Ira Rifkin, "Teachers Change Evolution Wording" (1997)

TEACHERS CHANGE EVOLUTION WORDING

By IRA RIFKIN; RELIGION NEWS SERVICE

After first refusing to do so, the National Association of Biology Teachers has dropped the words "unsupervised" and "impersonal" from its official definition of evolution. The group's eight-person board of directors voted unanimously Saturday to alter the definition contained in its 2-year-old statement in support of teaching evolution 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 inclusion of the two words constituted a theological judgment about the nonexistence of God going beyond the boundaries of empirical science.

Meeting in Minneapolis, the NABT board agreed - but not at first. Wednesday, at the tail end of a nine-hour meeting, the board rejected the suggestion following a 10-minute discussion. Still, the issue lingered.

Wayne W. Carley, executive director of the Reston, Va.-based teachers' group, said Tuesday board members continued to discuss the statement among themselves at considerable length.

Saturday, the board reconvened just before 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."

'Staying religiously neutral'

NABT member Eugenie Scott, who was instrumental in getting the board to reconsider, said 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," Scott, who is not a board member, said in an interview. "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, Calif., 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 offered for the origins of life. Informed of the board's change of heart, Smith, a retired University of California at Berkeley professor and one of the nation's pre-eminent scholars of religion, 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 pair wrote, it cannot answer the question of whether evolution "is or isn't directed by God."