Evolution Alone Should Be Taught Place For Everything Faith-Based Teaching Appropriate At Church And In The Home.

Creationists declare that evolution, (they prefer to call it Darwinism) is only a theory and no more entitled to be part of the public school curriculum than any other theory.

They also pretend that creationism, which you can read about in the Old Testament book of Genesis, is supported by science and therefore belongs in the schools as much as evolution does.

For centuries, several of which are together known as the Dark Ages, biblical accounts of the origin of life and other natural mysteries went unquestioned. Challenges to their literal truth were branded as heresy. Galileo got in trouble for using a telescope to get a closer look at God’s universe.

But human beings’ God-given inquisitiveness was too strong to be smothered. Restless Enlightenment thinkers such as the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon - who anticipated Darwin’s theories by more than a century - were restless over the contradictions between scriptural accounts and what they could see. They began to seek, and offer, more plausible explanations. Buffon was one of the first to debunk the 17th century pronouncement by Irish Archbishop James Ussher that the world was created on Oct. 26, 4004 B.C. - at 9 a.m., by the way. Incredibly, some people still accept Ussher’s calculations, just as some people accept Genesis at face value.

That’s no justification for teaching it in the public schools, however.

Neither Buffon nor Darwin, nor Alfred Wallace, who coined the phrase, “survival of the fittest,” got it all right, of course. But their work launched the rigorous process of experimentation, observation and measurement that science uses to test such theories, to validate or invalidate them, to revise them in an endless process of refinement.

That’s how knowledge expands. That’s how legitimate science works. That’s how evolution gained credence and creationism lost it.

For most mainstream religions, evolution is no threat. Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, among others, accept it. So do Jews.

If creationism represented credible science, the separation of church and state would be no reason to exclude it from the science curriculum. But it is not credible science, it is religious faith, and it belongs in the church and the home, not in public schools.

, DataTimes MEMO: For opposing view see headline: Evolution requires lots of purposely blind faith

The following fields overflowed: SUPCAT = EDITORIAL, COLUMN - From both sides CREDIT = Doug Floyd/For the editorial board