Creation and Evolution: What Should We Teach?

What Should We Teach?

So, finally, we come to the question I began this essay with: What should we teach? Both high school and college teachers have told me that many students come into a class with the attitude that evolution is somehow unacceptable for a religious person. Such students are reluctant to learn about evolution. One way to assuage their concerns is to use the "creation/evolution continuum" to illustrate the wide range of opinion within Christianity toward evolution, which helps religious students understand that there are many options available to them as people of faith. Most students will recognize themselves somewhere on the continuum, whether believers or nonbelievers; it makes for an engaging lecture. It is perfectly legal for teachers to describe religious views in a classroom; it is only unconstitutional for teachers to advocate religious ideas in the classroom. If a teacher should use the continuum, he or she should present it only as a description of a range of religious views, and avoid advocating any particular position. To do so would violate the First Amendment’s requirement that the classroom be religiously neutral. Many people are unaware that there is far more variation among creationists as to how things came to be than there is among evolutionists!

We should also be teaching science in the science classroom. None of the schools of creationist thought is science. That does not mean they are true or false, but it does mean they are not science. As I say in my book, Evolution versus Creationism:

Science requires deciding among alternative explanations of the natural world by going to the natural world itself to “test” them. There are many ways of testing an explanation, but virtually all of them involve the idea of holding constant some factors that might influence the explanation, so that some alternative explanations can be eliminated. The most familiar kind is the direct experiment, which is so familiar that it is even used to sell us products on television. The willingness to change one’s explanation with more or better data, or a different way of looking at the same data, is one of the great strengths of the scientific method. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu summarized science rather nicely when he wrote, “The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof” (Montagu, 1984, p. 9). (Scott, 2004, p. 5)