Unfortunately an enquiring mind will always want to start at the beginning of a story or in this case theory. A building naturally starts with its foundations. For this reason, for the idea of evolution to stand up in the mind of a student, he/she will expect the theory to have a solid foundation, root or beginning.- This is where it becomes dodgy to justify teaching only evolution in its present form as anything more than an idea, and a bad one at that. When one re-traces the "rivers" of evolution they end up at their source which is this fanciful puddle of primordial soup which is where all life was supposed to begin. This is where many thinking people are left completely dumbfounded and beyond incredulous at the ridiculousness of it all. We are taught about the amazing intricacies of the DNA of a simple uni-cellular amoeba- (when I was doing biology at high school (1992), we were taught that an amoeba was the simplest of creatures and may have been the first life form) yet it's genome is massive and highly complicated- to call even this "simplicity" a random event is insulting to even the meanest intelligence. My feeling is that if we cannot agree on the origins of life then we cannot teach evolution, we need to teach on issues where we have common ground, ie on the facts that we currently observe from current evidence that can not be open to conjecture in any way. It is merely speculation and arguably and ironically religious in itself (because through evolution some "seek" to obviate religion) for "evos" to push ideas/agendas on such fanciful ideas as the big bang theory and primordial soup for the origin of life, etc as theories when in fact they are just ideas that defy common sense. Would it not be more ethical albeit a compromise, to include a separate subject (or as a subject within a subject) of beliefs, hypotheses and even theories that could be studied to embrace ideas from all quarters. I fail to see how spending so much time and resources fighting over the past can be of use to man or planet. I probably needn't mention it but it is my conviction that there is a Creator God, and I for one would object to my child being taught theories that exclude a God and have no plausible beginnings