What I AM worried about is when religion interjects into science, it does so to the purpose of stopping the questions. ID says "This is what happened. End of Story." Creationism says the same thing. Both of those stifle growth.

Agreed. Which is why it shouldn't be in schools. I was saying that exposure to this may have less effect than you fear. A lot will have to do with the way it's packaged, of course. If it's taught in the form of, "Even though we have no evidence..." then the undermining potential is much higher than the, "Some believe... despite the evidence that evolution is a robust explanation of life on earth."

Genesis may well be the word of god, but it was copied down by us dumb humans, and you know what, as demonstrated in one of the othere memes popular on here right now (English as she is spoke) we're really bad at that sort of thing.

Dude, if people are crazy enough to believe that God (a being who just exists and is omnipotent) created the world fully formed and mature in seven days then the leap to believing that He protected his word is minimal. Multiple translations? Yea, well, they all hit the same high points so far as I know. (I'm going to stop there as that's a whole new argument that I doubt many of you care about)

Tangentially -- does it really matter, the whole evolution/creation thing? I mean, two cases here:
1 - Creationism is right - what does this mean? it doesn't change any of the laws of physics or the progess that various fields of science have made. All it does is negate evolution as the source of life, not refute genetic drift, natural selection, or any of the other things that have come up to explain how evolution worked.

Okay, I'm going to stop -- I see the problem. A valid argument is that, no matter the field, blind belief will have a negative impact on knowledge because there is the possibility that the Something would be discovered in attempting to prove a pet theory (in this case evolution). Yet if we're going to say this why teach evolution and not ID-with-leanings-toward-aliens? There's certainly a lot that could be learned if we put a large effort into contacting and/or visiting aliens. Also, there are points evolution doesn't address, or science in general. In the end, they face the same problem religion does "where does it come from." Relgion get's to say that, "God always was and will always be," but science has a harder time dealing it. Big Bang? but where did it come from? ad infinitum.

The whole issue, to me, just became trying to teach people what religion is and what science is. I mean it seems that people's biggest problem here is the inability to separate what is religion and what is science. ID isn't science any more than creationism is but if people continue to frame their world in such a way that something taken on faith, without evidence, is science then we're just going to continue having this problem. Maybe we're going about it entirely the wrong way, by separating religion from school[0] we're letting youth become indoctrinated by people who (for the most part) are clearly wrong[1] in how they think. And this is only going to perpetuate the problem.

Man... why can't people just not be stupid? (for that matter, why can't we all just get along?) And it's not likely this is ever going to get any better is it?

[0] - And no, I don't mean we have a class on Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc. I'm talking about something as simple as a segment in class (a science class, even) 'What religion is, and why it's bad science.' Of course this may work if taught fairly but I'm certain it'd quickly become 'What relgion is, and why science is wrong' or 'What religion is, and why God can't exist'.

[1] - Ya know, wrong is really subjective though...

RE: CNN.com - Bush: Schools should teach 'intelligent design' - Aug 2, 2005