And this perceived attitude, so explicitly said, will only serve to permanently entrench the fundamentalists’ beliefs, or lack of it, in regards to Evolution. Good job fighting ignorance. Yay.
I’ve been hanging in atheist chatrooms as of late. There always seems to be at least one Christian infiltrating the room in a fruitless attempt to proselytize. I’ve chatted one on one with a couple of them and evolution came up. I pointed out that the Catholic Church has found that evolution can be compatible with the religion. This seems to take a bit of steam out of their divisiveness.
However, calling a spade a spade in regards to the Bible being neither fact nor theory is blunt and won’t help convert, but at the same time, it’s not being ignorant either.
Surely you mean that fundamentalists have a very, very strong perceived notion that evolution = abiogenesis?
And that since they know the World is 6,000 years old, all paleontologists, archeologists and astronomers are lying?
Until such ignorance is dispelled, education in the classroom will be fought even more vigorously.
Or perhaps they are more properly part of a hypothesis. When a hypothesis is supported by enough evidence, and is shown to predict results as an accurate scientific model, it is upgraded to a theory. Such as the theory of gravitation, or of evolution. Saying that something is “just a theory” is practically tantamount to saying that it is “just a fact”, and simply attracts attention to the glaring, foam-at-the-mouth ignorance of most anti-evolution Creationists.
But perhaps we expect too much basic scientific literacy from the teeming millions.