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Evolution Battle Brews In Texas
oxide7 writes "In Texas, a battle is brewing over the teaching of evolutionary theory as the Board of Education considers a new set of instructional materials to be used in science classrooms. [Two sections of the new material] deal with the origin of life. Those sections say the 'null hypothesis' is that there had to be some intelligent agency behind the appearance of living things. It is up to the scientists proposing a naturalistic explanation to prove their case."
that we have to spend time and effort keeping creationism from being taught as "science" in the
21st century.
Do people in this country really understand that the right wing religious nut-cases are out to make this
country a theocracy ? American taliban indeed.
Absolute statements are never true
Really? It sounds like someone from the board of education had a sit down with a statistician and thought it would sound cool to throw in the null because, for some reason, ID is the default explanation for the origin of species. I mean, this isn't a bad thing considering the vast amount of evidence in support of natural selection, ultimately suggesting that we can confidently reject the null.
They also may want to take a look at Jacob Cohen's classic paper, 'the world is round, p .05' for more information about the current Fisherian statistical paradigm we currently exist in and what it means to establish a null (and ultimately reject or fail to reject it).
Carl Sagan quotes get you an automatic +5 on all posts.
That... That is a whole lotta derp right there, I tell you what.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
We scientifically-minded people have had a perfectly reasonable naturalistic explanation for the origin of life for a long time. No sir, the ball is in YOUR court to show that there is evidence for your intelligent design theory.
Creationists hate and fear anything different from what they were told to believe. They also breed and vote a lot.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Democracy can only work with good education. The people voting are supposed to be able to make intelligent decisions.
This kind of thing is going to undermine our ability to govern ourselves and I cannot imagine something more insidious than corrupting children toward that end.
This must be stopped.
Really?
I grew up in a religious household and I respect people for their views on creationism (although I do not agree, no matter how long you believe a "day" is), but evolution is just as plausible if not more so, because they have some evidence, not none(well besides an old book re-written a million times and re-worded just as many times).
From the article: "In 2009 the Texas Board of Education said that students should be taught "all sides" of current scientific theories."
but creationism isn't allowed because it's religious. I'm so confused.
Sorry Texas but stop your backwards ideas/views and join the real world
Evolutionary theory has fuck-all to do with abiogenisis.
As far back as I can remember, I couldn't wait for the future to arrive and dreamed every night that I would wake up in the 23rd century. So here I am decades later, living in the 19th.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
It is a bad thing because in the scientific world we don't use the default of "some magic being created it" if we don't understand it. Science is about study and practise in order to uncover an understanding of the truth. At no stage should any scientific baseline start with the unicorns did it.
What the majority wants eventually wins. When there are no external threats, the majority will create its own scarecrows -- usually from the things they understand least. Modern science is high on that list, especially given the many "evil scientist" representations in what Wikipedia calls "modern culture".
I expect you to vote, Mr. Bond.
Why wouldn't the null hypothesis be "people have always been basically the same as they are today"? Surely that was the null hypothesis that both evolution and creationism attempted to supplant?
Yes, it fails because of all the reasons we know life wasn't always here throughout an infinite history and that time is not cyclical over the timescale of human existence. That's why it's the null hypothesis that the theory of evolution disproves and supercedes. Creationism also seeks to supplant it by positing some creative event that put into place the current ecosystem, whose basis comes from, essentially, old books and traditions, with maybe the occasional misunderstanding of probability and the absolutely grand scales of time and space involved.
In a theology class, a respected Reverend said "Religion is simple mans way of explaining what he doesn't understand".
Over the next several sessions, he covered various cultural and religious beliefs by groups from around the world.
I had known him for years, but it wasn't until that day that I realized, he wasn't a leading member of the church to preach the word of god. He was a leading member of the church to help people who couldn't grasp the fact that there are things we don't fully understand yet. He wasn't preaching the "truth" in gospel. He was helping them from being scared of the unknown.
Unfortunately, there are too many people who take these fairy tales that were intended to help them not be scared, and demand everyone understand it as the truth.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
A null hypothesis must be falsifiable, and therefor "it must be a wizard that did it" cannot be the null hypothesis.
Q.E.D.
there had to be some intelligent agency behind the appearance of living things
Ok, so what intelligent agency created them, and who created them, and who created them, ...
How did the first "intelligent agency" come to be, because there had to be one before them, but there couldn't be because they were the first.
This is a stupid theory that invalidates itself.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
More like the Samuel L Jackson version of Dawkins (although, I'll admit I'm not nearly as cool as either.) And yes, I'm just letting of some steam here.
What?!
What the fuck?!
Those sections say the "null hypothesis" is that there had to be some intelligent agency behind the appearance of living things. It is up to the scientists proposing a naturalistic explanation to prove their case.
Since motherfucking when? I'll tell you, motherfucking never. How much more fucking evidence must scientists throw before your motherfucking ugly fucking face before you fucking get it?
Sample says the "null hypothesis" is such because the old experiments that attempted to produce "building blocks" of amino acids failed to do so. In addition later experiments that produced other precursor chemicals, such as DNA and RNA, required very specific conditions in a lab, and aren't he said. Necessarily reflective of what the early Earth was like. Therefore, he said, the odds of making life from non-life seem too small for a naturalistic hypothesis to work.
Well, what the fuck do you call this? And very specific lab conditions? Well, guess what motherfucker, the early Earth have very specific conditions that resemble nothing like what we have today, so yes, those conditions have to be specific in the laboratory. This doesn't even touch the fact that the early Earth was a much bigger fucking laboratory than some fucking room at a university.
Sample says it isn't stealth creationism - he says the intelligent agency might just as well be aliens. But he emphasizes that he wants students to learn to think critically, and that unlike the physical sciences, there aren't any experiments you can do to demonstrate evolutionary theory.
Firstly, observational evidence that can be repeatably confirmed is just as valid as repeatable experiments with observation in a laboratory. And this is yet another case of "What the fuck do you call this?":
While studying the genetics of the evening primrose, Oenothera lamarckiana, de Vries (1905) found an unusual variant among his plants. O. lamarckiana has a chromosome number of 2N = 14. The variant had a chromosome number of 2N = 28. He found that he was unable to breed this variant with O. lamarckiana. He named this new species O. gigas.
Do you see what year is in there? 1905! Speciation was observed in nineteen o'fucking five. That's 23 fucking years after Darwin's death. Can't fucking demonstrate evolution in the lab my ass.
To paraphrase:
Does the idea that there might be knowledge frighten you?
Does the idea that one afternoon on Wiki-fucking-pedia might enlighten you frighten you?
Does the idea that there might not be a supernatural so blow your Christian noodle that you'd rather stand there in the fog of your inability to Google?
Isn’t this enough?
Just this world?
Just this beautiful, complex
Wonderfully unfathomable, NATURAL world?
How does it so fail to hold our attention
That we have to diminish it with the invention
Of cheap, man-made Myths and Monsters?
(Watch the rest, you won't regret it, promise.)
I get the idea that it's scary to think that this is all we have, but that's not an excuse to just start making things up to make yourself feel comfortable. If we truly want immortality, the only thing that can possibly deliver on that is science. And we can't continue to be held back by people whose only goal is to advance their favorite fairy tales in spite of the consequences. And yes, science can answer question
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
As a missing link it makes sense. As a finished product it does not
But then how do you explain ClearCase? Wasn't it intelligently designed?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
How the world *should be* should be based on the way it is.
Codes of Ethics are best based on psychology and empiricism. If you wish to create an ethical construct "You should be monogamous with a member of the opposite sex and faithful for your entire life." Then you should have evidence to support that the outcome of that rule results in the maximum happiness/success/productivity/etc.
Worship is based on an expression again of what elicits the maximum spiritual experience in the believer within the historical/metaphystical claims of the religion. The historical claims are subject to historical sciences and the metaphysical claims are subject to the logical/philosophical fields. Both the logical and philosophical fields also require empirical data to form their assumptions.
At its core Religion is history. It's a claim about the history of the world. Without that history it has no special authority. The authority that religion derives is directly tied to its emperical claims about the world.
If Jesus didn't exist then the words of Christ might be valid but Christianity had to defend their code-of-ethics based on the same criteria everyone else does: empirical studies on the cultural and personal efficacies of those rules. The only reason Religion believes it can circumvent that regular oversight is because it's been ordained by God and God is perfect therefore his commandments require no double checking.
Science is perfectly capable of saying how the world should be. In fact it's better than speculation by bronze age goat herders.
Religion: You should treat women like property and second class citizens.
Science: Women are usually equally capable of making as good of decisions as men and should be equals.
Religion bases its belief on divine ordination. Science performs tests and determines that "God" is a sexist bigot.
Religion: The world should be perfect and some day God will fix it if you sign this metaphysical document here agreeing to agree with everything contained in this book.
Science: The world should be perfect and here are some ways that have a good chance of making it better.
When atheists reduce Religion to God of the Gaps they're being generous. Because Religion not only tries to fill in Gaps, it also tries to fill in things that we're confident about--but are quite different from the religious claims. Atheists try to give the original authors the benefit of the doubt that knowing what we know now they wouldn't have written such foolish things and attributed it to God.
How the people should behave is not religion, it is ethics. People can have no religion and be ethical and can have a religion and behave unethically. If you cannot see ethics outside religion you just cannot see ethics outside *your* religion and start to think like a fundamentalist.
If we're the result of the efforts of some "intelligent agency", that just replaces the origins question with "Where did the intelligent agency come from?"
Of course, their answer is "God", who, unlike everything else, they claim does not require an explanation. You regularly hear creationists argue that God must exist because "everything has to have a cause", but when you ask what caused God they're suddenly willing to make an exception.
But when offered the hypotheses of and uncaused God and an uncaused universe, the uncaused universe is the economic explanation; assuming an uncaused God is a bigger assumption, because you're assuming the existence of something that's more than the universe.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If I were Chinese or Indian, I would be loving this. Imagine, my biggest competitor, ensuring their next generation is superstitious and ignorant. Perfect!
If religion is the normative study of how the world should be, I hand in my membership card. Religion is probably the worst method of doing normative study, as it is based on fairy tales of ages old, arguments from authority, and stuff people make up on the spot. Ethics can be approach logically, consistently, and without any reference to a book that supposedly contains the basis of your ethics (or the basis of 20 mutually inconsistent normative approaches). As there's no solid basis for weighing argumentation, a religious normative debate usually ends up with a cabal of people claiming to be right because 'God says so'.
A null hypothesis is falsifiable.
Creationists: Come up with a real, actual experiment and a plausible outcome of it that will disprove the existence of an intelligent creator in your eyes. Sign a binding statement to shut the fuck up about God if that outcome occurs. Then people will stop laughing at you, at least until the experiment shows you wrong and you start whining about interpretations and ineffability.
You could be honest with yourselves and reject the scientific method outright - "don't trust your eyes, trust your faith." It's slightly ridiculous and nobody will take you seriously, but at least you'll be left alone. You want to play at being scientists? Then you'll play by the rules of science.
The less scientists there are on the world, the higher my salary. Please go on teaching your students that scientific theories are stories about how it could be, without making any testable predictions.
That strategy and mind-set will be very helpful when doing fault-finding in semiconductors. In case the fault rate goes to high, please don't look for testable reasons, but invent a story how a higher intelligence planned out that a race condition or some glitch on the laptop sold to a specific customer is the will of god. The claim that it is very unlikely that a complex processor exists by coincidence and declare any working processor to be the work of a higher intelligence. Don't forget, you cant loose this argument - you cant be proven wrong, unless the stupid guy who tests one process gas after the other for purity - he is wrong all the time.
The fundamental difference between evolution and ID is that evolution tells me what should happen if i put bacteria in a nutrient and change the nutrient compostion slowly over 100000 generations of bacteria. ID doesn't.
>UNKNOWN REASON,
It's not unknown. It's errors. DNA does not copy exactly every time. And sex is merely a way of being able to get more variation in DNA. More variation = more chances to survive (up to a point).
And if you want to get down to the actual reason why DNA copies are not always true, it's because of physics. Physics and probability. Nothing more and nothing less. We've been testing the probability part of the physics for nearly 100 years.
And since your argument fails on its premise - that we don't know where the randomness comes from, all that shit you typed was for naught. The attempt to pull science down to "we just don't know" failed. Indeed, your entire argument is "Argument from incredulity" which isn't an argument at all, but simply a lack of imagination on your part.
Your argument is typical of creationst screeds. It tries to paint scientific arguments as "we just don't know either" when in fact that's not true. Science has done a pretty good job of explaining how the universe operates and we've created some nifty technology based on those rules, which in itself is a test of those rules.
Creationist arguments are not testable. They are not science. Evolution is testable. In fact, we run experiments on evolution all the time with antibiotics. Such experimentation by society nearly killed me with MRSA.
Keep religion out of the classroom unless you want to teach it as a cultural studies course. But then you have to teach other cultures to put things in perspective, and I don't think that the christian taliban behind this bullshit are quite prepared to have the Quran, Mahabharata, Tibetan book of the dead, the writings of Zoroaster, et alia to young minds. They might find their kids might learn something.
--
BMO
No. Science might run a bunch of tests and determine that women are equal to men in whatever category it is being studied. *That* is the extent of science. Applying it to normative questions is not science, but something else. Sociology, perhaps, in this example.
Ummm, Sociology is the scientific study of societies. Sociologists use both qualitative and quantitative analysis like any other science to study societies.
But when someone makes a normative claim like "most animals are not monogamous, therefore I need not be monogamous", it just sets my teeth on edge.
As it should since that's a strawman first off and secondly not very good science. That's like saying "Fish can breath underwater therefore there is no reason to say that you shouldn't be able forbidden from holding your neighbor underwater for hours on end." If however science found that *HUMANS* were actually happier in non-monogamous relationships (and many are) then it would stand to reason that monogamy is not an absolute rule.
When you use this as the basis for your code of ethics, you see nothing especially wrong in infecting twins with smallpox, as the lessons you learn from your horrible results will result in "maximum happiness" for the human population.
Whether or not ends justify means isn't really addressed by any religion either. I don't remember any religion covering "Thou shalt not perform experiments on humans which will harm your subjects."
The closest is the Hippocratic Oath which was largely secular. Furthermore the basis of that is that all human life has value and that we cannot simply take life or injure others without their consent. That's a practical empirically verifiable position since without that basis we open ourselves to tyrannical societies with majority abuse. Our ideal society is not like that and any such society ultimately implodes under corruption and general malaise. You're reducing "science" to essentially saying that happiness is the only standard and if the murder of a hobo makes many happy we are net happier. But I didn't say that. I said maximize Happiness/Success/Productivity/ETC. Etc also includes freedom, independence and value of all sentient life.
If Evolutionists can't provide sufficient evidence to disprove the null hypothesis then why should should Evolutionism itself not be considered just as much a matter of faith as Intelligent Design? Arguing that the existence of a process proves the non-existence of the process engineer is no better than saying we were all created as we are in an instant. Neither argument carries any logical validity and can only be considered as statements of "faith".
Apples fall because of gravity - along with God's help.
Combining hydrogen and oxygen produces water via a chemical reaction - along with God's help.
We get rain because water vapor in the atmosphere condenses into droplets - along with God's help.
My car moves because internal combustion is converted to rotary power with a crankshaft, and the rotary power is transmitted to the wheels via the drive train - along with God's help.
I can compose this message on my computer because...
You can read it on the internet because...
How come "maybe God helped it" only needs to be considered when ordinary explanations contradict someone's religious beliefs?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Every time I read one of these stories I think of my little cousins... They are a full generation younger than I but still my cousins. They have been raised by two wonderful and caring people; An evangelical minister and his wife. Somehow, despite their caring and the love for GOD they have passed on, these three children are for all purposes, ILLITERATE!!!! The eldest, age 12, somehow made it to grade 6 without being capable of reading. They were sent to an evangelical school where the teachings of the Bible trumped basic skills.
Fortunately, they are now in public school. The 12 year old has been brought back 2 grades and the two little ones brought back 1 grade. "This was a concession as the school felt that all three children should be brought back further" They will have to suffer the the stigma of being the "stupid" kids in their classes. They will have to work their butts off just to reach the same level of understanding as their peers.
This anti-evolution movement is part of a much bigger, much scarier problem in The United States. It is actually an anti-intellectualism movement and it scares the crap out of me. Last year in Texas there was a school board trying to remove references of Thomas Jefferson from History texts because of his deist beliefs. They were also trying to refer to the Slave Trade as the "Atlantic Triangular Trade."
Ignorance is alive and well in this country. And it's literally breeding...
How long does it take to teach Intelligent Design anyhow? Would not a lecture lasting more than ten minutes run out of material?
IMO what these people really want is not to teach evolution at all. Darn kids are smart enough see which concept holds water when placed side by side.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
He can't break his own laws
Breaking his own laws is what's called a "miracle".
But regarding omnipotence there's a question that has been unanswered for so long that there's a special name for it: theodicy. If god is both infinitely powerful *and* infinitely good, then why does he allow suffering to exist?
How is it then that I've managed to live over 40 years, and the vast majority of non-atheists I know only believe moderately in their religion, and use it solely for life transition ceremonies like marriage, birth, burial, or perhaps the annual Christmas eve mass "before the party"?
Oh, and by the way, I'm not Christian, nor do I believe in any major religion. But your assumption that I have religious beliefs is another data point which shows me that atheists who actively protest against religion tend to be aggressive about it. I admire your ardentness but must point out that not everyone who disagrees with you believes in what you think they believe in.
Just because the fundies are a lot louder than the moderates (see, I can bold stuff also), doesn't make them a majority in many locations, even in the US.
Your assumption that they are silent because they actively support the fundamentalist seems to me to need real statistics for confirmation. I take it that your reasoning is "because the percentage of non-fundamentalist Christians in the set of people actively protesting X is very small, this means that the majority of non-fundamentalist Christians support X". This seems to be erroneous reasoning, it only means that Christians are less likely to actively protest X compared to atheists. There are billions of Chinese atheists who also do not protest against anti-evolution crap, does this mean that they support it? It does, by your reasoning.
Perhaps the null hypothesis is that there are no intelligent living things (at least in Texas). I propose that we call this 'Unintelligible Design'.
I wonder why there's this big issue with creationism in the US. Even the Roman Catholic church (ya know, the guys in old women's dresses with the inquisition and all) have no beef with the idea of a big bang and evolution. I guess they learned from their Gallileo fiasco. And even back then there were voices that said that the Bible only tells you how to get into heaven, not how heaven works, and that's pretty much their stance today: Are there parts in the Bible that seem to contradict how the world works? Yes. Does it matter? No, because it's God's word and if we understand it wrong, it's us that fail, we're mere men, we can't understand the plan and word of God. Ever. Case closed.
Why do Creationists feel the need to push their faith into science? What's the gain? I see mostly a dangerous side effect: That pupils will see that they're being taught bullshit and extrapolate that if you get to hear bull in one class, it won't be much better for the others.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
These types of games remind me of long essays explaining how the laws of the DC universe of Superman or the Star Wars universe operate to make everything that was written internally consistent. It's humorous in the same way The Big Bang Theory is intended to be.
Put identity in the browser.
Because it plays well to the yokels and brings comeuppance to those high and mighty professors with their useless book-learning and fancy education. And it makes them liberals mad, which is a bonus.
And one wonders how we've gotten so royally fucked as a nation...
Actually, the serious answer to your question is "Creationists feel the need to push their faith into science because replacing science and reason with magical thinking and superstition is a necessary part of destroying a middle-class and creating a new feudal state. You have to attack all of the empowering institutions to make that happen: science, education, a reliable news media, social security programs etc. and replace them with fear, superstition, divided communities, regionalism, ignorance. And the final step for the entities pushing this agenda, as always, is...Profit!"
You are welcome on my lawn.
The bible is NOT, I repeat, NOT the word of God. It was authored by men and men alone. You might have even heard of a few of them, lik Mathew, Mark, Luke and others. They may describe acts attributed to a god but other than that it's all man.
Evolution does not address the divine. God may well have deliberately created evolution and for all we know God, Himself might have evolved from a lesser state or continue to evolve today. It is only a few oddball church groups that have a problem with evolution. Creationism has a place in world religions course but should not be mentioned anywhere near a science class. Hopefully students might be able to tell when they are actually in a science class.
"The godma/dogma affected will never reason effective." They are fyking delusional megalomaniacs like hitler, stalin, napoleon, popes, mullah ... all godma-wars prove insanity lurks within the "soul" of many humans.
Another sign of politician/clergy...sheep is their fervent belief that godma/dogma is a prerequisite for moral/ethical nature/behavior. From decades of experience and observation, I do expect, regular folks and atheist will protect and never (weasel-rules) break any 10 Constitutional Rights, commandments.... Politician/clergy and their sheep are mental/emotional cripples that are still willing to murder (men, women, children) all infidels for a global dogma/godma-republic on earth.
US/EU... Democracy is we rule with reason. We are responsible.
US/EU... Republic is godma/dogma values. We ain't responsible.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I find it curious that for all the backwards stuff the Catholic Church does, evolution doesn't seem to bother them in the slightest.
FWIW, the vatican observatory does real academic research: Planetary Sciences, Stellar Astronomy, Extragalactic Astronomy, Cosmology.
"With support from the Vatican government, the scientists at the Vatican Observatory have a freedom to choose research topics not constrained by three-year proposal cycles or passing scientific fashions. As a result, our research topics, reflecting the wide range of interests in our staff, can focus on long-term survey programs and sometimes risky cutting-edge topics."
http://www.vaticanobservatory.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=38&Itemid=145
Also, the current theory for the origin of the universe, the big bang theory, was developed by a priest and it was rejected by the "open minded" eminent scientists of the day because it was developed by a priest and "smelled of creationism". The term "big bang" was used by these eminent scientists as a pejorative.
"Monsignor Georges Lemaître, a priest from the Catholic University of Louvain, proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, he called it his "hypothesis of the primeval atom". The framework for the model relies on Albert Einstein's general relativity and on simplifying assumptions (such as homogeneity and isotropy of space). The governing equations had been formulated by Alexander Friedmann. In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the distances to far away galaxies were generally proportional to their redshifts — an idea originally suggested by Lemaître in 1927. Hubble's observation was taken to indicate that all very distant galaxies and clusters have an apparent velocity directly away from our vantage point: the farther away, the higher the apparent velocity."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_Theory
That is actually a bit of a myth. The pope had a problem with Galileo, but that was because of the way he framed his theory, in the way of a story, using the name of the pope as one of the villains. If he had resisted poking fun at the most powerful man around he would have been fine.
"Evolution" is both a theory and a fact. The "Theory of Evolution" is science's explanation for the fact of evolution.
What few (if any) creationists don't realize is that the fact of evolution was recognized over half a century before Darwin published his explanatory hypothesis. Lamarck published his (incorrect) theory in 1809.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I believe, as an atheist, that someone who requires a set of arbitrary rules to behave ethically -- or worse, the threat of eternal damnation -- is a scumbag at heart. Although I believe actions speak louder than words, I also believe doing the right thing for the wrong reason is not sustainable.
Thus I believe that ethical systems based on figuring out which individual behaviour leads to more desirable collective outcomes are better ethical systems than those prescribing the same individual behaviours for arbitrary reasons.
Also, as an individual, ethics are not hard to build: one but needs to think about the consequences of one's actions, and prefer those actions which are better for the greater number of people, as well as those actions which have no more negative outcomes when duplicated by a large fractions of the population. And this is fundamentally consistent with the belief that there is no afterlife and no second chances: your deeds live after you, as well as the memories people have of you. “Heaven”, is therefore when these are maximised.
One often hears cranks of one sort or another insisting that their view should be the "null" hypothesis.
This reflects a widespread misunderstanding of what the "null hypothesis" actually is.
Cranks imagine that the null hypothesis is somehow a privileged hypothesis that doesn't require evidence--it is just assumed be true until proven false--which is why they want their own particular notion to be considered "null."
In reality, the "null hypothesis" has a very specialized meaning, which is not general to science, but rather limited to statistics.
Basically, when you are asking if two things are different, or if something has changed, one does this by exclusion--by showing that the evidence does not support the assumption that there is no difference. That's what the "null" means--"no difference." This does not mean that one starts by assuming that "no change" is correct, or even that the null hypothesis is more likely to be true.
Of course, a creation myth, like the theory of evolution, is an account of change, so it cannot possibly be a null hypothesis. A null hypothesis of the history of life--that nothing has changed--is not going to be very appealing to those who look to nature to justify their religious beliefs, because a universe that has always existed, unchanging, does not have much need for Gods. Scientists are more open to the notion; at one time, a steady-state theory of cosmology was popular. It's just that the evidence, both cosmological and earthly, does not support the null hypothesis of an unchanging universe.
There is sort of a chicken and egg thing going on, but they do tend to feed into each other. The huge religious revival in the United States occurred just as the factories were starting to close en masse. This is not a coincidence, people lives literally turned from a certainty of relative comfort and ease in exchange for a bit of hard work into a massive pile of uncertainty. To counteract the uncertainty they turned to those who promised certainty, ie the church. The rich noticed this trend and immediately set out to use it to their own advantage. To make sure the people they were fucking over didn't rise up against them, they cajoled the Republican party into adopting a lot of the hard core religious beliefs(the ones who are "certain" about everything) and combine them with pro-rich policies. That way you could actually convince people to vote against their own economic interests.
Monstar L
Teacher : World is round.
Student : Prove it!
Teacher : Folks have sailed around the world. That proves the world is round.
Student : I haven't sailed around it. How do *I* know? How do I know anyone has actually sailed around the world? Prove it!
Teacher : They took photos from satellites. Shows the world is round.
Student : I didn't take those photos! How do I know those photos are real? Prove it!
Teacher : Astronomical calculations prove that world has to be round.
Student : I don't understand this complicated maths. Prove it!
Teacher : Uh, this over here on the globe map is America.
Student : PROVE IT!
Or while we are at it
Teacher : George Washington was the first president.
Student : Prove it! How do I know that? Everyone who existed at that time is dead. How do I know you are not bullshitting? Is there any proof that this guy actually existed? I use photoshop too, so don't show me any photos and crap!
Teacher : USA has 50 states.
Student : Prove it!
Teacher : Everything is composed of atoms and molecules.
Student : Prove it! And don't show me any funny circles in an electron microscope. Why should I trust anything you show me? Those could be anything!
You will be surprised at how much of what we teach in school, is expected to be taken on basis of trust and faith. It is neither practical nor feasible to teach anything whatsoever to a student who is expected to question and distrust everything you say. GP is right. You make the student doubt everything you state, and it will become downright impossible to teach any science whatsoever in the classes. The only way the system works is by "proving" to the student that teacher is correct and trustworthy in most of the cases, and therefore asking him to trust the teachers even in the cases that cannot be demonstrated/proved in a class room.
Start teaching them bullshit like "Everything needs a creator and therefore God created everything!" and the next obvious question they will eventually ask is "If everything needs a creator, who created God?". If you answer with "Nobody created God", they will simply ask "then why does everything else need a creator either?" and eventually thinking you are not being completely honest with them, or worse, are actually stupid.