Stevedye56 said:
I think that a soon as science starts to solve problems that it can't then a debate arises. I pose this question to everyone: What happens with the CERN program if NO new information is found after full operation of the LHC? Is it a dead end? Or, is there a cover made up for why nothing was found?
You seem to have a very erroneous idea of science. Science is not saying "what is" or "what isn't", science is not about "truth" of "falsehood" ; science is about models which can make predictions, which can be confronted with observations. These models can handle all kinds of concepts and ideas, and in fact, it doesn't matter whether you consider these concepts "true" or not: what counts is the coherence of the model and the predictability of observable facts.
So the LHC is going to make observations, unless the machine is broken in some obvious kind of way. There are going to be Petabytes of data taken, again, unless the machine is broken. That's not "nothing". It is observation. And that will be compared to different models people have set up. Maybe all of them will fail to agree with the data. But for sure, it is not possible that there are no data. In fact, it is not possible that the LHC "doesn't find anything" - I guess, doesn't find new particles, such as the Higgs, because that would be the most astounding discovery in 40 years of particle physics. It would falsify about all models that have been set up.
But in wondering what should be taught in science class, one should wonder what predictability the item has. One should wonder whether, with the taught model, one can predict anything or not, and whether that prediction is going to be observable in some or other way. If the answer is yes, then it is science, if the answer is no, it isn't. This is why creationism isn't science, and why evolution is. With evolution, you can make predictions. With creationism, you can't. With evolution, you can make predictions of observations that ought to be in the fossil record, and you can make predictions about what will happen to certain populations under certain environmental pressures. That doesn't mean at all that evolution is "true", it only means that it is a good model, and a good summary of a lot of data. Creationism can't do such a thing, because whatever happens, it can be the will of the gods. So creationism has no predictability. In its naive versions, it makes wrong predictions, but in its more sophisticated versions, it can adapt to any observation and its converse. Such flexibility is what makes a set of statements unscientific.
For instance, if we have a population of bacteria, and we expose them to a certain poison, let the survivors colonize again, expose them again to a certain poison and repeat this over and over, then evolution makes a clear prediction: the mortality under the poison should decrease, or at best, remain stable. It cannot increase. Creationism can't say anything, one way or another: it could be that it is the gods' will to make the bacteria stronger, or it can be that it is the gods will to do the opposite.
In the same way, the biblical story of creation in 6 "days", but which leaves of course no observable record anywhere, has no predictive value. However, as others pointed out, the big bang model does. That doesn't mean that the universe is "truly" 15 billion years old - this is only within that model that such concept has a meaning. What I'm concerned, the universe is just a few seconds old, for that matter. However, even if the universe is only a few seconds old, and it was the divine desire to have it the way we see it now, still then the big bang model is a good model of it, in the sense that it summarizes a lot of data, and can make a lot of observable predictions of it.
So science is about model building that summarizes observational data, and that allows to make observable predictions. All the rest is not science, and doesn't belong in a science class. Science is also about ways to make observations, ways to build models, ways to test models against observations and everything that turns around that. Science is not about "truth". (Absolute) Truth is in fact a pretty meaningless concept, but those who want to play with it, are not doing science.
