why those who deny evolution are incorrect

Just to be sure, you are joking, right?

Just to be sure again, you are joking, right?

Nothing persuades the creationist but giving his own mind a serious round of self-beating. And that's rarely going to happen.

It must be harder than to quit smoking.

 

The Bible is a book of facts

 

Show proof of what you mean

 

Nope, former high school biology teacher at an inner city high school. In 5 yrs of teaching, I taught evolution once. Why? I ran out of time making sure that they knew the parts of the cell, the basic systems, Mendelian genetics, the basics of ecology. The high school biology curriculum has sufficient material to teach for at least two years. Now, I'm not saying that I didn't use evolution in my explanations, but I only had the chance to explicitly teach evolution once (with an honors biology class). Explicitly teaching evolution or not is not going to cripple the country. Heck, an MD needs doesn't need a knowledge of evolution to be an effective physician, nor do any other medical professionals. Evolution is important for academics, but for the nuts and bolts of science in the world, it's not needed.

In that part I was just stating their arguments (based on arguments I've had against creationists in the past). I don't agree with anything in the above section. (I do agree with the part about high school biology, based on experience).

Your arguments have to be pretty strong to persuade them. I haven't seen it done.

 

What about all the history since the end of the Bible?

 

Has it occured to you that not having time might be partly by design?

My American history class in high school ended with a treatment of the civil war as mainly a series of movements on battle maps to be memorized followed by a lecture on how nasty the carpetbaggers were.

The end. All done. No more American history.

Where did I go to school? In Richmond VA, the former capital of the confederacy. I find it almost impossible to believe this was a coincidence.

 

No, it's a matter of a huge curriculum and body of content that has grown over time, without a reexamination of what is most important to teach. For example, I spent a month teaching about DNA--biochemistry, replication, etc. That has been added to the curriculum since the 1960s. Most ecology is fairly new--also since the 1950s. A lot of important biological principles have been discovered in the last 60 yrs.

 

As a former high-school biology teacher, you should then be aware that evolution is the basis and foundation for modern biology itself. Just glancing over it or skipping it entirely does a major disservice to the students.

Every general education high-school biology course should include a substantial focus on evolution. All subjects have way too much material to cover in one school year, and trying to fit in as much as possible essentially means glancing over everything. Rather, the fundamentals should take center stage, and only in higher level courses should the specifics be a focus.

Obviously touching on the other areas that you mentioned are beneficial, but to go over many of those instead of focusing on the basics seems counterproductive.

To be fair, you didn't give any detail as to what grade or course level you taught, so if the students already had a previous course where they should have learned about evolution, then I have no issue with your method. Only if your class was more introductory do I believe the above applies.

 

Yeah I hid in myconcrete bunker with fully functioning internet and cameras so I could watch it all go down!

 

It's also a matter of poor planning on the part of those planning school curricula AND since the US Education takeover by the left if anything is taught historically it is anti american.

and actually, if you can see European political cartoons they laugh at us more for our Presidebt than they would over evolution/creation. Hell. I hardly think they know anything about the latter.

 

So Pi equals 3, rabbits have hooves, and leprosy can be cured by rubbing dove blood on someone, right?

 

Quite the opposite actually, there is no archaeology evidence that the Hebrews were ever slaves in Egypt.

 

Well, I taught evolution indirectly (don't know how to teach biology without that), but I didn't spend time on natural selection, and the nuts and bolts of it. I had a curriculum with a lot of objectives--50 or 60. Only two or three directly included evolution.

And the cell is the fundamental that took center stage.

 

I am confused, how creationists are you able to always avoid the paradox of the created God by other god that was created by another one, and successively?

Because, you've added an entity, a problem to solucionate this problem, and you say this new entity created the world. But we have the problem, that who created this entity if we live in a created world of this entity.

 

That's an easy one. They define God as being the One Thing that does not require creation.

Since that's in the definition, the question, "Who created God?" is an absurdity.

 

God is a "necessary" being, which means God cannot cannot exist. That's the standard theistic response.

 

MMM, I don't see any logic in that definition. If we are in a creationist theory, even God was necessary being created by someone else.

And also we have an additional problem to this solution, if God was not necessary to be created, if not that always have been there, then it sends us to the possibility and the necessity to see that probably the Universe was something that didn't need any creation, so God isn't necessary.

Sorry, but always that you use the logic and you think rationally less sense has the existence of something like God.

It is absurd. This thinking is ridiculous. And like always it gives me the reason that it's thinking is fallacious and no rational. Then is giving reason to us that being theis is being irrational.

 

Yeah I wasn't defending the view per se. I'm more of an agnostic. But that is what most theists will tell you when you ask them, what created God? And if you buy into the idea a necessary being could exist, then it seems like they would have answered the charge.

 

What about in my example of history class? I find it hard to believe that was an accident.

 

I think David Hume pretty much destroyed the ontological argument...over 200 years ago.

"[T]here is an evident absurdity in pretending to demonstrate a matter of fact, or to prove it by any arguments a priori. Nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary implies a contradiction. Nothing, that is distinctly conceivable, implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no being, whose existence is demonstrable."

To translate, there is nothing whose existence can be considered necessary unless its nonexistence is contradictory. But since anything that we can conceive of as existing we can equally conceive of as not existing, there is nothing whose nonexistence is contradictory. Hence there are no necessary beings.

 

If it's like my American History class in high school, they wasted too much time on Native Americans, colonial times, the American Revolution and the Civil War. I don't think it's an accident, but it's also not a widespread conspiracy. The late 19th century was pretty boring, compared to battles, etc.

 

He is the man who Christians should cite when they want to say science isn't justified (since he gives a great argument against induction). However, I'm not so sure he has disposed of God. God's non-existence would be contradictory because a necessary being cannot not exist by definition, kind of like there is no such thing as a married bachelor. So God couldn't not exist and exist. IT (not he) MUST necessarily exist.

The key point from what you said seems to be this. If we can conceive of anything as existing, we can equally conceive of it not existing. We can conceive of God as existing or not existing. Therefore God is not a necessary being. The problem here is that if God is a necessary being, then we couldn't really conceive of it NOT existing. These arguments always make my head hurt.

This is why I'm not a full blown atheist and only agnostic. I think the argument from evil is pretty decisive against God, but I'm not sure God doesn't exist somehow in a way we may not understand yet.

 

I wasn't answering to you, if not the idea that you presented that the theists think. And I tried to refute this idea.

I interpreted that wasn't yours.

 

ptiff you are the biggest idiot i've ever encountered. DURRRRRRRRRR "the bible is a book of facts" ok thump that bible . wow you really dont know how to think correctly that book is fiction not fact!

 

Actually, that's the conspiracy of the historians. Make history boring by making it nothing but dates and names. History has always been about ideas, and you can follow the ideas that people had and what happened when they were applied to human societies.