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Weekly Online LessonOnline Lesson ArchivesGrade Level: 9-12
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Creationism vs. Evolution
On August 11, 1999, the Kansas Board
of Education voted to delete the teaching of evolution from the state's science
curriculum. The vote means individual schools can continue to teach evolution in
science classes, but it removed evolution from the required curriculum.
Students will not be required to demonstrate an understanding of evolution
to pass state-sanctioned tests.
The vote has angered the mainstream science community in the United States, and has sparked threats of lawsuits by such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for the Separation of Church and States. They consider Creationism—the theory that man originated from a supreme creator—to be a region-based curriculum and therefore unconstitutional for public education.
The purpose of this week's online lesson is not to persuade you toward
evolution or creationism, nor is it to try to reconcile the two views. Rather, the focus
of this lesson to make you aware of both sides of the debate, and to increase your
understanding of the range of issues.
The Evolution/Creationism Debate
Before jumping into some of the difficult essays and position statements you will encounter in this lesson, it's worth spending some time becoming familiar with the tenets of each side. One place to begin is Frequently Encountered Criticisms in Evolution vs. Creationism: Revised and Expanded (Vuletic, 1999). The author takes a conspicuously evolutionist stance, but his points are well-organized and succinct, as are his responses.
Scientific Creationism
Turning to arguments supporting Creationism, begin by visiting
the Institute for Creation Research.
Read the ICR Educational
Philosophy, and then the ICR
Tenets of Creationism. Feel free to explore some of the online publications
at this site, such as Highlights of the Los Alamos
Origins Debate (Baumgardner) and Neocreationism (Morris, 1998).
For a complete index to ICR Impacts articles and subjects, browse the Impacts Number Index.
Another good source of Creationism information is available at www.creationism.org. After reading the introduction, read A Defense of Creationism (Abramson) and Could Life Just Happen? (Lyttle).
Next visit The Revolution Against Evolution and browse the essay subjects. There are many resources to investigate, but go to the Overviews of Creation-Evolution category and read Why is the Creation-Evolution Issue Important (Sharp) and Creation vs. Evolution (Weibe).
Evolution
To help you better understand the issues behind evolution in
science education, begin by browsing to the National
Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization "working to
defend the teaching of evolution against sectarian attack." Begin by reading What We Do, and then follow
the link to Voices for Evolution,
where you'll find a list of links to position statements by scientific, educational,
religious, and civil liberties organizations. There are many you can read and study, but
the more compelling position statements are those from the National Academy of Sciences,
the Society of Vertebrate
Paleontology, the Academy of Science of the Royal
Society of Canada, and the American Institute of Biological
Sciences.
You'll can find many articles about evolution and public education at the Secular Web. Go to the Science and Religion library and browse the titles. In particular, you should read Can Creationism Be Scientific (Drange, 1998) and Evolution and Philosophy-An Introduction (Wilkins, 1997).
Reconciliation
There seems to be no reconciliation between evolution and creationism; the debate will likely go on indefinitely. Nevertheless, a new book by John C. Greene of the University of Connecticut comes close. Read the excerpt from Debating Darwin: Adventures of a Scholar, reprinted on the CNN Web site. In his concluding paragraph you can get a sense of his sentiment:
Science, it appears, does not dictate what moral and religious conclusions must be drawn from its effort to describe the interconnectedness of things in terms of general laws and processes. That interconnectedness and the human mind seeking to discover it are pre-scientific. The scientist is both a part of that interconnectedness and, at the same time, an observer and admirer of it. But if he is wise, he (or she, as the case may be) will feel reverence and a sense of obligation to the source of that interconnectedness, realizing that the scientific way of grasping it is but one of many ways and that the aim of human existence is neither pure intellection nor the command of nature for human purposes but the shared harmony of life with life and with the source of all life and being.
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