Alchemy? Astrology? Phrenology?

Place your bets, everyone! Which long-discredited pseudoscience will Kansas bring into their school "science" curriculum once they're done crippling the standards for biology?

/me weeps silently for the future.

Darwin on trial: Evolution hearings open in Kansas

I think they are both equally acceptable theories.

I've never seen evidence of anything "evolving" into anything else beyond a microscopic level. Even then I hesitate to call it evolution.

I've also never seen god create anything.

Teach children the foundations of science and proving theories. Don't teach children what you need to in order to get the next big research grant.

I've never seen a million dollars but I still know it exists.

In fact, no one's seen anything evolve because it takes generations to do!

It's like... I've never seens mountains form, but I still know that they didn't poof into place! We can examine the tectonic movements of the Earth and draw reasonable hypothesis. We can then measure sea floors and ground elevations following tectonic movements and draw conclusions. In the same way we can examine species as Darwin did, draw his hypothesis, and then come up with predictions on what we would expect to see in certain conditions. We then have already been able to apply these predictions and witness that the hypothesis is right on.

As to the cause of evolution, that's still up for debate - there's a big split in the scientific community whether it's slow adaptation or sudden genetic mutation that is the main force behind it, but to ignore all the overwhelming evidence of evolution and say "Oh, well, creationism is equally viable" is absurd; it ignores all the research done. Sure, it's possible, but the likilihood is much, much, much less than contemporary theories of evolution.

And it should be taught that way.

I doubt we'll ever find out what makes things evolve from unicellular to multicellular... the vaaaast majority of life on the planet, and probably the universe, is unicellular. Multicellular organisms are a cool little fluke.

Oh, absolutely. I think revisionist Christians have a decent argument by saying that the conditions needed for intelligent life are so exceedingly rare that it is a fairly good sign that there was at least a bit of guidance involved.

To be fair to the other side of the argument, though, the universe is very, very, very big and inevitably somewhere it would likely be bound to happen by chance, and wherever that intelligent life may have been, they would have had the same opinion.

Regardless, I think the important thing to realize is just how precious all life is. I think the Buddhists have the right idea with thoughts like "Every life is a precious jewel". Maybe us Christian thinkers could learn something.

*puts on his asbestos suit*