Depends. If you were to say Evolution is an absolutely fact, then Evolution clearly is a belief on par with religion. If, however, Evolution is taught as a scientific theory with evidence, then it's not.
No, the truth is Evolution doesn't have 100% proof. Accordingly, teachers should be mindful that others might not belief Evolution occurred.
I'm not sure what you mean by "Greek fundamentalist". Fundamentalism is a new concept in religion. What fundamentalist oppose is complex, allegorical theology. That said, you can't have an ethics based on reasoning. Reasoning to what end? Evil, good. Sure, from some type of principles, reasoning can extend those principles; but then those principles would become the base of the ethical system.
God doesn't cause people to sin. Without Him people sin; so when God leaves people, their hearts have hardned.
Throckmorton, Pythagorean's theorem is a case in point because it makes no real predictions. Spatial distances could be made up of discrete elements. It might be impossible to have a flat space. Furthermore, for a student to reject Pythagorean's theorem, he'd have to question logic itself; for the premises are explicity Euclid's axioms. On the other hand, atomic theory, like Evolution, is a theory that fits observable evidence. It too shouldn't be taught as fact; it isn't fact.
John Galt, the best you can say is that descendents share common physical makeup, and so, overtime, those descendents who have favorable traits will live while others will die out. Whether you accept the fossil evidence, however, depends on your premises. If for one of your premises you believe the Devil will go to great lengths to plant evidence and God will allow him, then the fossil evidence isn't really evidence.
The great immunologist Maurice Hilleman died on Monday aged 85. I quote from his Daily Telegraph obituary.okrinus said:
Ophiolite, yes, I'm not saying that teachers shouldn't teach evolution, but that they shouldn't say it's absolutely correct. To do so isn't science--it's not even true. Instead of a teaching forcing students to believe, students should know the main premises and logical inferences used to derive the theory--they should be able to derive other facts assuming the theory is true--they also should be able to reject the theory, perhaps if their own premises differ or they don't find the logical inferences compelling.
staples disconnected, no, I never said that religion was 100% fact. What I said was that teaching specific beliefs or theories as if they are 100% fact, requiring others to believe so, can violate another's religious rights. Some of these religious beliefs are premises. Just because I believe a student has the right to believe in creationisms, that is, believing it 100% true, doesn't mean I do. My perspective is that this student's belief is his own premise, his own way of seeing the world. If we had no premises we would remain unable to believe anything, but we do have premises, the normal ones being belief that what we see exists. Others, we'd expect, would have different premises from ourselves. Furthermore, what you call mountains of evidence can be construed by others to be palour trick of the Devil. From a scientific perspective, you can reject such things outright; but from a religious perspective, one for which the Devil is out to deceive, it remains a possilbiity, however remote.
Throckmorton, the possilbity exists that they were all wrong. What I mean is, atomic theory holds up under observation, experimentation even, but no one knows absolutely whether atoms coorespond to reality. Even so, if atomic theory is flawed, your knowledge of the subject isn't necessarily obsolete. You may yet even teach history. And, for one thing, you'd still be able to make predictions. Perhaps like Newton's theory of gravity, you'd make pretty accurate predictions most of the time, and do so with sufficiently less wrong than your more complicated but correct theory.
There isnt too much wrong with this, except that what I've seen over on Pandas thumb, is that a lot of people reject evolution not on scientific grounds, but because they cant see how it could have happened. The problem is their reasoning from disbelief. The starting point is not "This is odd, I wonder whether it is correct or not" but more like" I dont think this is right at all ebcause I cant understand it" or suchlike.okinrus said:
A chemist may define water to be H2O, in which case it's not really up to debate, being a premise. But for other situations, what we call water is basically a chemist's definition of water plus minerals and perhaps salt.
I agree, creationism shouldn't be taught because it's not yet a scientific theory. It's not testable and likely infringes on someone's religious beliefs moreso than Evolution. But just because it's not science doesn't mean it's not true.
Throckmorton, how many flight simulators use the theory of relativity? Science is just a matter of creating a model that cooresponds to reality, to experimentation. Science never tells us whether a model is absolutely correct. And, even if we knew that a model cooresponds to reality exactly, we still do not know whether the model is reality.
What a chemist calls water is clearly different from what someone else might. Often, sea water and tap water are called water, even though there're a mixture of H2O, salt, and minerals.
I don't know what you mean by air getting less dense. If air is contained within a fixed space, the density won't change because heating the air will change neither the mass nor the volume of the air.
