Jack Springer, you don't need to worry. No child will ever be taught in a science class that you can put rocks in a box and get a lexus after a million years, because that has nothing to do with any scientific theory.
It is clear you know absolutely nothing about the Theory of Evolution which you fear. Next, these are not opinions, they are explanations anchored in facts.
To review:
- Facts are things we can observe, measure, show to other scientists or other people to confirm whether we made a mistake or not.
- A hypothesis is an educated guess about how all those factual things might be related.
- A Theory is a hypothesis that works again and again, lo and behold when a new fact is found the Theory has already predicted it or made sense of it or worked it out from what was known before the fact was uncovered. It's a hypothesis that has finally proven itself with existing and new data, and with challenges from alternative explanations where it still explains things better. That's how a hypothesis becomes a theory.
First, Evolution is not an opinion. It is a well-tested theory that explains all the things we find about the development of life and how those facts come together. It covers fossils, what we see in petrie dishes, dog breeding, scanning tunnelling electron microscopes, carbon dating, geology, farming, cancer research, the human genome project….
There are plenty of facts yet to be discovered, but those are not gaps in the theory. The theory is complete. All of those new facts have fit right into place with evolutionary theory. That is why it is so robust and so reliable.
If you can put a bunch of rocks in a box and come up with a lexus or a potato or a leprechaun or perhaps that idiot Kirk Cameron's crockoduck, then you will likely have stumbled upon a fact that cannot be explained by the Theory of Evolution; you will have falsified the theory, and scientists will have to go back to the drawing board. And I'll owe that idiot Kirk Cameron an apology. Until then the theory stands.
Second, the Theory of Evolution is different from theories about Abiogenesis. That means, the way generations of living organisms change over time is one theory. Where that life came from in the first place is another. And both of those theories have nothing much to do with the Big Bang Theory. So lets stop muddling them all together.
Abiogenesis (life springing forth from non-living matter) is the least-well-developed theory of the three. What happens once life gets here is a settled question; it evolves. But how did it get here? If you wanted to call Abiogenesis a hypothesis until it is proven by more data, I won't argue with you.
But it's looking better and better for Abiogenesis the more data we collect. Scientists can demonstrate that the right commonplace chemicals from some primaeval pond can organise themselves into cell-like structures. And we have discovered things like prions (the things that cause alzheimers and mad cow disease by disrupting the brain). They aren't quite alive, but they are too close to being alive to be called just another ordinary chemical. So there are plenty of strong leads that if the right chemicals fell into a pond at the start of time, life would be the outcome of that reaction without anyone having to put any creativity into it.
None of this, big bang included, actually rules out what some people might imagine about god or divinity. However it does rule out most of what has ever been preached in the history of humanity about god or divinity. It absolutely rules out treating the Bible as a catalogue of facts about the unfolding of the universe. So should we add that to the lesson? No; it's religious speculation, not part of a well-developed theory that belongs in a science class.
