Teaching students to assess the credibility of claims.

 Teach them to think?

Wise owl teachers used to suggest that the fundamental purpose of schooling is to teach young people to think.  For some reason, that priority never quite made it to the curriculum, at least, not in any classroom I was seated in.  Previously I have praised the National Curriculum for bringing a step change in the quality of the educational experience, an opinion I strongly maintain, as it specifies core areas of knowledge and understanding and also attempts a balance between knowledge content and skills acquisition, in Science and other subjects.  The first (1990) NC for Science had seventeen attainment targets, the first of which was specifically about the nature and processes of Science. ('Exploration of Science' was its title.) The perhaps inevitable slimming down that followed unfortunately led to not only the distillation of 17 attainment targets into a more manageable programme that respected workload concerns, but also a severe pruning of AT1.  The ambitions that had been nurtured in the design of the Science Curriculum were not preserved in the modified version.  In particular, the directions to show students how science skills could be demonstrated in connection with historical developments in science, such as our developing understanding of the nature of the solar system, were removed.   Such narratives and investigations could perhaps have been reintegrated into other sections of the repackaged curriculum, but textbook writers and exam specification authors generally did not value this priority.  I rather wonder how many of them realised how important it was.

In more recent years, the DFE under ministers such as Michael Gove directed a particular refocusing of the delivery of the National Curriculum which had implications for the way the balance of skills and knowledge would be addressed.  The EBacc (English Baccalaureate) statistical performance measure became a hoop through which schools, and therefore students, would be forced to jump. Slimming down administration and cost cutting became excuses to remove coursework, and therefore, skills development, from the curriculum.  This need not be the case, it could be objected, but this would be naïve.  If it isn't going to be examined, then schools won't teach it.  The 'National Curriculum' is not the sole basis for shaping the educational journeys that students might undertake.  The nature of the final examination syllabus and the assessment regime in which that journey is completed are also key shapers of the wider unwritten curriculum that students experience.

Less admin, more teaching.  Quite so.  Focus finances on teachers and the classroom and laboratory experience.  Absolutely.  Avoid burdening 15-16 year old students with punishing exam and coursework schedules.  Well indeed.  But the management of time, money and bureaucracy are not educationally neutral activities.  Are we now better positioned to teach Science and grow new scientists, as well as a generation of students who understand what Science is and its ongoing contribution to society?  

Many of us are not convinced that we are.  We fear that we have rather gone full circle, and post-Gove's reforms, are back in a distinctly Dickensian situation.  In the opening lines of 'Hard Times' (Charles Dickens, 1854) the teacher's manager put it like this:

Critical Thinking 

A few years into my career there was a small victory for those wise owl teachers I reminisced about.  A one year AS level course (half an A level) was developed that proved popular with sixth forms who wanted to broaden their students' experience without adding to the content burden they faced.  It was a requirement in my school for students taking two A levels, and an option for those following three- typical flexibilities in the non-National Curriculum years after GCSE.  The course taught students the formal nature of an argument, being the making of a claim with some evidence.  Through a sequence of case studies, in which class discussion was the default activity, we would attempt to get better at thinking.  Some studies would look at topics that are easy to critique, such as recent product advertising media, while others would engage more challenging topics such as Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda from the late 1930s.  Note that the inception of this course predated the common use of the internet by students.  The only 'content' required in this curriculum were the criteria for evaluating sources of information and the claims based on them, so-called credibility criteria which might be summed up in mnemonics such as RAVEN or CRAVEN, viz

At times it could be challenging to keep students' minds focused (is it ever thus?!) on the skills being developed rather than the content that was in question at any time, since it would only ever be skills rather than content that would determine their examination outcome.  But this rather begs a question.  Is good thinking, so-called critical thinking, only about the process of thinking, or does it matter what is being thought about?  I will come to this below.  But the point in question in the AS course was about the evaluation of sources of so-called evidence, and the basis on which claims are being made.  This is a reasonable enough aim, and further resources have been developed to assist students at all levels post GCSE.  Here is another mnemonic which brings a different focus to the criteria that could be used to evaluate discrete sources of information.  'CARS' is more tailored to the pitfalls of the internet age, where students can so easily be caught out by web sources of dubious academic reputation (if any!).

The cartoon below is a modified version of one that used to amuse my students tremendously- you can see that there is now a computer featured, which did not appear in the original.  As I write, Putin's war against Ukraine is passing into its seventh month; this cartoon offers a deeply cutting analysis of the 'sources' emerging from both sides.

Thinking skills at 11-16

Should we be teaching all students to think about these, or other things? Surely these skills do belong in the KS3 and 4 curriculum, not just as an option for post-GCSE students following an academic learning route? The cautious might reply that we ought not overburden the younger and less able students whose requirement for a basic set of GCSE results is a higher priority.  This debate is ongoing, but I will observe here that some younger students are being introduced to critical thinking skills and familiarity with credibility criteria under the heading of 'Gifted and Talented', or 'Higher Ability Pupils' as they are latterly described.  Schools are developing bespoke in-house extra-curricular programmes to assist those so identified (and it is entirely up to each school how they do that) to reach their full potential.  In principle it is recognised that students who do well in the standard curriculum don't need or appreciate more of the same, but rather something different.  So I find myself delivering a speed course to a few 13 year olds on credibility criteria and critical thinking skills.  For some reason, they are much amused by this alternative mnemonic, which I've given out at the end of the course as a plenary.

Teaching about the credibility of claims in Science and Religion studies

If you are a teacher or student who is unfamiliar with the resources I have referred to above, then I hope that you will be much helped by this discovery.  There is a reference to a full slide deck below on Critical Thinking that will repay further study. Whether offered as a discrete section of the curriculum at any key stage or not, your teaching and learning will certainly benefit from the strategic perspectives deployment of these perspectives, not least at a time when 'fake news' is a phrase that has entered students' everyday vocabulary.  However, this is all preamble to my intentions in this blogpost.  As I hinted above, there is a bigger question at issue.  

The first drafts for Critical Thinking adopted the mnemonic RAVEN, but many took to adding a 'C' for Context (or Circumstantial matters).  What may be considered a reasonable and uncontroversial claim in one context is not (necessarily) in another context.  Meeting the other RAVEN criteria then becomes insufficient.  

The 'C' in CARS stands for credibility, which chiefly refers to the academic credentials of the author(s) in question, and this is an important point to emphasise with students.  But this higher level language (tier 3?) perhaps hides that credibility is fundamentally about whether a particular claim, and the person making it, are believable.  We are being asked to show faith in the overall claims of the author, based on their training and expertise, speaking as we hope they are on behalf of their wider academic community.  'Facts' are only presented as factual in that field because there is general agreement that such-and-such things are indeed the case, as best as they can tell. 

So this also overlaps with the 'A' in CRAVEN; whether the so-called experts, with their prior training and qualifications, are indeed able to see/perceive as would be required to give a valid basis to their claims to adjudicate that certain things are facts.

In CARS, the 'R' is for reasonableness, which is to say, is there discernible bias, or unprofessional motivation, or an important flaw in the consideration of alternate possibilities?  It is one thing to examine these matters as they apply within a specific subject area, but quite another when the question is interdisciplinary in nature.

The 'P' for purpose in CRAAP is helpful in this regard.  This heading helps us to grapple with the reality that information/ knowledge, or claimed facts, are not necessarily to be considered objective statements that simply exist.  They must have a foundation, and this can be very secure for certain purposes (and so treated as factual), but if deployed for other purposes, then this does not apply. 

All this is not to argue for some post-modern denial of any kind of objective truth or our ability to know about the world with reliable accuracy, but rather to argue for the necessity for some appreciation of philosophy, especially our philosophy of how we know anything, which is called epistemology.  We are thus faced simultaneously with three challenges if we are to apply all this to interdisciplinary questions in science and religion studies.

1.  What is religious knowledge? ( I felt like putting that first...)

2. What is scientific knowledge?  (Does it even matter what order they go in?)

3. How could we relate 1 and 2 together?  (and what about others...  ?)

I visited the Natural History Museum in South Kensington recently, and noticed some folk wearing T-shirts adorned with the Neil deGrasse Tyson quote above.  It's a good basis to start from, given the enthusiasm for anti-scientific conspiracy theories and COVID denialism that is going around at the moment.  I hope to teach my students to place a great deal of trust / faith/ credulity in the claims of Science to show us what the world is like and how we can interact with it appropriately.  

But if the purpose behind the pronouncements of a scientist is to wield the valid findings of science as knock-down evidence in a boundary question, or across the border of boundary questions in another discipline where the rules of science cannot apply, then they lose credibility as a reliable and qualified speaker, no longer being an expert, and now only giving an opinion.

It is regrettable that the extensive scientific training most scientists and science teachers have received lacks the philosophical insights that would safeguard them all from making simplistic and invalid generalisations about the powers of Science, without regard for its limitations, as though admitting such limits would undermine Science in any material way.  Perhaps it suits those with atheistic and humanistic commitments to have it so.

It is regrettable that too many with proper and respectable commitments to theism in one form or another (but certainly including a significant number of so-called evangelical Christians) lack the philosophical insights that would safeguard them from making simplistic and invalid critiques of Science, suggesting, for example, that the nature of Science being such that it holds even its strongest theories in an open hand, constantly open to review and modification as and when new evidence comes to light, therefore stands as a fundamental flaw to the whole discipline, undermining the whole of Science. 'You admit that you are never totally sure- so you have nothing certain to say!'  Perhaps it has suited them to have it so.

What we lack in our society is a general appreciation of what Science and those who are engaged in it are really able to see and perceive. (Elsewhere I have commented on the phenomena which show that the cosmos is both regular and very surprising) An education that facilitated this outcome would ground a proper appreciation of what scientists can properly claim to be facts, both by scientists and the public at large. If such activities were a universal feature of the religious education of all our students, not merely those who opt for a sufficiently advanced qualification as at present, then future generations can be enabled to respect the particular assumptions of believers and non-believers of various sorts, and evaluating which sorts of claims can be considered truth claims because there is some sort of validated evidence to back them up, and which are not, though can perhaps be respected for other reasons.  It is proper that we should be teaching students to understand what the purpose is behind all the subject disciplines, therefore giving them a sense of the extent to which balance and the consideration of alternative perspectives is valid, and indeed, vital.  Let's be clear, as I give some guidance on (3) above: we should all be affirming that Science is a powerful way of knowing about the cosmos and it offers us much knowledge that we should rightly consider in the category of facts, even if certain matters are subject to revision.  Yet there is a great deal that we now know we do not know, and this does indeed include matters on which various people hold what we can respectfully categorise as religious views.  Faith of a rather more active sort applies to them, and Science might offer assistance in sorting between those that are more or less reasonable.  However, since Science itself now shows us that the cosmos is less predictable and more surprising than was predicted/ expected one hundred or so years ago, Science certainly has no authority to adjudicate on which (religious) beliefs are more or less likely to be true by itself.  We may find other grounds for that. {But we might not, which is what is meant by the 'theory laden-ness of facts'} If there is to be better thinking in the future, of a critical and rigorous kind that assesses claims against credibility criteria, then this will be informed by all the subject disciplines, not solely by science.  Might Charles Dickens still say that we will likely need to engage in more philosophical exercises with teachers and students, and especially those who direct them? 

Notes, links and references

http://www.online-literature.com/dickens/hardtimes/2/

My claim is that there has been untoward interference in the reshaping of the curriculum by a number of non-educational agents, including government ministers, especially Michael Gove.  Others would go further to accuse many before him of also engaging in an overtly 'P'olitical project under the guise of constructing a general curriculum. For example: oai:eprints.ucl.ac.uk.OAI2:10021590  The National Curriculum: the natural evolutionary product of two decades of debate and development? Or a device for keeping the world Tory?  Patrick Trevor Willan  1 January 1995 Institute of Education, University of London.  Perhaps this all goes to show the peril involved in discussions of God, sex and politics- especially all three at once.

https://slideplayer.com/slide/243756/  Unit 501 'Critical Thinking'

https://lewisuwritingcenter.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/cars-checklist-for-evaluating-sources1.pdf

https://twitter.com/BlissfulBunbun/status/1474833698453278721/photo/1 ALSO at https://9gag.com/gag/abGgQ1B 

Similar CC4 source at https://libguides.cwc.edu/bias AND https://www.oercommons.org/authoring/54677-media-bias-handout/view MODIFYING THE ORIGINAL AT https://library.csuchico.edu/sites/default/files/craap-test.pdf  OR https://www.facebook.com/UWStoutLibrary/photos/a.10150674191761280/10158515308611280/?type=3 

https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1381197292728942595

https://www.rit.edu/cla/philosophy/quine/theory_ladenness.html

Conspiracy theories, stress testing credulity and Bertrand Russell's atheism.

Some science lessons happen outside of the regular classroom or science laboratory.  I was at the barbershop the other day getting smartened up for the new school year.  My eastern European barber didn't take very long to work out that I am a science teacher, or he may have remembered that from a previous visit.  'I have one question,' he told me.  I made a bet with myself that there would be more than one.
 

"How were the pyramids built?  Surely it was aliens, as they are just too good?" 

Now I've not had this come up in class, but I have heard this sort of thing before.  As there were no other colleagues or customers, I was up for both fun and some gentle exploration.  I also realised I was already back in my day job, as his English was good enough to ask the question, but not to cope with me throwing fancy words at him.  

"Why would you think such a thing?" I asked.  Sure, the Great Pyramid is a big pile of stones, some over 50 tons in mass, though most of the 2.3 million stones are 'only' 2.5 tons.  I boosted his ego by saying that he'd fit right in with the Egyptian workers with their big muscles and big brains, to work out how to cut and carry those stones in a logical order from quarry to rock pile using rollers and ropes and machines they could make from timber, stone and perhaps copper or alloy tools.  The most important point is that the fertility of the Nile delta was so extraordinary that the farming population are thought to have had nothing much to do for six months of every year for under three decades, so they talked themselves into building a monstrous construction of limestone and granite.  These days there's Lego.  Historical researchers seem to think that as few as 10 000 men could have done this work and finished the largest pyramid within their lifetimes.  But the construction was nothing to do with Charlton Heston or Israelite slaves, or slaves of any other sort.  Skilled work isn't done by slaves.

While admitting that this is still a highly demanding undertaking, with significant costs to human health and wellbeing, it was not at all beyond possibility or reasonable belief.  A simple channel dug around the site can provide a water trough that acts as a very precise level for the measurements that were required.  There are further mysteries to solve in our understanding of exactly how this mammoth task was carried out, but it was not a superhuman accomplishment.

There was a short pause as my busy friend pivoted to work at the other side of my head.

"OK- another question."

I knew there would be more.

"Is the earth flat or ... round?"  We progressed from 'ball' to 'sphere' in raising the vocabulary to an analytical level.

We were still alone, so I went for his funny bone.  "Have you been watching the cable channels at 2am after too many beers?  Is this just barber shop banter, or are you for real?"  Now I can only take what he said in reply at face value.  Though he chuckled at the imagery, he gave me to understand that he was serious, though he had been watching some such programme.

The Artemis 1 manned moon test was aborted last week, and the second was also unsuccessful, showing that the propellant leaks weren't fixed, but I went back to Apollo. "Do you think that 12 men went to the moon when I was a boy in the 1970s, or do you think that was that made up in film studios in Hollywood?"  "I don't know," he began but after some consideration, he conceded that these journeys were real, so I didn't need to point out that the Soviets would have called it out if the Americans had faked it.  Perhaps he was just going along with me, though I continued to be a little nervous about my powers of argument as he was holding those sharp clippers very close to my ear.  "What shape did they see the Earth was?" "Can you see all the countries around the world as it turns?"  He agreed that our planet does indeed appear to be round, and that this is not a flat disc, but a spinning ball.  My strategy of taking a distant and more objective view, to see that the moon is not just round but spherical, and that this viewpoint makes it possible to see the spinning and very spherical Earth unsupported in space, seemed to have paid off.

I made a little effort to say that this understanding of the true nature of the shape of the Earth, its rotation and our grasp of the insights of Isaac Newton made this sort of extra-terrestrial travel possible, with Space X recently placing a Tesla car into orbit beyond Mars, but he wasn't done.

In halting English he did his best to explain, waving his empty hand in the air.  "What about the ships that sail away over the edge?  Why can't you see them tilted?"  A reasonable enough question- because it is indeed hard for us to get to grips with just how large the Earth is.  Sure, it curves over toward the horizon, but the distant boat doesn't tilt, as far as we can see, as the planet is so large.  I'd like to have had this picture to hand to show him.

We'd got as far as this conversation was going that afternoon.  My haircut was done, and further customers had arrived. I managed to squeeze in a plenary- which can be tricky to do even at school- drawing this comparison, as I paid up my fee.  "This has been great.  When I walked in today you thought that the pyramids were too hard for the Egyptians to build, not having access to our modern technology, so aliens must have done it.  But those old guys were smarter than people say.  Then you tried to tell me that even though we now have modern technology, to build rockets and planes and phones, we couldn't trust people who tell us that the Earth really is a sphere. (Though I did think I'd convinced him by this time.) Don't throw your brains away!"  

I could be a bit blunter now, as he had put his clippers down.  He nodded, seeming sufficiently convinced.

Since this really is a true story, you will imagine that I was pretty happy with how this conversation went, and not at all surprised to hear that I anticipated writing this blog post as soon as possible.  Nevertheless, there is more to say here, because while the matter of credulity is relevant to a discussion of the limits of science, my barber shop student didn't get to grill me about my interest in science and religion.  I wonder if I would have found words for that just then.  Where might we go?

When I tell my older students about Russell's teapot I deliberately mix it up with the quip about the usefulness of a chocolate teapot.  The outspoken atheist simply invoked a regular china teapot in his analogy, as summarised above.  So I ought to quote him accurately.  But the key point is this.  I do not believe there were any stray kitchen utensils orbiting in the solar system in 1952 when Russell wrote his article, though there is plenty of space junk up there now.  Nevertheless, I do support and promote that there is a particular God who is supernatural and transcendent, and also immanent in nature, both sustaining the cosmos and capable of exercising agency within it.  Such activity would generate evidence, some of which should be discernible, and some of that within the boundaries of science, at least in principle.

However, Russell was mistaken.  Firstly, he implies that belief in a supernatural deity is of the same sort as accepting the hypothesis of a very small (and therefore, for us, invisible) teapot in orbit around the sun between the orbits of Earth and Mars.  Why is this an error?  Simply because it limits the conception of deity to that of an object within this universe, and one that is necessarily visible in some quality and dimension observable by means of science.  

Secondly, Russell's argument also rests on the assertion that all rational 'science' is the product of verifiable observation.  This blog has rehearsed two important flaws in that view of science.  Firstly, we now accept that there are many aspects of our universe that are considered real even though they are invisible, including so-called Dark Matter and the temporary products of the quantum vacuum.  Further, we have established that the laws of science are descriptions of what generally happens, but these descriptions of regularity are not a barrier to other phenomena.  Indeed, we are still none the wiser about what the laws actually consist of.  What makes them work, what breathes fire into the equations? (Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time.)

In intent, of course, Russell's argument stems from his belief that the very idea of a Deity in communication with our cosmos, exercising agency over it, is simply fanciful, and not at all to be taken seriously as it has no basis in reality or human experience of any kind.  Some will agree with Russell in this regard.  We can and should introduce our students to Bertrand Russell and his point of view.  Perhaps there is a God; perhaps there is not.  It remains logically possible that the existence of a regular law-ful universe is the free product of a supernatural Creator Who sustains it, and us within it, or not.  But neither option is made more or less likely as a result of stepping outside the spaceship to Mars to take tea with Bertrand Russell.

As is commonly the case in debates between atheism and theism, the straw man argument is at work.  As a Christian, I am happy to affirm that I don't believe in the 'God' that Russell wants to say he does not believe in.  Put simply, his straw God is too small.

I wonder what Russell would have made of this:

There is a webpage given below that makes useful comments, highlighting the risk of misinterpreting Russell's argument.  I agree that the issue is NOT about the assertion of an actual teapot in space, but rather the challenge of disproving a negative.  But I think this humorous caption hints at a deeper truth that isn't noted in the webpage.  God's agency is sovereign, requiring nothing for its basis and depending on nothing for its freedom.  Or more crudely, God launches Godself.

References and notes.

Science lessons at the barbers:  Stress testing credulity while he's holding the clippers.

Alien pyramid image: https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1213368

Giza pyramid: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giza_Pyramid.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/81/Flatearthfalsification.svg/613px-Flatearthfalsification.svg.png

Apollo 17 photo: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/60/Earth_over_Moon_-_Apollo_17.png/854px-Earth_over_Moon_-_Apollo_17.png

https://www.flickr.com/photos/spacex/40143096241

Two ships near the horizon: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/culture-online/ask-expert/your-questions-answered/earth-flat-or-circle

Russell's teapot slide: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/05/5b/51/055b51c34bff889dc0332e327febc22e.jpg

Wiki article: https://www.tau.ac.il/~tsirel/dump/Static/knowino.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot.html

Solar system graphic with hypothetical teapot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot#/media/File:Russell_teapot.png

Fuller debunking of Russell's 'inept' argument at (three free articles per month access) https://medium.com/@jrcii/debunking-russells-teapot-aa06417c0137 

Cartoon and explanatory commentary: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1866:_Russell%27s_Teapot

“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?”

― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

Doing justice to Big Questions, especially about evolution.

 

This article will give you some insights into my own journey as a student and teacher.  It has one main message to teachers and those involved in education in the science and religion field, a plea that, had my own teachers heard and responded to it, would have significantly improved my own educational experience.

My plea is this: don't allow the teaching and learning experience for our current students become reduced to a box-ticking exercise in delivering lesson objectives, in the mad rush to complete the examination syllabus.  Put another way, don't tolerate a style of teaching that relies so much on existing published resources that our students are robbed of the proper sense of amazement that ought to permeate their discoveries about the history of the only life we know of, found on this one tiny rock, in a layby of one galaxy, in a universe of galaxies.  It is not your fault that engendering 'a proper sense of amazement' isn't specified in the programme of study.  But I put it to you that it is your duty to deliver it, as best as you can.

And to put it yet another way, which might help us when teaching:  Let's avoid allowing an educational narrative that deals with a set of small questions hold us back from appreciating and properly grappling with the big questions in (and beyond) the areas of the curriculum that underpin the science-religion dialogue.  As I look back on my own experience as a student, and the reasons that my journey as a learner in this area took some of the directions that it did, I now identify this crucial error.  I was, I now very clearly understand, deeply frustrated by the overall experience I had as a student, because whatever big ideas were supposedly included in the curriculum, especially evolution, my teachers did not adequately and directly address them (very much).  (You should realise that my student days were completed before the National Curriculum was implemented in 1991: I began my career as a science teacher having learned the new 17 Attainment Targets for Science during Initial Teacher Training.  So my own experience in the 1980s was in the context of less determination of the learning experience, and that freedom was not necessarily well used.)   

I'd like you to forgive me in that I have not said 'Please' in any of the previous three paragraphs.  I did also suggest an expectation of 'duty'.  I am saying that it is vital that our students have an educational experience that acknowledges that knowledge matters- it inevitably has implications with meaning.  Now government guidelines through the DFE are very clear that students should be equipped to live and work in an increasingly technological world. So the science we teach is to be delivered to all with that wider purpose in mind. But teachers are known by their students for nurturing particular passions, which is often a cause for humour in the classroom. I suggest that more science teachers in particular should also be known for encouraging their students to consider the intricacies and complexities of the natural world as they learn in science, actively preventing them from being squeezed into a utilitarian mould of education that values learning objectives to be delivered to the detriment of facilitating a sense of wonder and amazement about what they are learning.  If you are reading this as a Primary specialist, you may be less concerned about this than I am in the Secondary phase.  It was a rare classroom of young students that did not have at least one child who wore their encyclopaedic knowledge of dinosaurs on their sleeve- I hope this is still true.  Dinosaurs jump out of the pages of the most fusty and old-fashioned library book to grab the imagination of children with both arms- especially the flailing and laughable limbs of the Tyrannosaurs!  That seven year old does not need to be told that learning about fossils should be an imaginative shortcut to fun.  It may be that more than a few professionals began their journey into science and science teaching from such experiences.  The photo of Paul Williams below, with the life-sized model of a Jurassic era ammonite he made for a BBC TV documentary rather gives away that such wonderment can last a lifetime and sustain careers.

I am absolutely not setting up a false choice here between an efficiently designed and timed science scheme of work that properly equips our students for a thorough experience of the curriculum in preparation for their GCSE examinations, that turns out to be boring, or a fun-filled learning experience that, regrettably, does not meet our full professional obligations.  It may be that, despite several reviews since 1991, the current curriculum and exam syllabi are unbalanced in some respects, perhaps overburdened with knowledge content at the expense of more opportunities for skills acquisition, and all this may well easily lead to pressure to concentrate teaching into an overly dry experience. That concern can be tackled elsewhere. My argument here is that pressure must be significantly resisted in this topic area.  This is because this knowledge generates possibilities for profound meaning.  Knowledge about evolution matters.  Of all the Big Questions we might come across in our educational experience, evolution must surely be amongst the biggest.  This is firstly because it is a/the big idea in science, not just in Biology, but extends to the production of all the chemical elements in stars, and cosmology generally.  And by necessity, evolution has implications for the Big Questions we have about ourselves, our values and our sense of meaning.

I suggest that it is no accident that the author of the 1973 paper, 'Nothing in Biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,' Theodosius Dobzhansky, identified as an Eastern Orthodox Christian and continued to write on theological themes at the climax of his career as a geneticist.  We may or may not agree with the assertion of his title, or the details of his argument (I do agree with him, on both counts), but Dobzhansky helps us make the case that how we think we and everything else came to be has implications for many other Big Questions we have about our lives and the cultures we are forming.  

Many of my own teachers, at school and at university, exercised their right to hold back from engaging in metaphysical questions.  I tried to take a genetics lecturer to task over this position, and am grateful to her to this day for tolerating my impertinence.  Other teachers were less professional and rather more dismissive.  As I have tried to show earlier in this blog, these positions may well be choices that we ought to respect, but they are not necessarily part of being a professional scientist or of a scientifically informed worldview.  The boundaries of science should be understood to be open to dialogue with other disciplines, engaging with questions that cross disciplinary boundaries.  Those of us who are believers, and I am chiefly addressing Christian believers (though other friends may sympathise with these views), should expect to be challenged to give positive reasons for our intellectual positions, and to do so with integrity as professional educators, as qualified graduates in (a) science discipline(s), and certainly also in terms of practicing our faith.  To be clear, this never means proselytising, which is unprofessional and illegal.  But students quite reasonably ask me, in lessons, "How can you be a scientist and believe in God, and specifically as a Christian?"  And I can give answers which are educative, briefly giving evidenced opinions within proper bounds of freedom of speech and respecting religious viewpoints, under the heading of protected characteristics.  This blog is exploring what good educative answers might be, so our students think as better scholars of science and also RE, aside from their personal judgements of their teacher.

To focus specifically on our science teaching, I am saying that since the DFE curriculum specifications for science are so brief in this area that there is a risk- is danger too strong a word?- that teaching will not engage students' thinking and appreciation of the topic as much as could and should be the case.  Here are the relevant passages from the 2014 policy document:

 .  

Science programmes of study: key stage 4. National curriculum in England. December 2014. 

Students should be helped to understand how, through the ideas of biology, the complex and diverse phenomena of the natural world can be described in terms of a number of key ideas which are of universal application, and which can be illustrated in the separate topics set out below. These ideas include:...  • evolution occurs by the process of natural selection and accounts both for biodiversity and how organisms are all related to varying degrees.  

Students should be taught about:...

    Evolution, inheritance and variation:

• the process of natural selection leading to evolution 

• the evidence for evolution 

[In Chemistry:] Earth and atmospheric science: 

• evidence for composition and evolution of the Earth’s atmosphere since its formation  

[In Physics:] Students should be helped to understand how, through the ideas of physics, the complex and diverse phenomena of the natural world can be described in terms of a number of key ideas which are of universal application and which can be illustrated in the separate topics ... These ideas include: 

• the concept of cause and effect in explaining such links as those between ... changes in atomic nuclei and radioactive emissions 

[which help us to understand...] the main features of the solar system.

So we can see that there is sufficient direction to show that science students at KS4 should be taught that evolution is an overarching theory that draws on evidence and reasoning from all three main science disciplines.  Good teaching will make these links specific, perhaps like this.  "The solar system only exists in its present form because several cycles of stellar evolution have taken place over more than 13 billion years of deep time, forming the elements from which our sun and planets are now formed.  Radioactive decay gives us sufficient data to establish that the earth is old enough for there to have been enough time for life to evolve from its first beginnings into the many forms we see today, as well as others that are now extinct.  Past life and geological processes have transformed the earth's atmosphere in many different ways over 4 billion years, and the recent changes caused by humans are continuous with these phenomena."  

I wonder if such a narrative is found in the texts and resources used in your classrooms, or is that rather more joined up than is your general experience?  If not found in printed resources, do you give such a joined up account yourself?  I've also hinted at some 'How science works' points, suggesting that although we don't know exactly how old everything is, the scientific observations that experts have made and published and reviewed have been generally agreed to give an acceptable overview of history at the planetary, solar and cosmic scales.  I left a space to return and comment that while there is accepted evidence for the evolution of modern species from prior ones, the primordial origin of life is a very much harder question to interrogate.  

A fantastic life-sized reconstruction of a 1.8-2.5m Creteaceous ammonite at the Hauff Museum of the Prehistoric World, in Holzmaden, Germany.

We should really try to help our students to understand just how challenging it is to find out about the early history of our planet, and especially of life on Earth more than a few thousand years ago.  Just as with the rest of the science curriculum, there is very little teaching about the history of discovery- how scientific knowledge took important steps forward.  Even when this does happen, such as teaching younger students about Mary Anning and her ground-breaking work on fossils at Lyme Regis (see what I did there...), we tend not to tell students what intelligent people thought before the big discovery was made, or the new idea was accepted.  There are science-and-religion implications here which we might reach out for in future planning.  We don't have enough teaching time, you cry.  I agree, but perhaps we can help each other more.

I said I was frustrated, and that I remain concerned about the basic quality of the teaching we deliver in this topic area as a general rule.  I'll be specific and perhaps guilty of over-generalising, though I don't think I am.

If the lesson schedule is tight, and our classes are mixed ability and facing imminent exam deadlines, what might likely happen in KS4 biology classes?  In an effort to ensure that students are prepared for their assessments, teaching and learning activities focus on the skills and knowledge required for the exams.  That means natural selection and evidence for evolution (probably related to adaptations) will be the main points of focus.  Now it might be easy to forget how challenging many students find the ideas about selection (both natural and artificial) to be.  The literacy skills demanded of students to compose a paragraph-length answer about changes in types of peppered moths on tree trunks are considerable.  

So it is likely that teachers will tend to avoid spending much time on the Big Picture of evolution, giving any significant coverage to the history of life on earth in all its diversity and complexity.  Instead of discussing the origins of life and recalling forgotten facts about dinosaurs, our students only write about moths on polluted dirty tree trunks and perhaps why Lamarck was wrong about giraffes stretching their necks.  All well and good, but a far cry from significant engagement with wider questions about evolution, or possible implications of these.  The National Curriculum specification is only considered at the smallest scale- changes in one species, seen in the (near) present day.  

Then the concluding statement might be made, that all we have to do is scale up this species-level narrative to the larger scale and voila!  There we are: 'From Goo to You by way of the Zoo!

Ammonite Biostratigraphy of the Cretaceous—An Overview.  See references.

GCSE Textbooks will not present detailed data like that shown above, or offer any engagement with the significant differences in scientific method and processes that must apply in testing evolutionary hypotheses.  Palaeontology and related topics are really interdisciplinary exercises, which we might discuss with our students in terms of science and history. You can't do empirical experiments on the past.  Data can only be collected from what remains, which won't be a random sample of what was once alive.  Extrapolation beyond a data set is not advised in experimental science, but we have no choice when attempting to study earth history.  The present can be used to find keys to the past, but uniformitarianism can only explain so much.  We know that dramatic and cataclysmic events have taken place in earth's history.  We will hopefully tell our students that the differences in Peppered moth colouration or the phenotypes of Gregor Mendel's sweet peas are caused by single allele differences, but these genetic studies are at the extreme and most simplified end of the spectrum of testable investigations.  Change and stasis in whole populations is much harder to understand, and almost beyond practical boundaries to investigate*- now, with living populations, never mind in the fossil record.  So we are limited to partial and unrepresentative data in generating our explanatory theories, which must be held in an open hand, and understood to be even more tentative than in experimental science.

My complaint is this: that in the process of choosing materials that are suitable for the majority of students to engage with, and given the style of questions regularly selected by exam boards, the scope of stimulus for students in this topic is reduced to a very low level.  The communication skills demanded are still considerable to attain the highest grades, so my complaint is not about the maintenance of academic rigour as such.  However, the scope of questioning is highly constrained, only considering what might be termed cases of small scale or 'micro-evolution'.  I feel that this approach does our students a disservice.  The DFE National Curriculum documents do not limit the teaching and learning within any such narrow boundaries, but here, 'teaching to the test' (which is never a good basis for education) seems likely to result in a deliberate bias in the way our current scientific understanding of the concept of evolution is evidenced.

I wonder if this situation has arisen very directly because of the recent history of the science and religion debate, and especially in schools.  Is it because of arguments about whether evolution has really happened at the largest 'macro' scale that the examination boards and text book writers have brought in this approach as a means of avoiding/ minimising such potential criticism?

If there is any substance to my speculation, then that must surely be the basis for an argument to improve the quality of education we are designing and delivering.  If it is recognised that questions about evolution have a scope beyond that of empirical practice, and that there are aspects to questions about evolution that cross into other disciplines, then that should be an argument for better interdisciplinary thinking and teaching and learning.  

It is of course vital to acknowledge that there are two different matters at stake in the teaching of evolution.  First is the matter of what happened.  Is there good evidence, from a number of relevant fields of science, that evolution, the development of new species from previously existing species, has taken place and that this is the case universally for all animals and plants?  The National Curriculum statement is sound: the answer is Yes.

Secondly, there is the matter of mechanisms, and our understanding of them.  Is it the case that natural selection, analogous to artificial selection, is the best and prevailing theory currently accepted by science and scientists for the generation of new species? Yes it is, and so it should be taught, and taught as such.  

But it is the case that there is a very great deal that remains unknown and perhaps even unknowable about what happened, and how it happened.  Science education that only tells students what we do know, but does not admit to what we don't and cannot know is poor education.

There are also some long-standing questions that continue to vex the scientific community, and these are often the matters which attract unhelpful attention in the science and religion dialogue, or perhaps debate is the better word here.  Does the fossil record, now much more thoroughly researched and investigated than was the case in Darwin's day or even by 1960 (a century after 'On the Origin of Species'), show the gradual change of one species into another on a frequent basis?  No, it does not.  The picture below is much more the normal situation:

Evolution of ammonites of the families Craspeditidae and Polyptichitidae in the Arctic zoogeographical region in the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous (Neocomian). (see references)

Palaeontological investigation finds that species appear more or less suddenly in the fossil record, exhibit some modest level of variation throughout time, and then disappear.  Diagrams like the one above for Jurassic and Cretaceous ammonites, a relatively common type of fossil that might be expected to give a more extensive insight into evolutionary changes, show rather that there are significant gaps between the phenotypes of the various species and families.  Such diagrams feature dotted lines indicating what is hypothesised but not evidenced.  Should this fact be allowed to give our students the idea that the theory of natural selection is not adequate for explaining evolutionary relationships and changes? No.  But need we claim that there is no need to be open to new evidence and theories that might add significantly to our understanding of what happens, in the general case, and how it happens? No!  I think that part of good science teaching is being open to these truths.  If it is felt that such an approach makes education vulnerable to exploitation by 'young earth creationism' or the like, then that should be taken as a prompt to develop better science teaching, not to shy away from teaching all of the key aspects of the big picture offered by an evolutionary understanding of the world, and that may well demand a more cross-disciplinary approach in the future.  This should go hand in hand with the desire to equip our society for living in a future shaped by cutting-edge technological and scientific developments.

For much of the history of the cosmos, there was simply a vast and expanding space with just a few types of elements thinly distributed amongst that vast space.  It was many billions of years before oxygen was formed, and water became possible as a compound.   For less than half of the time there has been a cosmos- because it did start from nothing, we now know- the solar system we live in has been in formation, and while it seems that life did, somehow, begin on earth not very long after it cooled sufficiently for liquid water to remain stable, that cellular life only slowly evolved into vertebrates and then primates.  Giant molluscs including the ammonites had their heyday in the ancient seas up to 85 million years ago.  Based on the limited though not inextensive evidence now collected by generations of palaeontologists, we can surmise what the world looked like around that time.

Artwork of reconstruction of a Jurassic sea featuring ammonites, from Museum Joanneum. See ref.

Such an imaginative evidence-based picture is the result of sound work in science, and it should be brought to the attention of our students.  But it tends not to be.  They only get to study material like this:

I hold that this is fine as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough!  School pupils should be given the opportunity to appreciate the developing understanding that we have of evolution on the grandest scale, in the style of the following:

The evolution of endothermy in archosauromorphs and synapsids from the Permian to the present day. (See Benton and Wu, 2002, in references)

Here we might hope to bring a synthesis of the concepts of classification that are delivered at KS3, the physiology of so-called warm and cold-blooded organisms, the mechanisms of decay and biomineralisation that pertain to fossilisation, and revisit the enthusiasm that at least some of our teenagers used to have for dinosaurs when they weren't ashamed to be enthusiastic and seven years old, and the other questions that they come up with that are less predictable, and probably don't fit so neatly into our disciplinary silos.  

One of the interdisciplinary issues will be information.  The figure above shows there was a spectacular diversification of lifeforms at the end of the Permian/ start of the Triassic, just as there was a great diversification of life at the Precambrian to Cambrian.  We should be able to demonstrate to our students that these phenomena may appear to pose great challenge to our current understanding, but that we also have reason to be confident that science will be equal to those challenges, whether in evolution, or immunology, or in neuroscience.  Understanding genetics, especially in the context of evolutionary history, is a task for science that will be greatly enhanced through collaboration with information technology and computing.  Honesty about what we don't yet know should lead to well-formed questions and hypotheses that mean science, and its disciplinary partners, will lead us to new discoveries and understanding in the future.  Some may object that I am trying to squeeze too much into the KS4 curriculum.  Let's have that debate.  I maintain that the present situation is that we have squeezed too much out.

I think we should get back to the Triassic and Jurassic and the rest, so that we can try to ensure things make more sense to our students.  By which I mean that we are engaging our students in teaching and learning that comes to understand better how science helps us to know about and understand the world, including this world in the distant past.  Such improvements should lead them to a better appreciation of the powers and limitations of good science done well, and also to appreciate the potential for interdisciplinary working to make better sense of the world we live in and are part of.

The Judeo-Christian claim is that the covenant God of the Hebrew Bible (and for Christians, also the New Testament, therefore one and the same God) is the God who made 'all creatures, great and small', in the words of Cecil Alexander's 1848 hymn that Primary school students might still hear from time to time.  It is surely reasonable that if science lessons are thought to have considered the concept of evolution in an adequate manner, accepting that curriculum time is limited, then we should at least ensure that our consideration of the data that evolution theory addresses should stretch well beyond Peppered Moths to embrace 'P'terodactyls and Mammoths and the rest.   Evolution is a very big and bold theory, and if we teach that more adequately, we open the possibility to also doing justice to the ensuing Biq Questions that stretch across the borders of Science.

Postscript: I consider Dobzhansky's 1973 article to be spectacularly good.  I find myself repeating many things that he says, remembering that he puts them extremely well.  I find it extraordinary that some 5 decades later, all that needs updating is the estimate of how many species currently exist on Earth- or at least until we kill them off.  Without saying so directly, he repeatedly puts one of the most significant questions to believers who try to make sense of evolution, but then fall to criticising the idea in principle: 'Is your God too small?'  See link at (3) below.

References and notes.

1.  https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/381380/Science_KS4_PoS_7_November_2014.pdf

2. https://www.geologyin.com/2021/10/giant-ammonites-once-thrived-on-both.html "This was a replica that we used to show how big ammonites could grow. Made of polystyrene; it squeaked as we rolled it down the beach at Lyme Regis."  Model made for a BBC documentary by Steve Leonard and Paul Williams. Explore Paul Williams www.IronAmmonitePhotography.com's photos on Flickr.

3. Dobzhansky, Th. (1973). "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" (PDF). The American Biology Teacher. 35 (3): 125–129.

4. Ammonite model at the Museum of Natural History, Holzmaden.  https://pxhere.com/en/photo/552288     CC0 Public Domain.  Link to news article 2021 https://www.sci.news/paleontology/giant-ammonites-10129.html 

5. Ammonite Biostratigraphy of the Cretaceous—An Overview.  Jens Lehmann  First Online: 23 July 2015

 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-9633-0_15

* Unless you are going to join Peter and Rosemary Grant on a Galapagos Island for 25 years ringing every single one of generations of Darwin's finches and taking blood samples.  See The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner. 1994.  https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-beak-of-the-finch/summary 

6. Evolution of ammonites of the families Craspeditidae and Polyptichitidae in the Arctic zoogeographical region in the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous (Neocomian). Public access.
A Mesozoic Ocean In The Arctic: Paleontological Evidence January 2002 Russian Geology and Geophysics 43(2):143-170 Authors: V. A. Zakharov Boris Shurygin A.A. Trofimuk N. I. Kurushin S. V. Meledina https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-ammonites-of-the-families-Craspeditidae-and-Polyptichitidae-in-the-Arctic_fig13_237466024

7. https://www.museum-joanneum.at/fileadmin//user_upload/Presse/Standorte/Dauerausstellung/Naturkundemuseum/Messner_02.jpg  Available from https://www.museum-joanneum.at/en/press/museum-sites/natural-history-museum

8. BBC Bitesize page with graphics of horse evolution, at  https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zthcwmn/revision/2 

9. FIGURE 7. The evolution of endothermy in archosauromorphs and synapsids from the Permian to the present day. In the analysis, ancestral states of resting metabolic rates, measured in mLO2h−1 g−0.67, are estimated at each branching point in the phylogeny and color-coded to indicate the level (note the logarithmic scale). Values for ectotherms are typically 1.0, with modern mammals having RMR values in the range 1.5–3.5, and modern birds, 8–12 mLO2h−1 g−0.67. Based on data in Legendre et al. (2016), with thanks to Lucas Legendre for the base image. Excerpted from online paper 'Triassic Revolution' by Michael J. Benton and Feixiang Wu Front. Earth Sci., 17 June 2022 Sec. Paleontology at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2022.899541/full

10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2l0BP1DM4U  This rendition by a very plumy choir is so old I can imagine that Cecil is singing soprano in it.  Rather a lot of the current Youtube versions now feature one or other of the recent melodies, but this is the proper one.  The principle of Survival of the Fittest seems to apply to hymn tunes as well as biological species- a point that Richard Dawkins made, is we take it that hymn tunes are memes.

What about claims in Christianity which are close to Scientific enquiry?

So far I have explored what science is as a discipline, and commented on the way that school science lessons typically only deal with some aspects of what the scientific method consists of. I've described the way in which Science is a search for knowledge about the natural world that gathers all its data from our human senses, enhanced by scientific instruments, and tried to make the case that there could be some real features of the cosmos that might not show up in this way.  I then gave some critical consideration to what we mean by scientific law, and why we need to consider that there could be phenomena that could, in principle, be real, but might be hard or impossible for scientists to investigate and describe in 'lawful' terms.  To exclaim sceptically, "That isn't scientific!," is simply to misunderstand what the discipline of Science is really able to do.

I rather hope that I won't have lost any of my professional colleagues so far in this journey, whether you agree that science could have a constructive relationship with religion or not.  At this point in my discussion it should be straightforward to agree that a good understanding of Science would make it possible to consider the claims of one religion or another and, after investigation, finally rule them out as being a complete fantasy.  (Teachers will be challenged in this case to decide how to show respect to students, their families and their communities without being as blunt/offensive as I've just been.  This situation must surely apply to me too, as, presumably, I in fact do think that the religious claims made by believers of other religions than my own are false and therefore fantastical.  Let's keep this for another time.)

Since I am a Christian and a teacher at Secondary level (mostly in Science), I now need to move on to deal with the more challenging and interesting case: I propose that Christianity does make claims that are partly about the real world, life and the universe in which we find it, even as recognised by Science.  The reason for this website/ blog is because my experience has been that many of the 'contributions' made in this area of culture over more than the last century have more often been arguments about inadequately communicated opinions rather than reasoned investigations into fields of study that have different standards for facts and the findings that follow from them.  As the judge might say to the lawyer, 'I find that your argument generates more heat than light!'  (Now this statement itself warrants examination- hold that thought!)

So having composed four posts on Science, it is time to move on to examine key claims of the Judeo-Christian religion in a similar manner.  There are many of these, so as in every educational setting, we must be selective.  Sometimes the curriculum helps with this, but in the science and religion dialogue, there is little guidance in the specifications, so teachers &/or their students may well make reference to textbooks or other materials that give an ill-informed and unfair perspective. We should listen to proper specialists and experts who will tell us if that selectivity is biased in a way that misrepresents.  [This is also a common debating strategy, called the straw man argument.  Instead of taking the opposition seriously, the debater makes up a distorted version that their opponent doesn't believe either.  Let me sum up an aggressive position against Christians like this: 'Christians don't use reason or take notice of Science; they just believe the unproven opinions of their priests, having blind faith in their teachers and 'holy' texts made up before we were blessed with Science.'] (I would argue, in general, that there is insufficient attention given to these matters in the curriculum, and that giving scanty coverage to important culturally sensitive questions is itself a bias.  I will extend that idea in a later post.)

One of the few areas of science where the scope for a dialogue with religious (Christian, in this case) views comes up is the place of the Earth in the Solar System.  A school textbook is likely to deal with this topic in just a few words, which necessarily means that the treatment will be brief and, most likely, blunt.  Typically, they say things like this: In the time of the Old Testament (say 800BC) the Jews believed the scriptural statements that said that the Earth does not move.  In 1615 Galileo presented evidence to the Catholic Church that showed that this was not true, just as Copernicus had suggested with his heliocentric theory, that the Earth orbits the Sun, and not the other way around.  The textbook author might then close with a statement that suggests that Galileo the scientist should be judged as victorious over the blind dogma of the Church.

[I intend to illustrate this section with accurate quotations from recent textbooks.]

Such a statement is of poor academic quality and certainly does not make for good education, as it doesn't do justice to the position of science or religion.  It certainly does not give teachers appropriate guidance in showing respect for students and their religious viewpoints.  

As I said above, this sort of oversimplified account amounts to a straw man argument (especially as I've not yet quoted primary sources!).  A full specialist treatment of the Galileo affair would not fit in the secondary school curriculum, though I will indicate in a later article what more could usefully be said about it beyond the remarks below.

Is it fair to state that the Hebrew texts assert that the Earth does not move?  This seems a reasonable judgement to reach.  It is a commonplace argument to say that Jews and Christians take the biblical texts as being authoritative and the main source of revelation from God to His people, considered as both Jews and as Christians.  For many believers, if one scriptural text makes an assertion, it is taken seriously, but if two texts say the same thing, then this is like underlining, or using luminous yellow highlighter.  Well here are seven examples, from the Old Testament books of 1 Samuel, 1 Chronicles, Job and four more from various Psalms:

• 1 Chronicles 16:30 Tremble before him, all the earth! The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.
• Psalm 93:1 The LORD reigns, he is robed in majesty; the LORD is robed in majesty and armed with strength; indeed, the world is established, firm and secure.
• Psalm 96:10 Say among the nations, “The LORD reigns.” The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved; he will judge the peoples with equity.
• Psalm 104:5 He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.
• Job 9:6 He shakes the earth from its place and makes its pillars tremble.
• Psalm 75:3 When the earth and all its people quake, it is I who hold its pillars firm
• 1 Samuel 2:8 “For the foundations (translated pillars in the ESV) of the earth are the LORD’s; on them he has set the world.

[as quoted from the NIV and collated at https://thewartburgwatch.com]

It seems pretty clear then that the claim that the Bible teaches that the earth/ world does not move, that is, that it is fixed in place, rests on firm scriptural foundations!  

It should not be surprising therefore that intelligent people who were born before the eras of sailing around the world, or flying round the world, or orbiting in a spacecraft, might mistakenly think that the earth doesn't move through space.  Our everyday experience of day and night is just the same as it was for the people who wrote the biblical texts about 2000-3000 years ago: we don't see the sun at night, but rather the wheeling stars, while on a cloudless day the sun appears to move in an elegant and steady arc across the sky from east to west.  We have no sensation of movement when we look up at the sky. Rather, it seems that the stars above are moving around us, and that the Sun is what is in motion, not the solid ground we are standing on, during the daytime.  So expecting a modern astronomically accurate description is unreasonable. We should perhaps be content that the Bible is repeatedly giving a poetically conceived view of the earth and the heavens, and attributing this steady state of affairs to the might of God.  

A further criticism could be levelled at the Hebrew texts.  The talk of 'foundations' and 'pillars' seems to make it plain that the biblical authors had adopted the world picture of their near neighbours in the Ancient Near East.  So the descriptions indicate that the ancient Hebrews thought that the world that God sovereignly maintains looks something like this:

[Note that such a diagram exists nowhere in the ancient world or discovered texts- this is a modern graphic creation based on the textual sources.  Perhaps this very fact further establishes that we moderns think differently to the ancients- so we shouldn't demand that they perform to our expectations.] 


So the problem could be stated like this. Jews and Christians claim that the Bible is authoritative in all important respects, and the scriptures that both hold with great seriousness to be the revelation of God (Who knows everything) baldly states in clear language that the earth that is the common home of us all through history does not move, and what is more, it is fixed on some sort of pillar-and-foundation system. Modern science now shows, even from as far back as Galileo's telescope observations, that the earth is not at all fixed at the centre of the universe. Therefore, two fatal conclusions must follow: the repeated claims in the biblical texts about the place of our planet in the solar system and the universe are demonstrably in error, both in terms of the shape and nature of our earth, and also in its motion around the Sun. Most significantly, the very claim that the scriptures are the inspired Word of an all-knowing Deity is shown to be ridiculous.


All at once therefore the science lesson presents the telescope observations that Galileo first made and have been repeated and extensively extended since achieving the twin ends of establishing the triumph of Science over the naïve and mistaken beliefs of such primitives; also over the religious obscurantism of human authorities that insisted on holding to such unreliable texts. It also, by the way, rubbishes the claim that God had originally inspired the texts, giving us 'God's eye view' of our true place in the cosmos, and what might happen to it in the future. All that the various Psalms and other texts had to say was really no different to the view of the world picture held by the Israelite's neighbours at the time the Hebrew Bible was conceived and written down. They clearly had no such access to a more reliable view of the world.


It might then be added that the Catholic Church at the time of Galileo had dogmatically adopted the Greek Ptolemaic theory of our solar system, that the earth is a sphere at the centre of our system, with the moon and other planets orbiting us, as the Sun also appears to do. So Galileo was fighting two considerable enemies- the false science of Ptolemy that the Church in Rome had accepted, along with the human-centred view of the cosmos as laid out in the Psalms and elsewhere in Holy Scripture.

By such references Galileo Galilei is made out to be the oppressed hero of Science, who cleverly assembled the technology of the telescope from manufactured optical lenses and then methodically collected vital observations to prove that Nicolas Copernicus' heliocentric theory gave a better fit with the astronomical evidence than Ptolemy's geocentric model.  Further, Galileo heroically stands up to the bigotry of the Pope and the Church authorities, despite being placed under permanent arrest and confined to his house for teaching in the public marketplace that the earth really does move.  But it is usually not mentioned that Galileo continued to confess his Christian faith, despite the treatment he received from the Church authorities.

So how might a modern day Christian who takes science and history seriously deal with this situation?  I suggest the following approach will assist in the design of a more satisfactory apologetic and a superior educational approach.

First, it must be conceded that it must be the case that Jews and Christians, in the past and even in the present day, did not and do not always hold rationally defensible positions on these topics.  However, much in the account of science has changed even very recently, and this will continue to be the case.  I've given examples in the earlier articles.  Scientists (good ones anyway) do not ridicule those who held views that turn out now to be disproven.  So it is shoddy for science teachers, science textbook authors or even practising scientists to ridicule others who had/have religious views that come under critique in the advance of scientific explanations and theories.  It is easy to have perfect hindsight...

So what of the status of the Bible as a source of knowledge?  Well, it depends what is implied by that sort of statement.

My fellow religionists are sometimes heard to make statements like the one above, or alternatives such as, 'The Bible speaks in every area, and in every area in which it speaks, it speaks the Truth.'  You may care to read the essay by Matthew Barrett at the Gospel Coalition website (reference below) which explores this sort of position.  But the crucial point is this: do the Bible's own claims about the revelatory insights provided by the inspired word of God, such as found in 1 Timothy 5, mean that we should expect the Bible to speak authoritatively about Science as well as our (potential) relationship with God and one another, as informed by the Christian religion?  I once accepted that hypothesis in the affirmative, 'in good faith' as you might say, but do so no longer, as I found that it didn't work out- a sound outcome of the exercise of both faith and science, I would suggest.  There is not agreement amongst Christians and their churches on this matter, but that is why I am writing this blog!  Knowledge of all kinds is progressing, and at pace, so there need not be special reason for alarm here.  Since matters of faith and values are at stake, we simply need to proceed with caution.

So what do I now think?  What would constitute a reasoned position for a Christian who is a Science Teacher to adopt, and thus to inform their classroom practice?

I would begin by saying that a sound position would be to accept that the biblical authors were very much informed by their 'everyday perspectives' on the world as they saw and lived in it. The earth is steady under our feet, as is the appearance of things that are the heavenly bodies: Sun, Moon and Stars (some of which we now understand as nearby planets in the same sort of orbit as we are) which all seem to be moving around us while we are not; as they had no other means of understanding them.  The scriptural statements don't say differently as that would appear to be nonsense, not meaningful revelation.  God accommodates to our human perspective.  Now that we know better, we are expected to be wise enough to accept this, rather than to accuse God of unreliability, deception or incompetence.  It is a regrettable fact that many believers in history past did not come to such a realisation, but that is not our concern.  Galileo's example of grace (at least in this case) is to be applauded.

Further, we do not have to accuse the Hebrews or early Christians of intellectual incompetence in making statements that are now accepted as inspired and now inscripturated that, we now realise, are scientifically inaccurate, misleading, ie plain wrong!  They certainly seem to have accepted the 'world picture' prevalent at the time that they shared with their cultural neighbours, and this is evidenced in the literary substance in which the scriptures are framed and formed.  We do not need to commit to a view of scriptural revelation, reliability and meaning that claims inerrancy in matters of science as well as in (particular matters of) religion.  Some may choose to, but this cannot be an acceptable basis for science teaching in the UK at this time. This author and this site aims to meet the requirements for better teaching and learning.

What is the positive position that can be adopted regarding the 'proof texts' quoted above?  What is the inspired claim of scripture, of the word of God as claimed by Christians (as well as Jews, in this regard)?  I suggest this: the world as we live on it has all the appearance of being fixed in the heavens.  Why is that? And how did it come to be so? Will it continue to be so?  Importantly and vitally:- because the God that the Bible says is the One True God created it to be so, and Who Providentially maintains it in such a state, for as long as the Deity deems it will continue to be so.  The weight of scriptural authority does not, therefore, rest on the claims of an immovable earth in the midst of the cosmos (though Pope Urban VIII evidently thought it was), nor is scriptural authority endorsing the common world picture held for centuries and millennia by all in the Ancient Near East.  What the scripture is asserting with all weight and seriousness is that our place in God's cosmos is assured by God, the God of covenant with God's created peoples.  Our position at the centre of God's attention, says the Bible, now that we understand more science, is solely a function of God's choosing, not the nature of planetary orbits or the particular locus of the earth in the solar system, galaxy or universe.

So I disagree with the view adopted by Matthew Barrett and others, and hold rather more closely to the quotation above attributed to the US President, Ronald Reagan.  But with the caveat that the 'problems' we should have in mind are those that the Bible should be properly understood to be addressing.  As Galileo quoted another Catholic authority in his lifetime:

I invoked the judge in my introduction who tells off the lawyer for generating heat rather than light in his attempt to show that his view is superior.  Why do we get 'hot under the collar' arguing about these things?  Because the implications matter to us as people, as human beings who practise Science, and who are also motivated to form cogent views about our status as creatures in the cosmos, people whose lives and relations would have meaning.  As our knowledge about the cosmos is increasing exponentially at this time, as our technological powers are blossoming and running away beyond our ability to control, even to the imperilling of our planet, we are still struggling to recalibrate our traditions and cultures of meaning.  It is right that we should engage with emotion and spirit in our dialogues about our nature and place in the world, and seek to integrate our religious understandings with the perspectives afforded by science.  There must be both heat and light- this is true enlightenment, a progress of human becoming, in which we can embrace difference and also educate with mutual respect.

In conclusion therefore, having carried out an analysis of Science and the Scientific Method, I have now started to consider how we should handle religious claims (specifically biblical, Judeo-Christian ones) that pertain to science-and-religion conversations. Others must decide if these points are more widely applicable.  I have suggested that teachers and their students need to get better at describing and explaining what Science is and how it should be understood, because there is need for improvement.  Now we have started the same process on the religion side of the dialogue, addressing some stereotypes and past bad practice, both by science authors/teachers and by many proponents of religion generally, and many Christians in particular.  I am making the case that through these exercises we will become better teachers, handling boundary issues in science and religion with more accuracy and professionalism.  I suggest that our cultures and communities will be enriched as future generations of students become so equipped.

PS. You may agree with me that we are still left with nagging questions about what the worldview of the Bible actually is.  This would lie somewhat beyond the scope of teaching science and religious education in UK secondary schools, but you may be interested in further exploring my own views at common or garden theologian.

1. Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/exploratorium/481758327  Heat Camera Exhibit (c) Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)  [Note that this technology can be life-saving, as testified by this woman who noticed the early signs of breast cancer when she visited this science museum exhibit:  https://www.asiaone.com/world/woman-alerted-her-breast-cancer-museums-heat-cam-exhibit   Yes kids, visiting museums can save your life!!  Do read the article, and see if you can you spot an error in the story.]

2. https://www.abi.org/abi-journal/shakespeare-for-lawyers-more-heat-than-light

3. https://thewartburgwatch.com/2011/09/02/the-earth-is-fixed-and-the-sun-moves-real-christians-believe-it/

4. A P Dickin ANE world picture diagram at https://benbyerly.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/why-you-dont-really-read-the-bible-literally-the-cosmic-dome-and-contextualization/

5. Matthew Barrett's essay at https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/authority-inerrancy-scripture/

6. https://openclipart.org/detail/203633/geocentric-and-heliocentric-systems

7. https://www.siyavula.com/read/science/grade-7/relationship-of-the-sun-to-the-earth/18-relationship-of-the-sun-to-the-earth?id=toc-id-11

8. On accommodation: Denis O. Lamoureux, Evolution, Scripture and Nature Say Yes! (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016). p115

9. https://fourstringfarm.com/2013/02/12/the-path-of-the-sun/

10.  Galileo Galilei in his letter to the Grand Duchess Christina. Attributed to Cardinal Caesar Baronius.  Mentioned, for example, here https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/newsweek/science_of_god/heavens.htm   

"He is also famous for saying, in the context of the controversies about the work of Copernicus and Galileo, "The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."[3] This remark, which Baronius probably made in conversation with Galileo, was cited by the latter in his "Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina" (1615)." found at https://religion.fandom.com/wiki/Caesar_Baronius   Note 3 at this site references this pdf which says that there is no documentary evidence of the supposed conversation, but that it was never contested, https://www.oratoriosanfilippo.org/galileo-baronio-english.pdf