Science and reason, reason and science; these are the only ingredients you need to develop any sort of worthwhile society.

Certainly consider all the advancements humanity has made in the past 200-300 years. The radio, airplanes, the internet, even nuclear energy; we owe all that to the systematic and thorough method of investigation that is called science.

In that vein it seems unbelievable that anybody would stand in the way of teaching this tested means of making human advancements to our kids. But there are people who do that, they are called religious nuts.

A year ago, the UK issued a blanket ban on teaching of creationism in any school that received any sort of public funding. Flouting this ban would result in said school losing their public funding.

From Raw Story:

“On Thursday, the United Kingdom expanded its ban on the teaching of creationism from all state schools, to all state schools as well as semi-private Free Schools and Academies.

The decision effectively means that no school in the United Kingdom can teach creationism or any other “anti-scientific” dogma without losing the entirety of its funding, as they would be violating “the requirement on every academy and free school to provide a broad and balanced curriculum.”

According to a press release from the British Humanist Association (BHA), the new rules “explicitly require that pupils are taught about the theory of evolution, and prevent academy trusts from teaching ‘creationism’ as scientific fact.”

Not even Intelligent Design — the favoured faux- scientific theory of American creationists who wish to import biblical beliefs into public school classrooms — can be taught, as “creationism” is defined by the new rule as “any doctrine or theory which holds that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth and therefore rejects the scientific theory of evolution.”

This kind of ban is necessary in some Western nations because powerful Christian lobbyists always manage to get the teachings of the bible into science class. This lets the ramblings of the bible to be taught as facts.

Now at this point I feel an obligation to point out to my credulous Ghanaian readers that no, the bible does not contain any scientific facts. The world was not created in six days, the earth is not flat nor 6,000 years old. Our solar system is but a speck in the vast expanse of the galaxy, and there was no Adam and Eve- we all evolved from our ape cousins.

These are scientific facts that contradict every portion of the so-called world of God. And on balance, when religion and science come into conflict, I think only one has proven to be a means for improving human life- and it is not religion.

If only more Ghanaians knew that.