What Creationism is and Why it Doesn't Belong in the Classroom, Pt. 2

Despite its lack of scientific authenticity, creationism and intelligent design still have a large amount of proponents who continuously push and lobby for their inclusion in the classroom. I don’t think the movement has much ground to stand on; after all, what legitimate reason is there for something entirely faith-based to be taught in public schools as a legitimate alternative to a time-tested scientific body of facts? I think that the backlash against the teaching of evolution in schools is something that is entirely bred by misinformation and misunderstanding of not only what science is, but also what should be taught in schools.

The specifics of what should be included in education is a vast, comprehensive subject in and of itself; another blog for another time. But I definitely think that legitimate science is something that should be taught in schools and that religious ideas should be kept out, especially when they are taught alongside legitimate scientific ideas and theories. I consider such a notion to be a violation of the separation of church and state, and so does the U.S. Supreme Court. That last bit may sound rather tangential, but it’s important to note that creationism and intelligent design are essentially religious in nature, being non-scientific explanations for origins that invoke creators and deities, and as such can have those kinds of criticisms levied against them.

Science is not a discipline that is subject to the whims of those who dislike its ideas; it’s a naturalistic, method-dependent way of testing and proving observable facts and phenomena in this world. It’s important that that is what is instilled in students and not the faith-based ideas behind creationism that serve a religious agenda.

UPDATE: Formatting correction, enjoy the paragraphs.

What Creationism is and Why it Doesn't Belong in the Classroom, Pt. 1

As you've most likely been taught in high school biology, biological evolution is the change of genetic material in a population of organisms from generation to generation. In a context more specific to the question of origins, universal common descent, a facet of evolutionary theory, is used to describe the origin of animals, including humans. First proposed by Charles Darwin in his book On the Origin of Species, universal common descent is, within the framework of evolution, the idea that all organisms evolved from a single common ancestor. Nothing you haven’t heard already. It’s important to note that the ideas presented by evolution do adhere to the principle of falsifiability and are supported by numerous amounts of paleontological, geological, genetic, and biological evidence. Additionally, evolutionary biology and numerous other scientific disciplines (such as genetics) have long been building off of Darwin’s theories in numerous ways.

Now, creationism offers a much more religious explanation for origins. Creationism is the belief that everything, including life and the universe, was created by a deity or deities. The creator usually takes the form of the Abrahamic deity but nevertheless can be described as a number of deities. Not very scientific (and I’ll get to that in a bit). But proponents of creationism claim that theirs is a legitimate belief and with this persecution complex strive to put their belief in schools. Now here’s the fun part: using my previous definition of science, we can see why creationism is not scientific in nature. I know that’s a pretty strong statement, and I hope that I won’t come across as some sort of hopelessly biased blogger fighting armies of creationist straw-men; I feel that there are legitimate reasons for discounting creationism as a science-based belief, and I also feel that as a non-scientific explanation for origins it has no place in the classroom.

In one of my previous posts, I explained how important it is that scientific hypotheses need to be falsifiable. If a hypothesis cannot be tested, then there is no sure way to elevate it beyond the realm of speculation. As it happens, the basic tenets of creationism are not predictions that are simply not able to be validated in the context of our natural world. There’s simply no way to test the vague, metaphysical processes that creationists claim were used by whichever deity or intelligent designer of their choosing. We can’t ground such ideas with the scientific method. Furthermore, creationism is a blatant inversion of the scientific method – instead of striving to test hypotheses in pursuit of facts, creationism presents its facts first and attempts to justify them later. That's about as far from actual science as you can get.

UPDATE: Formatting correction, enjoy the paragraphs.