South Korea to remove evolution from textbooks

[flike]

The idea of supernatural and worship is so stone age in thinking.

Yet it's also so very human. What you call the worship of the supernatural has been at the core of human history, from the Egyptians to the evangelicals of today. I suspect it's very close to the heart of what it means to be human, in fact. It may very well be the ONE thing that distinguishes us from all primates, all mammals, this need to invent, name, and worship the irrational - a physiologically latent chunk of reflexive, inductive reasoning that all us humans share to varying degrees.

[redandy]

This is one of those wearying topics.

I'm a Christian, would probably even be considered evangelical. I'm certainly conservative in my personal morals (though less so when it comes to morals and public policy). And yet, I have no problem with evolution, and I think those Christians who do crusade against teaching evolution are working in completely the wrong direction. Nowhere does the Bible state that its purpose is to be a science book. I think it's clear that Genesis is written in a poetic manner, that presents the formation of the world in an easy-to-digest manner. In fact if anything the remarkable thing about Genesis is how closely it resembles our understanding of evolution (working up from plants to fish/birds/etc to mammals to man) when compared with other ancient creation stories. My fellow Christians would be better to spend their time an energy learning science as a complement to their faith as well as a means to achieving more traditional Christian goals such as feeding the poor and healing the sick.

[tsukinodeynatsu]

The problem is that the idea of God directing things, or only directing them at a certain point, is completely superfluous.
There is no need to invoke any supernatural being as the cause of anything.

I completely agree, but I do think that there are plenty of things in the universe that we don't know about, and a supernatural being's as good a theory as any other.

That's faith or religious thought, it's not equivalent to rational thought in my book.
Even if there is a supernatural being how do you know how much superpower it has.
Is it simply just more advanced than us?

The idea of supernatural and worship is so stone age in thinking.

Personally, I feel that dismissing the possibility all together smacks of faith and religious conviction. The very idea behind science is to consider all the possibilities and experiment until you can disprove them. While there's no proof supporting the supernatural and paranormal, there is also nothing that disproves it to a scientific standard; erasing it from your list of possibilities seems very narrowing to me.

I quite like atheism, but the only thing that annoys me is people talking about knowing the 'truth' of what happens after they die. Nobody knows the 'truth', your theory's as good as any other. But you know who else claims to know the truth? Religious nuts.

[headhonchoII]

I know the truth as in there is absolutely no evidence for any supernatural intervention in the universe or in our daily life. None...diddly...squat. Everybody who has ever lived has died in the end in the same way.

Even if there are things that we don't understand fully like the UFO phenomenon it is more likely to be other intelligent entities, that's it.

I don't want to be facetious but anybody can claim anything they like but without any evidence whatsoever it's just human constructed fairytales isn't it?

And as I said earlier, an entity or civilization sufficiently advanced compared to us would have God like abilities, but they are not super natural, just more advanced than us. We can never tell the difference.

Plus the idea of a supernatural being that we worship, I don't get that. What is worship? Why do we need to worship something?

[tsukinodeynatsu]

I know the truth as in there is absolutely no evidence for any supernatural intervention in the universe or in our daily life. None...diddly...squat. Everybody who has ever lived has died in the end in the same way.

Even if there are things that we don't understand fully like the UFO phenomenon it is more likely to be other intelligent entities, that's it.

I don't want to be facetious but anybody can claim anything they like but without any evidence whatsoever it's just human constructed fairytales isn't it?

And as I said earlier, an entity or civilization sufficiently advanced compared to us would have God like abilities, but they are not super natural, just more advanced than us. We can never tell the difference.

As long as you don't assume that your truth could be wrong, I'm good with that.

Plus the idea of a supernatural being that we worship, I don't get that. What is worship? Why do we need to worship something?

I never got this either. I guess because it's easier to blame and praise something that may or may not exist than accept our own failures and successes? Because it makes people feel good? I really have NO idea.

My best bet is that some bloke thought 'Hmm, I bet I could make a lot of money doing this' and thus was born the church, yea.

[tsukinodeynatsu]

I know the truth as in there is absolutely no evidence for any supernatural intervention in the universe or in our daily life. None...diddly...squat. Everybody who has ever lived has died in the end in the same way.

Yup. Sure, there could be something supernatural out there, but given that there's not an iota of evidence or reasoning supporting the existence of such, I have no cause to believe in the supernatural.

Plus the idea of a supernatural being that we worship, I don't get that. What is worship? Why do we need to worship something?

Probably stems from random violent events in the past (e.g. lightning strikes, volcanic eruptions), and ancient people thinking that they are signs of angry spirits that need to be appeased. The worship would be part of the appeasement, since humans would ascribe human qualities to the spirits. People like to be worshipped, fed, pampered (privileges we all experienced as infants, by the way).

Humans are pattern-seeking animals. We're not content with "It just happened randomly". We want to know why. The primitive human mind sought answers through concepts like spirits, deities, rituals and magic, since they didn't have the tools to seek the real reasons. Now we have science.