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Creationism is an anti-science, fundamentalist religious movement which in its usual form claims that all of science is incorrect and invalid, and is a kind of atheist conspiracy to attack religion. Creationists don't just object to scientific biology, they also assert that all of geology, geophysics, any physics since Maxwell, all of astronomy and astrophysics, and even all of world history before classical antiquity, is "made-up nonsense" intended to damage the faith of believers. Strict Creationists may even claim that the earth is flat, and at the center of the universe. Intelligent Design is a spinoff of this movement. Instead of attacking all of science, promoters in Intelligent Design point to various features of nature as discovered by science as "evidence" that the natural world is the work of an unspecified and possibly unknown "Designer."
Strictly speaking, Creationism is
a religious movement, whereas Intelligent Design is a
pseudoscience. However, promoters of both of these vacuous ideas
have created a major social problem by launching a direct attack
against science education in US and UK public schools. Such
attacks were increasingly common in the era 1990 - 2010.
The fact that such attacks have an obvious religious basis
resulted in US courts consistently ruling against Creationism,
when lawsuits were brought to allow "equal
time" in K-12 science classes for Creationist and ID
dogmas. The Establishment
Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution
explicitly states that "no law" shall establish one particular
religion as an "approved" State Religion. However, organizations
such as the Federalist
Society, beginning during the Desegregation
Era of the early 1960s, started identifying law students
who were religious and political extreme conservatives, and
helping them into eventual judgeships in Federal courts, Appeals
courts, and even the Supreme Court. As a a result, as of 2023,
it is unlikely that many existing courts could or would rule
against Creationism and Intelligent Design as replacements for
actual science education in public schools! Even worse, US
public schools have consistently failed to teach basic science.
So, at the current time, about 40%
of the US population consists of staunch religious
fundamentalists who basically "do not believe" in science.
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Creationism-centered textbooks were created by huge numbers of Christian publishers, between 1970 and the present, for use in all K-12 level classes, in public schools (where allowed by local law), church-run schools, charter schools, and for home-schooling. No matter what grade level the books are written for, they have ZERO scientific content, and basically state over and over that the world and its processes can only be understood by reading the Bible.
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In the past few years, religious
conservatives have widened their target. No longer is the attack
against science in public education... instead, the full-on
attack is directed against the whole concept of public
education! The pressure on courts is to allow public funds
to be used to support and enlarge the system of private
religious schools, at the expense of public school funding.
Let's see why the concept of creation or a creator could never be a part of science. Suppose I have a divine revelation to the following effect: Space Monkey created the world and all that is on it, three years ago today. Your objection might be that you can remember back more than three years, there are things obviously more than three years old, and so on... but, oh, you pitiful amonkeyistic fool! Don't you realize that Space Monkey created everything just the way it is? He created those memories, those things, he created it all. Now we can see the problem with this concept. It is not a scientific theory, it is not even a pseudoscience scenario— it is a completely empty phrase. Translated into ordinary English, it is, “The way things are is the way things are.” When I ask for evidence for or against Space Monkey and his creation, the problem is that no matter what I point to, and no matter what it signifies logically or scientifically, it means nothing, because Space Monkey could have created it any way He wanted to. The Intelligent Designers merely replace the word “created” by the word “designed,” a replacement which actually makes things even more confused, since the verb or noun “design” has no known relevance to any system or process in nature. Having creation or design occur 4.6 billion years ago or 13.8 billion years ago, instead of 3 years ago, also changes nothing.
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Because our sun is fortunately
located in a spur in the outer parts of a spiral arm of our
galaxy, we are very close to the Great Nebula in Orion, a
nursery where stars and planets are constantly being formed from
clouds of interstellar gas and dust. We can see systems in every
stage of formation. What is making these stars and planets and
moons is ordinary GRAVITY. Given an initial cloud spat
out of dying stars, gravity has a unique role... it is the only
fundamental force which has both infinite range and is always
attractive. Thus the initial nonuniform density of the
clouds of gas and dust is intensified... the denser parts get
denser, the thinner parts get thinner, and the most massive
concentrations become stars, while the lesser concentrations
become planets and moons. There is little or no mystery
about such "creation" because we can view the processes in every
stage, with hundreds of examples to study. There is
another fundamental force, which in practice has a range so
short that it is scarcely more than the diameter of an atom...
this electromagnetic force forms atoms, and forms clusters of
atoms... molecules! When we focus our attention
on the surface of a planet where complicated molecules can be
stable, and combine easily, we can readily wind up with some
kind of life... molecules that can self-replicate. Organic
molecules are made of precisely the most abundant atoms in
nature... hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc. They
form even in the near-vacuum of interstellar space, in so-called
molecular clouds. So at the molecular scale, the great
structure-former is the electromagnetic force. [The other
two fundamental forces, the strong and weak forces, despite
their very, very short range, play a starring role in nature...
making the stars themselves shine!]
When the great physicist Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988) was asked to think of a single sentence that would convey the most important scientific knowledge we possess, he answered simply: "Everything is made of atoms." Atoms naturally attract one another at short distances, and so naturally cluster by accident to form molecules of ever-increasing complexity. EVERY MOLECULE in the entire universe formed by accident... there is no other way to make molecules. And lucky for us, organic molecules are the easiest molecules to form because they consist of the most common atoms... atoms produced in the course of the life-cycle of stars.
Every large university or research institute, everywhere in the world, which has a large astrophysics group, has created programs that simulate structure formation in the early universe, based on the gravitational attraction of dark matter filaments for normal matter. See a collection of visualizations of calculations here.
