Good News, Everyone!
Good news, everyone! Texan school kids won’t be forced to consider “alternatives” as if they are equally valid compared to established, actually scientific, theories.
Yes, the scientific method encourages questioning and skepticism, but for a whole other reason than proposed by Creationism/ID supporters. Those people have already reached their conclusion beforehand, and they’re actually also telling you not to question that conclusion. Instead, they question the scientific conclusion, as well as the methods used, in order to validate their own, unquestioned, hypothesis. This isn’t scientific, and this is why Intelligent Design isn’t science.
Evolution is not “just a theory”. Creationism and Intelligent Design, however, are.
No, creationism and intelligent design are NOT theories, they are at best hypotheses. For something to be a theory, it must be well-substantiated with evidence.
Evolution IS a theory, the problem is that theists often don’t know the difference between theories and hypotheses, so please don’t give them more ammo by mistaking them as well.
Subtle nuance is hard to convey in text :)
I mean to say that evolution is fact and scientific theory, while creationism/ID is precisely what creationists/IDists claim that evolution is: “just a theory”. They use theory as in conjecture or guess, a definition that fits perfectly with their own worldview, but not actually with evolutionary theory.
So you’re absolutely right, and I never meant for anyone to think that I was saying that creationism is anything other than hypothesis.