Today, the education director at the Royal Society has said that teachers should be open to discussing creationism in schools if pupils bring it up. Is that right?
When people talk of "creationism" they usually have in mind a particular account often called "Young Earth Creationism" or "Special Creation", according to which the world was created in the past 10,000 years and virtually all of modern science is wrong. I'll come back to that shortly, but I don't believe that we can work out how to proceed on whether Special Creation should be taught in schools until we have formed a view as to whether it would be inappropriate to teach any creationist account (whether or not "Young Earth" in nature).
Throughout history there have been many and varied accounts of whether the physical world had a beginning, and if so how it came to be. Amongst the key positions the following have been known for millenia:
- The physical world has always existed. It had no beginning. (Hindus to Fred Hoyle to certain multiverse theorists)
- The physical world came about by accident. (Ancient Mesopotamians to modern Big Bang theorists)
- The physical world was created by a/some bad god/s. (Other Ancient Mesopotamians)
- The physical world was initially created by a/some good god/s, then left to function without further intervention. (Certain platonists, some deists, some Jews)
- The physical world was initially created by a/some good god/s, who continue/s to intervene regularly. (Christians, most Jews, Muslims)
- The physical world is an (illusory?) artefact of the human mind. (Ancient mystics, solipsistic philosophers, and certain modern advocates of the Anthropic-Cosmological Principle)
This is a debate that is by no means closed philosophically, religiously, or scientifically. Indeed, the only one of these positions that is even unfashionable is the view that the world was created by a bad god or gods.
In particular, even if materialistic atheistic science had any privileged position to comment on this matter, over philosophy or religion - which it does not - there is no consensus on the issue even among materialistic atheistic scientists. The closest position to consensus there - the numerically majority view - is that the world had a beginning, perhaps 15 billion years ago, in a remarkable event usually called the "Big Bang". Indeed, when I was at school, the Big Bang theory was taught as something akin to knowledge, despite the many scientific uncertainties still attending (e.g. as alluded to above, many scientists now take the view that our universe is just the latest version - Universe 3.1, as it were - in an unending cycle of big bang - big crunch - big bang...).
Thus, the question of whether the universe was created, and if so how, is emphatically not one that is solved, such that we can say that to have children discuss various possibilities about it in school would be to "mislead" them.
However, this only gets us so far. For what is the appropriate forum for discussing how the universe might have come to be? Is it something for a science class, for a religious studies class, for a philosophy class, or perhaps for a history class? My view is that "science" should take it as axiomatic that there is no and has never been any active supernatural being. The task of science is to explain as much as possible without invoking supernatural agencies. (I note in passing that one consequence of such an axiomatic approach is that science can never "disprove" the existence of supernatural beings, except insofar as belief in the existence of such beings depended on one's being unable to explain things without them. Deity-absent-axiomatic science simply excludes/assumes away the existence of supernatural beings.) Whether, as a matter of historical fact, certain events were the result of supernatural agency would be neither here nor there as far as science is concerned.
If my view of science could be taken as given, then school science classes would, by definition, not be the place to discuss the possibility of supernatural events - the whole point of such classes would be to see how far we could get without supernatural agency. However, it seems to me that school science classes should not be as pigeon-holed as this. It would not be out of place in some school science classes to discuss the political implications of global warming, the ethics of abortion, the social issues around MMR scares, or (I submit) issues in philosophy of science (such as instrumentalist accounts of scientific models - cf Bishop Berkeley - or the merits or otherwise of Intelligent Design theories in the development of biological engineering) or indeed questions relating to the origins of the physical universe (creationism/accident/no-beginning universe) and even to the origins of humankind (Darwinian evolution, Lamarckian theories, game theoretic accounts, Young Earth Creationism - some of these having strong empirical support, others virtual empirical refutation, and that is of course something that should be pointed out).
You see, it seems to me that the point of teaching science in schools is not, primarily, to equip children with a body of scientific knowledge that they can carry through to the next stage. Most children will not go on to be chemists or physicists or whatever. So it is not important that we teach science strictly in accordance with the no-supernatural-agencies axiom that I mentioned or that we delimit science from non-science in other ways (indeed, the question of the delimiting of science might be one of those topics worth discussing). We want children to attain some grasp of the nature of the world, to learn how to think according to the scientific method, to be animated by wonder about the world, to learn sufficient basics to inform their practical lives, to have enough grounding that they can go on to further study if they so choose.
There are only so many hours in the week, of course, and so not every topic can be covered. But an important criterion of topic selection should be the interest of the topic. And the questions of the origins of the physical universe and of humankind are, I would submit, topics likely to stimulate interest and debate amongst pupils. Indeed, in faith schools, especially Christian, Muslim and Jewish faith schools, these are also likely to be topics that animate the interest of teachers.
This is also not to say that scientific questions should not be discussed in other parts of the curriculum - indeed, they come up all the time in religious studies and philosophy and politics discussions. Good! Personally, I would also like to see more discussion in religious studies classes of Young Earth Creationism and why it is thought (as is my own view) incompatible with a belief in the truth and message of the Bible and more generally why it has never - on religious, not scientific, grounds - been the mainstream Christian position. I believe Young Earth Creationism is false. But children will not come to understand the competing views on the matter if we ban the discussion of them in school. It is an error to think that by refusing to discuss such beliefs we therefore protect children from them. We do not believe this true of racism or sexism. Obviously Young Earth Creationism has no moral equivalence to these, but it is similar in being a belief that people are more likely to hold if they hold it undiscussed.
There must be some delimiting of school classes, of course, but I submit that we should not permit the intrinsically (and entirely appropriately) anti-supernatural nature of the scientific method to stand in the way of interesting debate, or be permitted to confuse children by teaching them (falsely) that the anti-supernatural bent of science is anything more than its (excellent) working method. And we must not believe that we make error less likely if we refuse to debate it.
