Evolution ? Creation (ID)

Source: Berkman et al. (2008). Evolution and Creationism in America's Classromms: A National Portrait. PLoS Biology 6(5):e124.

"Evolution--more precisely opposition to it--is profoundly important to fundamentalist Christianity, where it has played a critical role in its early formation as doctrine and as a social movement". This is one of the key sentences in this paper, highlighted by the authors themselves. They make the case that despite recent judiciary victories of evolution over its petty imaginative counterpart (Intelligent Design [at least someone is intelligent]) in the courtroom, we (the scientists) are losing the case in the classrooms where the science teachers have to actually teach evolution. While only 16% of the science teachers believe in creationism (compared to 48% of the general public), they have a hard time devoting enough resources to this theory which is dubbed "a unifying theme in science" by the National Science Education Standards. As the authors put it, "community pressures place significant stress on teachers as they try to teach evolution, stresses that can lead them to de-emphasize, downplay, or ignore the topic".

The question is, why do we care? For example Richard Dawkins believes that any public discussion of this matter with creationists would bring them a sort of validity that they don't have and don't deservce (thus the question mark in the title of this post). Everyone treat this matter as if it is a personal decision to make. Believeing the Earth to be flat is not a personal decision, so is not evolution. Nowadays, science is pretty much speclizied with researchers deep into their specific knowledge. For example, I trust my friends in Math department when they say "the world has 11 dimensions" because I don't know squad about string theory. Or I don't question my doctor's diagnosis as absurd as they may seem to my untrained eyes (e.g. you go to them for headaches, they say there's something wrong with your stomach).... The same should hold for evolution... We know what we're talking about because we have studied this for years... We have a whole field that's working based on it.... When we say it holds, TRUST ME, it holds.