When you don't know, you don't know. Teach both sides, the truth will someday be known.
"When you don't know, you don't know. Teach both sides, the truth will someday be known"
If you don't require any evidence to teach something then there are not two sides but thousands.
That's why science prefers teach the stuff that's backed up by evidence.
"When you don't know, you don't know. Teach both sides, the truth will someday be known"
If you don't require any evidence to teach something then there are not two sides but thousands.
That's why science prefers teach the stuff that's backed up by evidence.
You contradict yourself. If you "don't know" then you don't know there are only two sides. We'd have to consider, and teach, any and every view we could find. There's a LOT more than just two, as anyone familiar with fringe and psuedo sciences can readily attest. For instance we'd have to cover some version of antievolutionism as held by the Hare Krishna, who assert that each individual species is biologically fixed (it's souls that evolve -- through reincarnation) something that even most "creationists" do not believe.
If we "don't know" in the dismissive (and permissive) sense that you suggest, then we "don't know" what to teach.
We do, however, know which theories have earned and maintain standing in science -- that is which ones are actually used and implicated by working scientists in the conduct of ongoing, original research -- and which have not, or at least have not yet. And because the content of the professional scientific literature reflects (with a reasonable level of fidelity) the ideas that are so employed in the conduct of research, we know this as objective fact.
So what not base what we teach in a science class on what we objectively know about the content of science? If some creationistic or design theory (or something else non- or extra- evolutionary) someday actually earns scientific standing on merit, then it can be taught too.
And, btw, if some new theory is sufficiently successful to supplant evolution completely, then evolution should be dropped from the curricula, just as would be done with any other scientific theory abandoned by working scientists.
Sorry, but I find this just obvious. And I find your view that we should just teach "both sides" to be relativistic, wimpy, wishy-washy and anti-intellectual.
When you don't know, you don't know. Teach both sides, the truth will someday be known.There are more than two sides. Personally, I think they ought to be teaching Wolfram's New Kind of Science.