Perhaps it would have been better to ask if the creation account should be taught as an alternative explanation of how life arose on the earth, even if it's taught in science classes along with the ToE. It would be interesting to see the poll results for that wording, as I know several others have expressed the same difficulties in voting as you did.
That's a very interesting suggestion, metmom!
It seems to me any creation account really belongs to cosmology. Evolutionary theory isn't the least bit cosmological, it does not and cannot say what the origin of life or consciousness is; it only speaks to what happens to species once they're here (so to speak).
Darwin said that "life can only come from life." He never said where life came from. Neils Bohr agreed, saying the origin of life is simply unknowable -- not just "unknown," but "unknowable" on principle -- and thus could never be a proper subject for scientific investigation. And Hubert Yockey agrees with both men that the origin of life is "unknowable." And yet: There Life is!
All this really boils down to for me is that the origin of life is "unknowable" on the basis of reason alone, thus scientific methodology cannot give an account for it. To get the "full picture," Spirit, faith is required: Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive, but equally necessary complementarities for a proper understanding of man and the universe.
Yockey is really interesting -- I'd love to see him taken up in the public schools. He suggests that living systems do not "bottom out" in physics and chemistry, but have a deeper cause, which is essentially mathematical or geometrical in form.
But to me the main point is that for neither the case of an origin in geometry nor an origin in physics/chemistry, no one knows what the origin of the geometry or the physics/chemistry is. THIS is the PRIME "unknowable." Science must remain silent with respect to it, for its method cannot reach to it.
And so we are left in a situation where there is no evident "objective standard" by which either theory (chemistry vs. geometry) can be falsified.... (Might this be a tip-off that they may actually be "complementary," in Bohr's meaning of that word?)
Still from a cosmological or even explicitly theological point of view, Yockey's "geometry" seems to comport very well with what is meant by the word, "Logos." (Though I don't have reason to believe that Yockey is at all a "religiously-minded" person. I am, however; and so am mindful that the word comes up in the very first line of Saint John's gospel.)
Anyhoot, just because the ULTIMATE source of the universe cannot be a problem for the scientific method does not mean there is no ULTIMATE source. Speculations about what was going on before the big bang, or in universes parallel with our own, or in multiverses, etc., belong not to science class, but to cosmology. FWIW.
Perhaps with caveats the creation account could be offered in connection with a course on ToE. My preference, however, would be to offer cosmology itself as a course for high school students, where origin accounts from both science and the humanities (i.e., the Western cultural past) can be freely discussed on an equitable basis.
I hope something can be worked out. For our high school science students definitely are not getting the "full picture" of what Life is. Again, FWIW.
Thank you so much, metmom, for your engaging, thought-provoking post!
The way the question is usually asked is something like "Should religion be placed on an equal footing with evolution in the classroom?"
The real answer is, only if the religion you choose is the RIGHT one. In other words, in order to have an apples to apples comparison, you'd need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution and the only candidates I know of would be voodoo, rastafari, and santeria. Rastafari in fact would lend itself to certain kinds of team-teaching situations in that a biology teacher looking for a way to put 30 teenagers into the right frame of mind for indoctrination into a brain dead ideology like evolution, could walk across the hall to the rasta class for a box of spliffs.
Yeah, the wording of the question here reminds me of the kind of push-polling that the media polls engage in -- twist the wording such that you get a desired result. Besides, this isn't a Free Republic poll, as implied by the title of the thread, but a "Patrick Henry" poll designed to stir the pot.