In the week of Charles Darwin’s bicentenary, the debate on how his ideas should be communicated in the classroom rages on. Kate Whiting reports.

A third of Britain’s science teachers now believe creationism should be taught in their lessons alongside evolution and the Big Bang theory.

It is testament to the ongoing impact of Charles Darwin’s work that the debate over how to tackle alternative versions of the origin of the world is still waging on, some 150 years after he published The Origin Of Species. 

But what exactly do creationists believe, why all the controversy, and what actually is or should be discussed in the science classroom? 

Millions around the world, including Jews, Muslims and Christians, have long shared the belief that God created the universe and everything in it. 

But ‘Young Earth Creationism’ is the more specific belief that the earth has only existed for the last 6,000 years and that each species was created separately by God – as suggested in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. Scientific evidence, meanwhile, indicates that the planet and all the species on it developed over a period of 4,000 or 5,000 million years. 

In the 1600s it was seen as an important task to establish the age of the world from evidence in The Bible. 

Irish Anglican archbishop James Ussher did just that, and in 1650 published a chronology of the world that calculated the date of creation as October 23, 4004BC, thus paving the way for Young Earth Creationism. 

Two hundred years and much scientific thinking later, Shrewsbury-born Charles Darwin would revolutionise our understanding of how all life came about, which in turn shaped creationist thought. Dr Mathew Guest, a lecturer in theology and religion at Durham University and contributor to forthcoming volume Genesis After Darwin, says: “Within the last 150 years, there have been various attempts among certain Christian camps to establish creationism with greater rigour, in response to the rise of Darwinism. 

“In the mid 1800s, groups like the Plymouth Brethren viewed the bible as a document by which we can map the history of the world.” 

Then came the fundamentalist movement in the United States in the early 20th century, which published pamphlets affirming what they saw as the “non-negotiable core of Christian faith”. 

Fundamentalists

But Guest says evolution was actually accepted by some early fundamentalists. 

“In the pamphlets published as The Fundamentals, some writers acknowledged the legitimacy of evolution, they didn’t have a problem with it – it was accepted by some as the means by which God created the earth, and was not a focus of controversy or division.” 

The 1920s saw the controversial Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, where local teacher John Scopes was put on trial for teaching evolution – which was then illegal. The case was overturned, but the trial drew the attention of the media and the public. 

“In the United States, the media so ridiculed proponents of the pro-Genesis account as backward, uneducated and ignorant, that they became discredited in the eyes of the public and retreated from public life,” Guest says. 

The 1960s saw the development of the Creation Science movement, which attempted to find geological evidence for Bible stories like the flood recounted in Genesis. 

“The 1980s saw the emergence of intelligent design, which attempts to use the methods of science to establish an alternative set of explanations to Darwinism about the origins of the world, but it doesn’t rely on the Bible,” Guest says. 

“It looks for design in the world and presents that as evidence of an intelligent designer.” 

So, how does the Creationism v Darwinism debate stack up?

In the week of Darwin’s bicentenary, there are staunch advocates on either side who make any hopes of some kind of reconciliation seem unlikely. 

“It polarises people and I don’t think that’s necessarily helpful,” says Guest. “The classic example is Richard Dawkins (author of The God Delusion). There you have someone who is not only passionate about what he sees as the groundless nature of creationist ideas but also about alerting the public to the potentially damaging consequences of believing in them. 

“Dawkins’ work is valuable in raising such important questions within the public sphere, but it risks reinforcing a perception among the public that there are simply two different, mutually exclusive positions available to them. 

“One can be an advocate of creationism, or an advocate of evolution, with the Christians on one side and the secularists on the other. The secularists stand for reason and science, while the Christians (perhaps all followers of a religion) are driven by irrationality and superstition. 

“The range of possibilities available and the diversity of people advocating each of them means that the situation is simply much more complicated than this model might suggest. 

“So it’s frustrating when the debate is polarised. It’s especially difficult to come to clear answers on this because it’s not just an abstract argument, it’s not simply about intellectual ideas, it’s really about what belongs in the classroom.” 

So what of the future for creationism? 

“One future which I hope we don’t have in the UK is that we become more and more like the situation in the US, in other words, a larger proportion of people are creationists and it becomes more and more difficult to discuss and teach evolution in schools and society becomes increasingly polarised,” says ordained Church of England minister and a leading biologist, Professor Michael Reiss. 

“Another possibility, which the optimistic in me hopes is the case, is that precisely because there is now more discussion about these issues, we end up with a consensus about the role of education in both RE lessons and science lessons teaching in this area and there’s eventually a better understanding among people both of science and religion.”