The Origins of Life: Evolution vs Intelligent Design

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Half a century ago, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech about the importance of government always maintaining an attitude of neutrality towards religion. President Kennedy stated, “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” The United States has been a country, in which the separation of church and state has been adopted and assumed to be practiced, but there has been a perennial conflict disrupting the balance between church and state. In his innovative film, The Revisionaries, director Scott Thurman exposes how the public education system has become the latest battleground in the face of an old conflict – between religion and science – challenging the ideological edifice on which the nation stands. The contention is shrouded by vehement claims from those who claim Intelligent Design, a refinement of creationism, to be true; and believers of the theory of evolution, who claim scientific merit yields no other conclusion than what is presented in the theory of evolution. As a result, the spills of conflict are in the classrooms now.
In Austin, Texas, every decade fifteen people influence what is taught to the next generation of American children. The highly politicized Texas Board of Education gets to rewrite the teaching standards and textbook standards for its approximate 5 million schoolchildren. However, any changes made in Texas, trickle down into the rest of the nation. Texas is home to one of the nation's largest textbook markets (the other being the state of California), because as a state, it decides what textbooks schools can buy, rather than leaving it up to local districts (“The Revolutionaries”). Hence, publishers face the economic conundrum of whether they curtail the intellect...

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Layton, Julia."How Intelligent Design Works.” 26 September 2005. http://people.howstuffworks.com/intelligent-design.htm. Web.30 Nov. 2013.
Rich, Motoko. "Texas Education Board Flags Biology Textbook Over Evolution Concerns." The New York Times. Nytimes.com, 22 Nov. 2013. Web. 30 Nov. 2013.
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