“See there you go again...” < /reagan >
YOU are the one setting the argument as “creationism” being only a few thousand years old for all religious believers.
EVERYONE Christian, Jewish, Agnostic, Atheist, Scientologist, Buddhist has a creation belief. THAT is “creationism”.
if you want to use it as a pejorative and say that “creationism is a belief that a god or many gods created everything” that still does NOT give you the right to insist that everyone start that clock at 6,000 years.
That is the fallacy of this debate. Because “some religious believers” say “6,000 years” EVERYONE who believes in a God and believe that their God created the universe and life MUST believe THAT view of “creationist story” is a false argument.
There are some who see a “clockmaker view” of the universe, that the observed scientific principles had been put into motion by the creator.
To say ABSOLUTELY that there was no creator is a religious litimus test that makes ATHEISM the state religion. And that is outright academic bias.
We may “agree to disagree” as a nation but we cannot demand that everyone “forgo their religious beliefs to submit to the secular humanist atheists’ view”. That is what the muslim theocracy also demands. You may hold a different opinion as long as you never tell anyone that opinion.
Thus “freedom of speech” and “freedom of religion” become meaningless.
Whatever the timeline, the impetus of the belief in the near simultaneous “special” creation of all species is a RELIGIOUS belief, not a scientific one based upon evidence.
Nothing in science precludes God. Many Christians embraced the scientific data that points to a “Big Bang” because it so closely comports with the theology that there WAS a beginning to the universe (many previously thought the universe might not have a beginning).
So would teaching the Book of Mormon as actual history be acceptable in Utah public schools under your view of the 1st Amendment? Or would that be an establishment and/or endorsement of a religion?