Why do people deny evolution?

I think a good heart is more than half "the battle."

You merely presume that this tendency occurs and then deny the issue of the Establishment clause in public schools.
You started this whole conversation with blaming big-science-ed for "pushing its way into our lives" Thats bullshit and you know it so lets not try to cover up what you said and try to ridicule my comments which are on point.
Science education has come late to the public schools and its been done it by court case after court case (which you seem to continually try to dismiss by either belittlement or just hitting your mind's "ignore" button)
If ya dont get it , or keep trying to deny it, Ill make it my goal to make sure you understand that the courts dont always support the way that YOU think and their rationale is pretty well reasoned.

What is derived from all these court cases is the following
Public school= NO TEACHING OF CREATIONISM / ID or some hybrid miixture based on "teaching the controvesry as an issue (as you so often surreptitiously try to do). Its religion based and is therefore not to be included as curriculum in SCIENCE. If a school wishes to include it in a survey of cultures course, that entirely ok

Private schools not publically funded =YOU CAN TEACH WHATEVER YOU WISH including Creationsism/ID or the "big turtle in the primordeal sea dropped the earth as a dung ball". The stuff the kids are tested on are amazingly elementary and concepts like evolution are asked in the senior level biology tests.

Speculation about what they "Oughta teach" or "a kids natural recognitions of pattern in nature" only has a place for your kids if theyre in a private school where you are free to mess with the cuurriculum all you wish.

Im familiar with the Pennsylvania system of public science education and its based on a "stair step" methodology, wherein teaching stuff like
"What is evidence"
or
"Ho do we use the scientific method"
or
What constitutes a scientific equation

Are concepts that are actually taught in the early grades and, while its not pwerfect, it doesnt just jump around that the kids wont have any concept of how science does its work before they are taught the actual concepts under investigation.

For the last 2 years it appears to me that youve been more prosyletizing this ID base of reality and you periodically slip in these "concepts" that maybe someone will just accept and then later you can pile on some more. Youre assertion about teaching something in second grade in order to stunt the kids natural tendencies has gotta be about as ludicrous a concept as any other ludicrous concept Ive ever heard.
Bill Nye has been singled out, targeted, and verbally assaulted with just plain unscientific CRAP by the Creationists .Hes handled himself with grace , humor , and overall knowledge of the way science works.
Hes written about his encounters and , I dont know where hes actually gone out hunting Creationists (sorta like Dawkins does) He is a spokesman who's basing his work on entertainment and the teaching of scientific knowledge. I can see where the IDers want to try to trip him up ,It makes great entertainment and if he admits ANYTHING "about how science doesnt know everything " his statements to that effect are played up as a "big hole in the scientific "theory of evolution". Being honest is not a weakness when the evidence youve got at hand Doesnt call anything of the theory into question.

I recognize its hard being locked to your beliefs in this matter with non-existent evidence while trying to debate science. BUT puhleeze, try to understand and recognize where the limits of science education actually reside and what tests all these past court cases have used to actually define what is or is NOT a religious basis of "science" (and is therefore not welcomed into public schools science curricula).
Noone is trying to indoctrinate the kiddies, the science curricula are based on a process of a hierarchical unfolding of more and more difficult and abstract concepts.
The teaching of pattern recognition already is part of the curriculum in arts at an early elementary level. (WHich of these things are not like the other??)

Q: Do you have kids of your own?. Maybe Ive been assuming too much about your understanding from experience about how we learn from our own larvae . Im sure youd be fascinated about how a kids mind opens up and begins becoming a huge sponge in the first two years. How a 6 month old blossoms into a talking reasoning self aware and curious being by 2 years old.(The recognition of pattern is a huge part of the "becoming sentient beings" process) So teaching something to thwart a natural tendency is kind of something Id expect from some Creationist fable developer, you dont usually sound that desperate.

But thats another story

Thats pretty much the whole nutbag summarized beautifully.

Reasonable people leave religion alone , several of the shriller science types , (likeDawkins and Coyne) are actual embarrassments to sound reasoning.

THE LEMON TESTI brought this up as a title in past discussions with you ( Leadfoot) and others. It describes the sharp edge that the Supreme Court (and lower courts) have used since 1971 to define the "entanglement of a state with religion". This comes from the "Separation of Church and State" website. Its a bit contentious as you can see from the "criticism" but it is, at least for now"Settled case precedence"
If you read it and take it for what it says, youll see where the entire discussions of what should or should not be taught and why gets involved in an arena that of which Constitution demarcated the
boundaries (but have only been finalized via Supreme Court decisions), sorta like gun-laws

The Lemon Test

Research by Jim Allison.
The Lemon test was formulated by Chief Justice Warren Burger in the majority opinion in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). Lemon dealt with Rhode Island and Pennsylvania programs that supplemented the salaries of teachers in religiously based, private schools for teaching secular subjects. The Court struck down both programs as violating the establishment clause.
The purpose of the Lemon test is to determine when a law has the effect of establishing religion. The test has served as the foundation for many of the Court's post-1971 establishment clause rulings. As articulated by Chief Justice Burger, the test has three parts:

First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; finally, the statute must not foster "an excessive government entanglement with religion."
According to separationist scholars Barry Lynn, Marc Stern, and Oliver Thomas, the fact that a law may have a "religious purpose or be motivated by religion does not mean it is unconstitutional as long as it also has a bona fide secular or civic purpose" (The Right to Religious Liberty, p. 3). Similarly, "a law that has a remote or incidental effect of advancing religion is not unconstitutional as long as the effect is not a 'primary' effect" (p. 3). Finally, the Court has allowed some entanglement between church and state, as long as this entanglement is not "excessive" (p. 3). Hence, the Court has built some leeway into the test so as not to invalidate laws that have only remote connections to religious practice. This is not, in other words, the work of a Court that was hostile to religion. On the contrary, Justice Burger, a Nixon appointee, is generally reckoned as a conservative on social issues.

We note also that the Lemon test is squarely grounded on the principles articulated in Everson v. Board of Education. Accomodationist legal scholar Stephen Monsma, for example, notes that Burger's opinion is:

Deeply embedded in...the sacred-secular distinction and the Supreme Court's evaluation of the state's attempts to separate out the two and subsidize only the latter. His opinion noted that at the trial-court level several teachers had testified "they did not inject religion into their secular classes." And the District Court found that religious values did not necessarily affect the content of secular instruction. Burger agreed, but made the additional, crucial observation that "the potential for impermissible fostering of religion is present." He then went on to conclude that under such circumstances state attempts to assure a strict separation of the sacred and the secular would require continuing state administrative supervision and surveillance, resulting in state entanglement with religion (When Sacred and Secular Mix: Religious Non-Profit Organizations and Public Money, pp. 32-33)
The Lemon test has not escaped criticism. Many scholars (including separationists Leonard Levy and Donald Laycock) have argued that the test is unduly subjective and internally consistent, and it's usefulness has been questioned by a majority of the sitting Justices. Still, as noted by Monsma,

...[the test] has not been formally overruled and the basic principles on which it rests--no-aid- to-religion and the sacred-secular distinction--still form the core of what is the dominant line of reasoning dealing with public funds going to religious nonprofit organizations (p. 33)

It's useless to fight Christianity (or any religion). Members are hooked by their emotions, and not by logic.

yes, I think that's probably right..

Again, you didn't read what I wrote. Although I do agree this tendency exists, it was these 'respected professionals' from science and academia that made the claim. That, and their response to it, is what prompted my post on this sub-thread.

If you are trying to convince me that there is no popular support for any of my view points you could have stopped long ago. I realize the 'insanity' of what I'm trying to do. Anyone who tries to find a coherent path between the three very disparate fields of science, theology and human nature is not likely to be taken seriously.

Rest easy farmer, the kids are safe from such blasphemy

I think another aspect of this whole thing is the historical progression on this whole issue. Where did this fight come from?

Religious people made claims about the origins of the Earth and events (such as God stopping the sun in the sky). A few of those same religious people, due to various factors, were allowed to exercise their curiosity about the world and began collecting information. That information seemed contrary to what the rest of their culture believed. They were pilloried for their conclusions. At first it was physics then biology. Even more contentious because, while over time, almost the whole population of the planet was forced into a round earth, biology didn't fair so well. Yet, the collection of biological facts combined with paleontological, geological studies led to what seemed an obvious conclusion: evolution. And this idea was used as a guide to all subsequent study which led to the discovery of the mechanisms involved (genes) and so much of what you'd expect if evolution were true from the fossil record..

All this to say that folks who did science didn't start the battle. It was the religious people who continually drew lines in the sand and up until evolution had to keep erasing that line and redrawing it - backwards. But evolution is their last stand. The evidence demands that we at the very least entertain that the idea is true at the most accept it until otherwise shown.

And this gets at the heart of what I was talking about before about using similar rationals for similar things. Germ theory is just that, a theory. But how many of the uber religious fight this on the grounds that it is 'just a theory'? How many fight the idea of a theory when it comes to anything but evolution? I can tell you by listening to so many of these individuals that their understanding of what science is, what evidence constitutes, is severely limited. They don't have to 'believe' evolution, but their poo-poo'ing of it, their willful ignorance of overwhelming evidence in favour of "holes" is disingenuous in the extreme.

Oh, I forgot to answer this.. Yes, I have 2 children and 4 grandchildren

popular support be damned, sometimes the kids need to be taught what is reproducible , not a series of tales that sound fuzzy and comfy.

As far as "what the professionals have said", Im sure you only posted that to say "see?" . Perhaps these teachers (or whatever they do) say something like "What appears to be design". Or perhaps these "professionals could be members of the vaunted Discovery Institute (or similar focused organizations)


Actually I would like to read the clip from which you derive that whole litany.

Interesting story in the science news today. They've found positive evidence of feathers on a theropod dinosaur, the same family that birds evolved from, preserved in a 90 million year old lump of amber.
the theropod was not a bird, which sort of shoots a huge hole in that whole bogus rant which gungasnake keeps cutting and pasting, which maintains that evolution would never happen, because when one favorable mutation happened, it woulde have beenbred out of the species by the time the next one happened, because it wouldn't serve the purpose that the whole congeries of mutations would when it was the only one present. What actually happened is that feathers were widespread in theropods (which also included T. Rex millions of years later), both terrestrial and later to be fliers, well before the fliers evolved, as were several of the other mutations that combined eventuaally lead to birds, because they served other purposes. In short, gunga keeps reposting and reposting a crock of ****.

was that the find in the amber from Canadian coal fields?
I was interested in the stratigraphy of that.(I was kinda shocked at how a dino, several meters in length would be found in an amber rich environment.

I was reading several months ago about ceratopsian (mono and di and triceratops) dinosaurs from early to late K had shown a mini evolutionary sequence wjere the group had first shown evidence of fether like downy structures and then scales , and by the time they went extinct, the fossils were all showing scales.
Id like to see the selection inferences of that Family.

Gunga-sorta forgot him and his conclusions.

Not the whole dinosaur. Tail featjers. And it was afrom a ver small theropd, not sevaral meters.

Clant figure ou how to do cites on my phone.its in NYT and Nat Geog News.

I think it wwas Chinese

hmm from what i learn mutation in genetic is rarely occurred right?
so how evolution is completely sure it will trigger someone ask me that.
since it need more information to become complex being from simple being that what he say to me. then i told him this, "complex information not literally complex it just a few simple information that get added over certain period of time. as time go from some year to hundred year the accumulation of simple information that passed down to the next generation become more complex cause all the simple information that collected grow denser". are what i explain to him is valid like this?

Evolution isn't sure of anything, it's a theory, it doesn't have the capacity of thought.

What happened didn't occur over hundreds of years but millions, that's a long time, long enough for a ton of rare events to occur.

yes, i know. but for really small change to occurred it did not need over billion or trillion years. i just give him little example that can even happen now. simply to put, like small adaptation of body part continuous for million time of years it become evolution

Why are you bothering, some people believe what they want to believe and evidence be damned?

You can lead a horse to water and all that.

well he asked me so i answered it. since i think if someone ask u something u must answer him truthfully without lie and also as easy as they can understand. that's why i ask are the way i answer for his question is valid.