asi1998 wrote:furdabip wrote:SMWasder wrote:So long as religion isn't harming people or overriding actual scientific study in schools I don't care what people believe.
Religion brainwashes people into waging religious wars with each other, simply because people believe different things than each other. I can't think of a single war that was started for reasons other than religious ones. Not. A. Single. One.
That makes religion dangerous. You should NOT have a view of "Well, if they're not hurting anyone..." about religion, as
THEY ARE.
Evolution is a theory. If schools truly want to be neutral they need to teach all worldviews as theory. In addition if evolution was wrong (which I believe it is) then we would have millions of brainwashed people. Schools need to teach everything equally. In addition, there will always be religious radicals out there that are crazy and start wars but just because they are hypocrites, the fact that Jesus died and rose from the dead does not change.
In addition, Hitler started a world war over a scientific worldview he had. In Darwin's book: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and the
Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life explains what Hitler did. He thought he was helping science develop by promoting the Aryan race above other races. He took down a darker race as Darwin said would happen because he thought he was helping science develop.
Yes, evolution is a theory.
Or rather, the mechanism is. Evolution itself is as much a fact as gravity or continental drift, as they are all simply observations. Natural selection, on the other hand, is a theory, like gravitation or plate tectonics. All available evidence supports it and none contradicts it. It is not a theory in the colloquial sense; rather, it is a scientific theory.
Creationism or "intelligent" design is a colloquial theory. That is not even as good as a scientific hypothesis, as it does not explicitly make claims to be tested or results to be replicated. It's just an idea with no supporting evidence.
I'm gonna go into a bit more detail about one piece of evidence for evolution. On February 24th, 1988, Richard Lenski took twelve flasks of E. coli. They were, for all intents and purposes, identical. They were placed in a minimal growth medium and one of the things measured was how long it took for them to completely consume it. The next day, 1% of the population of each flash was transferred into another one. Large samples of the populations were frozen at 75 day intervals.
This is a chart of the size of the E. coli cells as the experiment went on. They also began to consume the minimal growth medium faster as the generations went by.
Here is a more detailed explanation of the E. coli experiment.
And about teaching alternatives, do you think that students should be taught that the earth may be spherical OR it may be flat? There's some
controversy there. Nothing scientific about the flat earth hypothesis, but there are people who support it and push for it to be taught to children in schools. And, back to teaching creationism, why not also teach that Quetzalcoatl created this, the fourth, iteration of the world and will one day return? It's got as much evidence on its side as creationism. Or maybe they should also teach that the world was created from the excrement of giant ants.
And onto Social Darwinism, Hitler did not start a world war over that in its entirety. He was also a catholic, and the catholic church placed a charge of deicide on the jews until the 1960s. That was one contributing factor with him wanting to exterminate them. And yes, he did believe that he should make the Aryan race. But he did not do it for the betterment of science. Also, you appear to think that The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection includes something about preserving favoured races. It doesn't.
And ideas like social darwinism existed long before Darwin. Europeans enslaved Africans and looked down on them because they considered them inferior. Didn't need knowledge of evolution to do that.
