Let’s get something straight!
No no no. Wrong.
It all starts with facts.
A ‘fact’ is an observed reality. Apples fall down. There is a sun in the sky, and it comes up every morning in the east and progresses westward to pass beyond the western horizon in the evening. 99+% of people who participated in a longitudinal Weight Watchers study on weight lost regained their lost weight within 5 years. Persons in the US who identify as ‘Christian’ are roughly evenly split between being registered as Democrats and Republicans.
Facts are inarguable. They just ARE.*
Facts form the basis of the chain of reasoning from which a scientist forms a hypothesis, tests it, and either discards it or has it elevated to the august status of a scientific theory. A scientific theory is NOT A FACT. It’s a logical extrapolation. It doesn’t become a fact until and unless someone manages to prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt using hard, observable, repeatable evidence. And then it stops being a scientific theory.
You can argue against a scientific theory. You CAN argue about dinosaurs and the source and extremity of climate change and, yes, even evolution. You may not sound very smart, because those are things with some pretty hefty bodies of evidence in their favor, but you know what? I’ve seen eloquent, rational, logically sound arguments made against all of them.
You cannot rationally argue the facts. You cannot rationally deny that things fall down towards a center of mass. You cannot rationally deny that we have bigass lizardy fossils, because you can go see them. You cannot deny that we have significant reduction of polar ice caps. WE HAVE PHOTOS. You can only argue WHY and HOW all those things.
You cannot deny that we have DNA and viruses and bacteria and multi-celled organisms and monkeys and apes and humans, but you can argue about why and where they all come from, because nobody has ever been able to sit down and watch mutations actually taking place to the point where one type of critter becomes another type of critter.
It’d be pretty stupid not to teach about the current dominant theory on these things in schools, because they’re important scientific questions. But you can argue whether current accepted theory is right or not.
Frankly science classes could do with a lot more arguing.
* (Unless you are a proponent of a subjective school of philosophy, in which case we have a different room to put you in while the scientists work.)