Ice Fox wrote:
Intelligent Design should be taught in schools. As should Evoloution. You should be able to choose without getting biased views on the subject.
Bingo! (Well, partially). I think both should be taught. The problem is that it proves nearly impossible to obtain non-biased views on the subject. This very thread is a demonstration of how easily biases leak into so much of what we say. We're so busy defending our respective points of view that critical thinking as such is essentially rendered nonexistent. We "should" be getting non-biased views, but that rarely happens.
Ideally, we should take both sides of the debate and critically analyze them and arrive at our own conclusions. The key is not to be swayed by the constant polemic of others, but rather to think for ourselves.
More to the point, I think that evolution as it's currently taught can fairly easily be placed into a biblical framework. One could simply argue that the Christian God made it so it
seems like dinosaurs once roamed the earth billions of years ago, and make the evidence
seem like we evolved from apes or whatever. It doesn't "prove" anything one way or another.
If we look closely, we see that the Bible is filled with great science. Pore through the book of Leviticus and the Jews were given commands that, at the time, would have made no sense. But in the light of today's advances in medical science, the wisdom of the Bible-as-science shines through.
Why were Jewish males circumcized on the
eighth day? Well, that's what God commanded them to do in the Old Testament. But there's actually a specific reason for this that medical science has only finally understood fairly recently.
Before the Lord ordained the ritual of circumcision for males, He arranged for the coagulating pro-enzyme called prothrombin to be at 130% of normal adult levels on the eighth day of life, and for natural analgesic enzymes in the blood to be at lifetime highs as well.
Circumcision on any other day can be a painful and bloody event, but on the eighth day of life it's remarkably less so. Of course, this is a fact the medical profession has only learned in the last century. Back then they just knew that everything worked better when they were obedient to God's commands.
Anyway, my point here is that the Bible is amazingly scientific on many levels. The examples could be expanded manifold. The Bible speaks of a "skin on our teeth" in the book of Job (chapter 19 verse 20), but it's only recently that dentists discovered that, indeed, teeth have a skin on them.
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