British Centre for Science Education

AUSTIN, TX, Nov. 20, 2008 – Three Reform Jewish leaders testified yesterday before the Texas State Board of Education on proposed revisions to the state’s science curriculum.

Advocating for students’ First Amendment rights, the rabbis opposed the state education curriculum that require the teaching of creationism/ intelligent design in science classes. The current curriculum requires the teaching of the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories. Although the first proposed change would have struck that language entirely, ensuring that only pure science is taught, the most recent proposal simply substitutes “limitations” for “weaknesses.” The Board is scheduled to vote on this issue in January.

Excerpts from the rabbis’ testimony are below. 

Rabbi Ana Bonnheim, Assistant Director for Education at the Union for Reform Judaism’s Greene Family Camp, said:

“On the surface, teaching about the ‘strengths and limitations of scientific explanations’… may not seem like teaching religious beliefs. Yet…When science teachers answer questions about evolution and origins of life by pointing to the divine or supernatural, they are incorporating religion into science classrooms.

“For me as a rabbi, science and religion are not at odds … Moses Maimonides … who is perhaps the greatest philosopher of our tradition, was also a physician. He taught that scientific inquiry can lead to more thoughtful religious questions and better educated religious individuals. The place for the quiet discussions about spirituality in science is not in public schools but around the kitchen table, in religious school classrooms, or in a clergy member’s office.

“Sadly and painfully, my Jewish ancestors had a long history of persecution in places where there was no separation of church and state. When we permit religious beliefs to be taught in our state schools, we begin to blur the line that keeps religion and government separate. We are so fortunate to live in a country that respects individuals of all faiths. It is essential to maintain the boundaries that will protect religious groups of every faith.”

Rabbi Nancy Kasten, of Dallas, said:

“Jewish tradition teaches that we serve God through a never-ending process of asking questions and making discoveries about our world … Studying the world using the tools of scientific method…and forming and testing hypotheses, is the way that scientists formulated our current understanding of evolution. This understanding does not conflict with the Jewish view of Creation. While there are still things to discover about how life evolved and continues to evolve, the questions that challenge current understandings are part of the scientific process itself, and should not be categorized as ‘strengths and limitations’ in the interest of raising doubt about widely accepted scientific method and promoting specific religious views.”

Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, of Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, said:

“I strongly oppose the revised version where the strengths and limitations of scientific explanations could be evaluated. It seems to me that discussing the limitations of widely accepted, sound scientific theories, such as the theory of gravity, the theory of relativity, or the theory of evolution would take up valuable class time that could be better spent ensuring that our children receive the best scientific education at a time when our country is falling behind the rest of the world in scientific achievement….

For more information about the Reform Jewish Movement’s opposition to the teaching of intelligent design and creationism in public schools please see http://rac.org/advocacy/issues/creationism/or contact the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism atrac@rac.org .

From the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.

God and Evolution Can Co-exist, Scientist Says

NEW YORK - A scientist is going public with his Christian belief in God and acceptance of evolution, in the wake of the Dover trial and recent, high-profile scholarly writings that have highlighted the contradictions between religiosity and science.

Karl W. Giberson, a physics professor at Eastern Nazarene College in Massachusetts, is hardly alone in holding both views (Francis Collins, who headed up federal Human Genome Project, is one widely-known example of a Christian scientist), but the nation’s current cultural climate allows such a person to easily make a splash.

Giberson has rejected fundamentalism, but remains a believer as well as a scientist. He has staked out a middle ground when it comes to the battle between Christians and Darwinists, stating that they can be reconciled with one another. He is sympathetic toward the motivations of creationists and scientists alike, though he is fed up with much of intelligent design as well as hard-core atheists.

The often acrimonious debate between science and religion came to a major head around the time of the Dover trial, which ended in 2005 when Judge John E. Jones III barred intelligent design (ID) from being taught in a Pennsylvania public school district’s science classes. The debate simmers on today as other school districts and legislators continue to try to get ID and creationism into the classroom, while Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and other atheists and agnostics have written recent books, blogged and spoken publicly about the logical inconsistencies and irrationality of religious, or at least Christian, beliefs.

For Giberson, his contribution is his book, “Saving Darwin” (HarperOne, 2008), which he discussed here Monday night at the Harvard Club with Michael Shermer, an agnostic and the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine. The event was sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.

Giberson’s journey involves being raised fundamentalist and then beginning to doubt, during his training for his Ph.D. in physics, that science was as thoroughly wrong about the origins of life and Earth as creationists claim.

Obviously, he thinks one can be a Christian and accept evolution, but these two sets of knowledge “don’t make as much contact with each other as people think,” he said. Many fundamentalists “elevate Genesis beyond what is appropriate.”

Fundamentalists’ spin on the creation story in Genesis “robs it of everything that is interesting,” he said. Instead, readers should recall that the Bible repeats the refrain that God found what he made “good” and looks at the world as good.

Shermer pushed on, asking Giberson to comment on the following definitional statement from Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos:”

“For we are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins … Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we sprung.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Shermer asked Giberson, with a smile.

This kind of thinking is “hardly going to inspire ordinary people” to be passionate about spirituality, Giberson replied. “I just don’t think it would be a functional religion.”

Shermer followed up, asking Giberson, then why believe in God at all?

“It makes the world so much more interesting,” Giberson said. “The mystery of God’s existence is a more satisfying mystery than the mystery of how can all this arise out of a particle.”

But what is your evidence, Shermer said, for belief in God?

“I was raised believing in God, so for me, the onus would be on someone to stop me from believing,” Giberson said, adding that “there is a certain momentum that is already there.”

Shermer said, so “you’re stepping off the page of science.”

“Absolutely,” Giberson said, but added that he thinks science will soon nail down a definition of consciousness that will make God’s intentions more clear.

From LiveScience.

In the beginning, there was religion. And God said, let there be light, and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light science, and the darkness He called creationism.

But this divide begat confusion, for it was unclear whether science and creationism could co-exist, or whether, like night and day, the one must necessarily cancel out the other.

The reductionist view is that creationism and science are utterly incompatible. On the one side are the creationists: people who maintain that all life was created within six days, approximately 6,000 years ago. At the other extreme are scientists: diehard atheists for whom physics and biology explain the existence of the world.

However, between the two sets of clear-cut beliefs, there is a murky twilight. And this is where the confusion lies.

David Wilkinson is an evangelical Christian minister. This should put him firmly in the creationism camp. But he is also a theoretical astrophysicist, with a PhD in the chemical evolution of galaxies.

“I’m not a creationist,” he said.

“There are certain things about the universe - that the universe is intelligible to us through mathematics, or that the laws of physics are so beautiful - that raise philosophical and theological questions.

“Creationism says that Genesis is supposed to be read as a scientific textbook. But it’s primarily a theological text, explaining that God exists.

“If science has a gap in it, the temptation is to use God to fill that gap. But I see God working through the science of the Big Bang and the science of evolutionary biology, rather than through the gaps.”

Similarly, the Church of England is keen to draw a distinction between what the religious might choose to believe and what should be taught in science lessons.

A spokeswoman for the Church suggested that a separate subject, such as the history of science, might cover all pre-scientific views: that the Sun orbits the Earth, that the Earth is flat, and that the universe was created in six days.

“The way in which people find meaning varies,” she said. “Science education enables them to understand how the scientific approach works. Science and religion are trying to answer the same questions, but they do different jobs.”

Many are unclear whether the controversy over teaching creationism evolved over time, or was created intact. That there is controversy, however, is undoubted.

Government guidelines are unequivocal. “Creationism and intelligent design are not part of the national curriculum for science,” the guidelines state. “But there is scope for pupils to discuss creationism as part of religious education.”

In 2007, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority also said that creationism should not be taught in any science lessons. Instead, it suggests that teachers use as a resource A Devil’s Chaplain, by the atheist scientist Richard Dawkins, who has described RE as “child abuse”.

But this is not a view shared by everyone. This autumn, Professor Michael Reiss was forced to resign as director of education at the Royal Society, after he suggested that banning discussion of religious creation stories from the classroom could alienate religious pupils from the subject.

And last week, a survey of more than 1,200 teachers found that 31.1 per cent would like to see creationism or intelligent design taught alongside Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection (see panel, left).

Though there is neither fossil record nor religious text to account for the origins of this debate, most believe they lie across the Atlantic.

The Rev Dr Wilkinson said: “Most Christians in history did not take a literal interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis. Creationism has grown out of the particular cultural context of the United States, where science education and politics have entwined themselves. Some of that has been shipped to other parts of the world.”

Derek Bell, chief executive of the Association for Science Education, agrees. “The fundamentalist Christian views have been coming through largely from the USA,” he said.

Indeed, it is in the US that attempts to couch creationist beliefs in scientific language first arose. The best-known version of this creationist science is intelligent design theory: the assertion that evolutionary processes were guided by an intelligent power.

Michael Behe, professor of bioscience at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, was one of the first advocates of intelligent design - a theory that his own university has denounced as pseudoscience.

“Suppose you found a factory on Mars that made little flying saucers, but no Martians left behind,” he said. “Would you think that had popped into existence by natural processes? No, of course not. The evidence is the intelligent arrangement of parts.

“A cell is an ultra-sophisticated, nano-sized factory. It contains elegant machines that humans are incapable of building.

“We know intelligent agencies can build sophisticated machinery, but there is no compelling evidence that evolution or random mutation could account for the sophistication of the cell.”

The British group Truth in Science advocates teaching Professor Behe’s intelligent design theory in science classes. Scientific truth, they say, is not determined by consensus, and many advances in science were made by those who questioned accepted truths.

The purpose of education, they add, is to expose pupils to differences of opinion and allow them to consider each argument on its merits. “Students need to adopt a critical, questioning frame of mind,” they say.

And Truth in Science has been making incursions into classrooms.

In 2006, Stephen Layfield, head of science at Emmanuel College in Gateshead, which is funded by the Christian car dealer Sir Peter Vardy, was revealed to be one of the directors of Truth in Science.

He was forced to resign from the group, and the Emmanuel Schools Foundation denied that his personal views reflected the school’s teaching policy.

Nonetheless, Truth in Science has received around 300 requests for their classroom resources, many from teachers.

Transatlantic religious beliefs have also been bolstered by local support from other faith groups.

In 2007, the Science and Religion in Schools Project, co-ordinated by a committee including the Bishop of Oxford and the Chief Rabbi, invited primary and secondary school teachers to make links between science and religious education.

And Professor Bell points out that creationist beliefs are a key tenet of religious faith for many Muslim pupils.

“You cannot simply go roughshod over people’s beliefs,” he said. “That’s about respect for the individual and their rights.

“The question is how do you handle it?

“Science is about looking at evidence and testing a theory or hypothesis against that evidence. Going beyond that, you move into how people interpret the world around them.”

Theoretical scientists, Professor Bell points out, can pronounce their beliefs into a vacuum; teachers have to deal with the realities of the classroom. And this is where Professor Reiss stepped in: he was a classroom pragmatist, rather than a panderer to the religious.

“If you want pupils to learn and engage with learning, you can’t say, ‘That’s a load of rubbish’,” Professor Bell said.

“That’s probably a luxury people who are not involved in science education have.

From the TES.

The debate regarding the teaching of creationism as an alternative to evolution has recently been re-ignited in the British and American education systems.  However, evolution is not the atheistic worldview that it is often thought to be, argues George Coyne SJ.  In fact, reflecting on our role in an evolutionary universe can help us to deepen our faith.

Evolution as a scientific explanation of origins is often viewed as atheistic.

It is not. 

Science, by its very methodology, is completely neutral with respect to religious considerations. But if one does believe in God, creator of the universe, can scientific knowledge be helpful in supporting and nurturing that belief? 

I would like to discuss how a believing scientist like myself views, based on scientific knowledge, the nature of God and the nature of the human being. Such knowledge is basic to any discussion of faith, and I hope such knowledge complements that derived from philosophy and theology. Several criteria exist to determine the veracity of scientific theories, such as predictability, repeatability of experiments, simplicity or economy of explanation.   There is, however, a growing awareness among scientists of another criterion: “unifying explanatory power” – not only are the observations at hand explained, but the attempt to understand is also in harmony with all else that we know, even with that which we know outside of the natural sciences.

. . .

This view of the evolutionary universe and our place in it, derived from the sciences and of God’s role in the universe, derived from the reflections of a religious believer upon that same science, may help us in a further understanding of faith. We share in the creativity that God desired the universe to have. I have not spoken above of the spiritual nature of the human being because that cannot be an object of scientific research. But the reflections of a religious believer upon the nature of God and his relationship to the universe bring us to a recognition of our spirituality. Such reflections are themselves an exercise of that spirituality.

Ultimately, reflections upon our scientific knowledge of the universe bring us to a recognition of our role as co-creators, so to speak, in God’s continuous creation of the universe.

George Coyne, SJ, is associate pastor at St. Raphael the Archangel Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. He was formerly director of the Vatican Observatory.

This article was originally published in the Spring 2007 issue of Ignatian Imprints, the magazine of the Maryland Province Jesuits.

From here.

Confusing creation with creationism

Intelligent design and young Earth creationism are both false, but that does not discount the notion of creation, writes Michael Poole

Two traditional beliefs held by Christians, Jews and Muslims are that God created the world and that he did it for a purpose - creation and design.

Creation is a religious concept, not a scientific one, so we don’t teach it in science. But neither can science justifiably deny it. Creation is the bringing-into-being and sustaining-in-being of everything there is. It is independent of any particular processes.

Scientific studies of origins can answer ‘what were these processes?’, but not ‘are they the actions of God?’ The latter question is one, in the words of the National Curriculum, ‘that science cannot address’.

Currently, science indicates an Earth some 4.6bn years old, but some people think the Genesis account of six “days” requires a geologically young Earth of 6,000-10,000 years. But that is not so. The historian, Professor David Livingstone, summarised a 19th-century perspective, when he wrote in Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders in 1987 that, “by and large, Christian geologists had both encountered and accommodated the issue of the age of the Earth long before the appearance of Darwin’s theory”.

The latter half of the 20th century saw a resurgence of young Earth creationism. It is the “young Earth” part that has caused a furore, since it runs counter to mainstream science and therefore has no place in science teaching - only in the history of science. So, is this belief required by the Genesis text? Interestingly, as early as around AD225 Origen, one of the early church fathers, wrote about the creation of the sun, moon and stars on day four of the Genesis account:

What man of intelligence, I ask, will consider as a reasonable statement that the first and the second and the third day, in which there are said to be both morning and evening, existed without sun and moon and stars…?
He, and others knew full well that 24-hour-days with mornings and evenings were meaningless before the sun and other stars arrived on “day” four. The Biblical text is apparently using a literary device and therefore those who insist on 24-hour-days actually need to treat the text much more carefully. A literal interpretation distracts from teaching about creation. People commonly think that by dismissing a young Earth (rightly, from current scientific evidence), they have removed the idea of creation - which they haven’t. They have just confused creation and creationism.

Another own goal lies in the arguments of the intelligent design movement. This claims that there are biological systems that are “irreducibly complex”, meaning that they only work if no components are missing, and therefore could not have evolved from less complete systems. According to ID’s proponents, such systems have no natural explanation and therefore provide evidence for intelligent design.

But this overlooks how intermediate components of evolutionary processes serve different functions at different stages of their evolutionary past, which torpedoes the argument. No one knows whether a natural explanation will be found tomorrow. If so, on ID reasoning, it appears that intelligence is no longer required.

Earlier claims that the development of immune systems and blood-clotting processes could not be accounted for by evolutionary change are now known to be incorrect. Furthermore, if irreducible complexity is the mark of intelligence, what about the rest of creation? If current gaps in scientific knowledge are where God acts, ID appears to be using a contemporary version of the “god-of-the-gaps”.

Charles Coulson, first professor of theoretical physics at King’s College London, coined this phrase in 1955 and commented from a Christian standpoint:

If [God] is in nature at all, he must be there right from the start, and all the way through it … When we come to the scientifically unknown, our correct policy is not to rejoice because we have found God: it is to become better scientists.

Both of what I have suggested are own goals provide unnecessary, and unserviceable, ammunition for religion’s detractors.

In attempting to defuse some current tensions over teaching about origins I have argued that both belief in a young Earth and the spurious argument of ID can be rejected, without providing grounds for rejecting the traditional concepts of creation and design held by Christians, Jews and Muslims.

Michael Poole, visiting research fellow in science and religion at the department of education and professional studies, King’s College London. He was a member of the working party which drew up the government’s guidelines on teaching evolution and creationism. His book, User’s Guide to Science and Belief was published last year.

From here.

The Christian’s friend

How strange that atheists see Darwin as their champion; his discoveries do little to challenge the fervour of believers

Would Christianity have been in better shape today if Darwin had never been born? It suits both many atheists and millions of believers to suppose that the answer is obviously “yes” - but if the answer is obvious at all, then theirs is the wrong one. Obviously Christianity today much less credible among intellectuals than it was in 1600, and this is largely a result of the growth of our knowledge about the world since then. But when you look at the thinkers whose contributions did most to make literalist faith in the Bible incredible, Darwin was really not one of the most important: in fact, as the welcome extended to his ideas by many Victorian Christians showed, his theory offers a way around the difficulties raised by others.

In any atheist pantheon, the credit for pulling down the house of faith needs to be shared quite widely, but at least half of it belongs to devout Christians. It is simply not the case that “science” showed “religion” was incredible. Neither science nor religion are single, simple entities like that; in any case the slow decay of Christianity’s credibility was a result of developments in philosophy, in history, in physics and in geology long before Darwin.

By the time that Darwin published the On the Origin of Species in 1859, it was already obvious that the God of the Bible was being squeezed right out of the educated world view. The physical world was increasingly revealed as law-bound; and Hume had argued that miracles (pdf)had to be understood as breaches of these natural laws, to be credited only when no other explanation was possible. The belief in the workings of providence in history could not among intellectuals easily survive the study of Gibbon and Voltaire. The literal truth of the Biblical narratives and even the credibility of their perspective on history had already been destroyed by the geologists’ discovery of the unimaginable age of the earth.

All this was true - and fatal to traditional Christianity - before Darwin published a line. The only theist argument that his work destroyed was the argument from design. But the argument from design is of interest only to nerds, whether atheist or believers. Most people just don’t have the kind of systematising imaginations which make the question of design in nature look compelling; other forms of imagination, while they marvel at the complexities of living things, don’t see why this should not be the work of a God responsible for the laws of natural selection.

If you concede - as the majority of Christians do without trouble - that God may express his purposes through the laws of the evolution, then Darwin’s discoveries do nothing to diminish the fervour of the believer: as his son Francis wrote:

Asa Gray observed that if the orchid book “had appeared before the Origin, the author would have been canonised rather than anathematised by the natural theologians.”
What made Darwin threatening to Christianity was not that he abolished the argument from design, but that he threatened - and threatens - human uniqueness. Against this, though, two points can be raised. The first is that Darwinian explanations of humanity end up with accounts of us which are much more compatible with the Christian view of human beings as inherently sinful and “fallen” than is the simple faith in human moral progress that was a powerful alternative to Christianity. The second is that Darwin lets God off the hook for much of the suffering of the natural world.

The more we understand about the workings of biology, the more horrible much of life appears. Most of it is parasitic; most of it is unremittingly ruthless; all of it is doomed. Tennyson called nature “red in tooth and claw” in 1843, 16 years before Darwin published the Origin of Species. If God had personally designed every last parasitic wasp and tapeworm: if some celestial watchmaker had carefully sculpted the HIV virus to make it so effective, and had shaped Eve to make her die so often in childbirth, then the case against him would be morally quite unanswerable, as Voltaire saw.

Darwin’s theory allows Christians - whether they want to or not - to understand the hideous and constant cruelties of the world as part of the mechanisms necessary to produce any kind of intelligent life. Disease, decay and death need no longer be exhibitions of gratuitous cruelty on the part of a creator. This isn’t by any means a knock-down argument for belief. But it is a conclusive argument against one kind of morally outrageous god.

Without Darwin this defence would not have been possible - but there is one final twist in the argument. It was not his personality, but his discovery which changed the rules of the world, and since natural selection is a fact about the world, and not a theory, it would have been discovered if he had never been born; in fact it was discovered, quite independently, by Alfred Russell Wallace - and Wallace was a spiritualist in his old age.

From here.

The Christian Man’s Evolution: How Darwinism and Faith Can Coexist

A geneticist ordained as a Dominican priest, Francisco J. Ayala sees no conflict between Darwinism and faith. Convincing most of the American public of that remains the challenge

Francisco J. Ayala pulls open the top drawer of a black cabinet and flips through nearly a dozen files, all neatly titled by publication and due date. These are the essays on evolution he has been churning out over the past six to eight weeks for popular books and magazines. “Hack jobs,” he calls them with a smile, bragging that each one takes only a day or two to complete.

After some 30 years of proselytizing about evolution to Christian believers, the esteemed evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, has honed his arguments to a fine point. He has stories and examples at the ready, even a shock tactic or two at his fingertips. One out of five pregnancies ends in spontaneous miscarriage, he often reminds audiences. Next he will pointedly ask, as in an interview with U.S. Catholic magazine last year, “If God explicitly designed the human reproductive system, is God the biggest abortionist of them all?” Through such examples, he explains, “I want to turn around their arguments.”

The 74-year-old Ayala is preparing for an exceptionally busy 2009. The year marks the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birthday and the sesquicentennial of the publication of On the Origin of Species, and the battle over the teaching of evolution is sure to heat up. Ayala says the need is especially great for scientists to engage religious people in dialogue. As evidence, he lugs over the 11-by-17-inch, 12-pound Atlas of Creation mailed out by Muslim creationist Adnan Oktar in Turkey to scientists and museums across the U.S. and France. This richly illustrated tome not only attacks evolution but also links Darwin’s theory to horrors, including fascism and even Satan himself.

In the U.S. the intelligent design-promoting Discovery Institute in Seattle has published biology textbooks questioning evolution and has promoted the 2008 film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed to make the case that anti-Darwinist scientists are persecuted. (For a rebuttal, see “Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Integrity Displayed,” by John Rennie, and related articles.) Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has said she believes that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in schools. One in eight high school biology teachers already treat creationism as a valid alternative, according to a Pennsylvania State University poll.

Despite outreach efforts by scientists and constitutional rulings against them, creationists and intelligent design advocates “are not getting weaker,” Ayala says. “If anything, they’re more visible.”

But Ayala thinks that scientists who attack religion and ridicule the faithful-most notably, Richard Dawkins of the University of Oxford-are making a mistake. It is destructive and gives fodder to the preachers who insist followers must choose either Darwin or God. Often students in Ayala’s introductory biology class tell him that they will answer test questions as he wishes, but in truth they reject evolution because of their Christian beliefs. Then, a couple of years later, when they have learned more science, they decide to abandon their religion. The two, students seem to think, are incompatible.

That saddens him, Ayala says. Instead he would like believers to reconcile their faith with science. Drawing on five years of study in preparation for ordination as a Dominican priest, Ayala uses evolution to help answer a central paradox of Christianity-namely, how can a loving, all-knowing God allow evil and suffering?

Nature is poorly designed-with oddities such as blind spots built into the human eye and an excess of teeth jammed into our jaws. Parasites are sadists. Predators are cruel. Natural selection can explain the ruthlessness of nature, Ayala argues, and remove the “evil”-requiring an intentional act of free will-from the living world. “Darwin solved the problem,” Ayala concludes. He refers to science-savvy Christian theologians who present a God that is continuously engaged in the creative process through undirected natural selection. By addressing religious people on their own terms, Ayala aims to offer a better answer than intelligent design or creationism.

More in NewScientist.

From here;

A survey carried out by an education TV station indicates that there is a degree of confusion and disagreement among teachers over what to do in science classrooms over views that challenge standard evolutionary biology.

However, the limits of the sampling and questioning make it difficult to draw any clear conclusions.

Nearly 50% of the respondents to an online teachers’ survey said they believed that refusing to discusss anti-evolution views in science classrooms was counter-productive and would alienate pupils from the subject, according to an online survey of attitudes to teaching evolution in the UK.

The survey, by the website and TV station Teachers TV, found strong support for the views of the Rev Professor Michael Reiss, the former director of education at the prestigious Royal Society, who resigned in September 2008 over comments about responding to creationism in science lessons.

Nearly nine in 10 respondents agreed with Reiss that teachers should engage with pupils who raise creationism or intelligent design in science lessons rather than dismiss or ridicule them.

Professor Reiss said at the time that creationism was not science and he did not advocate giving it equal time alongside evolution or any kind of equivalent status.

However the leading science educator was forced to step down after furious reactions to his comments in the media from some Royal Society fellows, many of whom seemed to have heard mis-reports of his remarks or had not appreciated the distinction attempted to make between curriculum content and responding to pupils.

“This poll data confirms that the debate on whether there is a place for the teaching of creationism in the classroom is still fierce,” said Andrew Bethell, chief executive of Teachers TV, as reported in the Guardian newspaper.

Teachers TV emailed 10,600 education professionals, of whom 1,210 responded. Because the sample was self-selecting, those teachers with the strongest views are more likely to have replied, placing question marks about the validity of the findings.

It appears that 29% of those surveyed said they either disagreed or strongly disagreed with the government’s guidelines on teaching evolution, which state that “creationism and intelligent design are not part of the science national curriculum programmes of study and should not be taught as science”.

Fifty-three per cent agreed or strongly agreed with the statement.

Thirty-one per cent of respondents and 18% of the 248 science teachers in the sample said they thought creationism or intelligent design should be given the same status as evolution in the classroom, although this question did not specify whether it was referring to science lessons or the curriculum in general.

Twenty-two respondents said they had been pressured to teach creationism or intelligent design by their school.

“It looks as if the government needs to do more to communicate its guidelines and to engage with teachers so that there is greater understanding of the difference between treating pupils with respect, which is vital, and teaching as science worldviews which have no scientific grounding and indeed reject scientific research, which is clearly inappropriate,” commented Simon Barrow of the religion and society think-tank Ekklesia, which says that creationism and ID are bad theology as well as non-science.

“Equally, the Royal Society might reflect further on what it can do, given the rumpus over Professor Reiss’s comments, which raised important issues, even if their initial expression was less than helpful.”

Ekklesia, a Christian think-tank, is among those, alongside scientists, educationists and the British Humanist Association, who urged the government to adopt clear guidelines in the face of pressure on schools from well-funded creationist lobby groups.

See Ekklesia’s briefing paper: ‘Theology, science and the problem of ID’ -http://ekklesia.co.uk/node/6707

From Nick Cohen in the Guardian yesterday;

The idea of intelligent fundamentalists, like the theory of intelligent design, does not stand up to 30 seconds’ scrutiny. I must, nevertheless, give credit to American evangelicals for showing belated glimmerings of sense. After decades of blindly endorsing evangelical politicians from the born-again Carter to the born-again Bush, they at last appear ready to look for more than religious dogma in a candidate.

From the blog “God Would Be An Atheist” an account of the creationist Paul Taylor at the recent Skeptics In The Pub Event.

No answers in Genesis
Creationism fails again
October 14, 2008

To the London Skeptics (sic) meeting in Holborn last night, to hear Paul Taylor of answersingenesis.org (pictured) give a talk on “Why don’t Creationists just shut up?”

First the upside. Paul is an affable chap, an ex-science teacher who, one suspects, was good at his job and well-liked by his pupils. He has a sense of humour and an easy speaking style and was unruffled by the many technical questions thrown at him in the Q and A session. We sceptics (I’m not a member, so I can use good British spelling) gave him a good hearing and the questions and comments were mostly put in tones of amusement or bemusement. There was no hostility from either side, as you would expect, given that we’re all - well, nearly all - rational people.

Now, the downside. Let’s put aside the fact that the title had nothing to do with the talk Taylor gave - most of us are guilty of saying what we want to say irrespective of the question we’re asked. And let’s temporarily set aside the fact that most of his talk was criticism of conventional evolutionary knowledge and scientific method. There’s no harm in pointing out apparent anomalies in a theory that you don’t understand and don’t agree with. Criticism can lead to intelligent debate and new insights, although last night didn’t get that far.

The real problem was not Taylor’s willingness to criticise conventional science but his inability to present his alternative - Creationism - in any meaningful way. All the questions on that topic received only vague answers. To take one example, two of us asked about the aftermath of the Flood (Genesis chps 6 - 8). I queried how the koala returned to Australia from the middle of Turkey after the waters subsided - a particulaly arduous task, given the distance involved, the inability of koalas to swim long distances and the lack of eucalyptus leaves (their only diet) en route. The other questioner asked about the availability of plants for animals to eat on a water-sodden earth. (Similar questions can be asked about penguins crossing the Sahara and how long the carnivores had to starve before the herbivores procreated enough to allow all species to continue eating their required diet.)

Taylor’s reply was the weakest of fudges. Maybe there was a land-bridge, he said. Maybe koalas had a different diet. As to the herbivores, maybe the plants grew really, really quickly. In other words, he had no idea.

On one level, this response is laughable. Creationism claims to be a science - which implies strict, testable theories - yet it cannot provide a simple, verifiable explanation for one of its most basic tenets, the Flood. There’s a reason why of course - the Bible doesn’t give that information. That in itself is suspicious; if the Bible truly is the word of God, the deity is remarkably uninformative at some very critical points in Biblical history (what crucial information is missing between Genesis 6:4 and Genesis 6:5, for example?), while providing us with too much information at other points (Exodus 33:23).

On another level, however, Taylor’s meaningless response reveals the hypocrisy and arrogance. Creationists are always eager to present harsh analyses of conventional science (this took up the bulk of his talk), using material which has a superficial credibility - yes, there are scientific papers verifying discrepancies in dating methods; yes, there are aspects of evolution that are still poorly understood. But they are always reluctant or unable to put forward clear, verifiable explanations for phenomena from the Creationist point of view (Taylor told us almost nothing about Creationist “science”.)

We were not looking for deep science. We accepted that Taylor was a generalist. But from a Creationist point of view, this was such a relatively simple task. After all, it is much easier to explain how two koalas and their offspring can travel several thousand miles across deserts, tropical forest and open sea than to explain the process by which single-celled life evolved into the complex human organisms that we are today. Yet no Creationist has ever explained even that simple fact; the koala question is extensively discussed on the web, but singularly avoided by Creationists.

It is that which makes me angry - not the legitimate questioning of Darwinism and related disciplines, which I can accept and participate in - but the trashing of conventional science by people who cannot be bothered to explain even the basics of their own theories. It is the desire to destroy rather than create. It is the reaction of the intellectually lazy to complex and continually evolving concepts.

It would be bad enough if this intellectual dishonesty was restricted to adults who fully understand how to debate and reason, but it goes further. The proselytisation of children - the lie that Creationism is somehow a science - is the most damning aspect of the whole charade. Our future depends on our children learn intellectual honesty; in disguising itself in the clothes of true science, Creationism lies to them again and again.

This is not meant to be - and should not be taken as - an ad hominem attack on Paul Taylor. I am convinced that he is sincere and he has not thought through the implications of what he is saying. But that means I want to finish this piece by focusing on one key remark that he made and leading him through the implications.

Paul, you said that your starting point for your “science” was belief in the Bible as the Word of God. Do you understand the implications of that statement? You are basically saying - “this book gives me the answer to everything; now I need to find the evidence to confirm it”.

Your statement is the same as that of the detective who surveys a crime scene and says “the butler did it; now I need to find the evidence to confirm it”. No doubt the detective can find some evidence that supports his theory, and where evidence is lacking he can offer suggestions that point the finger at the butler. And when he finds evidence that suggests or proves the butler is innocent, the detective ignores it. By selecting the evidence that comes to court, the detective ensures that the butler will be found guilty and sentenced for a crime he may not have committed. Creationism, by deciding the answer before it examines the facts, is as guilty of perverting truth and justice as the detective.

Paul, another speaker in the audience last nighted hinted at what real science is - and it is something that I really don’t think you understand. Real science says “we do not know the answer; let’s look at the evidence and see where it leads us”. At the moment, the evidence is leading us clearly towards evolution, despite its uncertainties and inconsistencies, but if ever there is consistent, irrefutable evidence that points elsewhere - including to the Biblical version - I assure you that I and all reasonable men and women will follow it.

We are not asking you to give up your faith, Paul. We are only asking you to use the intelligence that you believe God gave you. Does God really want you to invent silly stories about the koala? Did he really plant fossils all over the world to mess up the minds of his creation? Does he want you to privilege unproveable myths over logic and facts? For the sake of the country’s children, if not your own faith and peace of mind, please think again about the ignorance you are promoting and the damage you are doing to those around you.