There is a difference between the scientific method and the kind of proof you are talking about.

And that’s why I/D, while it may be an article of faith, is not a scientific theory.

Doug – I will deal with your question in a post of my own.

Bullshit. I just told you how evolution and natural selection can be disproved. No one has disproved it for a century. I’d say it is proven every day.

How can we disproved creationism/ID. We can’t, because it is not science. It’s made up by religious apologists.

You have some good points.

I think it’s also fair established, though, that most of the major intellectual influences on the founders (principally John Locke, but there were others as well) derived their theory of natural rights and natural law completely independent of any dependence of religious belief.

I don’t think its coincidential that individual rights arose in the West, but I think the major historical reason for that can be traced back to the initial break between Church and State at the fall of the Roman Empire. Unlike any other civilization in history, the Church and the State were independent sources of power in Europe for centuries.

Additionally, don’t you agree that among the founding principles of the Republic is the idea that people have the right to believe, or not believe, what they want. That was a conscious break from the nations of Europe where adherence to one sect of Christianity or another was enforced by the state. In fact, up until the Revolutionary Period, religious oppression of minority faiths was quite common in some of the colonies.

Given all of that, what is the real value of pointing out that America is a Christian nation when our own founding principles make it clear that citizens have the right to be Christian, Buddhist, Athiest, or to worship trees if they want ?

Our religious beliefs determine our values. Our values determine our societal objectives. Because Christian believe each soul must freely accept the gift of salvation, we have a government that respects civil rights.

Because 18th century colonials practiced the Christian faith, their had certain attitudes towards each other. The two prime tenets of Christianity are to love God and your neighbor. Jesus provide us an example of how we should love God and our neighbor. Christians believe that ultimate purpose of life is to freely accept Jesus Christ as our savior and follow His example. These beliefs provided the bedrock upon which a government of the People, by the People and for the People was formed.

Look at the nations of the 18th Century. Only in Christian nations will you find societies that respected individual rights. Only in America will you find a People that believed God, not the state, endowed each of them with inalienable rights.

You will also find in some Christian nations where democracy failed utterly. That occurred in Christian nations where the rebelling elites disowned their Christian heritage.

Also, I don’t think it matters what the religious faith of the Founders was. The Constitution is explicitly neutral on the issue of religion, which is the way it should be.

America is neither a Christian nation, nor a Deist Nation. It’s a nation where people are free to believe, or not believe, whatever they want. Given that, appellations like “Christian Nation” are meaningless.

If the Founders believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ, if they could sign the Declaration of Independence and risk their lives and fortunes over God endowed rights, then how could they be deists?

You’d have to ask them that.

Religion explains the WHY of things. Creationism is part of a religious explanation for why we exist. When we get too caught up Genesis seems to explanation of HOW things came to be, we miss the real significance of the story — the explanation of WHY.

Intelligent Design purports to be science. Because this theory is inherently untestable, the claim that Intelligent Design is science is more than a bit dubious. However, since the “Hypothesis of Evolution” also seems to be quite difficult to test….

I am not a Huckabee partisan, and I do not care whether he started the debate. However, since the debate over evolution has been going on for quite a while, I do not see how it is possible that he started the debate.

The assertion Deism pretends to significance and import where there is none. The idea is to somehow suggest that the elites amongst the 17th Century, the Founding Fathers, were not “real” Christians. They only pretended to be.

The assertion Deism was common amongst the Founders is poppycock. Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence. Franklin insisted that each day the Constitutional Convention should begin with prayer.

Do you believe 18th Century Anglicans were not Christians, that they did not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ? If the Founders believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ, if they could sign the Declaration of Independence and risk their lives and fortunes over God endowed rights, then how could they be deists? Look up the definition.

Evolution and natural selection can be disproved in two ways, and no one has done it. Creationism is not subject to to this rigor; it is not science.

1. Irreducible complexity. For example, for many years the eye was thought to be an example of a structure of such irreducible complexity that it had to be designed and could not be a product of natural selection.

2. Finding artifacts such as fossils and bones in the wrong geographic area/wrong strata of the Earth. While there may be gaps in the historical record, there have been no artifacts found in contradictory places.

Also, to a large degree the Founders were Deists. This is certainly true of Jefferson and Franklin. And High Church Anglicanism, which predominated in late 18th Century American was nowhere near the literal truth school of Huckabee and the Baptists.

And Huckabee is the one who started that debate because he claimed, falsely, that most of the Founders were ministers when in fact only one of them was.