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As somebody who worked in education for a few years, let me share my views on this. Every single school system in America customizes their curriculum to meet the needs of each individual student. The only difference is it is paid for by the state and is limited to those with a learning disability or students deemed at risk.

If I were a New Hampshire parent I would love the fact that I could now have phonics taught to my child instead of the Whole Word approach, which consistently fails to help a child to read at grade level. My mother began teaching me phonics and how to read at age two and by the time I entered kindergarten I was at a third grade level because of the phonetical approach to language and reading.

Also the current trend of everyday math has lead to a decline in mathematics scores nation wide because it stresses calculator use and asks children to come up with their own solutions.

I would be ecstatic to be able to give my child a proper education by taking him/her out of these programs.

It is expensive to develop an IEP (roughly $2,000 per student, but this cost includes the testing and prescreening so my estimate is $1,000 per student for this plan) , this will limit the number of parents who can realistically afford to come up with an education plan for their child.

The only reason I would vote against this bill, for all the actual good it does restoring education for my hypothetical child, is that it is proposing to remove evolution from the science curriculum. Creationism just won't go away and now it seems to be winning the fight for your child's mind. Fucking fundies...

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I know where you're coming from, but this isn't just about evolution. Any one thing, or several, within a student's curriculum that their parent disagrees with, can be changed to something else so long as the parent pays for the education. The school just has to customize the new curriculum to fit little Johnny "my parents don't want me learning about the civil rights movement, evolution, or that not every Muslim is a violent extremist."
Parents will be able to extend their personal beliefs into the education their child recieves in a public school without giving the kid a choice.
From what I've learned after leaving school and doing my own research, I've seen there's no such thing as an unbiased education. Unfortunately, not everyone questions what they've learned in school or what they've read from an expert.

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This might be a tangent, but as a Christian and a person deeply involved in the sciences, my worldview allows for the dual existence of Evolution and Creationism.

It's entirely possible I'm not educated enough about specifics in evolution, but from I'm surprised more people don't take this sort of mixed approach.

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There are things in this world that I dislike. One of the things I dislike the most is a serious argument, well constructed, delivered by someone who makes themselves difficult to respect.

I find Magikot's last paragraph particularly amusing given the content of his signature.

Please elaborate.

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My North Star: Jose Gomez
I'm an introvert. Now shut up so I can be happy. Except for you, helpful sales bot. Also, download this.
Away from The House, yet forever near to my heart

Means that Philes (probably) believes that biological evolution has occured but believe that it was initiated by and has since been kind of administered by, uhm, G-God.

Sorry about the Youtube link, it was just the first thing that came to mind.

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Lacy: How did I fall in love with such a jerk like him? Why can't I ever meet a nice man?
Tom: You've met lots of nice men, Lacy. I'm a nice man. The biggest lie all of you women tell yourselves is that you like nice men, when, in fact, we bore you silly.
The trouble is, you tell this lie out loud and so damned often that some of us more gullible types hear it growing up and work hard to become nice men.
Well, from all the nice men in the world, Lacy, fuck you very much.

I believe the same thing. I think I said so on this forum years ago. I'm always shocked by how people find it so difficult a concept to comprehend. Maybe part of it is that people just like to fight, and the compromise is so obvious that everybody needs to block it out with their mind.

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It's close to what I think. It's possible for random chance to churn out something like complex life and working solar systems in a universe this size, however, compare it to a tornado ripping through a junk yard and assembling a working 747.
I just don't think fundamentalist mentalities are really based on anything but an old book.
I also don't believe in an omniscient presence, but I find it rather hard to stomach the panspermia theory as well.

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Teilhard de Chardin wrote that evolution is not just an expanding sphere of mutation but also a contracting sphere of selection towards an omega point in consciousness.

Modern physicists would describe this omega point as an emergent order in the chaos, lurking in the infinite n-space of life like a rake in the grass.

Therefore he predicted as part of this evolution towards an omega point, a global 'noosphere' of communication as another step in our species towards a true overmind. He described ants as another species on its way toward a unifying system of communication.

Therefore, as evidenced by anthives and interwebs, some 18th century Jesuit missionary to China was right all along. Consciousness is a part of the laws of physics and we evolved because we're keen on Jesus.

Frankly, the wording of Genesis is vague and mythic enough to be completely disregarded when scanning the bible for clues to our biological origins.

"Let the sea bring forth, let the earth bring forth." Sounds reasonable enough to me.

As for "let us (plural) make people out of mud" well, one hebrew commentary describes the plural "us" as referring to the animals + yhwh co-operating to create humans. As for "out of mud" well it's half true and anyway the moral is "humble yourselves."

Considering every element in the universe heavier than hydrogen was formed by nuclear fusion within the heart of a star, and the only way for elements heavier than iron to form is from nuclear fusion that results in a supernova, that means everything found on this planet used to be in a star, or has been here since atoms could form. To think that all of the elements on this planet came from rampant explosions from far off in the universe, and aggregated around a single typical star in a far arm of the milky way galaxy to result in the planet we live on today is pretty damn cool. If by "half true" you mean true until the word mud is mentioned, then yes. We can still be humble knowing we wouldn't be here unless stars exploded billions of years ago.
Communication is increasing in complexity faster than we can physically evolve as a species, in what is known as a sideways data transfer. It's similar to how single-celled organisms would exchange genetic information before there was ever such a thing as a biological sex. There are things we take for granted today that we didn't have words to describe even 50 years ago.

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Maybe it's that compromising on this issue makes no sense. Either there is a God, or there isn't. On the one hand there are a load of theories explaining how everything you see around you came about by chance, on the other hand there is a book describing a God who encourages you to smash open the skulls of babies from the tribe next door.

So sure, you can sit around in a circle with your hippy friends, avoid facing up to the question, and spew a bunch of cop-out liberal nonsense like "Hey guys, maybe they're both right... wooaah!" but it just shows that you haven't thought rigorously about either position.

Or it shows that you have and rather than take total random chance or the great plan of some omniscient invisible man in the sky, you think that perhaps someone/thing put that ripple into the water and we're simply seeing the most recent results. I tend to think we're an experiment and not the work of a deity. A group of scientists much more advanced than us simply created a universe like theirs, to see how life would evolve. Sure, they can have all of the empirical evidence in their universe they want; but until they had shown that a universe with identical laws of physics and contents could create life in this way, there'd still be an argument about it. It Hell, they most likely made dozens of universes to repeat the experiment with controls and variables.
Now, would any being smart enough to know how to create a universe and essentially life be considered a God? That's entirely up to the person being asked that question.

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Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see.

My point was that this universe seems to be ideal for holding life. And, it should be noted, that I am not the originator of that statement and simply heard it before, in varying iterations and gave a paraphrase.
If any aspect of the laws dictating the workings of the universe were different, there's a pretty good chance there'd be no natives to say what those laws were. If the earth wasn't hit by a planet more than 4 billion years ago to form the moon, there'd be no buffer against impacts. The amount of hits the moon takes for us really helps us out, not to mention that it gives us tides, which helped form protocells that eventually became the first living things. If the starting positions of the objects in the solar system were different, that might not have happened. Hell, the only reason we're here is because the universe expanded to the point where energy density didn't prevent hydrogen from forming.

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This theory is equivalent to atheism, which makes you functionally identical to an atheist. My point stands.

I identify as agnostic, because I don't really know what happened. I'm not about to say there's nothing, and if my theory is remotely correct, what if it was just one scientist? That one person would take the role of our Creator, just as a group might, though I doubt the omniscience goes further than what would be expected in a control, and the omnipresence is just being observed. Hell, if the person even knows all of our languages, he/she probably thinks we're stupid for fighting about religion...but would probably acknowledge that it's one of the reasons the experiment is taking place due to a similar situation with her/his own species.
I don't understand religion literally, because it simply doesn't make sense that way. Even the language used is entirely metaphorical, so it'd be like saying a woman is a fox and then someone overheard you and sent a pack of hounds after her.

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But who created the scientist(s)?

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Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see.

Their parents, ad infinitum. If you really want that question answered, build a time machine that allows you to travel back further than the date it was created. You'd need a way to stabilize every wormhole in history simultaneously to get you anywhere and anywhen you had to go. Even then, I don't know how much energy is needed to create one large enough to travel through (though I know a design was worked up that would require 600,000 solar masses), or even if they're possible to find and connect to.
However, I also don't know if a construct of time and space can exist outside of the boundaries of time and space as we know them. Me? I'm working on a damn fusion reactor. Enjoy my practically free energy and you might be able to do what I said.

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But who created the first parents in that family line?

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Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see.

That's nice, but you're actually an atheist. Your beliefs map to atheism, you behave like an atheist, and you smell like one too, you filthy heathen. "Agnostic" is a word that atheists use to describe themselves when they're trying not to offend religious people, but it means exactly the same thing as "atheist".

The first parents descended from simpler and simpler organisms until all that was left were the raw ingredients to form lipid chains, amino peptides, and carbohydrates. Everything else goes back to that point too, because DNA is made of the same four things in every living organism we can see. And those raw ingredients are derived from long-dead stars. What put it all there/here in the first place? Damned if I know.
Hell, I don't even know the logistics of creating a singularity with all of the matter and energy in the current universe, making it unstable and watching it expand, unless the universe it was created in had even more matter and energy than that, and it was placed in a "pocket space" with no dimensions, which caused it to become unstable and expand faster than light can travel simply because there was no outside force acting on it to keep it stable.
Or it's simply the remains of a previous universe, and it happens like this forever.
Whatever the case, Hawking estimates there are 10 quintillion particles in the observable universe. The only ways I can think of to get a number even that high is by recycling a dead universe or somebody gathering particles from a universe much, much larger in scope, which would ask the question, "Is there a series of infinitely larger universes all created in a method of experiment?" And really, that could be, but that's as ridiculous to me as both a deity-creator and pure random chance...though if there are infinite universes along side ours with different physics, some with identical physics and different positions for astrological objects, and all that, I could accept random chance. Hell, the infinite alternate universes thing could also work along side the big bang/crunch idea, perhaps it's happened several times before and the physics were slightly different each time, and this universe happened to be one with life in it.
You...don't care about my design, so I'll assume you're trying to flummox me. I already said I can't answer the question directly. There's a pretty good reason, too - I wasn't there.

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I'd vote for this guy:


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Back to square one, then. If the theory with universe-creating scientists doesn't in the slightest bit bring us closer to answering the "Where did everything come from?" question, why introduce it and put any stock in it in the first place?

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Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see.

Yup. Of billions to the power of billions of planets, we have this one planet which can sustain life on some of its surface some of the time. Doesn't get more ideal than that.

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Lacy: How did I fall in love with such a jerk like him? Why can't I ever meet a nice man?
Tom: You've met lots of nice men, Lacy. I'm a nice man. The biggest lie all of you women tell yourselves is that you like nice men, when, in fact, we bore you silly.
The trouble is, you tell this lie out loud and so damned often that some of us more gullible types hear it growing up and work hard to become nice men.
Well, from all the nice men in the world, Lacy, fuck you very much.