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 tested. Therefore creationism is NOT a theory. The correct terminology for creationism is conjecture (from the Old French conjecture, meaning "an interpretation of signs and omens"), because it is a random, unsubstantiated guess. Using creationism to describe reality amounts to nothing more than playing a game of Pin The Tail On The Donkey in which you blindfold yourself, spin yourself around three times, stick the tail on some random spot on the wall and then claim that the tail is on the donkey simply because that's where you want it to be. Only when you remove the blindfold will you see how far from the donkey you actually are.

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