I am sorry, Mike, but several of your statements simply aren't correct. Not only is the age of the earth pretty well established, not only is it pretty much as solid as anything in science, but a million years one way or another aren't going to help creationist belief very much.
The problem is this. If you're going to argue the science, then you have to play by the rules of science. You can't pick and choose what you want, just to preserve another belief system. And science is by definition a materialism, which means that God is simply beside the point. Doesn't appear on the radar screen. (One wonders about stealth technology...) "Does God exist?" simply isn't a scientific question, because there's no way to provide the sort of generation-of-hypothesis-and-test-against-material-reality-then-retest pattern of science. Or to paraphrase Sagan et al, the problem is that the beliefs of religion are--by definition--not falsifiable, which means that you cannot test them and prove them wrong by aany meeans whatsoever.
Now religious ways of seeing are, in their way, every bit as good as science. They're simply different. Problem is that some science, and something about the whole approach of science, runs smack into some aspects of religion. Skepticism and testing, for examplee, runs counter to the whole idea of faith.
Personally, I think that science takes the rap for capitalism. By that I mean to say that many religious (and let's be clear--for, "religious," read, "Christian and fundamentalist") people are pissed off (and they probably should be) by many aspects of the modern world. However, their analysis doesn't focus on an economic system that, sorry, as Marx said, makes, "everything solid melt into air," but on scientific theories like evolution. If you listen to, say, Pat Robertson, you'll hear why--it's because his ideology is strongly pro-capitalist, and he doesn't want to examine those premises.
Personally, I don't get why there's such a big hassle over this. The Catholic Church, for example, has simply gone back to an old argument: God, the Author of all things, has left us two books to study: the Bible, and Nature. Reading them both is part of what we're here for. If the two books appear to contradict one another, that's not God's fault, it's not the Bible, it's not Nature--it's a mark of our limited understanding. Genesis and Darwin, that is, go together perfectly well--we're just too thick to see how.
Budddhism seems to have an even easier time, because Budddhism doesn't postulate that either God or our ape origins are relevant to religious and moral questions--unless we start fetishizing God or the soul or whatever, in which case we'd best be prepared to deal with having our fetishizations exposed as nonsense.
It's just Spencer Tracy slapping the Bible and
Origin of Species," together at the end of "Inherit the Wind," and walking out of the courthouse, is all I'm saying.
Incidentally, it is completely inaccurate to claim that teachers cannot teach both Darwin and the basic theories of religions in schools. I do it all the time...and frankly, I'm at least as appalled by some student's ignorance of their own religions (to say nothing of others!) as I am by their ignorance of Darwin...the ONLY prohibition is that you're not allowed to jam your own beliefs down students' throats...
Thanks for the discussion.
