This is why Westboro Baptist Church is a joke

[Jester]

Should they be bandying about opinions about God in any way? Is that not a violation of the "Separation"? God is not necessary for me to go to the restroom, but I pray that someone remembered to replaced the toilet paper. You don't want "wink and nod" indications that "God is necessary", but you are OK with "wink and nod" suggestions that "God is unnecessary"?

Again, these things are not symmetrical. Saying a process requires a designer is making a very strong claim. Saying a process does not require a designer is making a very weak claim. What is necessary for biology class to teach is that evolution is a process that functions without guidance. It need not be specific about exactly what kinds of guidance are unnecessary - the list is infinite. If that contradicts someone's belief in God's hand in evolution, or any other religious doctrine, tough beans. Nobody is being taught that there is definitely no god - only that god (or any other outside agent, of any kind: aliens, faeries, Xenu, The Force, whatever) is not necessary to explain these phenomena scientifically.

And, you are actually wrong about how Christians, or Buddhists, or Muslims view the superfluousness of God in all things. To them, God is the simplicity of an equation, God is the beauty of a flower, God is the process of a chemical reaction, God touches the hearts of elected and electorate, saints and sinners. It is not necessary to contradict their beliefs, and it is not constitutional either.

The free exercise clause does not defend religion from science! People are allowed to practice their religion freely. That's it. If your religion tells you that verbs are nouns, your English teacher still gets to correct you. If your religion tells you that two plus two is five, your math teacher still gets to mark you down. These things are not unconstitutional - and neither is teaching that evolution does not require direction.

If you, or anyone else, wants to believe that within every flower, between both sides of every equation, guiding every chemical reaction, there lies an omnipotent-yet-invisible creator deity, you are free to believe that - it's constitutionally protected. But the science remains the science. The naturalism of these processes is inherent to science, and it is certainly not unconstitutional to teach as much.

Not every scientist is on board.

They are free to have their opinions, same as anyone else. They don't tend to make much headway in science - we obviously disagree as to why.

But, as we've discussed before, I view cosmology as just another type of religion, requiring little proof and a lot of faith.

We've built gigantic space telescopes and colossal observatories, pointed them at space, and accumulated an enormous amount of data that has, many times in the last century, overturned our previous hypotheses about the state of the universe, its size, its origins, its composition, and so on. We understand more and more every day, clarifying our better theories, and scrapping some of the shakier ones.

When do we get to point the telescope at God and collect some data? Seems to me, the only changes to "theory" in theology are random drift and social trends. Nobody ever learns anything new about it, empirically. This is absolutely nothing like cosmology. Perhaps Treesh is right - some day, we'll find a deity, learn how to measure and observe it. On that day, Theology will become a branch of science (cosmological zoology?) and we'll start to make some progress. But so far, we're not even at step one, and if God is what you say, an ineffable force always within concepts and processes, we're probably never going to get there.

-Jester