Creationism should be Taught in Public Schools

I'd like to begin with my opponents request to see the Gallup poll that I cited in my opening remarks as evidence of the rejection of creationism by scientists. While I have been unable to locate the original poll, I am happy to provide a different poll showing similar results. According to this poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, a think-tank based in Washington D.C., 97% of scientists believe that humans and other living things have evolved over time, with 87% believing that this occurred through naturalistic means alone, as opposed to just 2% who believe that living things were created in the present form and have not evolved: http://www.people-press.org... In addition to polling date, intelligent design has been utterly rejected by numerous scientific institutions such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) who said regarding the teaching of evolution in 2006: "... A number of bills require the students be taught to 'critically analyze' evolution, or to understand 'the controversy'. But there is no significant controversy within the scientific community about the validity of the theory of evolution. The current controversy surrounding the teaching of evolution is not a scientific one." The AAAS is the world's largest general scientific society, serving 10 million individuals. This is a view supported by the American Association of University Professors, which has a membership of over 47,000. The AAUP said, regarding proposed academic freedom bills involving the creation/evolution debate, "Such efforts run counter to the overwhelming scientific consensus regarding evolution and are inconsistent with a proper understanding of the meaning of academic freedom". Now it's at this point that I want to deal with an objection my opponent made in his rebuttals. He argued that my argument regarding the number of scientists who rejected evolution was nothing more than an argumentum ad populum, or to put it in simpler terms, he argues that creationism should not be considered false simply because the majority of people disagree with it. Now, he is actually right when he says this, and if the truth of creationism was what we were debating, then I would not have brought it up at all, but we are not debating the truth of creationism, we are debating whether or not it should be taught in schools. The scientific consensus does not claim to be true, it claims to be our current best understanding held by those who are experts in the field, who actually study the matter. In a court of law, such people could and would be called as expert witnesses, as indeed they were in the aforementioned Kitzmiller vs Dover trial. My opponent is arguing that creationism is a valid scientific hypothesis that should be taught in public schools. It is not remotely fallacious to point out that the overwhelming majority of the scientific community vehemently disagrees with him. Now, onto my opponents actual rebuttals. My opponent begins by contesting my argument that creationism is not scientific. He further goes on to say that creationism is falsifiable, but he gives no examples or evidence to support either of these two claims. He claims that creationism does not have to be falsifiable to be science, however in his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery, the philosopher of science Karl Popper argues that falsifiability is critical to the enterprise of science, since no amount of experiments can ever prove a theory, but just one can contradict it. Popper argues "The criterion of demarcation inherent in inductive logic - that is, the positivistic dogma of meaning - is equivalent to the requirement that all the statements of empirical science (or all 'meaningful' statements) must be capable of being fully decided, with respect to their truth and falsity; we shall say that they must be 'conclusively decidable'. This means that their form must be such that to verify them and to falsify them must both be logically possible" My opponent goes on to say "I would be interested in what evidence there is against creationism". The need to produce evidence to support the claim being made logically must fall on the person actually making the claim, but as it happens, the evidence against creationism is very powerful. The most prominent example being countless examples of bad design in nature, be it simply inefficient (such as the design of the human eye) to being seemingly downright cruel (the constant life and death struggle present in nature between predator and prey). As it happens, the eye was something that my opponent cited in his opening remarks as an example of good design, so lets analyse it a little further. My opponent referenced a quote from Charles Darwin, the full quote being "To suppose that the eye with all it's inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic abberation, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree" This quote is a favourite of creationists, because it seems to imply Darwin himself considers the idea of the eye evolving not just wrong but "absurd". However, the quote in question has, on many occasions, been taken from it's true context in the most pernicious of fashions. Darwin immediately makes it apparent that this is nothing more than a rhetorical tactic very often seen in debating, to appear to grant the opponent victory, only for him to step by step show how the eye in fact could have evolved, spending three and a half pages detailing several intermediate stages that are all present in nature today, from a simple, photosensitive cell to the development of muscles that would allow a lens to adjust. As mentioned before, every intermediate stage, and I can elaborate on those individual stages if required, is known to be viable, because examples of each stage are present in animals living today. Darwin concluded with "... and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, should not be considered as subversive of the theory." As I alluded to earlier, despite being a popular example among creationists of design evident in nature, the eye is actually quite inefficiently designed. Our eyes are actually built backwards, and upside down, requiring, according Dr. Michael Shermer, here being quoted by Christopher Hitchens in his book God is not Great, "photons of light to travel through the cornea, lens, aqueous fluid, blood vessels, ganglion cells, amacrine cells, horizontal cells, and bipolar cells before they reach the light-sensitive rods and cones that transduce the light signal into neural impulses, which are then sent to the visual cortex at the back of the brain for processing into meaningful patterns". It is this inefficient "design" that creates a blind spot in the eyes of vertebrates. Now I just want to make one final point regarding a theme that has permeated my opponent's rebuttal. He says that there are phenomena in nature that can not be accounted for by chance alone, but this betrays a fatal misunderstanding of how evolution works. Evolution, primarily, is not dominated by chance, natural selection, evolution's principle driving force, is explicitly non-random. Mutations are random, but they are only one thread in the tapestry that is evolution. Thus, to categorize evolution as being a matter of chance is demonstrably fallacious as it is a blatant strawman of how the theory of evolution actually works. He claims that to disprove creationism, I must disprove 2 premises, that biological systems show objective patterns and that these patterns can't be accounted for by chance. His problem is that evolution accommodates both these premises, and do