I know this isn’t exactly a popular opinion these days, but I don’t see what the big deal is in teaching children that some scientists disagree with the idea that species evolve into other species over time. It is a true statement. As long as there remains one scientist who disagrees (and you can always find one guy who believes just about anything), it will be a true statement.
Here’s where I think the crux of the problem lies: Science does not deal with reality, but Scientists like to believe that it does. Science cannot describe reality because nothing can. Scientists can only construct mathematical models of reality, and test those models in their predictive capabtility by running experiments. Why can’t science tell us about realitiy? Simply put, there’s no experiment anyone can perform which would tell us that we are not living in a video game, a movie, a book, or some child’s dream.
Evolution is a scientific theory because it makes predictions ranging from the nature of the fossils to the behavior of bacteria. Evolution, as a theory, is an abstract model of reality that happens to make very accurate and useful predictions. Creationism, on the other hand, makes no predictions. It is a theory dealing purely with metaphysical truth, with the nature of the reality in which we live. This difference doesn’t imply that Creationism is somehow objectively worse than Evolution; you simply can’t compare the two. One is a set of statements that attempts to describe an objective reality, and the other is a mathematical model used to make predictions about the nature of the sensations we experience. They both have their places.
My main point here is that Creationist theories cant’ be ‘wrong’ becuase they can never be tested. Evolutionary theories, however, can be tested, and they have continually passed those tests. That doesn’t mean evolution is ‘true’ because science can never prove anything true. If the scientific and educated american communities would stop insisting that Science is Truth, perhaps they’d find less opposition from more faith-oriented americans.