Evolution statement altered

Christian Century, Nov 12, 1997

AFTER FIRST refusing to do so, the National Association of Biology Teachers has dropped the words "unsupervised" and "impersonal" from its official description of evolution. The group's eight-person board of directors voted unanimously October 11 to alter the wording of its two-year-old statement in support of teaching evolution--and it did so just three days after it voted unanimously not to make the change.

Noted religion scholar Huston Smith and Notre Dame philosophy professor Alvin Plantinga had urged the NABT to make the change, arguing that inclusion of the two words constituted a the theological judgment about the nonexistence of God that went beyond the boundaries of empirical science. Meeting in Minneapolis, the NABT board agreed--but not at first.

On October 8, at the tail end of a nine-hour meeting, the board rejected the suggested change following a ten-minute discussion. Still, the issue lingered. Wayne W. Carley, executive director of the Reston, Virginia-based teachers' group, noted that board members continued to discuss the statement among themselves at considerable length. On October 11 the board reconvened just prior to the conclusion of the 7,500-member organization's annual meeting and reversed itself.

"We decided that we had construed a meaning we had not intended," said Carley. "[The statement] was interpreted to mean we were saying there is no God. Absolutely not. We did not mean to imply that. That's beyond the purview of science . . . We had only intended to say there is no evidence the process of evolution is directed from some source."

NABT member Eugenie Scott, who was instrumental in getting the board to reconsider, explained that the change was a matter of staying religiously neutral. "It's no more proper to present naturalistic philosophy as valid science than it is to present religiously based arguments," said Scott, who is not a board member. "The board just didn't spend enough time thinking this through the first time around."

Ironically, Scott is executive director of the National Center for Science Education, an organization based in El Cerrito, California, established to defend the teaching of evolution in public schools and, she said, "to keep religiously based arguments such as creationism out of the science class." Creationism holds that the origin of the universe and life rests with God's actions. Biological evolution holds that all plant and animal species evolved from simpler life forms. In public school districts across the nation, religious conservatives have challenged the teaching of evolution as the sole explanation for the origins of life.

When informed of the board's change of heart, Smith, a retired University of California at Berkeley professor said: "Isn't that heartening? It restores one's faith in human nature and what reason can do. . . . It's not easy to admit one was mistaken. I take my hat off to them."

In September, Smith and Plantinga, past president of the American Philosophical Association (Central Division) and the Society of Christian Philosophers, sent a letter to NABT asking the group to strike "unsupervised" and "impersonal" from a key paragraph of its 1995 Statement on Teaching Evolution.

The paragraph read: "The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments." While the fossil record may shed light on the process of evolution, the two scholars wrote, it cannot answer the question of whether evolution "is or isn't directed by God."

They argued that the statement's "vulnerability" made it a "legitimate" target for "extremists in the Religious Right" who favor creationism over evolution. They also said that since polls have shown that more than 90 percent of Americans profess belief in God, the statement served to undermine Americans' respect for scientists.