Ok, so here's the deal... I was talking to this friend of mine who has 3 kids the same age as 2 of mine (a set of girl/boy twins the same age as my oldest daughter and a daughter the same age as my oldest son) All 5 of them are in high school this year, but at separate schools, and we were catching up and comparing notes having a completely normal conversation when all of the sudden she launches into this little rant about how she is going to go to the school and insist that her kids be allowed to leave the classroom when their biology classes cover evolution because the school refuses to teach creationism as a competing theory.
I had to almost physically restrain myself from responding to her. I really like this lady and there is a lot that I really admire about her, but when it comes to this subject I just can not agree with her, but in the interest of preserving our friendship, I held my tongue and did the whole smile and nod routine. After all, whether I agree or not I am a firm believer in the idea that if she wants to believe in that type of religious claptrap... well that is her business, but when she suggested that Creationism SHOULD be taught in our schools I almost lost it. I wanted to scream at her! CREATIONISM IS NOT A SCIENTIFIC THEORY! AT BEST, FROM A SCIENTIFIC STANDPOINT, IT QUALIFIES AS AN UNTESTED HYPOTHESIS (AND I'M NOT SURE BUT IT MAY NOT EVEN QUALIFY FOR THAT AS HYPOTHESES USUALLY HAVE TO BE BASED ON OBSERVATION AND CREATIONISM REALLY HAS NOTHING EXCEPT THE HEARSAY FOUND IN THE BIBLE!
In fact, I have to wonder how many people who claim to believe that Creationism is true are even aware that prior to the creation of the King James version of the Bible, there were actually multiple versions of the creation story in Christian lore. Most of those versions can still be found from other sources, though a few have been lost to ages due to the Church at the time of King James hunting down and destroying as many copies as they could get their hands on. Furthermore, the biblical book of Genesis, like most other early biblical texts, was not written down at all until the time of Moses, which means that it's most likely not even close to the original version to begin with since we all know how well facts are preserved when spread by word of mouth alone- anyone ever play "telephone" as a kid? Each generation that told that story prior to it being written down would have changed the story a little bit- maybe not intentionally, but it would have happened- and we are talking about a lot of generations here. Not to mention that each time it got translated into another language it would change a little bit more and it went through at least 2 translations before it landed in the King James Bible (Hebrew to Latin and Latin to English).
So near as I can tell, the closest thing that the Creationists have to real proof of their claims is another hypothesis- the idea of intelligent design, which basically says that the fact that all things in the universe follow set rules like gravity implies that there must be a God.... that at least has some observable basis, but it's pretty weak, because while there are indeed a large number of rules that the universe follows, there is also a lot of chance and a lot of random crap that argues against the idea. Honestly I think that I would be more apt to believe in God if those rules of nature didn't exist because then there would be no other explanation for why anything worked.
If any of you have gotten this far (and I would be surprised if you did, all of you folks out there that believe in the idea of creationism), I would urge you to consider this thought: You can not permanently protect your children from learning about theories like evolution (and if they intend to progress in scientific studies in college, they won't have the option of opting out and still getting credit there) but do you really want the scientists that view your "theory" as little more than popular tripe to be the ones teaching your kids about the creationist ideas? It is my opinion that if you believe in creationism as strongly as you seem to think that you do, the better idea would be to ask for an elective class that would have a teacher that believes in it teaching these ideas, but don't be surprised if not even the religious based colleges consider the elective an acceptable alternative to sciences like modern biology.
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