Last week, the public school district board of Grantsburg, Wis., passed a motion allowing for “various theories / models of origins” to be taught in its science curricula. The door is now open for creationism to be taught in Grantsburg’s public schools.

Predictably, the move was met with academic condemnation. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 43 of the UW System’s letters and science deans, joined by 300 biology and religious studies faculty from state institutions, publicly called for a reversal of the policy. The criticisms were centered largely around education policy. Presenting evolution and creationism as theoretical competitors is bad policy, according to former UW Madison botany professor Don Waller, because teaching creationism “takes time away from real learning, confuses some students and is a misuse of limited class time and public funds.”

Grantsburg officials disagree. According to Grantsburg science teacher Greg Stager, “[e]volution is a theory, just as much as creationism is a theory. There is contradictory evidence for both.”

Unfortunately for Grantsburg’s teachers and school district officials, one of these theories is scientific, and the other is not.

In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits the teaching of creationism — the doctrine that a deity, usually the God of Christianity, is the creator and source of the development of life — in public schools, as it is an expression of religious belief.

Legal rulings, however, do not determine whether theories are scientifically sound. Advocates of creationism have attempted to rebound by repackaging creationism as “intelligent design,” the theory that a higher intelligence is responsible for the complexity and evolution of organic life.

Opponents of the teaching of evolution in public schools call attention to the fact that evolution is a scientific theory, and that as a theory it remains unproven. They go on to argue that it would be scientifically derelict of educators if they did not present opposing viewpoints in the classroom — so why not also teach intelligent design?

This argument is not only a misportrayal of both evolution theory and intelligent design, but of science itself. Science is not the consideration of opposing viewpoints and judging them on their merits (or, as many supporters of intelligent design wish, the intensity of individuals’ belief in them). It is instead a particular way of thinking: obtaining verifiable results by reasoning logically about observable facts.

This is not an exact definition, but it does not need to be one. Genetics, economics and geology do not precisely overlap, but they all share the empirical habit of forming hypotheses, making logical deductions or predictions about them, and then testing them against facts that are observed in the real world. Such an approach is necessarily skeptical: we should not accept or endorse the hypotheses presented in a theory unless they can be confirmed through repeated testing of the same variables.

In this sense, no scientific theory is ever definitively proven. Instead, some theories are successful at providing coherent explanations of the way the world works, and some aren’t. A theory is successful to the extent it generates results that are not at odds with those obtained through repeated experimentation. This leaves open the possibility of refining existing hypotheses or generating new ones to be tested; the skepticism at the core of this process will always drive new attempts to invalidate the existing hypotheses.

As a collection of certain hypotheses, and predictions based on those hypotheses, evolution is a theory that may be verified through experimentation and testing in the fields of zoology, botany, genetics and paleontology, to name just a few. It offers up its theoretical claims for empirical testing in a way that intelligent design theory cannot, as the latter concerns itself with phenomena — spiritual and philosophical — that cannot be observed in the physical world.

Because of this, intelligent design cannot be considered a scientific theory at all. Meanwhile, through testing and verification, evolution has come to be broadly accepted by the scientific community.

While there may be compelling theological or philosophical reasons to consider the intelligent design argument, they have no place in a public school science classroom. The educators and administrators calling on Grantsburg to give up teaching alternatives to evolution are right to do so, not because such teaching is bad education policy but because it is bad science.

Rob Hunter ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in political science and philosophy.