Truth in Science

Radio 4 'Sunday' Programme

3 June 2007 07:43

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/sunday/index.shtml

Transcript

The Church of England usually stays out of rows over evolution versus creationism. Anglicanism after all has long since absorbed evolution into its theology so why has the Church’s new head of education now suggested that intelligent design – which any suggest is creationism by another name – could be taught in schools, not only in religious education but in science classes too. Intelligent design was a term coined 20 years ago by American creationists, and it holds there is a guiding intelligence behind living things, though it doesn’t call it God. The Reverend Jan Ainsworth, the Church’s head of education, joins me now.

You’re not a supporter of intelligent design, are you, so why suggest that it can be taught in science classrooms?

JA: I don’t think I’d only be supporting the things that I believed in to be taught in education. One of the things you’re hoping is that through their passage through school children will actually encounter a whole range of different ideas, beliefs, ways of looking at the world, absorb a whole range of ways of doing that – of finding out about the world.

BBC: But isn’t that for an RE class and not science because I mean in this it’s all very well to posit a guiding intelligence but it’s not a scientific theory is it? This isn’t disprovable.

JA: It of course finds a place in RE because the minute you start looking at Christianity in any seriousness you have to take account of the fact that it believes in a creator God and that the world is the result of the actions and the love of that God. So in RE it has an obvious place. In science what I was suggesting is that there may well be room to explore intelligent design. There clearly is an opportunity in the history of science if you’re looking at pre-scientific ideas and encouraging a compare and contrast.

BBC: But it’s not historical and its not science. So why don’t you leave it for RE?

JA: No, it’s pre-scientific, so if you want to look at what scientific methodology does and how it operates it’s actually quite useful to have some contrasting ones. However, having looked at some of the more recent syllabuses it’s also suggested as part of the biology syllabus so that students can see the different ways in which the same evidence is interpreted. Whilst intelligent design and creationism does stem from the religious points of view, that also is quite helpful for them to see. The particular syllabus recommends that they look at Dawkins for example, and other commentators.

BBC: Richard Dawkins. Aren’t you lending credibility to this though, and to the campaign of the lobby group Truth in Science, to get intelligent design into the science curriculum?

JA: I think it depends on what you think education’s for. I do think some people have a view in their minds that if children are told something they will automatically believe it. It depends very much how the material is used in the classroom. And if it is to explore and allow children to develop the capacities to explore different ways of finding out things, different ways of deciding which view is right then I don’t see any problem because you’re helping them develop critical methods, rational methods, which is after all the point of education.

BBC: The Church is in talks with the government to open one hundred academies. With this aren’t you giving fuel to the critics of faith schools and they’re not going to look kindly on you application.

JA: They probably are but they probably aren’t reading things very clearly anyway. They probably aren’t hearing what’s being said: that it’s part of a general education to look at a range of ideas and work out for yourself which are the ones that are going to guide you for the rest of your life. So it’s the whole question about almost everything you do in education is ‘What is truth and how do you get there?’ And so I think this is just as good an opportunity to contrast with scientific method.

BBC: The Reverend Jan Ainsworth, thank you.