That's the problem. Most Americans are so scientifically illiterate that what they think is scientific controversy is really scientific ignorance against current scientific understanding. To teach the controversies in evolution, or in any branch of science (because they all have controversies in their repsective frontiers) would require a graduate-level background in the respective subject. With respect to evolution, ther are no rational explanations that fit all of the observed facts.
Science is not a democracy. You can't vote or mandate by law a scientific result. Science is morally neutral. To inject morality into science means taking science and turning it into something that it isn't. Science deals with the material universe and is hence, materialistic. Science is not equipped to deal with questions of morality. On that basis, these anti-evolution attacks really are undermining the future scientific capabilities of the United States. We are already graduating more foreigners than Americans with advanced degrees in science and engineering and this type of anti-science hyperbole isn't helping.
I was going to edit out the superfluous parts of your post, but found that each and every word was critical to pointing out the elitism and disdain for 'those not like one's self' that it represents.
Sadly, I've known all too many who believed themselves to be scientists who shared that attitude.
So far I've been content to assign it to people who have so much invested in a single bit of knowledge that they must give it special status over the efforts of lesser beings.
So is it better for a special interest group to decide what is and isn't to be taught in public schools using the power of the judiciary to force on unwilling parents and students that philosophy?
As far a creationists undermining science, I guess the great strides made in science for the hundreds of years before Darwin's theory was published were just coincidental. Someone probably forgot to tell Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus, Pasteur, etc. that science couldn't be *properly* established all the while believing that everything was created by a God of order. My understanding is that if they had not had that concept, they would not have started looking of patterns of regularity and orderliness in the world around them.
Somewhere along the line, science got divorced from philosophy and morality and it shouldn't have been. It needs both to moderate it and keep it from being abused by man. Besides, if science has nothing to do with philosophy, then perhaps there should be some change made in giving scientists who highly specialize in their fields a . Perhaps they could rename it.
That's probably because foreigners are weaker and will take the abuse dished out by arrogant priests of the church of Darwin better than strong minded, independent thinking Americans.
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"Science deals with the material universe and is hence, materialistic. Science is not equipped to deal with questions of morality'
Then the science types had better shut up about morality then! I get tired of the science types who decry the the moral history of given religions, the wars...ect. blah blah blah! For a science type to decry a belief as "superstition" is actually a moral judgment and not a scientific statement.
I actually had two or three graduate-level seminars on problems in evolution. There were plenty of controversies too!
(They weren't the ones pushed as "controversies" on these threads.)
Darn, I should have bought that Tshirt which explained why God was a bad scientist.
I think one was that gods experiment, creation of the universe, was not duplicable by other scientist..
I forgot the rest.
Great statement!