Creationism in Public Schools

Creationism in Public Schools

Whether creationism should be taught in public schools or not has been a battle in America for many years. It was in 1859 when Charles Darwin introduced the theory of natural selection, and from the start many people believed that evolution opposed the Christian religion. In the 1960’s, the idea of creation science started gaining popularity. This was started by John C. Whitcomb Jr., a professor of religion, who wrote a book called The Genesis Flood. This book tried to prove that Noah’s flood had a helping hand in the world’s history of catastrophic events. This caused creationists to argue that creationism was not just a religious belief, but science also.

It was in the 1990’s when the debate on whether creationism should be taught in public schools or not really took off. The idea of Intelligent Design (ID) started rapidly increasing. According to Patrick Glynn, the associate director of the George Washington University for Communitarian Policy Studies, ID theorists, “Use principles of molecular biology and mathematical probability, respectively, to make the case that life is too complex to have evolved.”(1) ID theorists oppose the title “creationist”, even though it is believed to be the same thing. Some creationists/ID theorists agree that the world is a lot older than 10,000 years and the Book of Genesis is mostly, but not totally, correct. They think that evolution has been occurring, but with the help of a higher being; a creator.

Creationists believe that if a theory denies the Book of Genesis, then it is not true. This is not rational thinking at all; they should be open to everything, not just what a book says. They believe that Darwin’s theory is wrong because it went against the word of the Bible. The fact is that, according to education journalist Leon Lynn, “creationism, ID, and other claims of supernatural interventions the origin of life or species are not science because they are not testable by the...