N.Zealand Christians challenge teaching of evolution
Pastor Dale Morgan
N.Zealand Christians challenge teaching of evolution*
By LANE NICHOLS - The Dominion Post | Saturday, 28 June 2008
A Christian group promoting intelligent design theory over evolution has
sent teaching material to schools that critics say is religious
propaganda and sloppy pseudoscience.
The Education Ministry says the unsanctioned material does not breach
the Education Act and there are no plans to ban its distribution.
But officials stress the theory of evolution underpins the science
curriculum and schools have a responsibility to teach theories that are
subject to accepted scientific scrutiny.
Focus on the Family has sent The Privileged Planet CD and booklet to 400
high schools, asking that they be made available to science teachers and
school libraries.
Waikato University biological sciences senior lecturer Alison Campbell
says the material champions creationism - the belief that God created
the world as described in the Book of Genesis - claiming the universe is
too perfect to have been produced by chance so must be the work of an
intelligent designer.
It represented a religious viewpoint, she said, not a scientific one,
and had no place in science classrooms.
"It's an underhand way of getting creationist material into schools."
Similar debate in the United States led the Supreme Court to ban public
schools from teaching creationism. In 2005 a court banned the teaching
of intelligent design at a Pennsylvanian high school.
Focus on the Family's executive director Tim Sisarich said the material
was intended to expose pupils to an alterative theory of cosmology.
"We're a Christian organisation so we believe that God made the planet
and God made the cosmos ... Science takes a theory and tries to
establish it as the truth, and that's all this is."
Education Ministry senior manager Mary Chamberlain said parents had a
right to withdraw children from religious instruction.