Creationists Use New Tactic to Challenge Evolution

WICHITA, Kan. — The Bible says God created man in His image. Biologists say man evolved from primordial muck.

Steve Abrams, a member of the Kansas Board of Education, considers both versions and then asks: Why is one more scientific than the other? True, we can’t prove God created us. But neither can we prove that monkeys became men. Neither theory can be tested in the lab. Neither can be directly observed.

So neither, he concludes, should be taught in school.

This is the new creationist crusade: Instead of trying to push the Bible into biology class, they’re working to kick Charles Darwin out.

In a fresh twist on an old debate, conservative Christians have given up insisting that public schools teach the Book of Genesis as science. That approach raises too many hackles--and violates a Supreme Court decision, besides.

But creationists haven’t abandoned their agenda. Far from it. Learning from defeat after defeat in the courts, they have fashioned a new approach--one that leaves out all talk of God and creationism. They focus instead on the theory of evolution, insisting it’s too preposterously speculative to merit a place in the science curriculum.

“In the scientific field, we should be studying science: facts that can be documented, observed and measured. That’s what I want for our kids,” said Abrams, a veterinarian who leads a creationist bloc on the education board. “Evolution is not good science, and, as such, we don’t believe it should be presented.”

This new creationist strategy is making some headway, raising serious debates about what to teach kids in states as diverse as Tennessee and Michigan, Arizona and Alabama, New Mexico and Nebraska.

Kansas is just the latest, and perhaps the loudest, battleground, as the state Board of Education weighs what students here should learn about why we are who we are and why the world is as it is.

At a meeting later this month, board members will consider dueling drafts of a new science curriculum for kindergarten through 12th grade. One treats evolution as a central theme. The other leaves it out altogether. Indications are that the 10-member board is deadlocked.

Laura Kersting, a creationist and mother of six, understands why the debate has flared so hot: “It’s all about us. It’s about who we are and how we got here. That’s why it’s so emotional.”

Do You Have to See Evolution to Believe It?

Indeed, the question of our origins has stirred passions again and again this century, churning through our courts and schools ever since the infamous “Monkey Trial” of 1925, when Tennessee biology teacher John T. Scopes was accused of breaking the law by teaching the theory of evolution.

Polls consistently show that at least 44% of Americans believe God created life as described in Genesis: Over the course of six days, He separated day from night and created every species of life, culminating with Adam and Eve.

A roughly equal percentage accept evolution but think God had a hand in guiding it. Only about 10% believe in strict evolution, unaided by external forces.

Although the timetable keeps shifting as new fossils are discovered, evolutionary theory generally holds that the first life on Earth--primitive scraps of genetic material--appeared 3.9 billion years ago. From this humble common ancestor, a huge diversity of species evolved over eons. The man-ape hybrid, Australopithecus, which walked on two feet but had a small brain, appeared 2 million years ago. Modern Homo sapiens--who painted cave walls, crafted fine tools and looked like brawnier versions of us--emerged 50,000 years ago.

It’s impossible, of course, to duplicate the grand sweep of evolution in a lab. The journey from a snippet of DNA to modern man required not only billions of years but also lucky genetic mutations and advantageous shifts in climate. Still, scientists scoff at Abrams’ contention that evolution is not scientific. They don’t have to watch a phenomenon unfold, they say, to be convinced that it’s real.

“Chemists don’t physically observe the breaking and making of bonds in test tubes,” said Keith Miller, a geologist at Kansas State University. “They put in known quantities, they measure the results and then they go back and reconstruct what happened.” The same type of reconstruction, he argued, is at work in evolution and is perfectly valid. “In science, you very, very rarely observe a process directly.”

Although the vast majority of scientists accept evolution as fact, public queasiness about the Darwinian gospel is starting to creep into education policy. Consider:

* In Alabama, all biology texts must carry a sticker advising that evolution is an “unproven belief” and “should be considered a theory.” The sticker also lists several “unanswered questions” about evolution--such as the lack of transitional fossils showing, for example, a half-fish, half-amphibian--that mirror creationists’ main arguments.

* In Nebraska, the attorney general recently warned the Board of Education that a new science curriculum that presented evolution as fact might violate the state’s constitutional guarantee of freedom of conscience since “students would be forced to accept as true something that contradicted their religion.” The board revised the curriculum to teach evolution as a theory.

* In Georgia, a bill would require teachers to include evidence against, or inconsistent with, evolution when they present the subject in class. Similar bills were rejected in Tennessee and Ohio in recent years.

* The National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit group founded to promote the teaching of evolution in schools, maintains a list of “flare-ups,” documenting creationist moves to push their agenda on the local level. The current list runs three pages and covers 17 states. The center’s director, Eugenie Scott, predicts the new creationist strategy is going to be “far more effective” than the old approach “because it doesn’t sound religious, so from a legal standpoint, it’s going to be harder to attack.”

* In Kansas, meanwhile, the creationist view has earned considerable public support. In a recent Sunday editorial, the Topeka Capital-Journal opined that “creationism is as good a hypothesis as any for how the universe began” and urged schools to teach both views of our origins.

Even the creationists’ proposed curriculum doesn’t go quite that far.

Mindful of Supreme Court rulings that states cannot require schools to teach creationism or forbid them to teach evolution, Abrams and his allies on the Board of Education want to simply omit the topic from the list of what Kansas students should know. Under their plan, Kansas would not quiz students about evolution on any standardized tests. Teachers could introduce the material if they chose, but the state wouldn’t hold kids responsible for learning a theory some conservative Christians regard as flimflam.

“This is America,” said Bob Swigart, a middle school principal from the small town of Douglass, just south of Wichita. “We should not have dictated to us what we believe or what we want our kids to believe.”

Opponents respond that students don’t have to believe in evolution, they just have to learn it. Their draft curriculum, based on standards drafted by the National Academy of Sciences, talks of kids “understanding” various Darwinian ideas and then adds, for emphasis: “Understand does not mean believe.”

That disclaimer does not satisfy the Kansas creationists.

“They’re going to try to ram evolution down our throats, and that’s wrong,” Swigart said.

“I see it as sort of brain control,” added Celtie Johnson, a mother of four from eastern Kansas. If evolution must be presented, she said, creationists should be allowed to poke holes in it by presenting their counter-arguments in class. “If it’s really scientific,” she said, making clear she seriously doubts it, “it will withstand any kind of scrutiny.”

‘Local Control’ of Curriculum Proposed

But evolutionists insist there’s no point in offering opposing arguments because they’re basically bunk.

Creationists, for example, claim there are no “transitional fossils” showing one species turning into another. But geologists counter that there are plenty, including the many exemplars of primitive man.

Creationists also contend that living organisms--and vital biochemical processes, such as blood clotting--are so incredibly complex it’s impossible that they evolved by random mutation. Biologists respond with computer models showing that even something as intricate as an eye could evolve from scratch, given half a million years.

Then there’s the all-change-has-limits argument, as framed by Bill Hoesch, a spokesman for the Institute for Creation Research: “You can breed dogs and get enormous variety, but you do eventually hit a brick wall. You can’t keep breeding dogs and get a porcupine.”

To that, evolutionists reply: Give it time. Give it hundreds and hundreds of millions of years.

Although most mainstream scientists refer to evolution as a theory, it’s backed up by the fossil record, by DNA tests and by comparative anatomy. Its central tenets have been independently confirmed by botanists, biologists, paleontologists and geologists.

“Teachers are so susceptible to the argument that we should have kids debate both sides” of the issue, said Scott of the Center for Science Education. “It sounds so sensible. But it’s like debating whether the Earth is flat or spherical.”

Equally loony, Scott and others maintain, is the creationists’ proposal to let individual school boards decide what to teach about the origins of life. (“Communities know how their citizens feel about this sort of thing,” explained Linda Holloway, chairwoman of the Kansas Board of Education.) But critics argue that “local control” could set a dangerous precedent.

Could a community order history teachers to skip the Holocaust because some civic leaders think the genocide a fraud? Could a school board ban all foreign language classes on the grounds that English alone is God’s chosen tongue?

Evolution, its defenders insist, is not optional. “Good heavens! It’s as basic to biology as the atom is to chemistry,” said John Richard Schrock, a biology professor at Emporia State University in Kansas. In addition to the educational principle, Schrock cites several practical reasons for requiring evolution: It’s tested on the SATs. It’s assumed in college biology. It informs many of the issues important to a farm state like Kansas, from how to breed better strains of wheat to why cattle are becoming resistant to antibiotics.

As the Board of Education debate nears, both sides predict passionate argument, with little room for compromise. For in the end, despite all the talk of promoting good science, this is really a fight about religion. Both sides, indeed, refer to it that way.

The creationists say evolution has become dogma, a gospel clung to by those afraid of the truth. The evolutionists say much the same thing about Genesis.

“This is just the latest episode in a long-standing battle” between fact and faith, said Timothy Miller, who chairs the religious studies department at the University of Kansas. “Five hundred years ago, it was flat Earth. Three hundred years ago it was the Earth at the center of the universe. One hundred years ago it was an attempt to establish the biblical value of pi. This is just this century’s version.”