"I supposed that's why there are so many different sects in Christianity and Judaism."
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Actually yes, it is. An inflexible leadership in a particular church refuses to acknowledge the validity of multiple viewpoints, instead claiming a monopoly on all knowledge, and so the church splinters.

This is off subject, You shared a movie link I watched which made me wonder if another great movie was on You Tube. Maybe you've seen this, it is a great movie Magic Bullet, about a great scientist Paul Ehrlich Ihope you enjoy. . http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oG...

>Contrary to this belief among the anti-evolution movement proponents, evolution of life forms beyond the species level (i.e. speciation) has indeed been observed multiple times under both controlled laboratory conditions and in nature.

Indeed? For example?

So then your issue is not with the idea of free education, but rather with taxation?

>You can believe a dog is a cat, but that doesn't give you the right to force your belief into the science classroom.

In a free society, it sure does. And the parents have the corresponding right to pull their children out of such a classroom and put them into some other classroom where they teach "dogs are dogs" and "cats are cats."

>Scientifically, evolution is a slam dunk.

I don't understand what that means. You mean the theory has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt?

Mind showing us some of that proof?

>Charles Darwin is considered the father of evolutionary theory,

He's considered the father one particular slant on evolutionary theory. Various theories of evolution existed well before Darwin.

>religion, which imposes the binary demand of either full acceptance or full rejection.

I supposed that's why there are so many different sects in Christianity and Judaism.

>The creationists then require an intermediary between the two smaller gaps. and so on.

And why not? That's what the original Darwinian hypothesis says we ought to observe: lots of small, incremental steps between Species A and Species B. The Darwinian hypothesis disallows "jumps" (known as saltations) between the two species. And if there really were lots of small, incremental steps between A and B, then each step should have reproduced and then died — so where are its remains?

>If a million small steps are found then they say it only 'micro-evolution'. (A concept invented to confuse).

Actually, the terms "micro-evolution" and "macro-evolution" have been standard terms in the Darwinist community for many decades. And the only confusions came from within its own ranks: the Darwinists actually believe that given enough time, "micro-evolution" turns into "macro-evolution," despite the fact that THAT is completely a matter of faith: there is no evidence, neither geological nor genetic, that the accumulation of small changes in this or that trait leads to radical changes in things like body-plan (which would be a macro-change).

And as for there being literally a "million small steps" between one fossil and another . . . you should be so lucky, Lucky. Most fossils show no transitions at all; some only show a few transitions.

It's called "Punctuated Equilibrium" and was the brainchild of two hardcore Darwinist believers: Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge.

It was noteworthy in its day because it admitted that the gaps in the fossil record are real; i.e., they are not an artifact remaining after various geological strata were shifted due to natural disasters, human meddling, etc. According to Eldrige and Gould, the reason there are gaps in the fossil record is not that the intermediates have been lost; it's because the intermediates never existed. There's nothing to be found.

They also took seriously the mathematics of people like Sir Ronald Fischer and Sewall Wright in the field of population genetics, who both showed that in large populations, single mutations — even the rare beneficial ones — would easily get swamped by the overall "gene frequency" of traits within the population. In other words, large populations tend to pull mutants — good ones and bad ones — back into the mainstream, because large populations like stability. So in order for a really big change to occur in a species, a smaller subpopulation must be split off from the rest and allowed to survive on its own. In a smaller population, the gene frequency of particular traits is much lower, so a mutant would have a far higher chance of surviving and getting its mutant trait "fixed" in the smaller population until it, too, becomes mainstream.

It's an inventive hypothesis, but it also stretches the limits of plausibility: did this happen in ALL cases? Hard to believe. And in organisms that already have smaller populations, e.g., mammals, a natural catastrophe would be just as likely to kill off the entire small population as it would be to split off part of it and allow to survive on some remote new geographical location.

Punctuated equilibrium was a brave attempt to save Darwinism from the mounting criticism that the original hypothesis predicts something that we ought to observe in the fossil record but do not.

>geneticists embrace this theory

I did not say "geneticists don't embrace Darwinism." I said Darwinism is, and was, unnecessary for discoveries in genetics.

"Embrace" means "retro-fit" or "shoe-horn." First comes the discovery, then comes the attempt to explain it via Darwinian mechanisms; i.e., the embracers imagine scenarios in the distant past in which imagined mutations were fortuitously selected for survival by an imagined natural selection. Then they imagine this happening successively until they arrive at the desired result: the present-day concrete facts they see in front of them.

This is great fun, but is hardly scientific, even if done by scientists.

No major innovative discovery in genetics came about by the researchers "applying" Darwinism to the data.

Nothing has ever been predicted by "applying Darwinism" to present data.

For example, after DNA was explained as being a helically-shaped, molecular sized, digital storage device, some biochemists later tried to retro-fit a Darwinian mechanism to explain how it could have come into existence. They've all failed for 1 of 2 reasons: either their explanations rely on infinite-loop chicken-egg scenarios (e.g., with DNA requiring enzymes to create the ribose backbone, but the enzymes themselves requiring DNA to code for the proper sequence of the amino acids that compose them); or their explanations stretch plausibility beyond the breaking point, as well as assuming into existence conditions on the early earth for which there is zero geological evidence (e.g., with an RNA World scenario comprising little pools of just the right nucleotides, coming together in just the right sequences, with no destructive reverse chemical reactions happening, etc.).

You're also ignoring the sorry politics of Darwinism. According to David Berlinski, one biochemist told him, "Darwinism? Please. That's just the Party Line."

And according to biochemist Michael Behe (who wrote "Darwin's Black Box" and "The Edge of Evolution") if a young scientist really has doubts about Darwinism as a satisfactory explanation for things, he learns quickly to keep his mouth shut until he his Ph.D. and until he gets tenure. Even then, he has to be careful how he broaches the subject of the weakness of Darwinian explanations to a class of students lest one of them complain to the dean that "Our professor is trying to teach us creationism."

EF, could I recommend Kenneth Miller's book "Finding Darwin's God."

I'm well acquainted with Miller's book, and his work.

In turn, may I recommend 2 books by Stephen Meyer:

1) Signature in the Cell (about why DNA or RNA could not have evolved by Darwinian methods, and why design is a better hypothesis for explaining how they came to exist); and

2) Darwin's Doubt (about why the Burgess Shale formation in Canada, as well as the Chengjiang Shale formation in China — both extremely well preserved and dating back 0.5 billion years to an era known as the "Cambrian" — offers solid evidence against the Darwinian hypothesis of small incremental changes over long periods of time. Darwin himself was aware of the findings in Canada but the Chinese ones are recent. These formations show indisputable evidence of a "Big Bang of Life" (popularly called the "Cambrian Explosion"), in which many different kinds of organisms — each unrelated to the other in terms of basic body architecture (each body plan known in paleontology as a "phylum") — all occurred more or less simultaneously — within only a few millions years of one another — and with no intermediate forms showing how one body plan could have evolved into another. They simply appear, all at once, with no intermediates between them, and — just as significantly — with no precursors before them.

Design has nothing to do with trying to reconcile religion and science; in fact, I think the entire "war between science and religion" was bogus to begin with, having been propagandized as such by anti-clerical writers starting in the Enlightenment (Voltaire was one).

The point of design is to show that "final cause" exists in the universe, and is not limited to what goes on subjectively inside the head of a human.

You speak about the possibility of one having religious faith yet embracing Darwinism, with no contradiction. Fine. I'm speaking of the possibility of being an outright atheist yet embracing design, with no contradiction.

For good measure, I'll also recommend David Berlinski's witty and wise book, "The Deniable Darwin".

Not the only way to solve that problem. Government run schools are not required to address that issue.

Hogwash.

Actually, that is still religious indoctrination. Pretty much every scientist agrees that religion can be neither proved nor disproved, so even presenting the argument at all in a classroom is a no go, because science is only concerned with things that can be proved or disproved. It doesn't matter how you word it; introducing unprovable problems into a curriculum that's supposed to be based on provable facts is irreconcilable.

Why not? Public schools makes it possible for poor people to obtain an education when they would otherwise not be able to afford one. I see no problem with that.

Charles Darwin is considered the father of evolutionary theory, but scientists today actually no longer operate on many the hypothesizes he initially proposed. Modern science has evolved (haha) beyond Darwin's original theories.

That's what's beautiful about science: when someone proposes a particular theory, but after substantial testing that theory turns out to be only partially true, we can discard the parts which are proven wrong while still accepting the parts which are correct, and human knowledge moves forward.

This is a far superior method of acquiring knowledge than the dogmatic approach of religion, which imposes the binary demand of either full acceptance or full rejection.

Getting taller is not a function of evolution, rather that is nutrition.
You missed the point about humans gaining sentience. But otherwise, good points.

Actually, yes, they are the same thing. If people are not free FROM the religious beliefs of others, then there can be no freedom OF religion. Freedom of religion and freedom from religion go hand in hand. Neither can exist without the other.

Yes it is. :P