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We generally don't ask students to 'think critically' about other established scientific laws either.

I should hope we do. Critical thinking is essential to truly understanding them.

You're teaching a university general chemistry course. You have a year and approximately 90 lecture hours to cover all of chemistry. You can find lots of typical syllabi and textbooks on google. Typically, you have one lecture and maybe one recitation to cover the second law of thermodynamics. Explain to me how you're going to effect 'critical thinking' about the second law, incorporating a reasonably comprehensive overview of the theoretical background and the experimental evidence.

Funny how allegedly hard-nosed conservatives turn into fuzzy thinking liberals when it comes to evolution. 'Critical thinking' is ordinarily a postmodernist code phrase. But then politics makes strange bedfellows.

Critical thinking is a skill, an approach. It could be applied in virtually every lesson in every subject. What does this really mean? What would its negation really mean? What are the assumptions behind it? Could they be wrong, perhaps subtly? What is the evidence for it? Could there be errors in the explanations of the evidence? Are there possibly limits on its applicability? And so on.

Of course there are other pedagogical desires that are just as important. The knowledge, organizing concepts, attitudes etc. must be imparted. But critical thinking is a cross discipline attitude that it is also beneficial to impart and building it into the curriculum is a good thing.

I shan't take offense at your "fuzzy thinking liberals" crack. The fact is liberals are among the least critally thinking people I know. But the lack of this skill isn't a purely liberal thing. Just look at the typical deevo posting to these threads. I assume they are generally conservative but are unable to think critically.

'Critical thinking' is ordinarily a postmodernist code phrase. But then politics makes strange bedfellows.

But there is no difference in the philosophies of the Creationists and the PostModernDeconstructionists. They are allies in their attempts to deny the validity of scientific knowledge. Both claim that their feelings are of more import than observations. It is not surprising that the same philosophical underpinnings should lead to the same code phrases.