Hi again,

Just popping in to correct a wide misconception about what the word theory means in the scientific world. When people say The theory of evolution it's not something that someone came up with and put it out there.. In contrast of how people casually use the word theory, in science it has a bigger substance than the word law or the word fact. So the word theory is pretty much up high in the chain, like this:

Theory
Law
Hypothesis
Fact


The way the rest of us use the word theory is like scientists use the word hypothesis, but to them a theory is something that complies with all known facts and observations of the universe, something that has withstood a lot of testing and debate and the test of time and also something that is able to make correct predictions that may be testable through experimentation. The theory of evolution holds no less validity than the theory of gravity and the theory of electromagnetism.

Laws are only a subpart of the theory it belongs in. If sometime in the future the theory of thermodynamics collapses then the laws of thermodynamics will collapse as well.

Facts on the other hand are a dime a dozen and they're not as important in the scientific community. They refer to simple things like, water always flows downstream in rivers. They're just observations that withstood the test of time and are now a fact, but they don't explain anything. A theory in science is much much bigger and important than a fact.


Just clearing this out.. Of course this doesn't mean that a theory is automatically correct. No amount of experimentation can ever prove a theory right but a single experiment can prove it wrong. But in terms of how far our understanding of the universe goes, theories is pretty much the best thing we have.


As for the topic question I'll have to say I couldn't care less. In my country we get taught about the bible in schools and in turn we were never taught about evolution but yet we have nearly 0% of creationists in Greece (the right winged Christians as Jimmy Carr calls them..). Christians here just don't take the bible teachings all too literal, so i think there's more than the education system to attribute to what the kids will end up believing in. In usa on the other hand, the theory of evolution is actually being taught in schools but Intelligent Design only became a subject in a few schools just recently, yet that's the country where most right winged Christians live in..