Originally Posted by greenburke
The First Ammendment... "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights#The_Amendments
"The point of such an amendment is twofold. First, it ensures that religious beliefs - private or organized - are removed from attempted government control. This is the reason why the government cannot tell either you or your church what to believe or to teach. Second, it ensures that the government does not get involved with enforcing, mandating, or promoting particular religious doctrines. This is what happens when the government "establishes" a church - and because doing so created so many problems in Europe, the authors of the Constitution wanted to try and prevent the same from happening here."
--http://atheism.about.com/od/churchstatemyths/a/phrase.htm
Government run public schools are worried about Intelligent Design being taught as fact.
While the "creationism" camp is worried that government taught evolution will seep into their religion. Evolution did seep into Christianity, via the Gap Theory, introduced by Thomas Chalmers in 1814.
Even Christians debate "old earth" versus "new earth."
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I disagree that "there is no debate;" scientists themsleves debate this theory, and have done so for hundreds of years. Scientists debate the plausibility of the theory as a whole, they also debate the finer details of how evolution occured scientifically.
Darwin thought natural selection breeded life on earth, then recanted, turning back Lamarckism. Darwin was also upset by a lack of linking species found in the dirt.
Neo-darwinists believed that natural selection and random mutations would do the trick.
Even more modern evolutionists like Stephen Gould disagreed,
[I]"What good is half a jaw or half a wing? . . These tales, in the ‘Just-So Stories’ tradition of evolutionary natural history, do not prove anything . . concepts salvaged only by facile speculation do not appeal much to me[/I]."—*Stephen Jay Gould, "The Return of the Hopeful Monsters," Natural History, June/July, 1977.
Gould turned to the "hopeful monster" theory introduced by Richard Goldscmidt, "that every 50,000 years two animals are born within a close parameter and mate creating a new species." (evolution-facts.org)
"Richard Goldschmidt (1878-1958). The same year that *Clark wrote his book (1930), Goldschmidt gave up also. An earnest evolutionist, he had dedicated his life to proving it by applying X-rays and chemicals to fruit flies at the University of California, Berkeley, and producing large numbers of mutations in them. After 25 exhausting years, in which he had worked with more generations of fruit flies than humans and their ape ancestors are conjectured to have lived on our planet, Goldschmidt decided that he must figure out a different way that cross-species evolution could occur. For the next ten years, as he continued his fruit fly research, he gathered more evidence of the foolishness of evolutionary theory;—and, in 1940, he wrote his book, The Material Basis of Evolution, in which he exploded point after point in the ammunition box of the theory. He literally tore it to pieces (*Norman Macbeth, Darwin Retried, 1974, p. 152). No evolutionist could answer him. Like them, he was a confirmed evolutionary atheist, but he was honestly facing the facts. After soundly destroying their theory, he announced his new concept: a megaevolution in which one life-form suddenly emerged completely out of a different one! He called them "hopeful monsters." One day a fish laid some eggs, and some of them turned into a frog, a snake laid an egg, and a bird hatched from it! Goldschmidt asked for even bigger miracles than A.H. Clark had proposed! (*Steven M. Stanley, Macroevolution: Pattern and Process, 1979, p. 159)." -(evolution-facts.org)
"Return of the Hopeful Monster (1972). *Stephen Jay Gould, a highly respected paleontologist at Harvard; *Niles Eldredge, the head paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City; and *Steven M. Stanley, of Johns Hopkins University, have led out in resuscitating *Richard Goldschmidt’s "hopeful monster" theory—and demanding that the community of evolutionary scientists consider it as the only possible mechanism for trans-species changeovers." -(evolution-facts.org)
Debates and questions about evolution have been happening in the scientific community for the last couple-hundred of years; to say "there is no debate," shows a lack of study into the scientific community and their research.
