Creationism fails the Lemon test established by the Supreme Court in Lemov vs. Kurtzman: Under the Lemon test, a government-sponsored message violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment if: (1) it does not have a secular purpose, (2) its principal or primary effect advances or inhibits religion, or (3) it creates an excessive entanglement of the government with religion.

In order to be conidered a valid scientific postulate, creationism must have the ability to be proven false, which is clearly does not, as it is impossible to disprove the existence of God. Thus creationism is not a valid scientific theory, and does not belong in a science classroom.

Restricting ourselves for the moment to determining which we should be teaching as established science (as opposed to Religious Studies), it appears to me that the theory of evolution is more closely derived from extant data and scientific principles than the conjecture of Intelligent Design (or whatever it's called this week). Hence, Evolution should be taught as having a factual basis; Creationism should not.

I speak as someone who hangs around with a lot of scientists. Your mileage may vary; if so, please respond.

...and while that does not mean that it is wrong, it does mean that it is not a scientific theory, following the scientific method, and therefore does not belong in a science class, any more than a poetry reading does. The objective of a science class is to teach students how to utilize the scientific method to formulate and test theories utilizing the scientific method. Bringing in a religious view which does none of these things does not further that aim.

If one wants to teach comparative religion in the context of a social studies, sociology, or history class, it may be appropriate, as religion and religious beliefs do figure heavily into many historical and sociological phenomena. But it is not science.

Science doesn't recognise or teach belief's only theories and fact's based on repeatable observasions and studies. Not on unprovable belief's, phylosophies or religious views. If this were the case then we'd also have to teach other creation theories like budisum, Douisum etc.. Not just catholisum's ID belief. Equal airtime as it were. Call it what you want catholisum or ID theory whatever you want it's still advancing religion and as such can't (or shouldn't) be taugh in public schools due to seperation of church and state in the US so it's a mute discusion. Besides their is already a venue for the equal airtime of ID theory it's called church and sunday school so it's not like ID isn't or can't be taugh to thoughs willing to hear it. This is just pushing for forced teaching in schools as a way around the church state seperation.

Good, very good, really very very good!

There are too many creation stories in the world,
and either all of them would need to be taught or
none of them. To only teach the Christian story
would be religious bias.

...would go hand in hand, had history not split the two apart. Religion and science could intertwine through the acceptance of multiple viewpoints. God could be the creator of science, or god could be science itself. Therefore, creationism should at least brush the classroom.

teach both, for goodness' sake. there's a lot more and more interesting material to be discussed regarding evolution, since it has a real observational and experimental history. creationism is take it or leave it.

We definitely should teach evolution. But it should not be taught so matter-of-factly as to preclude alternate ways of modeling the universe. Scientists should be sensitive to different belief systems and also remain openminded. Just as the Bohr model of the atom was later modified based on new information, we should also allow that biological models can admit of future discovery. When evolution is taught, it should be noted that it is excellent predictor of biological processes, provides generally accepted explanations for the development of earth life, but that it is a model or theory nonetheless and that it doesn't preclude one from having specific religious views.

You ask a die hard evolutionist where we came from they say apes you ask them where apes come from they say reptiles you ask them where these reptiles come from they say fish you ask them where fish come from they say bacteria and so on until the point where they get mad because they just don't know and they punch you in the face. At some point there is no evolutionary explination and the answer becomes (to evolutionists) that we just appeared or in other words we were created by some power or force that we can't understand.