Creationism is alive and well in the public school classroom. Is it science? Is it religion? Any view of how we were created requires a bit of faith, in my opinion, so one shouldn’t necessarily trump the other. Evolutionary biology can be taught via empirical evidence quite nicely, but what the media frequently forgets is that evolutionary biology only hints at our origins, it doesn’t explain them fully.

The observables with this branch of science all have been collected over the past hundred and fifty years and force humans to draw conclusions about what the body of evidence means. That’s not a recipe for 100% infallibility.

My biology teacher in high school was a rabid creationist, going far enough to believe that the Earth was scarcely 10,000 years old. I have a hard time believing this based on what I know from benchmarking data (such as radioisotope dating), but creationists even have an answer to that. (Not a good one, but an answer.) He taught his classes from a creationist point of view, but he didn’t skimp on the science. Quite the contrary, we had weekly laboratory exercises, brutal exams on physiology and comparative anatomy, and a two week course in Latin to better understand taxonomy. 

My education didn’t really suffer because of this, and I strongly doubt that the origin of life on Earth is truly a necessary bit of knowledge when preparing for the practical acadaemia of college. I don’t even really buy the argument that teaching creationism is promulgating ignorance, provided the things that are deeply rooted in empiricism are taught to the best of an instructor’s ability.

My thoughts: No one really has a definitive answer at this point, so I prefer to keep an open mind.