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Debate:Should Creationism/Intelligent design be taught as a scientific alternative to evolution in public schools? (view source)
Revision as of 02:24, June 21, 2011
, 02:24, June 21, 2011→Teach all theories
:::Using the math skills employed to determine the comparative liberalness of wikipedia, I can ascertain that there is a 33% chance that with any experiment, evolution can be disproven. As much as you say evolution is a religion, evolution is falsifiable and has predictive abilities. ID does not. [[User:Myk|Myk]] 13:29, 3 April 2007 (EDT)
:::Using the math skills employed to determine the comparative liberalness of wikipedia, I can ascertain that there is a 33% chance that with any experiment, evolution can be disproven. As much as you say evolution is a religion, evolution is falsifiable and has predictive abilities. ID does not. [[User:Myk|Myk]] 13:29, 3 April 2007 (EDT)
::::Myk, you're making a lot of assumptions there. First, you assume that the outcome of any experiment is purely random. I get this from your 33% chance thing. Let me do what you just did: If I drop a ball close to the Earth's surface, one of two things will happen:
::::#It will fall to the ground and prove gravity exists.
::::#It will float in mid-air and disprove gravity.
::::Using math skills, I can ascertain that there is a 50% chance that gravity doesn't exist whenever anything is dropped from mid air. Since things are dropped near Earth's surface all the time, the chance that gravity exists is almost nothing.
::::Do you see the problem with your logic? When there's a system in place, the chance of something tested within it being untrue is actually very, very low. The chance that gravity exists is actually very close to (but not exactly) 100%. The same applies to evolution. It's a natural phenomenon that you can test. It's a system that has a (close to) 100% chance of being true. It's entirely possible that creation happened, it's entirely possible that there's no such thing as the past and we're all living within a snapshot of time. However, the chances of either of those being true, according to current information, is very very low.
::::As for "Teaching all <s>theories</s> explanations," here's the problem with that. By the time we teach our children every single explanation about where the Earth came from, their grandchildren will be about fifty years old. There are too many explanations from all parts of the world to possibly teach to someone in a reasonable amount of time. The best we can do is to teach the most probable (or most successful) explanations, of which creationism is not one of. If anyone comes up with a model that explains things better than the current one, we will switch to that.
::::As for "Teaching all '''''theories'''''": A theory is a set of models that has an overwhelmingly large amount of evidence to support it and that hasn't been sufficiently falsified. The Big Bang theory and the five or so competing theories in science fit into this category, and we don't even teach all of those! Creationism doesn't, because there is very little evidence supporting it, and things like rocks and fossils seem to contradict it. [[User:SEdwin|SEdwin]] 22:24, 20 June 2011 (EDT)
:::Roopilots6, once again you have shown that you truly do not understand science. What you may have learned in a high school science class does not scratch the surface of what constitutes science and what constitute philosophy. As Myk pointed out above the theory of evolution is a science because it meets the criteria of what is science. ID does not meet this criteria as of yet. The whole conspiracy theory about not receiving funding because you take a anti evolution stance is ridiculous, there is nothing that states you must indicate if you are for or against evolution when writing for a grant. Some institutions even support antagonistic evolution research funding due to the research further strengthening the theory. Why your statement about the faith needed to believe in evolution is false can be summed up that the empirical evidence out weighs the antagonistic evidence by such a staggering amount that it would require no faith at all. However, since ID does not give a mechanism for how things happen, nor does it state why things happen, it relies on faith for a person to believe that all living things were the product of the designs of some intelligence, that we can not see nor know how it influenced our designing. This my friend is theology not science. When ID can give an explanation of the mechanism of how this intelligence was able to design all of the diversity of living creatures on this planet then it could be considered science. Evolution is as much of a religion as gravity.--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 11:57, 5 April 2007 (EDT)
:::Roopilots6, once again you have shown that you truly do not understand science. What you may have learned in a high school science class does not scratch the surface of what constitutes science and what constitute philosophy. As Myk pointed out above the theory of evolution is a science because it meets the criteria of what is science. ID does not meet this criteria as of yet. The whole conspiracy theory about not receiving funding because you take a anti evolution stance is ridiculous, there is nothing that states you must indicate if you are for or against evolution when writing for a grant. Some institutions even support antagonistic evolution research funding due to the research further strengthening the theory. Why your statement about the faith needed to believe in evolution is false can be summed up that the empirical evidence out weighs the antagonistic evidence by such a staggering amount that it would require no faith at all. However, since ID does not give a mechanism for how things happen, nor does it state why things happen, it relies on faith for a person to believe that all living things were the product of the designs of some intelligence, that we can not see nor know how it influenced our designing. This my friend is theology not science. When ID can give an explanation of the mechanism of how this intelligence was able to design all of the diversity of living creatures on this planet then it could be considered science. Evolution is as much of a religion as gravity.--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 11:57, 5 April 2007 (EDT)