Bill Roper's Journal

I agree with you, as someone with hard science and social science training. Gov Palin said, "I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum." I hadn't thought about a hard prohibition as an authoritarian push of science as a matter of faith, but it's a good point you raise.

As I've said elsewhere, I for one am very much against "creation science" as a curriculum item, but very much for discussion of the differences between science and religion. My experience is also that there's no need to disparage either science or religion in that discussion. Then again, my schooling included a state-wide top science program that was taught by a religious institution. It was impressed upon us that science is a matter of methodology, and religion a matter of faith, each to its own purposes. Mixing up the two, it was explained, is best reserved for Philosophy classrooms.