by Sage Doak

Created on: June 12, 2008

To be able to learn about something you must examine all alternatives. Both evolution and creationism are valid theories. Evolution and creationism do not need to be mutually exclusive and parts of each can work together. To truly expand our minds, we must look at all possibilities.

Explaining what evolution and creationism is and all the problems associated with each would take many individual articles. This article does not aim to do that but I will provide a basic insight.

Evolution explains the origin of species though generations of adaption and successful reproducing. Put simply if a species has a trait that allows it to reproduce more and/or faster than others it will lead to that individuals genes becoming more dominant. There are a few major problems with evolution theory; these predominantly focus on missing stages in the fossil record or the difficulty in explaining how non-organic matter becomes living organic organisms. There are many good ideas on how prokaryotic cells can become eukaryotic and a few ideas on how single cell organisms can become multi-cellular. Even with the flaws in evolutionary history there is a lot of good evidence of evolution happening on a day to day basis. Humans can create evolution though selection of certain traits, this is how most breeds of dogs you know have come about.

Creationism explains the origin of species in a much simpler way. We are here because we were placed here. This may be though the form of the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, the ontological argument etc. Each of them has their own merits and problems. Common problems along these arguments include; Infinite regression (god must have been created by god and so on), the ability to reuse the same arguments to explain or make fake gods, and many problems around semantics.

To provide a good education, one must teach their students to explore other possibilities. At primary school, one should learn facts and how to ask questions. Once a student reaches secondary school, one should learn that fact is not always fact. Secondary school students should be starting to look at both sides of arguments. By the time a student is in tertiary education students should be critically analyzing both sides and finding the most common color in science and philosophy is grey.

The only problem I see with teaching creationism alongside evolution is added strain on the teacher. This requires the teacher to look outside of their own idealism and possibly teach ideas they don't agree with. Ideally this should already be happening; teachers need to be able to show that things very rarely only have one answer. The science curriculum is huge, and finding time to teach is all is near impossible. This should never lead us to settle on only teaching single ideas on contentious issues.

God may have evolved from nothing; god may have evolved from the human mind. God may have created species and gave them the ability to evolve. If a species wasn't able to evolve they would be susceptible being preyed on to extinction or outcompeted by species in similar niches.

Learning requires integration of multiple ideas, to teach just one, is to limit one's ability to learn.

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