"
Why is evolution taught in our schools?"
Yeah, as has been explained, the issue is with the U.S. Supreme Court justices' decisions, specifically as pertaining to the
Establishment Clause and the
Free Exercise Clause of the
First Amendment to the U.S, Constitution. It's erroneously thought, imo, and now established as
legal precedence that any teaching of a personable or intelligent creation origin violates one part of the 1st Amendment (EC) over against another part of the 1st Amendment (FEC).
In 1968, the US Supreme Court ruled on
Epperson v. Arkansas, another challenge to these laws, and the court ruled that allowing the teaching of
creation, while disallowing the teaching of evolution, advanced a religion, and therefore violated the
Establishment Clause of the constitution. Creationists then starting lobbying to have laws passed that required teachers to
Teach the Controversy, but this was also struck down by the Supreme Court in 1987 in
Edwards v. Aguillard. Creationists then moved to frame the issue as one of
intelligent design but this too was ruled against in a District Court in
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in 2005.
The issue has remained contentious, with various US states debating, passing, or voting down alternative approaches to creationism in science classrooms. There is no bar in US law to creationism being taught in civics, current affairs, philosophy, or comparative religions classes.
Unfortunately, during the
High Middle Ages of Western civilisation, theology and philosophy began to get divorced from what had previously been considered
science. The short version of a TL;DR is that
evolutionary theory (which doesn't consistently speak to origins) is judicially (presently) considered science over and against most other creation assertions that are considered exclusively religious.
This, oddly, again imo, does not account for the fluctuation in paradigms of both evolutionary theory and science overall. For example,
racism was once almost universally purported as
scientific truth within the ruling
scientific paradigm. Of course, by-and-large that thankfully is no longer the prevailing paradigm. Scientific paradigms are ALWAYS shifting interpretations. BUT,
science is nonetheless considered outside the purview over and against what is more clearly considered
religious per U.S. judicial dictate. Even though there
are temples of science, even of differing flavours (just like
Protestants and
Catholics of
religions), the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to recognise a
worship of particular scientific paradigms on a consistent order of comparison with the "religion" of the 1st Amendment. One has to reflect on clashing scientific paradigms, as e.g. evidenced in
The Big Bang Theory (both the scientific construct and the television sit-com show) to grasp the religious nature of science itself, though this usually really peeves off some "
scientists". It's perhaps confusing (though otherwise helpful for some), but Western philosophy and epistemological constructs have preferred neat little compartmentalisation and categorical segregation of scholarship. Thus, today, the Western scientific paradigm is that theology is divorced from science, where once
theology was considered the "queen of the sciences".
The bottom line is that as long as evolutionary theory is judicially thought sanitised from religion, which imo it is not, it will be included in U.S. educational impetus. A better plan, imo, is to consider
all theories of origins as outside the purview of establishing any particular religion and certainly allowing for a free exercise of all religions which are not in conflict with other established laws (such as against polygamy, human sacrifice, or a 2-dimensional holographic universe principle theorised in some paradigms of string theory).
