Why creationism should not be taught in schools
When someone suggests to you that creationism should be taught alongside of the theory of evolution because evolution is "just a theory", educate them on what a theory actually is. Whether you build a theory from the bottom up, as science does, or from the top down, as a prosecuting attorney would in a court of law, a theory is the top layer of a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid are facts: irrefutable, observable truths of nature. The next layer up are laws: consistent and often calculable explanations of those facts. Built on those laws and facts are hypotheses: suggestive and predictive inferences which can be tested and verified or proven to be false. The sum of the verified hypotheses themselves IS the theory. It is precisely because evolution is a theory that creationism cannot be taught alongside it. Creationism provides no facts about reality, provides no laws to describe those facts, and therefore offers no suggestive or predictive hypotheses which can be tes