In the beginning was the void. In the void God created heaven and earth, day and night, with the sun to rule the day and the moon to rule the night. Earth was divided into lands and seas. God filled the seas with whales and fish and the skies with birds. On the land He created grass and trees, animals of all sorts and finally, in His own image, humans.

In the beginning was the void. In a single, massive convulsion all of space and time came into being. Matter swirled, condensed and coalesced. Stars formed, ignited, grew, died and blew apart - spreading new, heavier elements across space to form planets, comets and meteors.

New molecules appeared, some of them simple and some of them stunningly complex. From those foundations, over billions of years, the processes of evolution brought about the living world - and us.

These are two wonderful, exciting and self-consistent accounts of the origins of the world - and yet in school science lessons, almost invariably, only one of the above theories is discussed.

Whether or not creationism should be taught is a source of huge controversy in the US and a growing debate in this country. It's a bad-tempered argument. "Creationism is just a myth," growl the evolutionists. "Evolution is just a theory," snort the creationists. Both sides are wrong, and the error of each stems from a misuse of the word "just".

Where did creationist accounts come from? Nowadays we know them as tales from books: from the Bible, from Norse mythology, from Ovid. They were not written as literary exercises, though, and they did not spring into being ready-made. They were developed over time as a result of observing the world, and as a result of honest, intelligent attempts to find coherent explanations for what was seen. They were, in short, not "just" myths - they were the scientific theories of their day.

We believe the sun is a huge ball of gas, glowing as a result of gravitationally induced nuclear fusion. But is that really preferable as a theory to Phaeton's golden chariot soaring across the sky?

Of course it's preferable. The idea of Phaeton's chariot is as unsatisfactory an explanation of the sun to people who could make pinhole cameras as Genesis is to people who can examine the origins of fossils.

The essence of science and the scientific method is falsifiability: all scientists, whatever their discipline, constantly try to prove themselves wrong, and no theory which is not falsifiable has any place in science. (This, by the way, is why creationists are wrong to dismiss evolution as "just" a theory. To be a scientific theory means to be rigorously tested and improved against evidence, and to survive attempts at disproof. There is no "just" about it.) To let pupils understand this process we must take them through the life of a theory: from tentative conception, through evidence-based consolidation, development, modification, strain and, finally, abandonment. Pupils should then understand better how modern theories about the world have arisen and about how they in turn might be - will be, in most cases - modified or discarded.

Creation theories are perfect examples of this. What evidence suggested that a six-day creation was a reasonable postulation? What differences in observations explain the difference between the Norse, Greek and Jewish theories of creation? And, crucially, what further evidence led to the scientific rejection of all these models? Why do intelligent, educated people no longer believe the world was created at 9am on October 3, 4004BC?

We should not teach creation stories in science simply to dismiss them as fanciful or wrong. That would be pointless and arrogant, and it would do a grave disservice to those who developed them. We should teach them as honest but misguided attempts by intelligent people to make sense of the world around them, just as we attempt to make sense of the world around us.

By Dr Ian Johnston
Dr Ian Johnston is a staff tutor in technology with the Open University in Scotland.



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