That is the crux of the matter and why Creationists consider Evolution to be the work of Satan, and Darwin to be the tool of Satan. They recognise the truth: that Evolutionary Theory is incompatible with their religious beliefs, and should the Theory go unchallenged and be allowed to become a dominant tenet of society, Secularism will triumph (as it is doing in several European countries where Creationists are considered mentally aberrant.)
Religious beliefs are irrational, and Creationists not only embrace that irrationality but celebrate it, which does at least have the virtue of simplifying their lives.
“Thinking” Christians are denied such a luxury because while they need to believe in God and the divinity of Jesus, they are unable to face up to the whole picture of what that entails: ie God being a magician who took six short days to conjure up everything in creation.
The point is, if you can accept a little bit of irrationality (the Virgin Birth, the NT miracles and the Resurrection), why not go all the way, as the Creationists do?
I’ll suggest why not. Belief is not a function of the intellect but a product of a psychological impulse which occurs as readily in the highly intelligent as it does in the really stupid, for whom it presents no problems whatsoever. They aren’t bothered about contradictions and inconsistencies and the sheer improbability of God stopping the Earth from spinning so Joshua had an extra bit of daylight in which to finish off slaughtering an enemy of Israel (for example,) but the thoughtful Christian has a whole lot of stuff to struggle with, and at some point along the way is forced to accept a compromise here and a compromise there.
Accepting Evolution is one of them.

bluefugue

I guess you figured it out, but I didn't mean evolution was a "glaring exception" in terms of usefulness. I meant it was a "glaring exception" in that, unlike most science, it doesn't seem to be tolerated by a lot of Americans.

emotional

Yet even among the hardcore creationists there is a tendency to suspend literalism when the facts are too much to stomach. In my Orthodox Jewish background, I know that the Orthodox Jews are six-day creationists but not geocentrists or flat-earthers, even though a plain reading of the Bible would so lead one to believe.

In the <a href="http://www.ncseweb.org" target="_blank">National Centre for Science Education website</a> there is an interesting article about the continuum of creationist and evolutionist views. On the far end of the creationists, the Flat-Earthers, scientific facts are totally disregarded in favour of what the Bible says; conversely, on the far end of the evolutionists, the Philosophical Materialistic Evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins and William Provine, the facts of science are extrapolated into the realm of metaphysics.

I am among such Philosophical Materialistic Evolutionists. I'm a science-religion contradictionist, a denier of "non-overlapping magisteria".

emotional

Had Genesis been really written or inspired by the Creator of the Universe, this is what it would read like:

<a href="http://www.geocities.com/stmetanat/sci-gen1.htm" target="_blank">http://www.geocities.com/stmetanat/sci-gen1.htm</a>