The September 2008 issue of the School Science Review has an article entitled "Creationism, intelligent design and science education". This is a very lucid and useful article, for teachers of religious education as well as for science teachers. If you do not have access to your own copy of the journal, but would like to read the article, ask the head of science in your school if they can let you have a photocopy of the article or, failing that, contact the science advisory teacher (or equivalent) in your local authority. What follows is the abstract of the article.
Science teachers may currently find questions about creationism and intelligent design being raised in science lessons. In 2007 the UK Government's Department for Children, Schools and Families published some guidance on these matters, followed almost immediately by a resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. It therefore seems appropriate, especially in view of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, to examine the meanings of these terms and how they differ from traditional beliefs in creation and design.
Apart from a very lucid account of the scientific/philosophical/religious issues themselves, Michael Poole also gives a good account of how these issues have been treated in public policy debate. Or, more accurately, mis-treated in that public debate tends to insufficiently distinguish ideas of creationism and intelligent design from the traditional religious understandings of creation and design. This demonstrates rather well how Christians of what one might call (and I intend this charitably) a fundamentalist evangelical tendency - who in practice do not give sufficient recognition to the part played by human reason in the search for knowledge, particularly knowledge of God - do a great disservice to the standing of religious belief in the public square by creating the opportunity for such mis-treatment.
The same issue of School Science Review also contains the ASE statement on "Science Education, Intelligent Design and Creationism". This is rather less useful than Michael Poole's article. Whilst it can be stated as a truism that creationism and intelligent design are not scientific theories, and therefore should not have a place in the science curriculum of a school, the ASE statement rather begs the question of how these ideas relate to human reason in a wide sense and opts out of the question as to whether or not these ideas should have a place elsewhere in the curriculum. In so far as they are ideas that can be subject to the critique or analysis of human reason, there seems to me no prima facie reason to ban these ideas simply as non-scientific, which seems to be the implication of the ASE statement.
More than ever, Pope Benedict XVI's emphasis on the importance of both faith and reason, and the correct understanding of the relationship between the two, can be seen to be quite prophetic.
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