When you don’t teach science in schools anymore beyond a handful of electives for gifted kids, can you really be surprised when religious folk conflate the two? To them, it’s an “alternative teaching” that they’re told to accept on “faith,” and so to them there’s no difference between Darwin and say, Muhammad.

If you have never been taught how science works, by verifiable testing of hypothesis, etc, you can’t really blame them.

The solution is to have more real science education in classrooms. Not memorizing “Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species” and forgetting it a month later, but actually learning that science works, is objectively verifiable, and thus cannot be compared to religion.