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Does anyone know if this debate ever comes up seriously outside of the US?
Anyways, I think it is important to say that public school cannot teach science from the viewpoint of students collecting evidence until they can figure things out for themselves. There is a good reason that the world's brightest minds have spent the last few hundred years arriving at our modern understanding of the universe. Things are complicated. At the level of basic education, it is best to just present the accepted viewpoint. I would guess that almost no public schools really get into enough detail in anything to be controversial.
Evolution, by the way, is not controversial in the sense that I'm using that word. There are no experts who believe in the versions of creationism which conflict with evolutionary ideas. The opinions of the uninformed public are irrelevant. The world does not work based on a vote of what people want to be true. We figure things out based on evidence, and all intelligent people who have evaluated that evidence have come to similar conclusions.
prosequence, I could also make an argument that you are not proven, but are merely a predictable figment of my imagination. The entire universe could be a fabrication of my mind. Certain philosophers have fun with that idea, but I think most of us can agree that it is not a very productive viewpoint. Science is about trying to compress all of the complexity of the world into a few simple rules. Its entire goal is to obtain predictibility. Anything "more" is not a part of science, whatever "more" may mean. Evolution is a part of science, whereas the only versions of creationism which conflict with evolution and actually have observable consequences are ruled out. Creationism therefore does not deserve any time in a science classroom.
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