Religious High Schools Grapple With Evolution, Intelligent Design

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) The debate over evolution has exploded in Kansas, Michigan and Pennsylvania as public schools consider teaching intelligent design, a competing idea that proposes natural systems were planned by a higher power. But the controversy is not limited to public education. At the country’s more than 8,500 religious high schools, […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The debate over evolution has exploded in Kansas, Michigan and Pennsylvania as public schools consider teaching intelligent design, a competing idea that proposes natural systems were planned by a higher power.

But the controversy is not limited to public education. At the country’s more than 8,500 religious high schools, science teachers must decide if intelligent design is good science or a foray into matters better handled in theology classes.


Views are hardly monolithic.

“Intelligent design is just a clever way of masking creationism for what it is,” said Mark Cahn, who teaches biology, chemistry and a class on anatomy and physiology at Kehillah Jewish High School in San Jose, Calif.

“This is about science, it’s not about a belief system,” he said.

According to the scientific method, Cahn said, experiments should begin with a hypothesis and test for an answer. Intelligent design scientists begin with their desired answer and look for evidence, he said.

Nonetheless, students in his classes are welcome to disagree with evolution and rely on their faith instead, Cahn said.

“If everybody believed everything out of a scientist’s mouth, the world would be a pretty boring place,” Cahn said.

Other teachers at religious high schools are enthusiastic about teaching intelligent design as a valid alternative to evolution.

“If evolution were a Christian theory, it would have been shot down a long time ago,” said Michael Smith, a biology teacher at Christian Community School in Grafton, Ohio, who teaches intelligent design as well as evolution. “There are some excellent reasons to doubt evolution.”

Smith finds the theory of intelligent design _ first put forward in the 1970s _ to be scientifically rigorous, putting “the discussion in a scientific realm.”


Finn Laursen, president of the Christian Educators Association International in Pasadena, Calif., and a former public school educator, said students need to learn about evolution _ a theory first laid out by Charles Darwin in the 1860s. The theory argues that genes mutate by chance, driving the process of natural selection through which different species arise.

At the same time, he said, “Intelligent design needs to be taught.”

He added there are increasing resources available on intelligent design for both Christian and public schools.

John Calvert, managing director of the Intelligent Design Network, based in Kansas City, Kan., said intelligent design scientists are working to build a stockpile of evidence pointing to the hand of a planner in nature.

However, they “do not seek to prove a literal interpretation of Genesis,” he said, and accept that it might have taken the designer billions of years to lay out his or her plan rather than the shorter time period suggested by some who interpret the Bible literally.

Regina Skudera, a biology teacher at Whitinsville Christian School, an evangelical institution in Whitinsville, Mass., said she encourages students to think critically about evolution but does not introduce intelligent design.

Students have not brought the idea up either, she said, but are glad evolution is discussed.


“They think in a Christian school setting, it should not be a taboo subject,” she said.

In Skudera’s biology classroom, students consider legal battles over teaching evolution _ the 1925 Scopes trial as well as recent developments _ and debate how they should be educated about the origins of life. Later, they write a paper examining the evidence for evolution and explaining their positions.

“They’re pretty skeptical of evolution,” Skudera said. “They ask, `How could 10,000 different proteins come together randomly and functionally?”’

Cahn said one of the benefits of teaching science at a religious school is that when students have questions about beliefs regarding the origins of life, he can refer them to campus clergy.

“I don’t want to muddy the water between where science is and the role of religion in the student’s life,” said Cahn, a Reform Jew, adding that Judaism does not oppose teaching evolution.

Smith said he thinks students from religious backgrounds should learn about intelligent design in order to face the tension they might encounter between faith and science when they are in college or in their careers.


“I think they are going to be intellectually and spiritually better off,” said Smith, who is a member of the Christian Educators Association International.

“My job is to prepare the kids in our school to go out and face the questions critically,” Smith said. “If they say, `Maybe intelligent design holds up,’ that would make me happy.”

MO/PH END RNS

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