I can't believe I'm having this discussion again...

First of all.. Because I don't think anyone wants to see me go in one of those monster rants about theory>law again, please read any of my previous posts here, just so we all mean the same when we use those words. If you're bored to do so then at least watch the first 2 and a half minutes of this video. I know it looks like evolution propagandish stuff and I don't care much for it myself, but these people are explaining the terms in question perfectly..

Now that we're up to date.. I also don't mean to imply that what actually happened was natural selection and NOT creationism, or visa versa. Or, if any of these topics should be taught in school (I've already expressed my opinion on this earlier in the thread). The only thing I have a problem with is calling Creationism a theory.

You can't just go around calling everything you like a theory. Even if we decide to ignore the fact that absolutely no-one from the scientific community accepts Creationism as a theory, there's a few simple reasons why it's not. For once, creationism can be disproven. And even though no theory can actually be proven, one CAN be disproven, as jcl said by seeing how well it fits into our current most generally accepted cosmology. As I've mentioned twice already, there's a Nobel prize and a hell lot of money waiting for the person that manages to disprove evolution. Right now, no one has. For creationism, there's no prize, because there's probably a billion acceptable ways to disprove Creationism as a scientific theory.

Ok so i took 5 minutes to come up with one of those ways.. I haven't googled it or anything, i just wanted to show how easy it is to do so.. Feel free to correct me if you like:

I looked up Creationism in wikipedia and saw there are many different schools of it.. The most popular one is called Young Earth Creationism and it says that 47% of Americans hold this view, and almost 10% of Christian colleges teach it. It implies that both the Earth and the entire Universe are less than 10,000 years old. So... my argument is this:

Light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second. Our Galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter so even if we assumed that Earth is right in the middle, then by looking up at the sky or with a telescope, Young Earth Creationism dictates that we should have only been able to see 10,000 light years away from earth, demonstrated here in my l33t mspaint skills:



So if the universe was created 10k years ago, the light from any other stars further away than 10k light years away from earth wouldn't have time to reach our planet at all. This includes the bigger part of our galaxy as well as all the other billion galaxies out there with their billions of stars in them. However, we are able to see stars which are 13 million light years ago, thus proving that our universe is at least that old. Of course, there are other ways to prove that it's actually a lot older than that.

Now what do I win? Nothing. If this was actually a theory, this would be huge.. But since it's nothing but, as wikipedia puts it, a religious belief; using science to disprove it means absolutely nothing..

There's also other ways to separate stories from theories. A theory must be able to predict things. With the theory of General Relativity you can predict the position of stars at any given time. With Newton's theory of Gravitation you could predict the movement of objects in most situations(but not all of them as Einstein showed). The theory of Evolution predicted a lot of behaviors in microbiology which at the time was non-existent. Give me one thing that Creationism predicted..

Finally, I found this case, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005) where the outcome was pretty much the following:



Not that a decision by an American court actually means anything but I liked how the outcome was: "ID not science. What's it doing in schools?".

Anyway... I know you're just being the devil's advocate here saying: "Christians once suppressed science, we're now doing the same", but that's not the case. When Copernicus wrote his heliocentric model he feared for his life and almost didn't publish his theory. According to Church doctrine, the Earth had to be at the center of creation. Saying otherwise was heresy. But christians aren't hunted down for believing in their God. It's just that this subject doesn't belong in schools. Especially in United States where there are people from so many different religious backgrounds.

Even in my school (I'm from Greece), I remember these two Albanian students in our class, who were forced to leave class and stay outside during our religion module (the kids were muslim and their mothers didn't want them to participate in the class). Now, being in a foreign country and be different than everyone else is difficult enough without the school alienating you by excluding you from class. Just my two cents worth..

Cheers,
Aris