Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional

An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC reports that a judge in Atlanta, GA has ruled that a sticker placed on all textbooks in Cobb County stating that 'Evolution is a theory, not a fact,' is unconstitutional, and ordered that all stickers be removed."

Comments

analogous != equivalent

[aendeuryu]

By that logic, you are declaring Evolution a religion...

I'm doing no such thing. You're confusing analogy with equivalence.

My point is that Christianity (specifically, Creationistic Christianity) is going outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour by trying to intrude on other disciplines. If the converse were done to them and their bibles, hopefully they could see the error in their ways.

Unlikely, though. Christianity's biggest problem, as Joseph Campbell pointed out, was that for Christians it's more important to believe the existence of Jesus, Adam and Eve, Satan, etc. than it is to understand the meaningful significance behind them.

That's a good call, dude

[IdahoEv]

I'll be the one screaming "medic!" at the top of my lungs. Modern medicine may just be a theory but I reckon it's statistically a better bet than relying on His strength.

And you'd be absolutely right. In the current conflict in Iraq, the death rate from battle wounds is only 1.6%, whereas in vietnam it was 3.68%, more than twice as high. The army, at least, attributes this huge increase in survivability to modern medical technology and improved practice.

looked at as a ratio of wounded (but survived) to killed, the current ratio is 7.6:1. Going backwards in time, counting only U.S. soldiers:
Vietnam: 2.6:1
WWII: 1.7:1
WWI: 1.8:1
US Civil War: 0.74:1

In other words, a trend consistently shows more people surviving war wounds as time goes on.

Meanwhile, the evidence is not that there has been a massive (factor of twenty) increase in religiosity in the United States since the Civil war. Certainly, available data show that people self-identifying as Christian have decreased significantly between 1990 and 2004.

So the evidence would seem to indicate, unless God has consistently increased his tendency to save the lives of wounded soldiers despite no significant increase in their faith, that improvements in medical technology are in fact a good bet for saving your life when you're lying bleeding on the battlefield.

Good call, mike260.

Re:Dear Creationists

[GryMor]

Err, thats not particularly usefull. Better to say:

Dear Creationists,

We'll put these stickers on our science textbooks when you put "God's existance is an untestable hypothesis that can never rise to the level of validity of a theory. Belief that 'God' created the universe is as demonstratable and testable as 'invisible pink elephants' created the universe."

Re:Evolution: both theory and fact

[ultranova]

Gravity is a fact and a theory.

No. "Things fall down" is a fact - an observed phenomenon. "Things fall down because there's a force called gravity that causes an attractive force between any two masses" is a theory.

As for the sticker, "evolution" means "species change over time". This has been observed, so it is a fact. "Theory of Evolution", on the other hand, says that "All species on Earth were born from a common ancestor through evolution", which may be true, partially true ("some, but not all, species developed from a common ancestor through evolution") or completely false. Therefore, it is not a fact.

It should also be noted that one of the reasons that the Theory of Evolution gained so much support was simply a counterreaction to the centuries of oppression by religion and the then-fashionable atheism; scientists, being humans, aren't any more immune to letting fashion influence their thinking than anyone else. It was fashionable to deny the existence of God, and the authority of church, so any theory that would allow people to do so seemed inherently better than it's merits might have allowed.