Honest Creationists 2
So, how should science relate to religion in teaching?
A friend has pointed out that, as Lawrence Krauss says, insisting that science leads to an atheistic worldview is going to make some people resist the teaching of science, particularly evolution.
The answer is to keep science and religion separate in schools (which is what the NCSE is campaigning for anyway). Science teachers need say nothing at all about religion. There is no need to promote any view about the compatibility or otherwise of science and religion. Not promoting compatibility does not mean that the only alternative is to actively promote incompatibility. It isn't. A silence on the matter (and referring any questions about this to a religion teacher) is not evasion - it is acting according to the very standards that we expect of others.
Regarding evolution and biology, it is often said that evolution and the origin of life are separate issues - you can deal with questions about one without avoiding the other. This is convenient as we know almost nothing about the origin of life. Or we did. I think this is a cop-out. There is no magic point at which evolution 'switches on'. Fortunately, there are now some very convincing ideas about how life could have got started. The key term to look up here is 'RNA World'. The idea is that polymers of the nucleic acid RNA, which can be used to store information, could have been the earliest form of life, catalysing their own reproduction from simpler units. We have seen such catalysis in the laboratory. We have even seen reproducing RNA evolve in the laboratory to overcome the effects of chemicals that poison reproduction. The problem has been how the initial long strands of RNA formed. Now we have models. There are environments in the early Earth that we think could have easily led to the formation of unimaginable numbers of RNA polymers, such as within ice sheets. It would not be at all unlikely that some of that number would catalyze their own reproduction. And then, life is started. There are many further steps that need to be explained. How DNA got involved (perhaps as a more stable 'backup store' for RNA sequences?) and how the protein coding system arose. But at the current pace of research, feasible models for these may turn up in the near future. So, we need not be afraid of raising the issue of the origin of life. But, I would suggest, what we do is simply to describe the wonder of it all. Let creationists draw their own conclusions!
A friend has pointed out that, as Lawrence Krauss says, insisting that science leads to an atheistic worldview is going to make some people resist the teaching of science, particularly evolution.
The answer is to keep science and religion separate in schools (which is what the NCSE is campaigning for anyway). Science teachers need say nothing at all about religion. There is no need to promote any view about the compatibility or otherwise of science and religion. Not promoting compatibility does not mean that the only alternative is to actively promote incompatibility. It isn't. A silence on the matter (and referring any questions about this to a religion teacher) is not evasion - it is acting according to the very standards that we expect of others.
Regarding evolution and biology, it is often said that evolution and the origin of life are separate issues - you can deal with questions about one without avoiding the other. This is convenient as we know almost nothing about the origin of life. Or we did. I think this is a cop-out. There is no magic point at which evolution 'switches on'. Fortunately, there are now some very convincing ideas about how life could have got started. The key term to look up here is 'RNA World'. The idea is that polymers of the nucleic acid RNA, which can be used to store information, could have been the earliest form of life, catalysing their own reproduction from simpler units. We have seen such catalysis in the laboratory. We have even seen reproducing RNA evolve in the laboratory to overcome the effects of chemicals that poison reproduction. The problem has been how the initial long strands of RNA formed. Now we have models. There are environments in the early Earth that we think could have easily led to the formation of unimaginable numbers of RNA polymers, such as within ice sheets. It would not be at all unlikely that some of that number would catalyze their own reproduction. And then, life is started. There are many further steps that need to be explained. How DNA got involved (perhaps as a more stable 'backup store' for RNA sequences?) and how the protein coding system arose. But at the current pace of research, feasible models for these may turn up in the near future. So, we need not be afraid of raising the issue of the origin of life. But, I would suggest, what we do is simply to describe the wonder of it all. Let creationists draw their own conclusions!