The Creationism Taboo: Teaching the controversy - a necessary part of teaching the science

It’s been a wild ride over the last year in the age-old creation-or-evolution debate. Intelligent Design was pitched to religious fundamentalists as the end-all, “scientific” challenge to the theory of evolution. School-board battles were waged, won and lost, but amid all the arguments between religious leaders, scientists and politicians based on 1^st Amendment principle, the adults have completely lost sight of what should be the true goal: educating students.

However inadvertently, the Intelligent Design movement hit the mark with its “Teach the Controversy” campaign — it echoes the frustrations and concerns of creationist students across the nation. Make no mistake - I take evolution as more or less proven, and have no faith in the credibility of intelligent design or creationism. But for many students — even here in California — the issue is not so clear-cut: Why is creationism not possible? To many scientists and atheists, the reasoning seems logical and obvious. But as evidenced by the fact that 90 percent of the U.S. population believes in a god(s), according to a 2003 Harris Poll, for the vast majority it is a perfectly valid question, and one that the school system does not address.

To many students, evolution is presented by schools to be believed unquestioningly, on faith in teachers and the education board alone, and nothing is given to refute creationist theory; its discussion is the greatest taboo of modern education. Any teacher who would dare discuss it would face parental outrage or a lawsuit; any student caught gullible enough to believe its credibility would be ridiculed out of the classroom by peer disapproval.

In this way, evolution in the biology classroom is dogmatic in ways unlike any other branch of science. Like the word of the gods in times past, evolution is the sacrosanct pillar of science; just as no religious leader would tolerate the voice of a dissenter, no scientist today will tolerate any talk that creationism is plausible. Though Galileo was admonished for expressing notions counter to that of the Roman Catholic Church, I am sure that truly in his mind, he never reversed his beliefs; the Church only censored him and imposed its version of “truth”, never addressing the logic behind his wrong and their right.

In exactly the same way, in teaching evolution — and silencing all dissent in the classroom — the minds of creationist students will never be changed. We censor their notions and force-feed them evolution, and by the taboo of its discussion, we never address the doubts of creationists with the logic that is seemingly self-evident for most scientists.

In any other branch of science, teachers and curricula take a considerate approach to the failure of students to understand what is taught. To take a purely scientific example, we have Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the galactic speed limit of light (roughly 300,000,000 meters per second). It is, like evolution, a theory thoroughly proven and universally accepted by the scientific community. But to your typical high school physics student, and most of the general American public, the question is perfectly valid: “Why can’t I go faster than the speed of light? Won’t acceleration just keep increasing my velocity right beyond it?” While we may be perfectly justified in considering those who still desperately cling to classic Newtonian physics as wrong, it would be folly to answer a student’s confusion by exclaiming outrage that he or she could give credit to such a faulty notion and banning any further mention of Newton and his obsolete laws.

Yet that is exactly what is done with the teaching of evolution today.

It’s not that evolutionary theory isn’t proven or true — it’s that it’s not convincing anyone who doesn’t already believe in it (the American creationist majority). Biology courses, at least in the teaching of evolution, are failing their goal as science classes: to teach students the science, and affirm its validity. Students (and, as any parent knows, teenagers in particular) are only turned off when notions THAT make no sense are forced upon them. They don’t learn what they don’t care to believe. This, at the critical entry level of freshman biology, has the dangerous potential of turning students off to science; it is the superiority complex of science (however valid) over religion, forcibly hammered in, that turns students away and has created the general dismissal of science and fear of technology that pervades so many adults today.

So yes, teach the controversy. It is, in the end better — and necessary — for science.