Design comes into fashion | Andrew Halloway

Andrew Halloway reports on how Intelligent Design and creationism are gaining ground across the world.

In a major article titled ‘In the beginning’, the April 19 2007 issue of The Economist said, ‘The debate over creation and evolution is fast going global’. After debating whether or not the Pope supported Intelligent Design (ID), it stated: ‘Not that the advocates of Intelligent Design or outright creationists are in need of anyone’s endorsement… their ideas are flourishing and their numbers growing.’

Both creationism and ID argue that the world shows evidence of a Designer. Creationism goes further and also argues for the specific process of creation as outlined in the Bible. But both aim to expose the deficiences of evolution, and it seems that their efforts are succeeding, way beyond their origins in America and Britain.

Russian challenge

Earlier this year, Russia saw its first legal challenge to the teaching of evolution. According to the February 2 2007 issue of Science Magazine (published by The American Association for the Advancement of Science), the Russian Ministry of Education and Science was sued for not allowing other theories on origins into school textbooks.

Mariya Shraiber, 16, an 11th grader at public school No. 148 in St. Petersburg, sued the Russian Ministry of Education and Science, on the basis that the school’s biology textbook offended her faith because it does not allow for other theories, such as creationism. She believes that the science in The Origin of Species is unproven and derived from Marxist-Leninist ideology.

A spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate, Father Vsevolod Chaplin, said Darwin’s theory of evolution was ‘based on pretty strained argumentation’ — and that physical evidence cited in its support ‘can never prove that one biological species can evolve into another’. Despite the support of Father Chaplin and other members of the Russian Orthodox Church, some of whom regularly attended the court proceedings, Mariya lost her case. But the country’s education and science minister, Andrei Fursenko, suggested that he was not averse to amending the textbook to include a variety of theories (Science Magazine, Vol. 315, No. 5812, February 2 2007).

EU workshop

Across Russia, creationist societies are growing, and they conduct their own research. For example, the Moscow-based ARCTUR Research Geological Lab is gathering geological and geochemical evidence for creationism.

Meanwhile, the Polish biologist Maciej Giertych has been trying to convince the European Parliament that evolution is a falsified hypothesis. The 70-year-old, a Member of the European Parliament and former head of the Genetics Department of the Polish Academy of Science, organised a workshop for parliamentarians in October 2006 entitled ‘Teaching evolution theory in Europe: is your child being indoctrinated in the classroom?’

Professor Giertych questioned the value of teaching a continually falsified hypothesis — macroevolution — to students throughout Europe, as well as pointing out its lack of usefulness in regard to scientific endeavour. Dr. Hans Zillmer, a German palaeontologist and member of the New York Academy of Sciences, also told the meeting that the fossil record holds no proof for evolution theory. Instead of showing gradual change from one species to another, as is often claimed in the classroom, it actually reveals the stasis and stability of life forms.

Creation questions

The rise in creationism and ID is constantly dismissed in the media by evolutionists. But leading evolutionist Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College London, is worried. He says, ‘I have talked about evolution in front of more than 100,000 British schoolchildren in the past 20 years — during most of that time I was never asked questions about creationism. But in the past couple of years, wherever I go I am asked about it’ (Nature 444, November 23 2006).

In Germany, after it emerged in 2006 that two schools in the German state of Hesse were teaching creationism, the state education minister Karin Wolf argued that the Christian view of creation should be discussed in science classes (Nature 444, November 23 2006). In Italy, a 2006 study by Observa Science in Society, a Vicenza-based group that promotes scientific debate, showed that almost two-thirds of Italians wanted school lessons to include creationist views as well as evolution.

Korea and Kenya

In South Korea, the Korea Association of Creation Research boasts over 1,000 members, including about 500 PhD level scientists. Most of the members hold jobs as university professors, research scientists or engineers.

According to The Economist, in Kenya there was a bitter controversy in April over a display of the skeleton of a ‘prehistoric human being’, known as Turkana Boy, and other fossils. Bishop Boniface Adoyo, an evangelical leader who claimed to speak for 35 denominations and ten million believers, denounced the exhibit, asserting, ‘I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it.’

Muslim interest

Creationism and ID are also strong in Turkey and several other Muslim countries, though, obviously, Muslims use creationist science to argue for the Koran rather than the Bible. One of the world’s leading Muslim creationist organisations is based in Turkey — the Bilim ve Arasütirma Vakfi. In a TV debate on the Turkish educational system, the country’s Minister of Education, Mr. HŸseyin ‚elik, argued in favour of intelligent design and for incorporating the theory into Turkish high school biology textbooks. The debate was aired on CNNTurk on October 17 2006 on the popular TV show Tarafsiz Bšlge (Neutral Zone).

According to Steve Jones, creationist publications are proving extremely popular at the Istanbul book fair. He says, ‘Creationism is a major issue in Turkish politics; the debate is much more tense than in the United States. All biology textbooks now used in schools are creationist in tone.’

Meanwhile, over 700 scientists have now signed a ‘Dissent from Darwinism’ statement launched by the Discovery Institute in America in 2001. The list of signatories includes members of the National Academies of Science in Russia, Czech Republic, Hungary, India (Hindustan), Nigeria, Poland and the United States. Many on the list are professors or researchers at major universities and international research institutions such as Cambridge University, Moscow State University, Chitose Institute of Science & Technology in Japan, Ben-Gurion University in Israel, MIT, The Smithsonian and Princeton. See http://www.dissentfromdarwin.org for more information.

Andrew Halloway is editor of The Delusion of Evolution, published by New Life Publishing, http://www.newlifepublishing.co.uk. He is also editor of the evangelistic newspaper Good News.