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Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) Resolution 1580 (2007), titled "The dangers of creationism in education", is a resolution adopted by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on October 4, 2007, in addition to a report of the same name.
The process of drafting the resolution began in 2006, when a group of the PACE delegates led by the British Labour Party's Andrew McIntosh submitted a draft recommendation of the same name for consideration. [1]
The report was made by a French socialist delegate Guy Lengagne . His report, which included resolution draft [2] was returned by the Assembly to the Committee on Culture, Science and Education for revision on the initiative of the Flemish leader of the Christian Democrats group in PACE Luc Van den Brande by 63 votes to 46. [3] [4] Committee on Culture, Science and Education protested against the procedure by which the report was returned for revision. [5]
The report was redrafted [6] by another reporter, Luxembourgian ALDE delegate Anne Brasseur and after some amendments the resolution was approved by the Assembly by 48 votes to 25. [7] [8]
The resolution states that "creationism cannot lay claim to being a scientific discipline" (para. 4) and refers to "intelligent design" as creationism (para. 8). At the same time, the resolution considers it acceptable to present creationist ideas as a supplement to cultural and religious education (para. 16).
The part of the resolution calling for action reads as follows:
19. The Parliamentary Assembly therefore urges the member states, and especially their education authorities to:19.1. defend and promote scientific knowledge;
19.2. strengthen the teaching of the foundations of science, its history, its epistemology and its methods alongside the teaching of objective scientific knowledge;
19.3. make science more comprehensible, more attractive and closer to the realities of the contemporary world;
19.4. firmly oppose the teaching of creationism as a scientific discipline on an equal footing with the theory of evolution and in general the presentation of creationist ideas in any discipline other than religion;
19.5. promote the teaching of evolution as a fundamental scientific theory in the school curriculums.
After the rejection of Lengagne's report, the former rapporteur was interviewed on the subject by the French newspaper 20 Minutes , where he evaluated the events as follows: "We are witnessing a return to the Middle Ages." [9]
The resolution was criticised by deputy head of the Department for External Church Relations of the Russian Orthodox Church, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, stating that "those few fossils presented by the anthropologists as examples of ape-human transitional forms could be explained by random mutations. We don't claim to found a new species upon finding a fish with two heads." [10] and by the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Albert Mohler considering that "this can only mean that Europe (at least as represented by the Council of Europe) has forgotten even its Christian memory." [11]
In February 2009, the resolution was a starting point of a conference held in Dortmund, Germany, and led by Dittmar Graf from the Technical University of Dortmund. The conference, including participation of Anne Brasseur, among others, was held in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology, University of Vienna and Hacettepe University and with support from German Ministry of Education and Research. [12]
Michael Poole, a King's College London Visiting Research Fellow in Science and Religion and a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion, criticised the resolution for being too restrictive while disapproving of young Earth creationism and the intelligent design movement. [13]
Deutsche Welle, covering the disagreement among members of the Assembly on whether the resolution constituted an attack on religious beliefs, [14] and Die Welt , pointing to journalists-expressed suspicions of wishing to limit freedom of conscience and Brasseur's response that the aim was to draw a line between the spheres of faith and science. [15]
Creationism is the religious belief that nature, and aspects such as the universe, Earth, life, and humans, originated with supernatural acts of divine creation. In its broadest sense, creationism includes a continuum of religious views, which vary in their acceptance or rejection of scientific explanations such as evolution that describe the origin and development of natural phenomena.
Creation science or scientific creationism is a pseudoscientific form of Young Earth creationism which claims to offer scientific arguments for certain literalist and inerrantist interpretations of the Bible. It is often presented without overt faith-based language, but instead relies on reinterpreting scientific results to argue that various myths in the Book of Genesis and other select biblical passages are scientifically valid. The most commonly advanced ideas of creation science include special creation based on the Genesis creation narrative and flood geology based on the Genesis flood narrative. Creationists also claim they can disprove or reexplain a variety of scientific facts, theories and paradigms of geology, cosmology, biological evolution, archaeology, history, and linguistics using creation science. Creation science was foundational to intelligent design.
Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins". Proponents claim that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." ID is a form of creationism that lacks empirical support and offers no testable or tenable hypotheses, and is therefore not science. The leading proponents of ID are associated with the Discovery Institute, a Christian, politically conservative think tank based in the United States.
The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) is a not-for-profit membership organization in the United States whose stated mission is to educate the press and the public on the scientific and educational aspects of controversies surrounding the teaching of evolution and climate change, and to provide information and resources to schools, parents, and other citizens working to keep those topics in public school science education. Based in Oakland, California, it claims 4,500 members that include scientists, teachers, clergy, and citizens of varied religious and political affiliations. The Center opposes the teaching of religious views in science classes in America's public schools; it does this through initiatives such as Project Steve. The Center has been called the United States' "leading anti-creationist organization". The Center is affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The Discovery Institute (DI) is a politically conservative think tank that advocates the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design (ID). It was founded in 1991 in Seattle as a non-profit offshoot of the Hudson Institute.
Eugenie Carol Scott is an American physical anthropologist, a former university professor and educator who has been active in opposing the teaching of young Earth creationism and intelligent design in schools. She coined the term "Gish gallop" to describe a fallacious rhetorical technique of overwhelming an interlocutor with as many individually weak arguments as possible, in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument.
Recurring cultural, political, and theological rejection of evolution by religious groups exists regarding the origins of the Earth, of humanity, and of other life. In accordance with creationism, species were once widely believed to be fixed products of divine creation, but since the mid-19th century, evolution by natural selection has been established by the scientific community as an empirical scientific fact.
The status of creation and evolution in public education has been the subject of substantial debate and conflict in legal, political, and religious circles. Globally, there are a wide variety of views on the topic. Most western countries have legislation that mandates only evolutionary biology is to be taught in the appropriate scientific syllabuses.
The intelligent design movement is a neo-creationist religious campaign for broad social, academic and political change to promote and support the pseudoscientific idea of intelligent design (ID), which asserts that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." Its chief activities are a campaign to promote public awareness of this concept, the lobbying of policymakers to include its teaching in high school science classes, and legal action, either to defend such teaching or to remove barriers otherwise preventing it. The movement arose out of the creation science movement in the United States, and is driven by a small group of proponents. The Encyclopædia Britannica explains that ID cannot be empirically tested and that it fails to solve the problem of evil; thus, it is neither sound science nor sound theology.
Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins is a controversial 1989 school-level supplementary textbook written by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, edited by Charles Thaxton and published by the Texas-based Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE). The textbook endorses the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design – the argument that life shows evidence of being designed by an intelligent agent which is not named specifically in the book, although proponents understand that it refers to the Christian God. The overview chapter was written by young Earth creationist Nancy Pearcey. They present various polemical arguments against the scientific theory of evolution. Before publication, early drafts used cognates of "creationist". After the Edwards v. Aguillard Supreme Court ruling that creationism is religion and not science, these were changed to refer to "intelligent design". The second edition published in 1993 included a contribution written by Michael Behe.
Anne Brasseur is a Luxembourgish politician and former sports and training minister. On 28 January 2014 Brasseur was elected as the President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) for a one-year renewable term, the second woman to hold this post.
The intelligent design movement has conducted an organized campaign largely in the United States that promotes a pseudoscientific, neo-creationist religious agenda calling for broad social, academic and political changes centering on intelligent design.
Truth in Science is a United Kingdom-based creationist organisation which promotes the Discovery Institute's "Teach the Controversy" campaign, which it uses to try to get the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design creationism taught alongside evolution in school science lessons. The organisation claims that there is scientific controversy about the validity of Darwinian evolution, a view rejected by the United Kingdom's Royal Society and over 50 Academies of Science around the world. The group is affiliated with the Discovery Institute, the hub of the intelligent design movement, following its strategy and circulating the Institute's promotional materials.
The level of support for evolution among scientists, the public, and other groups is a topic that frequently arises in the creation–evolution controversy, and touches on educational, religious, philosophical, scientific, and political issues. The subject is especially contentious in countries where significant levels of non-acceptance of evolution by the general population exists, but evolution is taught at public schools and universities.
The British Centre for Science Education (BCSE) is a volunteer-run organization in the United Kingdom that has the goal of "countering creationism within the UK" and was formed to campaign against the teaching of creationism in schools.
The Akron Fossils & Science Center is a small museum and learning center located in Copley Township, Ohio, United States, a few miles west of Akron. The building contains the Creation Education Museum, which features exhibits displaying the arguments for and against creationism and intelligent design, as well as an exploration of the relationship between science and the Bible. The building also houses several areas with interactive tour stations and activities focused on hands-on science. An outdoor park offers playground equipment and a 200 ft zip-line.
In American schools, the Genesis creation narrative was generally taught as the origin of the universe and of life until Darwin's scientific theories became widely accepted. While there was some immediate backlash, organized opposition did not get underway until the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy broke out following World War I; several states passed laws banning the teaching of evolution while others debated them but did not pass them. The Scopes Trial was the result of a challenge to the law in Tennessee. Scopes lost his case, and further U.S. states passed laws banning the teaching of evolution.
This article presents an overview of creationism by country.
Eduard Lintner is a German politician and lobbyist. From 1991 to 1998, he was Parliamentary State Secretary for the Federal Secretary of the Interior and from 1992 to 1998 he was the Drug Enforcement Officer in the Federal Government.