Evolution and the Bible in Public School

As a ninth and tenth grade English teacher, I suppose I could pretty easily sidestep the issue of the Bible in public school. I really can't explain why I have taken it upon myself to design and teach an evolution unit. Still, of all the things I teach, it's the one unit I'm most proud of. As part of our ninth grade curriculum at my district I am told to teach a unit on problem/solution or cause/effect essays. The curriculum is fairly specific in terms of what they ask us to teach--organization, grammar, structure, use of evidence, etc.--but is very non-specific in terms of the topics that the students write about.

I found out early in my career that letting the students pick their own topic is a bad idea. It might work in a college course, or even in a higher level high school class, but for high school freshmen the temptation to simply cut and paste a generic global warming or anti-smoking paper from the web is too much to resist and I found that every semester I was going through the painful (for both student and teacher) process of discovering plagiarism and punishing it. I realized that it was easier to assign a topic to the whole class. That way I could keep better track of what was out there on the web, what the kids were reading, and how their papers were developing. As an added bonus we could have whole-class discussions about the issue to help us develop our arguments.

It just so happens that around this same time I was working on Letter from Tomorrow and I was struggling with a chapter that I knew I wanted to include, but just couldn't make work. That chapter, as you may have guessed by now, is the chapter on Evolution—in which Sharanrala and the narrator have their most dramatic conflict over one of the most controversial issues of our time. The idea of teaching evolution occurred to me at first as a way for me to write that chapter. I figured that I could get the kids to write some papers, we could have some good class discussions, and I could see the kinds of questions and arguments that real people ask and make when they argue about Evolution.

Little did I know that not only would this unit help me immensely in writing Letter from Tomorrow, but it would also became one of the best units that I teach. I know that most teachers shy away from these controversial issues, but as a debater and debate coach, I love the moments when students lose that blank stare and actually sit up and listen, hand in the air, ready to engage in a serious discussion. As it turns out that's pretty much what happens for the entire six-week unit. The kids just can't stop asking questions, making arguments, pointing out things that I've never considered before, and generally just . . . well . . . learning.

One of the interesting benefits of being an English teacher rather than a science teacher is that I don't have the burden of teaching science exclusively in my classroom. If I were a Biology teacher, I would feel obligated to teach scientific theory--not religious speculation or scripture--but as an English teacher I can bring any kind of literature, including religious texts, into the classroom so long as they are taught as literature and not preached as scripture. The Supreme Court precedent is very clear on this--we have a Bible Literature class at my school because the courts have ruled that bringing religious texts with literary merit into the classroom and presenting them in a secular manner does not violate the separation of church and state.

In my unit we read the King James Version of the Bible (because it has the most literary merit of any English translation of that particular text) along with non-fiction works about creationism, intelligent design, and of course, the theory of evolution itself. At the end of the unit I give a test and the last question is: "What do you think about the teaching of evolution and creationism in school?" The comments I got in response to this question the first time I asked it were a bit of a surprise. Not only were most kids fine with the idea of being taught both evolution and creationism in English class, their biggest complaint was not that I had brought the Bible in, or that I had brought Evolutionary theory in to my English class, but that I hadn't gone far enough. The most common comment was that we should read a greater variety of creation stories representing cultures from all over the world, rather than just the one found in Genesis.

I had brought in Genesis because I felt it represented the perspective of most American creationists. Reading this, along with the writings of respected advocates of intelligent design, would give plenty of ammunition to my creationist students, I thought. After all, all three of the major Abrahamic religions--Islam, Judaism, and Christianity--use translations of the story of Genesis that is found in the Hebrew scripture as the foundation of their understanding of creation. This story is one part (the beginning) of what is sometimes referred to as the Pentateuch--the sacred scriptures that form the backbone of all three of these religions. The Pentateuch is made up of the five books of Moses, which are called (in the English language) Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

But clearly, there are a lot of cultures left out when you focus solely on the story in Genesis. What a great opportunity to bring literature from all over the world into my English class and at the same time give my students an understanding of an issue that too many teachers avoid--the crucial debate between evolution and creation that is dividing this country and threatening both the quality of our education system and our culture’s understanding of the role of science in human thought.

In my class I teach this unit as objectively as I can, which is easy because I sincerely believe that there is room for both faith and science in human thought. I don’t think that faith conflicts with or contradicts the understanding and application of the theories of science any more than I believe that Galileo’s famous discovery that the Earth circles the sun (which appears to conflict with the cosmology described in the Bible) disproved the existence of God. So I have no problem teaching strict creationism, strict evolutionism, intelligent design, theistic evolution, and every perspective in between.

Unfortunately, however, a very vocal group of creationists continues to persist in the untenable belief that the Bible should be read completely literally, and that any conflict between scripture and our own observation must be resolved by ignoring scientific observation and placing blind faith in the scriptures. I have studied a time when this was the accepted practice in Europe—when blind faith superseded empirical understanding—and there is a reason that it is called the dark ages.

This is a lot to cover on a web page like this—for a more complete picture check out the book Letter from Tomorrow.