Creationism should be Taught in Public Schools

I will be arguing that creationism has no place in public education. It is a profoundly unscientific approach to the origin and diversity of life and the available data and evidence fit much better with the theory of evolution than with creationism. In addition, creationism violates what's known as the establishment clause of the U.S. constitution. These are the three pillars of contention that I shall be building my case around. 1. Creationism isn't scientific 2. Evolution better explains the evidence 3. Creationism is unconstitutional Let's look at point one first of all. Creationism is unscientific for a variety of reasons, it's not falsifiable, it doesn't make any testable predictions, there is no evidence to support it and plenty of evidence against it, in addition to it blunting Occam's razor by grafting on the premise that life needs a designer when we have a perfectly suitable naturalistic explaination for the diversity and complexity of life in the form of evolution (more on that later). As a result, creationism has been widely rejected by the scientific community. A Gallup poll taken in 1991 showed that of the 480,000 scientists in the U.S., only 5% were creationists. That number however takes in to account engineers and scientists not working in fields relevant to the creation/evolution debate. When only taking in to account scientists working in relevant fields, that figure drop to less that 0.15%, and that's in America, the country with more so called "creation scientists" that anywhere else in the developed world. Creationism is unscientific simply because it does not follow the scientific method. A scientific theory begins with an observation, leads to a hypothesis to try and explain the observation, makes testable predictions, constantly compares those predictions against new evidence, then experiments are done to test it's veracity even further, experiments that must be reproducable and replicated to ensure that the theory really is the best, most complete explanation of the way a facet of the world works that we can offer, and when a better theory comes along, the original theory is either discarded or ammended.Creationism begins with the hypothesis and looks for observations to support it. Creationism offers no testable predictions or experiment by which we might test it. Creationism offers nothing that could falsify it, and now we most definitely have a better theory in evolution by natural selection, a theory that provides a powerful explanatory mechanism that creationism doesn't, it makes testable predictions, and the many observations and experiments supporting it are reproducable. Evolution is a scientific theory, creationism doesn't rise above the level of hypothesis at the very best, and pseudoscience at worst. So let's look at evolution. Evolution is one of the most watertight, widely supported, rigourous theories in science, standing proudly alongside relativity, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics. It's supported by molecular biology, it's supported by the fossil record, including transitional fossils that creationists endlessly claim don't exist, and it's independantly supported and verified by other fields of science, including medicine, many treatments of which, such as vaccines, have to take evolutionary principles in to account, in the case of flu vaccines, the disease that the vaccine has been designed to combat evolves, which is why new vaccines need to be brought out each year to combat the new strain. The level of support evolution enjoys from the scientific community is almost unanimus, many members of which, are Christians, or religious in general. I'll elaborate further on the evidence for evolution in my rebuttals as it will no doubt be challlenged (and rightly so, this is a debate after all) but for now I want to examine the legal argument. The establishment clause is a clause found in the first amendment of the U.S. constitution that states, verbatim: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". This ensures that the United States cannot ratify a state church or state religion and ensures that religion and state are kept separate from each other, in other words, a religion, any religion, can't dictate the running of the state. Creationism is a religious viewpoint, even if you attempt to dress it up as merely a biological hypothesis, it's a hypothesis based solely on one's religious opinion, it has to be, because as I demonstrated earlier, the scientific method does not lead to the conclusion that there is a designer because such a theory is unscientific in a variety of ways. As further evidence of this, I call to your attention the very highly publicised legal trial of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area High School. This was a result of a recent decision of the school board voting to challenge evolution and "teach the (so called) controversy". The court found that intelligent design (which is just creationism in disguise, something else the court found) was a primarily religious initiative that unnecessarily and unconstitutionally entangled church and state, failing what has become known as the lemon test. It also found that intelligent design was not science. The lemon test examines three points. Is the action purely secular? Does it promote or inhibit religion? Does it entangle church and state? A failure of any of these conditions means the action is unconstitutional under the establishment clause. Intelligent design fails all three. So, with my opening statement, I will now turn the floor over to my opponent for his first rebuttal, and shall address his opening statement in my next round.