CofE school headteacher ridiculed after claiming evolution is only a theory & there is 'more evidence' Bible is true
Oh dear. Yet again the "just a theory" trope raises its ugly head. This is such a common issue that it featured predominantly in my chapter on evolution in The Little Book Of Unholy Questions.
The Daily Mail reports:
A Church of England primary school headteacher has been ridiculed after claiming evolution is only a theory and there is 'more evidence' the Bible is true.
Christina Wilkinson, 43, from St Andrew's Church of England School in Oswaldwistle, Lancashire, posted a message on Twitter saying Darwin's theory was 'not a fact'. She then said: 'There's more evidence that the Bible is true.'
But the teacher was quickly attacked as being 'stupid and ignorant', with some people even calling for her to quit her job.
One Twitter user suggested her views meant she should be a vicar while another said the comments were tantamount to 'child abuse.'
The local education councillor also weighed into the debate, saying schools should not be promoting religious texts as being 'more factually accurate than hundreds of years of scientific study.'
In statement, Mrs Wilkinson, whose Twitter account has since been removed, insisted her pupils are taught about evolution.
'I'd like to make it clear that we teach the full national curriculum in school and that our pupils receive a fully rounded education,' she said.
'The comment in question was made using my personal twitter account and represents my own views.'
The furore began when London headteacher Tom Sherrington, a trustee of the National Baccalaureate Trust posted a tweet about evolution.
Using the handle @headguruteacher, he wrote: 'For me, it is critical that teachers do not water down the science to accommodate religious perspectives if that means sacrificing the acceptance of evidence.
'This applies to science and RE teachers. New Earth creationism and more subtle variants of Intelligent Design are a denial of science and I think all teachers need to be conscious of that.'
But Mrs Wilkinson replied saying: 'Evolution is not a fact. That's why it's called a theory! There's more evidence that the Bible is true.'
I am pretty dubious about this later comment:
A spokesman for Blackburn Diocesan Board of Education said: 'As a diocese we state all schools should teach the full national curriculum which includes 'adaptation of plants and animals and that adaption may lead to evolution'.'
Since there is an important use ot the word may.
It's actually pretty cool that the Daily Mail seems to side with those who defend science. Makes a change. As I state in my book:
Part of the problem with how many theists approach evolution is that they declare it is ‘just a theory’. This is the sort of tripe you hear on Fox News when they roll out another exceptionally right-wing denier who doesn’t actually know what they are on about. You see, technically speaking, everything that you know, or think you know, is ‘just a theory’. For example, the Theory of Gravity is just a theory, but do you doubt it enough to jump out of a fifth story window in a moment of science denial? No, because the evidence for gravity is abundant and immediately available first hand. Unfortunately, evolution is a process that takes millions, even billions, of years and is inherently more difficult to observe over a short timescale. But the evidence is there. There are millions of fossils, there are archaeological findings that evidence the migration of man out of Africa, there is the cross-breeding of animals and plants that we do in our own back gardens, and there is DNA, amongst many other things.
To get back to the point of it being ‘just a theory’ though, let us actually look at what a fact is. In fact (pun intended), the only thing we know to be indubitably true, that we cannot doubt at all, is the fact that ‘I exist’. René Descartes[1] came to the conclusion that you can doubt everything in the world. I can doubt that the bin in the corner of my room is actually there; that it is actually an optical illusion. I can doubt that my fingers are typing this, inspiring the possibility that I am actually dreaming. However, the only thing that I cannot doubt is that I exist, because I am thinking. The act of doubting is itself proof that I (at least my mind or whatever signifies ‘I’) exist. I think, therefore I am. Genius in so few words. As a result, though, it means that, strictly speaking, we cannot prove anything, because we can only account unflinchingly for our own subjective minds.
This means that every scientific theory is simply that: a theory. There is no fact. It might happen that when I next drop my pen, it falls upwards, and we will have to reassess the theory of gravity. The theory of gravity, as we know it, is a descriptive rule that governs everything that we have seen so far, but it could happen differently at any time, and could have happened differently already without us knowing.
Consequently, we use the term fact in a slightly counter-intuitive manner. A fact becomes a thing that is supported by overwhelming evidence. However, it becomes arbitrary as to where to draw the line as to what is overwhelming and what is not. Yet, because Creationists have coined the phrase that evolution is ‘just a theory’, many less discerning onlookers think that it gives them to the right to easily doubt it as a theory, that it therefore cannot have superior supporting evidence, and (scarily enough) that it gives them the right to teach alternative theories alongside it that have far less evidence to support them. This is the same tack that many news channels adopt when presenting any news or scientific finding. Often, they feel obliged to provide an alternative view with the same amount of airtime (in other words give both views equal coverage) even though the alternative view might only be held by five crackpot scientists out of a hundred thousand.
We have coded the genome, we have mapped out the tree of life, we have an awful lot of fossils, and we undergo ‘artificial’ (how can anything carried out by man, a natural animal, be artificial?) natural selection by breeding cows / tomatoes / crops to be bigger and higher yielding, and still people insist on denying it. I challenge an evolution denier, when offered gene therapy to proactively cure a terminal disease they will get in their later life, to turn down the therapy on account of genes and evolution being ‘just a theory’. That would make them ‘just an idiot’.
[1] The famous 17th century French natural philosopher whose name inspires ‘Cartesian’ philosophy.