It's sad how adverse we can be sometimes to the presentation of other theories and ideas that differ from our own about any given subject. The great Kansas headache doesn't appear to be going anywhere for awhile. From The New York Times:
TOPEKA, Kan., Nov. 8 - The fiercely split Kansas Board of Education voted 6 to 4 on Tuesday to adopt new science standards that are the most far-reaching in the nation in requiring that Darwin's theory of evolution be challenged in the classroom.The beginning of life's existence is a one-day lecture in a semester long course, at least in high school anyway. What on earth is wrong with presenting at least two different theories? Some scientists point to evolution that started with the Big Bang, and others say the universe is too complex to have been started by anything but some form of intelligent being.
The standards press beyond the broad mandate for critical analysis of evolution that four other states have established in recent years, by recommending that schools teach specific points that doubters of evolution use to undermine its primacy in science education.
Among the most controversial changes was a redefinition of science itself, so that it would not be explicitly limited to natural explanations.
The vote was a watershed victory for the emerging movement of intelligent design, which posits that nature alone cannot explain life's complexity. John G. West of the Discovery Institute, a conservative research organization that promotes intelligent design, said Kansas now had "the best science standards in the nation."
A leading defender of evolution, Eugenie C. Scott of the National Center for Science Education, said she feared that the new Kansas standards would serve as a "playbook for creationism."
It's really that simple. No one alive today knows how life started. The evolution crowd is so content that their method is right you sometimes have to remind them that unlike other scientific theories there's no way to prove the Big Bang. Matter had to have come from somewhere and it's anyone's guess where.
As a favorite professor of mine at Florida State aptly put it, "The theory of evolution has been around for roughly a century and rather than gaining more and more scientific support, it has run into increasing difficulties as we learn more about the world and the universe from science. The problems for the theory of evolution began in earnest with the discovery of the Big Bang, that is scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning. Science had always assumed that matter existed forever, because science would have no way to explain its origins.
"Now it is becoming increasingly clear that since we can now date the origins of the universe at roughly 15 billion years ago and the origins of our earth at roughly 5 billions years ago, there simply was not enough time for the Darwinian mechanism of time and chance (chance meaning random events and mutations) to have produced our complex universe and life forms. Therefore evolutionists are today scrambling to come up with alternatives, and there are at least seven competing theories that have been presented which argue that it was time plus random mutations plus something else which must have been occurring in order for evolution to take place."
There's no clear cut answer, and because of that both sides should be presented.
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