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Charles Darwin 's Theory Of Evolution

Decent Essays

On December 15, 1791, the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America were ratified. Collectively known as the Bill of Rights, these amendments placed limits on the powers of the federal government in response to concerns of the Anti-Federalists, who argued that such safeguards were needed to protect individual liberties from the powers of the federal government. The First Amendment to the Constitution begins by stating that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Known as the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses, respectively, these words effectively create, according to the writings of Thomas Jefferson (1802), “a wall of separation between Church and State”, and thus require that the government remain religiously neutral in its actions. Perhaps nowhere else is this neutrality being challenged more vigorously than in America’s public school science classrooms. Of particular concern for school administrators and the educators whom they supervise, are the repeated efforts of Christian fundamentalists to replace the teaching of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection with Biblical Creationism. During the past ninety years, many legal cases have further defined the boundary of that wall of separation. In response, the methods employed by the proponents of Biblical Creationism to alter science education have continued to evolve. The issue of the intrusion of

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