Left of College Station

The debate about teaching creationism in the classroom is set to start again in Texas after a report was released this week by the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund detailing a survey conducted of what scientist in Texas think should be taught in Texas science classrooms. The survey concludes that 98% of scientists favor the unadulterated teaching of evolution in public school science classrooms.

The Discovery Institute, the conservative Christian anti-science “think tank,” posted an article in which the claim is made that it is actually the TFN that wants to “water down the teaching of evolution” and “remove the strengths and weaknesses language.” The article goes on to claim that the 95% of scientist in the report only want “half of evolution taught” and “are seeking to limit the free flow of information and censor science.” Another claim is that there are “valid and significant scientific challenges to Darwinian evolution that students need to know about. Evidence is not contingent on a consensus.”

Teaching evolution in science class is not teaching half of evolution, because intelligent design is not half of the theory of evolution. Intelligent design is not science, in fact it does not even met the basic criteria of a scientific theory. Also, there is not a significant amount of scientific challenges to evolution that students need to be taught; Lawrence Krauss reviewed 10 million scientific articles and scientific citation indexes over twelve years and found that there were 88 articles about intelligent design and only 11 were not in engineering journals and out of those 8 out of 11 were critical of intelligent design and the remaining 3 were not in peer reviewed journals.

Other notable findings in the survey included that 89.7% of scientist surveyed believed that “modern evolutionary biology is largely correct in its essentials, but still has open questions for active scientific research.” While 0% of scientists (none of the 464 survey recipients) believe that “modern evolutionary biology is completely wrong” and that “life was created essentially as we see it today.” When asked if there was significant difference between creationism and intelligent design 78.2% said that there was no difference and 15.5% said that there was a difference.

This evening the Texas State Board of Education is conducting a public forum on current curriculum requiring students to be taught the "strengths and weaknesses" of all scientific theories, and according to the Houston Chronicle “89 people had signed up to testify on the proposal, which also suggests encouraging middle school students to discuss alternative explanations for evolution.”

Despite the voices of hundreds of scientist from Universities across the state, including conservative Christian colleges such as Baylor University, Dallas Baptist University, and Texas Christian University, there are still voices that insist that intelligent design and creationism is actually about science and not religion. In the same article Jonathan Saenz, a lobbyist for the conservative Christian organization Texas Free Market Foundation, said, “The reality is this issue is about evolution and teaching strengths and weaknesses of evolution. It’s about science and teaching science right, regardless of what religious beliefs people have.”