Sir David Attenborough among those accusing ‘fundamentalists’ of seeking to portray creationism as scientific theory in class
Prominent scientists, including Sir David Attenborough and Richard Dawkins, have called on the government to toughen its guidance on the promotion of creationism in classrooms, accusing “religious fundamentalists” of portraying it as scientific theory in publicly funded schools.
A group of 30 scientists have signed a statement saying it is “unacceptable” to teach creationism and intelligent design, whether it happens in science lessons or not. The statement claims two organisations, Truth in Science and Creation Ministries International are “touring the UK and presenting themselves as scientists and their creationist views as science”.
“Creationism and intelligent design are not scientific theories, but they are portrayed as scientific theories by some religious fundamentalists who attempt to have their views promoted in publicly funded schools,” the scientists say.
“There should be enforceable statutory guidance that they may not be presented as scientific theories in any publicly funded school of whatever type.”
The scientists claim organisations such as Truth in Science are encouraging teachers to incorporate intelligent design into their science teaching.
“Truth in Science has sent free resources to all secondary heads of science and to school librarians around the country that seek to undermine the theory of evolution and have intelligent design ideas portrayed as credible scientific viewpoints. Speakers from Creation Ministries International are touring the UK, presenting themselves as scientists and their creationist views as science at a number of schools.”
Free schools and academies were not obliged to teach the national curriculum and so were “under no obligation to teach evolution at all,” it added.
Truth in Science denied advocating the teaching of creationism in schools. “We wish to highlight the scientific weaknesses of neo-Darwinism and to encourage a more critical approach to the teaching of evolution in schools and universities,” it said in a statement.
Creation Ministries International was unavailable for comment.
The statement appears on a website, Evolution not Creationism, aimed at driving out creationism and intelligent design from classrooms and marks the latest attempt to reinforce evolution teaching in classrooms. Professor Richard Dawkins, president of the Royal Society Sir Paul Nurse, neurobiologist Professor Colin Blakemore and theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili are among the other signatories.
Although teaching evolution is not compulsory in primary schools, many already introduce some aspects in classes. The proposal to add it to the national curriculum “accepted by Labour in 2009″ was dropped last year by the coalition and is currently being reviewed by the Department for Education.
The Department for Education said: “The education secretary was crystal clear in opposition and now in government that teaching creationism as scientific fact is wrong. He will not accept any academy or free school proposal which plans to teach creationism in the science curriculum or as an alternative to accepted scientific theories.
“Academies and free schools must have a broad and balanced curriculum. Ofsted takes a strict line with inspecting this. We expect to see evolution and its foundation topics fully included in any science curriculum.”
Earlier this month Dawkins argued that children should learn about evolution from the age of five.
Speaking in support of the statement, Dawkins said: “We need to stop calling evolution a theory. In the ordinary language sense of the word it is a fact. It is as solidly demonstrated as any fact in science.”
Last year Michael Reiss, professor of education at the Institute of Science Education and an Anglican priest, told the Guardian that while it was “important” for organisations that did not accept the theory of evolution to be “allowed to exist and to proclaim their message” in a free society, the arguments against the theory of evolution were invalid.
He said: “In a school setting this means that while teachers of science are perfectly at liberty to address creationist and ID issues, should they so wish, students must not be given the impression that there is a scientific controversy over whether the Earth is very old (about 4.6bn years old) or whether all species descend from very simple common ancestors.”
He was responding to the launch of the Centre for Intelligent Design which aims to promote public understanding of intelligent design and its implications.
In the classroom
There is no definitive data on the number of UK schools which teach creationism. The Department for Education says all schools must teach a broad and balanced curriculum, and creationism should not be taught as scientific fact.
But a spokesman for the British Humanist Association (BHA) said: “That’s precisely what we want to be monitored.”
The BHA says that some schools continue to promote creationist ideas in place of established scientific facts. It bases its conclusions mainly on information shared with it by parents. A 2006 survey by Opinionpanel found that nearly 20% of UK students said they had been taught creationism as fact by their main school.
In the same year, Truth in Science, a group which says it promotes “a critical examination of Darwinism”, said that it had received dozens of positive responses to creationist teaching materials sent to the heads of all secondary schools in the country.
The BHA says materials from Truth in Science continue to be used in UK schools.
A number of faith schools say that they teach creationism in religious studies but not in science and then leave students to decide.
The Everyday Champions Church, in Newark, Nottinghamshire, submitted its proposal for a 652-place school in January. Its leader, Gareth Morgan, said creationism: “Will be embodied as a belief at Everyday Champions Academy, but will not be taught in the sciences”.
In 2009, an Ipsos Mori survey found that more than half of British adults think that intelligent design and creationism should be taught alongside evolution in school science lessons – a proportion higher than in the US.
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September 20, 2011 at 6:29 PM
This article commits a fundamental error in confusing “Young Earth Creationism” with “Intelligent Design”. YEC is the idea that Genesis Chapter 1 establishes that the creation of the earth or the universe took place over a time period of either one week or six thousand years. It is not a deduction from scientific observation, but an intepretation of the Bible that is rejected by many Christian churches, including the Catholic Church.
Intelligent Design (ID) is a scientific critique of aspects of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis of Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection and modern genetic science (which Darwin had no understanding of). Advocates of ID generally REJECT the YEC claim of a short period of creation, and accept the standard cosmological science that places the universe at 14 billion years old and the earth at 4.5 billion years old.
ID does NOT start from the text of Genesis and make deductions. Instead, it starts with the assertions made about Neo-Darwinian theory as an explanation for the complex functioning of the biochemistry of living cells, and argues that natural selection simply fails as a rational and complete explanation for many observed facts. ID asserts that there are many complex features of living systems that cannot be explained as the mere random development of small gradual steps, since all conceivable random small modifications leading to existing mechanisms would not be viable, let alone “fittest” for survival. ID argues that observed evolution has only been at the small scale, and lacks proven creative capacity. Just as we recognize the marks of intelligent purposeful action in archeology and forensic science, we ought to acknowledge the marks of intelligence in the obvious purposive design and function of living systems.
ID does not argue that the intelligence we find is “God” or “a god”. It could be an ancient alien intelligence, just slightly beyond humanity’s current capability for genetic engineering. Many scientists are confident that the billions of solar systems with planets in our own galaxy make the existence of life elsewhere highly likely. If so, there is no reason to rule out the existence of intelligent life in the galaxy when life on earth began in earnest, some half-billion years ago.
September 20, 2011 at 6:55 PM
There is a simple fact that the militant advocates of Darwinism want everyone to ignore: the fact that the Neo-Darwinian synthesis ONLY tries to explain the EVOLUTION from one form of life into another. It does NOT even TRY to explain how non-living matter could turn into living cells. Rocks and random chemicals do not have the essentials for a living cell: A membrane that keeps the living material of the cell together and protects it from being dissipated in the surrtounding environment, a set of celular mechanisms that can collect and use energy and build structures, and a complete DNA computer that contains a complete DNA design for ALL of the cell mechanisms (including the membrane) AND a program that can read the memory and COBSTRUCT all the mechanisms.
While scientists have speculated about creating a self-reproducing “Von Neumann” machine that mimics the living cell, no one has been able to create one, either at the macroscopic level of our current automated factories, or at the nanometer level of cell structures. It is beyond current human abilities and even science to understand how it could be done form scratch from inorganic matter.
There are in fact NO widely accepted theories abouot how inorganic matter could be transformed into a living, reproducing cell, that then could be subject to diversification via Darwinian evolution. There is NO authoritative science to explain this observed “fact”, so there is hardly any basis to exclude ANY theory of how this essential event came to be.
Furthermore, anyone who has actually worked in computer programming knows that random events will NEVER create a working, self-reproducing computer, both hardware and software. A working computer program ONLY comes into being as a result of intelligence being applied to matter and energy. And cell DNA is one of the most complex computers we know of. Even a short string of DNA has more possible configurations than there are atoms in the universe. The idea that random concatenation of DNA elements could result in initiation of a self-reproducing program is ridiculous and defies everything we know about computers.
All of the “just so stories” abouit a million monkeys typing the works of Shakespeare contain hidden assumptions that some intelligent editor is overseeing the process and rejecting the unworkable junk in order to reach a pre-ordained result. Programs without intelligent design, even if they start processing, will quickly end up in a dead end or an endless loop. Without intelligence driving even a “trial and error” process, resources are not going to be repeatedly inserted into the input hopper of a process for creating biological software.
The most recent genetic research actually suggests that the vast majority of evolutionary changes do NOT result from random mutations of genes, but from other processes that execute cunningly powerful genetic mechanisms, that, if they evolved, did so at the earliest stages of life on earth, since they are shared by both insects and mammals. NO explanation is offered for HOW such powerful, Swiss-Army-Knife capabilities could be created via random processes back in the dim days of life’s development on earth. The threshold of what needs to be explained by evolution has become even higher and more complex, and no explanation for the origin of such powerful subroutines in our genetic code have been offered. The Neo-Darwinian Synthesis has a whole lot of ‘splainin’ to do, but it has not demonstrated it is up to the task.
September 20, 2011 at 7:22 PM
What are the atheists so afraid of ??????