Posted: Mar 06, 2018 7:27 am
Courtesy of this blog post over at PLoS ...
On January 18, 2018, House Bill 258 was introduced to the Alabama House of Representatives. As reported by the National Center for Science Education, if enacted, this bill would allow teachers to present “the theory of creation as presented in the Bible” in any class discussing evolution. Doing so would afford students the opportunity to choose which understanding of Earth’s natural history they wish to accept: evolutionary theory or creationist theology. Moreover, the bill would ensure that students accepting creationism instead of evolution would not be penalized for answering exam questions in their science courses in a way that reflects their preference for creationist explanations, “provided the response is correct according to the instruction received.”
Alabama House Bill 258, sponsored solely by Rep. Steve Hurst (R-District 35), sits currently with the state House Committee on Education Policy and is open for public comments (no comments have been posted at the time this blog entry was published). In light of this bill, we reached out to Dr. Amanda Glaze at Georgia Southern University, who is an expert in the intersection between science and religion in the American South. In the piece that follows, Dr. Glaze makes the important distinction that scientists and science educators need to be vigilant in our fight against educational policy that introduces religion into a science classroom, but not because we are at war against faith. Instead, this war is being fought in defense of science literacy.