Creationism should be taught alongside other theories

The argument

Proponents of this position hold that creationism makes claims about the origin of the earth and of life that are true, and that it therefore belongs in the classroom alongside the other accounts pupils are taught. Young Earth creationists believe that the Bible book of Genesis is literally true: that the earth and all forms of life were created by God in six days, around 10,000 years ago, and that the universe and everything in it could not have come into being without a supreme being causing it to happen. The claim advanced is not merely that this is one story among several but that it supplies a cause where the alternatives leave one missing — on this view nothing comes into being unaided, so any account of origins that dispenses with a creator has left its central question unanswered. All life on Earth is then the direct result of God's creative actions rather than of unguided processes. The second strand of the argument is an inference from complexity. Proponents hold that the current state of life on earth has come about through the actions of an Intelligent Designer, because some living things contain such a level of complexity that it can only be explained as the result of intelligent design; random mutation, on this account, cannot explain that complexity, since arrangements of the kind in question are said to function only when complete and so could not have been reached by the accumulation of small accidental changes. Because proponents treat these as factual claims about the world rather than as articles of private belief, they conclude that creationism should be taught in schools alongside other theories, and that leaving it out withholds from pupils an account its advocates regard as established. Both limbs of this case are contested: the literal reading of Genesis and the inference from complexity to a designer are disputed claims rather than settled findings about the evidence.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Many senior Christians say creationism should not be taught as a fact but as an allegorical tale. In 2006, Archbishop of Canterbury the leader of the world's Anglicans, stated his discomfort about teaching creationism. The American Academy of Religion stated creationism and intelligent design “represent worldviews that fall outside of the realm of science that is defined as (and limited to) a method of inquiry based on gathering observable and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning." Even in the early Christian church the Genesis story was not considered as literally true, instead it was part of the rich allegorical tradition of the time and should continue to be read as such. Creationism has no place in a science class. One measure to test whether a theory is scientific is whether or not it is falsifiable, an idea put forth by the philosopher Karl Popper. That is to say, one can conceive of a test or experiment which could prove the idea to be false. By this standard it is clear that the facts of evolution are scientific in nature. It has been put through rigorous tests and the evidence in favour of it is demonstrable. However, the same cannot be said for creationism. The concept of intelligent design creationism taps effectively into human desires and prejudices. Intelligent design theories, especially young-earth theories, make predictions that are already disconfirmed by geology and astrophysics. This has not prevented them developing this theory to add the semblance of a scientific veneer to their hokum. Intelligent Design says life is too complex for it to have occurred by chance, but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite: natural selection, the principal known mechanism of evolution, harnesses non-random change by preserving desirable and eliminating undesirable features.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Creationism is based upon a myth.