That’s an easy one! Who says God can’t create the earth and make it look like it’s millions of years old? (Of course, I would also in turn ask the 6000-year-old earth proponent “how do you know then that the earth isn’t 5 minutes old?”)
Ah, Last Tuesdayism.
It is pretty close to not being taught at the schools my kids go to in Georgia. There is no law preventing evolution being taught, but you will not find words like “evolution” or “Darwin” in the text books. When I called the county school science coordinator (or similar title), she was very reserved until she discovered I was called to complain that evolution was not being taught enough. She said that I was the first person who had ever called her with that complaint.
scott62 writes:
> Is it true that in some U.S. states the theory of evolution is not taught in
> schools?
This sort of thing is more a local matter than a state one. There are a wide variety of textbooks used in American high school biology classes. There are no high schools where the theory of evolution is outright denied in the biology textbooks, except perhaps for some private religious schools. The biology textbooks used in other American high schools varies from some with a lot of material on evolution to others in which any discussion of evolution is very vague.
Well, believing that the Solar System centers on the Earth, rather than the Sun, means you can’t believe in Gravity (either modern (Einstein) or classical (Newton) gravity theory).
Yet for centuries religious authorities insisted on this, and persecuted any scientist who dared to challenge it.
One data point:
I attended that Back to School night for one of my children at the start of this year. She attends a public school in the middle of Silicon Valley, California. We had 13 minutes in each class for the teacher to explain what was going to happen over the year. The teachers mostly covered homework, tests, skills expected, etc.
The science teacher spend nearly 10 minutes explaining that he would not be teaching human evolution. He was clearly attempting to avoid future confontation. Needless to say, after the “class” I went up to him and explained that I expected that he would teach evolution thoroughly. He was quite shocked and didn’t know what to say.
t-bonham@scc.net writes:
> Well, believing that the Solar System centers on the Earth, rather than the Sun,
> means you can’t believe in Gravity (either modern (Einstein) or classical
> (Newton) gravity theory).
>
> Yet for centuries religious authorities insisted on this, and persecuted any
> scientist who dared to challenge it.
From approximately the time of Aristotle to the time of Copernicus there was a theory of gravity which we might call the Aristotelian theory, and everyone who had any ideas at all about the subject believed it. No, they did not half-heartedly believe it because they were forced to by the Catholic church. They believed it because it worked as well as any other scientific theory of that time. The Catholic church did not persecute anyone before the time of Copernicus because of their belief that the Earth went around the sun, and they didn’t do much that could be considered persecution afterwards either.
The Aristotelian theory of gravity held that everything was attracted to the center of the universe (which was of course the center of the Earth). They had a reasonably complex theory to explain all the observed motions of the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars. It wasn’t a very mathematical theory, but then mathematics was not a major part of any scientific theory at that point. It wasn’t till after the improved astronomical and physical observations of Tycho Brahe and Galileo that it became possible to say that the Aristotelian theories of gravity, astronomy, and physics in general didn’t quite work.
One can argue about whether the Catholic church obstructed scientific progress during and after the time of Copernicus. Before then, there’s no argument though. The fact that people believed that the sun went around the Earth had nothing to do with the Catholic church forcing anyone to believe anything. It was a reasonable theory given the facts known at the time.
“Support”? In Spain it isn’t even a question.
Either you’ve gone to school and heard of evolution or you haven’t (and may still know what it is).
Facts need “support”? Reality needs support?
I haven’t read every post, but the one right before mine mentions the Catholic Church - which “supports” evolution inasmuch as it’s “the best scientific explanation we have come up with so far” and a field where many priests have worked. It “supports” nuclear physics, too 
I think the OP meant “accept as fact” rather than “support”. I find it hard to beleive that everyone in Spain who has heard of evolution accepts it as fact.