When my father heard that my sophomore-year high school biology teacher (in 1967) had asked his students to debate evolution vs. biblical creation during class, he laughed and said, “I thought that was already decided.”
Little did my father know. Students had a week to pick sides, meet with each other, research and formulate debate arguments.
When the day came, chairs were moved to opposite sides of the room–with space for those who did not want to participate and thus stayed in the middle.
When the debate was over, our teacher, a Mormon, explained his own position on the issue.
And the next day, we returned to discussing biology.
My biology teacher during my freshman year of college mentioned “the teleological solution” briefly in one of his first lectures.
And then he went on to another subject.
There was a reason for these two events. And that is because the exploration of origins–human and universal–is inherently philosophical and theological, as well as scientific. Those who suppose that they are teaching science alone are fooling themselves when it comes to talk of origins. Even if the first two fields are never mentioned in the course of a science class, students do not live in a vacuum, and they will use what they learn in biology class (or chemistry or astronomy, etc.) to form conclusions about these other areas.
There are people with impeccable scientific credentials, who are not biblical creationists but who have nevertheless pointed to what they see as mistakes and misidentifications that have sometimes been made in someone’s haste to fill in the blanks on the human family ancestral tree. Others have raised questions about the likelihood of accident or blind chance being sufficient explanation for the complexities of life–things that we take for granted, such as, for instance, the body’s ability to martial the necessary forces and materials to clot a cut or scrape in the skin.
There is also adequate evidence of evolution, or adaptation, on a number of levels.
Of course there are people on both sides–creationists and evolutionists–who will grant no point to the other side. This does not help anyone, and it does not make the issue of what to teach or how to teach it easy for anyone.
But I would suggest that it would do no one (student or parent) any harm to discuss these things–intelligent design, the teleological solution or whatever you wish to call it–in a non-hostile and non-sectarian environment, within the context of a class, even if it is only a five-minute mention or part of a list that includes spontaneous generation or the Navajo version of beginnings.
And then carry on with the main subject.
