Raising the level of evolution education

Pessimism about teaching evolution in U.S. high school biology classes is understandable — but maybe unnecessary.

In the past 12 months we’ve seen new attacks on evolution by state and local school boards. Almost one-third of teachers surveyed in March 2005 by the National Science Teachers Association said they feel pressure — mostly from students and parents — to teach creationism, intelligent design or other nonscientific alternatives to evolution.

Certainly one could see the glass as half empty, or worse. But there is good news — the glass may be filling.

The positive side: At least some evolution critics at this year’s school board hearings in Topeka, Kan. accepted the Earth’s ancient age. A few of the intelligent design proponents even accepted that humans evolved from non-human ancestors.

The negative side: The science in Topeka was still pretty bad. Testifying outside their expertise, witnesses consistently misrepresented evolution, confirming that a little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing.

But many Americans still consider evolution incompatible with theism, so the debate remains hot and loud.  The “incompatibilists” are completely polarized. They include atheists who defend their worldview as the only “scientific” choice and most anti-evolutionists who see current scientific mysteries as God’s fingerprints. Thus, the changes being made to Kansas’ science teaching standards portray evolution as inherently atheistic, as well as lacking in evidence.

From a strictly scientific perspective, it’s getting harder to deny evolution because the evidence keeps getting stronger. Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian and director of the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, said in a lecture delivered in August 2002, “Outside of a time machine, Darwin could hardly have imagined a more powerful data set than comparative genomics to confirm his theory.”

But the most hopeful signs are the increasingly frequent, clear statements appearing in the media that evolution and creation are complementary — not competing — ways of understanding. In the 1660s, mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote: “What meets our eyes denotes neither a total absence nor a manifest presence of the divine, but the presence of a God who conceals Himself. Everything bears this stamp.” 

Legions of scientists and theologians share this “compatibilist” view, fully aware that each person holds to some kind of worldview, some metaphysical framework  — consistent with science, hopefully —  but not testable within science.

Theistic evolution, or evolutionary creation, is not monolithic. There’s a wide range of thought as to how much independence and free contingency God gives to the evolutionary process.  Nonetheless, peaceful religious neutrality in science class flows easily from the compatibilist perspective in which students need not choose between evolution and theism.

But to “incompatibilists,” neutrality means a fair fight, on supposedly scientific grounds, between “atheistic” evolution and “alternatives,” such as intelligent design. Thus, the real challenge for science teachers is to respect all of their students, both those who view creation and evolution as compatible and those who do not, while still teaching good science.

I’m confident that the vast majority of teachers successfully meet this challenge. In a major poll conducted in July 2005 by the Pew Research Center, just 6 percent of parents with children in school say their child has mentioned feeling uncomfortable when evolution was taught.

Evolution can be taught with religious neutrality if teachers remind students of two simple truths: First, until scientific problems are actually solved in practice, it’s unknown whether they are solvable through natural science.  And second, successful scientific theories as well as unsolved scientific problems are both accommodated by diverse philosophical and religious perspectives, so the results of scientific investigations do not establish any particular philosophy or religion.

Charles F. Austerberry is an assistant professor of biology at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., and cofounder of the Nebraska Religious Coalition for Science Education