For Zack Kopplin, it all started back in 2008 with the passing of the Louisiana Science Education Act. The bill made it considerably easier for teachers to introduce creationist textbooks into the classroom. Outraged, he wrote a research paper about it for a high school English class. Nearly five years later, the 19-year-old Kopplin has become one of the fiercest — and most feared — advocates for education reform in Louisiana.
It is a pity that it is often the most extreme branches of Christianity that get the most publicity. Still, theology cannot replace science, just as science cannot replace theology. Zack's initiative, confidence and determination will no doubt be great assets to him for the rest of his life. Edit: Oh dear, "Accused of causing hurricane Katrina."
Good for him! I'm glad he's taking his education into his own hands, and out of the hands of people who simply do not know what they're talking about, or are bringing non-science into science classes. And even better (and braver) he's trying to take it out of their hands for everyone else. We can't educate people in thinking rationally if they're receiving completely irrational information from their teachers, even if they don't believe in what they say - it's a demarcation line indicating what is acceptable science and what is not, like it or not.
The Louisiana Science Education Act is such an unusual artifact. It is baffling that Creationism has thrived in the State when it is so hostile to Catholic Theistic Evolution. I realize that modern Louisiana is distinguished by an admixture of Christianity but Catholic tradition molded the sociocultural landscape and continues to dominate State politics today. Is it just apathy from lapsed Catholics and waning Papal influence that allowed these fundamentalists to co-opt the discourse?
"Creationism is not science, and shouldn't be in a public school science class — it's that simple," he says. "Often though, creationists do not, or are unwilling, to recognize this." Science, he argues, is observable, naturalistic, testable, falsifiable, and expandable — everything that creationism is not.
falsifiable??
So creationism cannot be falsified because it is entirely false? I do not get this point. :-(
Whether a proposition is "falsifiable" doesn't have anything to do with whether it is true or false. It essentially means "testable". As in, can one think of an experiment that, given a specific result, would show this proposition to be false? If the answer is no, then the proposition is not "falsifiable", and therefore does not fall under what we consider to be in the domain of science.