>Three of the ten Republican candidates in 2007 said they were creationist
Right, okay, lets look at McCain then:
Ron Paul denies evolution, he just didnt stand up for it during the debates:
So we have:
Brownback
Tancredo
Huckabee
Hunter
Paul
with McCain advocating teaching ID in science class.
Again, denying of evolution IS A MAINSTREAM CONSERVATIVE VIEW, ACCEPTING ID ALSO IS. Half of them are anti-evolution and he rest are ID sympathizers. Incredible.
Anyone remember the last election cycle? In the early part of the Republican primary, when there were about 42 candidates still in the running, there was one debate where the moderator asked anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution to raise his hand.
Well, for one, Measure for Measure does and tells us so in post #10.
The Texas board of education:
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=21988
A good friend of mine made the excellent point that evolution by natural selection make atheisn possible. His point was that before evolution, there was just no reasonable explanation for how we got here, other than a religious one. Obviously there were atheists before Darwin and I don’t know how they would explained the esistence of life on earth.
Insofar as most conservatives are also conservative religiously, I would expect the overwhelming majority of conservatives to reject evloution.
Same applies to everything. Before we figured out that the sun was a gigantic hydrogen reactor floating in space, there was no way to explain it without a religious one.
Does the pope count (the last one at least, there is some doubt about the current one).
What about major Conservative commentators and talk show hosts? Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, etc? I know Ann Coulter does not believe in evolution, calling it “bogus science”.
Rush endorsed Ben Stein’s intelligent design movie. It could be just political posturing though.
We still can’t explain the existence of life on earth (though there are plenty of decent hypotheses), and we also don’t really know why the universe works the way it does. Evolution probably did make atheism more broadly acceptable, but my guess is that that had more to do with the religious insistence that humanity is very special and some sort of proof of god, which became a lot more absurd.
A god of the gaps hypothesis isn’t proof of anything and doesn’t explain anything for the same reason homunculi aren’t and don’t.
A counter argument to this (though I’ve not heard any conservatives adopt it) is that Intelligent Design is a major contributing factor to Christians doubting and abandoning their religion.
Plenty of perfectly intelligent kids are brought up thinking that Evolution is evil and Intelligent Design is science, and are taught that this position part of their religious faith, and that belief in evolution is not compatible with Christianity.
Those kids then grow up and go out into the real world, and learn real science, at real universities. A good percentage of them them come to the obvious conclusion that what they had been taught about intelligent design is in fact complete horse shit, and seeing as this obvious fallacy has been taught to them as part of their Christian faith, why should they carry on believing the rest of it ? If they’ve been taught that evolution is not compatible with Christianity, but now believe in Evolution, then surely they can’t be Christian anymore ?
Well, evolution explains change over time. Its not biogenesis. It doesnt explain physics or why things are the way they are. So you could easily have a defensible atheist position in the past, even before the enlightenment, but at that point it would be self-limiting as heresy in many places was punishable by death. It wasnt until after the state and the church divorced around the enlightenment* before you could have open discussion of atheism or any form of skepticism.
*yes this is a generalization, but its the enlightenment period where a lot of this stuff came to a public boil.
The pope is supposedly okay with evolution. Not sure where I learned that, but I know he’s not big on letting the King James bible be the deciding factor of anything.
Catholics are supposed to accept evolution, but with the modifier that the changes are divinely managed. So its not really natural selection at all. I would argue that they dont at all accept evolution but have positioned themselves in a politically neutral situation to avoid being on the losing side of history again.
Sorry, this info was already linked above
In three roughly contemporaneous posts, you, an avowed student, asked for information on how the Library in Cerritos catalogues its books (indicating to me you’ve attempted to look some things up there), asked about Conservative Creationists, and asked about Gen. Petraeus and his conservative views. To me, this smacks of something potentially homework or assignment related.
But mostly I was being tongue in cheek. 
Funny story , in 8th grade (30 years ago) we had to find out who certain people were. Turned out 1 of them was editor of the local paper. Some students found him in the phone book and called him up to ask him who he was. 
It never occurred to me to look up any of them in the phone book.
Well, of course not - that’s a Protestant Bible. 
Now kids would just ask what a phone book was.
-Joe
What do you mean by managed? It was always my understanding that “under God’s guidance” does NOT mean that God takes a daily interest in how things evolve, or that a living creature’s particular traits are created by anything except selection (natural/sexual/group etc.).