Posted by Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
Reverend Michael Reiss is the director of education at the Royal Society. And he is advocating discussing creationism in science classes. And he has a PhD in evolutionary biology. Hang on a second, this doesn’t look like the recipe for a standard creationism debate.
What Reiss believes is that when the issue of creationism or intelligent design is raised in the class room (and he expects it to be raised increasingly frequently) the teacher should discuss it as an alternative “worldview” but show why it is not a scientific theory and why evolution is a scientific theory.
Reiss said that his opinions were formed when he was a biology teacher at school “banging on about evolution”. He describes himself as having been “evangelical about evolution”. As a teacher he found that this approach meant that students who didn’t accept evolution would just turn off from science.
Reiss says an increasing number of children are from families who don’t believe in evolution, in part due to the increase in Muslim children from families that hold creationist views.
I had the chance to catch up with Jim Al Khalili (see blog from Tuesday) and discuss Reiss’ ideas. Al Khalili said that creationism is the same in Islam, Christianity and Judaism, but the difference in Islam is that there hasn’t been open discussion of the theory of evolution yet. At the moment, even people who accept natural selection would not accept that humans are part of that evolution. He went on to say that it is absolutely crucial that Muslims are part of the debate about creationism and science, but that the debate has to come from within.
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