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Oklahoma waters down Science

By skenmy ⋅ March 10, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

The Oklahoma House of Representatives has passed a bill that effectively undermines scientific teaching in schools by allowing students to “voluntarily express a religious viewpoint, if any, on an otherwise permissible subject”. Let’s put that into terms that you and I can understand more readily:

If a student says that the Earth is 6000 years old because that’s what the Bible says, they MUST be given the same grade as a student who uses the scientifically accepted 4.54 billion year figure.

So you are telling me that a student can pass a science class based on religious opinions? That sounds like a load of rubbish to me - it is insulting to anyone who has ever worked in/on/with science,  and to those who have rightly learned the scientific viewpoint of the world, and used that to pass the subject named Science. It’s not science if it is suddenly permissible to include religious viewpoint - that should be kept to the subject named Religious Studies.

The bill angers me so much. As someone who is against deistic religion as a whole, and as someone who studies Science, and who plans to continue studying Science onwards for a good number of years yet, it angers me that it is possible that students will gain a pass grade in the subject that I am devoted to by using their religious viewpoint as fact, when what the human race has strived for in the last 3 billion years (admittedly, most advances have happened in the last 10,000 years) is left unacknowledged. Religion and Science should not and cannot cross paths - Religion is a set of arbitrary beliefs. Science is a set of experimentally-supported beliefs. If religious people are unable to set aside their arbitrary beliefs for what has been proven through real-world experiment and hard work of humans, then they should not be anywhere near science. If scientists are unable to accept the fact that some people are unable to set aside their arbitrary beliefs, then they should stay away from Religion.

Thankfully, it’s not law in Oklahoma yet.  But it has already passed through the House of Representatives, and all that is left is passing the state senate. It’s already law in Texas - and it has landed schools and the state in heap of trouble, with lawsuits flying left, right, and centre. All because Politicians are allowed to let their religious viewpoints and bias infiltrate their work, they have played politics with religion, and now it’s affecting science. Are we really going to have a generation of “scientists” who were passed for saying the Earth is 6000 years old? Or that we were created in 7 days? What will happen to Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection? What will happen to all the rational theories about how we came to exist - aside from the Theory of Creation? Will they fade into oblivion, because religion now dictates science? We’re slipping back into the dark ages, and we can’t let the Church (or any other religious group) take control of science again.

Tags: dark ages, law, oklahoma, Religion, Science