This is the title of an essay I have to
write. My answer is emphatically "No".

Here are a couple of my main points. I'd appreciate it if you could post your own ideas on the issue as not only will it make for an interesting debate but I hope to get some more ideas for my essay.

1. Schools should be centres for learning, places of objective reality. The lessons taught in schools should reflect our current theories and ideas regarding the world around us and they should be supported by tangible evidence.

2. Children (especially the young ones) are exceptionally impressionable. Therefore it is morally wrong to include a pseudo subject alongside actual lessons. It gives the impression that the school is just as accepting of the ideas in that subject as they are with the ideas in a Biology or Physics class. This is tantamount to widespread indoctrination of our countries youth.

3. "religion" is taught in schools but with a STRONG Christian emphasis. The way things go are essentially:

"God made the world in seven days, then Adam and then eve and then.....oh what's that little billy? You heard about the Norse Odin myth?? Well...that's ONE set of ideas...but we'll talk about that some other time"

It's an insult to even call these lessons "religious education" as they are primarily focussed on forcing the CHRISTIAN doctrine down our children's throats with a half hour session on Buddhism thrown in at the end of term so they can tick their equality box.

4. Inclusion of religious subjects in government teaching curriculum's diverts funding from the already over-stretched school budget.
Do I honestly want my kids using out of date and tatty physics text books because the school blew half the book budget on shiny new king James bibles? Do I fuck.

5. Intelligent design can cause much confusion, With children learning about evolution and the big bang in one set of lessons and something COMPLETELY CONTRADICTORY in their RE class. Schools are supposed to be teaching the most up to date and cutting edge ideas and theories to our youth and instead we've got the same old dusty bullshit. Not only that but dusty old bullshit that detracts from the credibility of the shiny new stuff.

Well that's the end of my little rant. The above points will be included in my essay (obviously re-written in a professional and concise manner)

If anyone would like to add any other points on why you think intelligent design has no place in a school, (Or indeed why you think that it DOES) then post It here!

Unfortunately the phrase 'intelligent design' seems to cover a multitude of sins. As you say, in reality, it almost always seems to consist of genesis 101.

If it was taught along the lines of 'many people and a few scientists believe that the universe may have been created by some 'being' and this idea forms the basis of most religions' then personally i wouldn't have a problem with it being taught.

Especially if all the major creation beliefs were studied and compared with each other and also with the hypothesis of evolution.

It is taught in schools, in theology classes as William Paley's watchmaker analogy with none of the pseudo-scientific crap tagged on.

If it was taught along the lines of 'many people and a few scientists believe that the universe may have been created by some 'being' and this idea forms the basis of most religions' then personally i wouldn't have a problem with it being taught.

Especially if all the major creation beliefs were studied and compared with each other and also with the hypothesis of evolution.

Creation/intelligent design is taught that quik though. Its a simple frase. That god/aliens etc. created it. Where as you could spend years and years studying the ACTUALL science involved. And if all major creation beliefs were taught, thats in theology/philosophy class. It has no place next to evolution. Evolution is taught in BIOLOGY!

So here's another point for you to add. Creation stories will NEVER have the "equal time" in the classroom. For the simple fact that there is no learning involved, its a philosophical answer to a tough question that doesnt require investigation, research, and especially the scientific method. Its the god of the gaps. Science requires skepticism, and the push to always learn more, something creation is completly oposite from. Therefor if you want it in schools, it needs to be in a highschool or above elective coarse.

Science requires skepticism, and the push to always learn more,

So does theology(biblical studies).

Do I honestly want my kids using out of date and tatty physics text books because the school blew half the book budget on shiny new king James bibles? Do I fuck.
-Ressotami

I should have picked up on that one straight away. Just the fact that a school was using the KJV would worry me. The ONLY place for the KJV is in an english class (or history sometimes).

It probably says something about who is considered 'qualified' to teach 'Intelligent Design' if some schools are really using the KJV.

So does theology(biblical studies).



ya when trying to understand what teh bible is saying. But when were talking about creation the end result is a constant, and its already decided. Science doesnt have an end, as far as we know.

Yes, of course it should, in religion/theology classes, but NOT in science classes, I believe science should be presenting current evidence and scientific "theories" not religious "theories". Shit, I believe in a lot of stuff that modern science has no faith in (and science does require faith, oh yus yus yus) but I don't unnecessarily want it taught to kids... because if they're interested, they'll find out for themselves, or learn it another way. The kind of people who want ID taught alongside evolution in the science lab are generally just hardcore-religious weaklings, who are determined to drum their mantra into children's skulls. I really don't agree with that... they present it as more than a theory usually...

This kinda debate exposes why faith schools are kinda dangerous in some respects, especially if they deviate from the national curriculum when it comes to stuff like science and religion. It's quite a tricky topic though, as generally parents should have the "right" to have their child "educated" how they want? Well, lots of people seem to think so.... but what if real education aint a fuckin' crowd pleaser... it was the oh so pleasant Athenians who made Socrates drink the hemlock remember, for that awful "corruption of youth".

intelligent design, imo, should be taught in, and only in, a theology class. In a science class, only scientific theories or laws should be taught.

ID has no more of a legitimate place in the classroom as a fact than episodes of the TV show Stargate do; both are fiction.

Yes it does. But not outside the religious education class.

ID has no more of a legitimate place in the classroom as a fact than episodes of the TV show Stargate do; both are fiction.

wow there. Stargate is real.

This is the title of an essay I have to
write. My answer is emphatically "No".

Have you by chance read The Case for Teaching Intelligent Design (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1601845,00.html) a few issues back in Time magazine? If anything, it might offer a good source for feeling out the other perspective and hitting all the finer points of it in your essay.

You should post your essay when it's completed!

"wow there. Stargate is real."

Chevron seven LOLed and engaged, thanks for the laugh!

Here is my completed essay.

Tell me what you guys think, any criticisms?











The evolution debate has been a subject of fierce controversy for decades; some have likened it to the animosity that existed between the flat earthers and the spherical earthers. It seems that when a widely accepted idea such as the flat nature of the planet earth is attacked by a rival theory, there is outrage that anybody could attack such a firmly accepted fact.

However, this is the very nature of science: to observe the available evidence and rethink existing ideas, creating new theories and laws to fit in with observable reality. We now know that the earth is spherical in nature and we have evidence to support this claim. So when discussing a widely held belief such as creation, we expect to meet some opposition when we attack this belief.

Creation is the widely held idea that the planet Earth, the entire living population on it and the observable universe that surrounds us was created by an intelligent being. Creationists do not tend to worry about HOW an intelligent being could achieve such a feat, or indeed why. Many assert that their creator (or “God” as I shall refer to it from now on) is a generally friendly type of creature. Some go as far as describing him as “all loving” with the exception of the occasional genocide, sacrifice of infants or vengeful plague.

It should also be noted at this point that Creation theory varies wildly depending on which particular religion you subscribe to and for the most part has absolutely no basis in reality. For the record, nobody has ever produced any empirical evidence for the existence of a god; god has never been measured or proven in any way.

Evolution is a theory first proposed by Charles Darwin, who observed finches on the islands of the Galapagos and noticed that there was variation between species. Each species displaying a particular attribute that specialised it; for example finches that ate primarily nuts had short, blunt but powerful beaks, whereas finches that fed from nectar in flowers had long pointed beaks. It was as though the birds had been “designed” for their environmental niche. A religious man would have seen this as evidence for intelligent design, but Darwin came up with a brilliant and elegant alternative theory which he dubbed “Evolution through natural selection”

The Galapagos were a set of volcanic islands; which meant that they were relatively new in a geological sense; having risen from the sea within the last 8 million years or so. It also meant that they had never been attached to any continental land mass and so technically speaking they should have been devoid of life. What Darwin saw however, was a myriad of species and he concluded that these species must have had one common ancestor long ago which spawned an entire island of natural wonders. After all, the islands were far too new for life to have independently evolved by itself there.

Darwin’s ideas were an outrage; he was labelled a blasphemer and verbally attacked and ridiculed at almost every opportunity. Yet the elegance of his ideas caught the eye of scientists around the world and his work was not lost, instead gaining popularity worldwide to the dismay of the church. The beauty and the complexity of the world around us could finally be explained in a simple way which did not require an intelligent designer, and the science of Evolution was born.

In recent times the controversy has only increased. Classic lines such as:
“I aint no monkey’s great grandson”
or
“Hey kids! You don’t think you came from a pool of slime do you?”
- circled around the Evangelical churches of the United States as a way of discrediting the theory and making it sound absurd. Whilst doing little to actually explain the real facts behind the theory, the truth was that people were poorly equipped to deal with the lengths of time that evolution demands. There is great difficulty in accepting that a chicken was once a fierce hunting reptile and religion relied on this apparent ridiculous nature to discredit Darwin. Only when you imagine the amount of time required for this change does the theory gain some credibility. Sixty Five Million years is an incredibly long time period for a person to imagine and even today this difficulty in imagining large numbers holds back the acceptance of evolution theory. It is of course a deceptively simple theory, childishly so in fact, and it is this habit of taking evolution at face value that makes it so easy to ridicule.

“Many of us have no grasp of Quantum theory, or Einstein’s theory of special and general relativity, but this does not in itself lead us to oppose these theories! Darwinism, unlike ‘Einsteinism’ seems to be regarded as fair game for critics with any degree of ignorance. I suppose one trouble is that, as Jacques Monod perceptively remarked, everybody thinks he understands it”
- Dawkins, Richard. The Blind watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. W. W. Norton & Company, inc. 1996.

It’s important at this point to return to the Evangelical churches of the United States, where the majority of the media controversy has erupted in recent years. America is often described as “one nation under god,” and many Americans feel radically that they are a chosen people and that it is the responsibility of the American people to destroy heathen, non-Christian thinking. This is reflected by America’s willingness, nay, eagerness to wage an unsubstantiated war against a Muslim nation. America, then, is the nation in which evolution has met the most vehement denial and attack.

Millions of American children are home schooled because their parents do not want them exposed to Darwinian thinking. Numerous lawsuits have been brought against schools to force them not to teach the theory of evolution. Books have even been written that make false claims about Darwin, for example claiming that on his deathbed he renounced evolution and accepted Christ, begging for forgiveness and that others may not fall into his erroneous lie. Such claims are false and serve only to try to incite ridicule for the idea. Why then does this theory meet such heated argument?

Put simply, Evolution is not compatible with the traditional Christian theory of creation. As religion serves a very important purpose in peoples lives, it is very difficult, in fact nigh on impossible to attempt to argue against religion, even if a better set of ideas presents itself. As America is a predominately Christian nation, and it is in this country that Evolution has met with the fiercest media controversy, I will be using Christianity as the example in this case.

Christianity is based on the seven day creation, where God created the observable universe in six days (resting on the Sabbath) approximately six to ten thousand years ago.
The sheer length of time that Darwin proposed was required for evolution to work outclasses the Christian age for the earth many times over. The idea of a hundred million years is abhorrent to a fundamental Christian.

Evolution also removes ‘purpose’ for the religious. The sense of purpose that a religious person may experience is profound, and it is an incredibly comforting notion to feel as though they have a greater purpose in life. Evolution essentially indicates that our existence is due to a series of chance happenings and not only that but that we are directly descended from creatures who in our minds are lesser primates. It is a very humbling thing to have to accept that humans are not as unique as we first thought and that we are not very far removed from the primate world at all.

Evolution also conflicts with the idea of the afterlife. Eternal bliss in heaven is an extremely important thing for Christians to retain, as it is the reward for a lifetime of servitude to god. It is often thought a heinous idea to propose that in fact we simply decompose when we die. Our consciousness being lost forever is a very painful thought. If Evolution is true and the earth spent billions of years devoid of life, millions of years ruled by reptiles and only a few hundred thousand years dominated by the relatively new species ‘homo sapien’ then it seems to indicate that humans certainly are not so special after all. It also raises all sorts of questions such as “at which point did we become true humans in gods eyes?” are there primate-like cavemen in heaven? Or did heaven only open its pearly gates once we reached a certain level of complexity and intelligence?

Such difficult questions are hard to explain if both viewpoints are equally accepted and as the idea of “eternal life” and “triumph of good over evil” are far more appealing than “we came from self replicating slime and we’re going to die eventually,” it’s certainly not hard to see why some find Evolution an intensely painful topic and why people will vehemently defend their religious position to the death.

A simple answer to the controversy would be to teach both sides of the argument in primary schools, providing an equal weighting to both opinions. I personally cannot agree with this solution because I believe teaching any sort of intelligent design to children is tantamount to indoctrination. Children are incredibly impressionable and will believe anything if you teach it with enough passion and confidence. But one must ask the question, why should we be giving equal weighting to creation as well as evolution when they are NOT equally weighted in terms of evidence?

Part 2:

The science of evolution is fantastically backed up by observable evidence whereas creation relies solely on the basis of faith. The fossil record shows a clear progression from less complex to more complex organisms, something which should not be apparent at all if all creatures were created within a week of one another. Transitional species such as Archaeopteryx are also indicative of evolution, with animals being found that represent a transition between for instance reptiles and birds. How then can we be asked to give these two ideas equal weighting when it seems clear that one is a much more developed and likely theory than the other.

Primary schools should be a place of truth and enquiry, and we should be teaching the next generation to question authority and think for themselves. What possible good can come from teaching children that it is acceptable to believe something that is not apparent in observable reality? Surely the distinction between a paranoid schizophrenic who is convinced there are goblins inhabiting the sleeves of his straitjacket and a over-zealous Christian who believes there is an almighty creator watching over us is only due to the fact that one of these beliefs is widely held. In a purely scientific study, both theories would be found to be equally unlikely.

So then can we reasonably allow ourselves to teach children something that can not be proven to be true? My suggestion is that we focus on subjects that can be objectively analysed, for filling the minds of our children with ancestral delusions can surely only serve to hold back their logical thinking and objective analysis skills. We have a moral obligation to our children to educate them in what is known to be true, and the inclusion of religious education in a school curriculum does not reflect this responsibility.

Christianity is based on the seven day creation, where God created the observable universe in six days (resting on the Sabbath) approximately six to ten thousand years ago.
The sheer length of time that Darwin proposed was required for evolution to work outclasses the Christian age for the earth many times over. The idea of a hundred million years is abhorrent to a fundamental Christian.



It is unfortunate that most christians never realise that there are 2 seperate and somewhat contradictory accounts of the creation to be found in Genesis.

Could you explain the second one? How does it contradict the first?

Could you explain the second one? How does it contradict the first?

Genesis 2:

4These are the generations
of the heavens and the earth when they were created,
in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.



5When no bush of the field[a] was yet in the land[b] and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up--for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, 6and a mist[c] was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground-- 7then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. 8And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.



Which you don't need a doctorate in theology to realise was written by a very different person than the '7 day' account.

Unfortunately I don't have time now to explain the contradictions right now ('Jamie Oliver Wonderland' aka 'Sainsburys' beckons me) but they are fairly obvious if you compare the two creation accounts.Although of course our beloved christians will not allow them as contradictions.

Nice work on the essay, Ressotami.

It delivers.

Thanks very much. I wanted to write a little more about the evidence for evolution as reading it back now it appears that I sort of rushed over that part where i could have given a little more detail or some more examples.

However I had a 2000 word limit that I had to stick to so there's always going to bits that I had to leave out.

Every one nows that is the correct theory of creation is the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I demand that we have one third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.

We even have an online flash game (http://www.venganza.org/worship/fsm-game/)

Every one nows that is the correct theory of creation is the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I demand that we have one third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.

We even have an online flash game (http://www.venganza.org/worship/fsm-game/)



Ramen!

However I had a 2000 word limit that I had to stick to so there's always going to bits that I had to leave out.

For a 2000 word limit, I think you have done a fine job in covering your arguments.

Out of coriosity, what class is it for?

It's for the science component of my Primary Education course. We had to choose an issue of controversy in the classroom and explore the issue.

Every one nows that is the correct theory of creation is the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I demand that we have one third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.

We even have an online flash game (http://www.venganza.org/worship/fsm-game/)

*touched by the noodle of His greatness*