"Nothing in the Bible can be proven wrong" means that the Bible cannot
be tested. See, a hypothesis gets elevated to the status of "theory"
through tests, and these tests have to be able to return either positive
or negative answers. The hypothesis of Last-Wednesday-ism that someone else
proposed can never become a theory, because there is _no_feasible_test_
that can tell us that the hypothesis is false. If it can't be tested,
it can't become a theory.

"Nothing in the Bible can be proven wrong" means that creationism cannot
be tested. And if it cannot be tested, it can never, by definition, be
a theory (and is thus not scientific). Reread those two sentences until
you understand, they're the crux of the matter.

Science is a process, not some kind of "dogma." Scientists come up with
lots of crazy ideas, and--through the process of testing--accept some
and reject others. Autogenesis is a good case study. The accepted idea
of the day was that a steak would, over time, spontaneously create
maggots. The test of this, done by Pasteur (?), was to put the meat
someplace where flies couldn't get to it, and to see what happened.
If maggots, then the autogenesis theory received strong support; if no
maggots, then the theory was probably false. The result was that the
theory was overturned.

_That_ is science. _That_ is what we teach in schools. Your claim is
that scientists' opinions should have no worth because the scientific
process had not discovered 20th-century knowledge by the 10th century.
If that's what you think, you are suggesting outlawing science classes
entirely. Do you not see how ridiculous that is?

Instead of that, how about this: we teach, in science class, what is
_science_. Creationism cannot be tested via the scientific method, ergo
it is not science, ergo it doesn't get taught in science class. Which
part of that don't you understand?

I've long thought that a "Critical Thinking" class is just what my high
school needed. If I were teaching it, I would consider focusing on
some creationist arguments for at least a section of the class.
"Creationists say that, because the X tons of uranium on the Earth would
have produced Y moles of helium after four billion years of decay, and
because there are actually only Z moles (Z < Y) in our atmosphere, the
Earth is therefore less than four billion years old. For Friday, give
two alternative explanations for the fact that Z < Y. Explain which is
the most probable. 30 points."

But that section of the class would probably be too easy.

Sure, students should think about lots of things, and maybe creationism
should be one of them, and maybe there should be a class about it. But
creationism is not science, and it should not be taught in science
class. And its arguments against evolution do not hold water, and
students should not be taught that they do.

-- 
 Jamie McCarthy Internet: k044477@kzoo.edu AppleLink: j.mccarthy