You seem to be tarring people with an opposing view to your creationist views as religious? Why's that? Is it because you can only rationally think in a dualist scenario?
You're also saying that these naturalists will only believe in one causality. Now if there are "true naturalists" (which I believe is a term created by creationists as a sort of yin to their yang if you will) then fine, treat it as a religion by all means, however flawed that may be.
However the very nature (no pun) of people who DON'T believe in the story of creationism suggests that this isn't the case.
You say they're pushing what they know upon millions of schoolkids, well yes, they are. And they're pushing it because, at the moment (and I've put those three words there strategically) it's the best we KNOW.
Guess what though, if proof comes along to change that way of thinking then what will be taught will also change. Unlike the creationist view which never changes as by definition, it can't.
From that respect I would say that it's impossible to call it a religion certainly in most people's definition of the word.
Quoting: Cahill You're not seeing the bigger picture of Premises which is where the Naturalist Faith comes in.
If we start from the Premise that life could *only* have come about through purely natural, non-intelligent mutations, then ideas like Evolution would certainly be the most logical conclusion, regardless of the lack of empirical evidence supporting it. The problem is that Premise is completely and totally flawed, yet it has become totally pervasive in modern Academia.
What we actually see around us is fine-tuning and complexity that defies chance/dumb mutations, and 'appears' to indicate intelligent design. BUT, this premise of intelligent design is considered heretical from the Naturalist viewpoint. Intelligent Design has been censored as blasphemy to naturalism.
You say the creationist view never changes. Neither does the faith in Naturalism: "Even if we don't have all the answers, it *must* have occurred by random natural phenomena." The more we discover about how seemingly fine-tuned our universe actually is, the more that the naturalist is convinced it is an ever increasing stack of amazing coincidences.
