I went to a high school where I learned more about the Bible than I did about math, and my tenth grade biology teacher refused to teach evolution because, well, people didn’t come from monkeys. They came from God. This is the type of scientific education that leads to 30 percent of Texans believing that dinosaurs and humans coexisted at one point.

I know it’s sometimes unbelievable, but within in the scientific community, it’s impossible to prove anything. The same is true for religion. The scientific process only allows you to disprove things. Every scientific theory has the common quality that they can be verified as false. For instance, if I were to see a white swan, then I may make the hypothesis all swans are white. I have evidence that there is a good possibility that all swan are white. This statement, however, is falsifiable because, upon finding one black swan, my hypothesis is false.

The theory of gravity does say that if you drop a pen, it will fall onto the ground, but it also says that the ground will also rise to it. Considering the size of the pen, this might not be so rational. If a pen were to stop in the middle of the air instead of falling against the rising earth, then the theory of gravity would be falsified. That’s not a miracle; it’s simply a falsification of a theory. But one man’s miracle is another man’s falsified theory.

Science books do change every 10 or 20 years, but they also change every one to two years as well. And thank God! Scientists are developing new experiments and producing new methods of teaching science. Climate change is one example of something they have recently added to textbooks because it’s something scientists have just recently started researching in depth.

I completely understand writing an article about the benefits of Christianity, or the probability of God, but saying something as asinine as “Today’s science is tomorrow’s joke. Today’s faith in Christ is tomorrow’s eternal life.” This type of regressive thinking is producing teachers that refuse to teach things because they don’t understand them or because they subscribe to a misconception that science and religion are at odds. That thought process produces people that don’t trust or invest in science, thus stifling scientific progression in cancer research, climate rehabilitation efforts, research to prevent birth defects, etc. Don’t be that biology teacher who doesn’t even know what the theory of evolution is before she denounces it in front of the class. Science is just as, if not more, important as religion.

Michael Patrick is a sophomore majoring in political science.