That’d be fine too.
I would argue there is plenty of empirical evidence as to the world and universe being older than a few thousand years but as to the origins of the universe itself, no one has the slightest clue. It just requires a huge stretch of the imagination that the world gets created and recreated every few thousand years and gigantic quantities of hand waving to say it happened when there is every reason to believe otherwise. There is no support for it while there is every reason to go against it from a scientific stand point.
And I agree completely that the idea of creationism is really not just 1 idea but many ideas and its important to piece those ideas out in the context of academic discussion.
Hm… between buying this and buying the Weather Channel, I’d pick the Weather Channel. At least then I could claim to control the weather.
Creationism actually is in the bio books I had in high school, the same books are still mandatory throughout the country. It’s just a small mini-chapter tacked onto the end of the evolution chapter, but still.
In my experience, creationism crops up in every damn science class which contains religious students anyway. Last year was fun, guy kept countering everything the bio teacher said with “but god did that!”, and bringing christian literature to hand out.
How the hell did these crazies get a mastodon skull??? You’d think something like that would be… you know… important to paleontology, and not allowed to fall into the hands of religious propagandists.
Creationism deserves to be taught as theology or even as philosophy, but has no place in a science class.
Just to add some additional speculatory fuel to the fires of speculation which I speculate to be mere speculation themselves (or perhaps proverbial). Though Evolution does an excellent job of explaining how we came from some primordial soup to walking on the moon in a portable outhouse, but it doesn’t really cover how that stew of proteins came to be to begin with. Perhaps Creationism could be used to answer that question instead. Perhaps that icky slime was residue was left over from a higher being much like the residue left over in someone’s pants when they aren’t able to make it to the john in time.
Or for those of you who believe that we were formed from organic material deposited by a passing comet. Maybe the comet that bore our cellular ancestors was formed by the hands of the almighty in the same way a stinky projectile is formed by the paws of a damn dirty ape.
And if by some miracle this part of the thread is being viewed by someone who believes that Aliens formed our civilization. It is possible that it could’ve happened. That, long ago, an ancient Alien empire once used this planet in the same way the Roman empire would’ve used some deep ditch out back, lined with bushes and/or shrubs, for.
And perhaps one of these theories in turn might possibly explain why so many people are so full of shit. <.<
Or why they like getting piss drunk, if you subscribe to the Killmorean theory.
I thought there was some explanation as to where the soup came from. Under certain conditions carbon atoms look JUST like cells and with water or something some shit fucks up and starts growing or some shit
Science runs into the “turtles all the way down” problem. Whenever science comes up with a cause of how something came to be, there’s always a question of “how did that come to be?” The end result of that is either a theory that folds back in on itself, a theory that everything has always existed, or a creationist theory. If I understand correctly, there’s no real evidence for any of them, but they’re all equally possible according to our current knowledge.
The fun part is where we constantly try and improve on our current knowledge, thus enabling us to form better theories. “We dunno yet” isn’t really the most satisfying answer to hear sometimes but it’s the reason we make any progress at all.
Of course ultimately you end up with the “well god created the conditions that caused the big bang” bit, which is fine as well. That’s not really the domain of science.
Not unless science progresses to the point where it can accurately posit about things that happened before the dawn of time, no. There are limits.
And that is why a fundamentalist government in the game Alpha Centauri cuts your research in half 
I don’t remember who said this, but…
The difference between creationism and science is that the latter can and does evolve.
Creationism has also evolved. Certainly the sort that I believe in isn’t the same as the sort that a lot of others do.
Could you elaborate further on that?
I mean that there are people who may believe that God created the world but not that he did it five thousand and some-odd years ago.
Science runs into the “turtles all the way down” problem. Whenever science comes up with a cause of how something came to be, there’s always a question of “how did that come to be?” The end result of that is either a theory that folds back in on itself, a theory that everything has always existed, or a creationist theory. If I understand correctly, there’s no real evidence for any of them, but they’re all equally possible according to our current knowledge.
That’s true, but science doesn’t even pretend to have the answer to the explanation of existence. There’s plenty of theories amongst the astrophysicists, I’m sure, but all of these theories are rejected, for the simple reason that there’s no observable data to back them up.
Contrary to popular belief, the Big Bang Theory is not supposed to explain the creation of existence. Rather, it explains the current composition of the Universe. IN other words, because the universe has a certain physical build to it, scientists have concluded that at one point there must have been a big fucking explosion. Otherwise, the universe would not look the way it does now. In fact, Big Bang theory assumes there was something before the explosion. Since all the theory says is that the universe used to look one way - all contained and bundled up - and then there was an explosion, and everything spread around. So its not the same as creationism.
If you don’t believe, this is from Wikipedia:
[The Big Bang is a cosmological model of the universe which has the primary assertion that the universe has expanded into its current state from an initial state of infinite density and temperature. The term is also used in a narrower sense to describe the rapid expansion of spacetime that started at or close to an initial event in the history of our observed spacetime.[1] The term ‘Big Bang’ was first coined by Fred Hoyle, ironically, in a derisory statement seeking to belittle the credibility of the theory which he did not believe to be true.[1]
“Expanded… from an initial state”. Not quite the same as saying there was nothing, and then God made everything, eh? Sorry if you weren’t referring to the Big Ban Theory with your post, but that’s what most creationists tend to focus on when they say science is the same as creationisism.
Whenever science comes up with a cause of how something came to be, there’s always a question of “how did that come to be?”
The question is always there, true, but science tries to answer it using real, observable data… and in the absence of such data, science admits that it doesn’t know.
That’s exactly my point. These are things which science can’t possibly know given current techniques, so they stay the hell out of the debate. And there are things which religion doesn’t comment on either (though people have tried to squidge it in so it does).
Wow. This is odd. I can’t believe you guys are fighting over whether creationism should be taught in schools or not. That dispute was settled a long time ago. If you don’t like it, don’t go to public school.
It’s far from settled. There are several places in the US where the debate is still ongoing (at least I know it was as of last year, and probably still is).