>From Michel Jullian > In school it's only mentioned in a historical context here. I understand there > are very many (>10%?) creationists in the US, I was just wondering if/to > what extent public school teaching was affected by this. > > Michel
You may find the following amusing. ;-) A PBS NOVA program recently did an insightful job of describing the recent creationism debate in America where an attempt had been made by proponents of that POV to force the school board to teach the theory of "Intelligent Design" alongside Evolution. Of course, since NOVA is a science based series I would imagine certain creationists are likely to cry "foul" claiming they have their own anti-creationist agenda. Perhaps there is an element of truth to this suspicion. Nevertheless, what was uncovered in the NOVA program was revealing. See: NOVA, Judgment Day, Intelligent Design on Trial. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/ Careful sifting through of previous revisions of text from one highly regarded book that supported the Intelligent Design theory ultimately contradicted what IDers had claimed their book was about. In recent history the U.S. courts had ruled that any book that discussed and used the word "Creationism" in the context of another SCIENTIFIC theory could NOT be taught as SCIENCE in a science class room environment. Intelligent Design proponents argued that their favorite book on ID was NOT about "Creationism". They claimed ID taught an alternative scientific theory based on the theory of sudden evolutionary-like jumps where it was theorized an Outside Intelligence had to be the only logical explanation for the sudden creation of brand new species. IDrs claimed to have piles of scientific data to prove their point - that historical fossils showed sudden "evolutionary" leaps that couldn't be explained by the traditional gradual changing theory of evolution. The ID book on trial, in fact, did NOT contain any references to the word "Creationism" anywhere in within its text. Therefore, IDers claimed their ID theory should not be judged within the context of being a religious treatise on Creationism. Unfortunately for the IDers that's not exactly what a few researchers eventually discovered in their investigations of how their favorite book on ID came into being. It was discovered that previous revisions of the book ORIGINALLY HAD USED the belief in "Creationsism" as a "scientific" theory. In fact the word "Creationism" had been peppered through the original pre-published text. The revisionists did their best to clean out all references to the word "creationism" to comply to the federal court decisions. However, the revisionists weren't as through as they had hoped. Researchers discovered curiously garbled phrases here and there where the word "Creationism" had literally been cut or SPLIT in half between hastily revised sentence structures, i.e.: "creat" followed by "ionism" later on in the same sentence structure. Ironically, it was if one was watching the evolution of the Intelligent Design text go through a process similar to what DNA code goes through during the mutation process! The Creationists lost their case. It's my understanding that for the moment "Intelligent Design" aka "Creationsism" is not considered a viable scientific theory and should not be taught in schools as an alternative scientific theory. Regards Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
