RESOLVING THE STANDOFF BETWEEN SCIENCE & CREATIONISM

The scientific and education communities lie in the midst of a culture war surrounding the nature of humanity and its relation to the earth system. This battle is most frequently depicted as a conflict between creationists and the scientific community over evolution, the geologic time scale and Big Bang theory. While the debate rages somewhat abstractly in academia and the press, science teachers in K-12 schools are the ground troops in this war over belief systems, and it is their actions working with local school administrators, parents and students which will ultimately decide how this generation resolves the battle between scientific and creationist ideologies.

Every system of knowing, from the most rigorously tested and documented scientific principles to well documented religions dating back thousands of years to the oral traditions of pre-literate societies, contains a base of knowledge derived from observed historical events and interpreted using a set of cultural assumptions about the nature of the observable (and unobservable) world. Each system attained acceptance with its adherents because the underlying assumptions are taken as valid. This is as true of the scientific community's belief in the principle of uniformitarianism as religious belief in the truth of religious texts. To the learner in a traditional science classroom, the assumption that the scientific belief system is more valid than a religion may not only contradict past life experience and education, but may appear reminiscent of the same blind faith of the most strident religion! Many science teachers remain unprepared to engage parents and students struggling with these same issues.

In this presentation, a method for preparing pre-service teachers of science for this conflict is addressed. The technique combines insights gained from efforts to create a broad, all-inclusive multicultural perspective within classroom environments with the ability of science to address one fundamental question: why are we here? Helping students understand how we know what we know in science affords them the opportunity to engage controversial scientific concepts without forcing a conflict with deeply held beliefs. Example lesson plans incorporating views of geologic outcrops from multiple perspectives will be discussed.