The Science-Faith Debate in Higher Education.

Abstract A voluntary survey regarding beliefs on evolution, and creation and ethics was developed and administered on-line from June through July 2006 to over 100 students, faculty, and staff at a mid-sized public university in the Midwestern United States. The survey consisted of 33 questions to measure participant agreement with core principles of evolutionary theory, 5 questions designed to place participant views along a creationism-evolution continuum, 21 questions to measure respondent beliefs on ethics, and a concluding question asking for comments. A KR-20 value of 0.896 for the first 33 questions indicated high reliability of the evolution portion of the survey, but the KR-20 of 0.510 for the last 21 questions indicated lower reliability for the ethics portion. The hypothesis tested in this study was that teleological ethical views would correlate positively with evolutionist views. An evolution score and a teleological ethics score were calculated from each participant's responses to the first 33 questions and the last 21 questions, respectively. To generate evolution scores, a response to each of the 33 evolution questions was assigned a "1" if the response indicated agreement with evolution and a "0" if the response indicated agreement with creationism. The evolution score for each participant was the sum of the scores across all 33 questions. Likewise, to generate the teleological ethics scores, a response to each of the 21 ethics questions was assigned a "1" if the response indicated agreement with teleological ethics and a "0" if the response indicated agreement with deontological ethics. The teleological ethics score for each participant was the sum of the scores across the 21 ethics questions. The mean evolution score (n = 123 participants) of 26.10, responses to the 5 creationism-evolution continuum questions, and comments solicited at the end of the survey indicated that participant views were more evolutionist than creationist, but participants held a diversity of views, and seemed unsure of some evidence supporting evolutionary theory, and of the nature of scientific theory itself. The mean teleological score (n = 123 participants) of 10.08 indicated that participants were almost equally split between deontological and teleological ethics views. A weak positive correlation between evolutionary views and teleological ethics views (r = 0.258, p Introduction Although the arena of the creation-evolution controversy has been primarily in United States high schools, signs of the controversy are starting to appear in colleges and universities in the country. For example, students have formed "Intelligent Design" clubs at several universities (Anderson 2005). Most recently, an evangelical Christian high school has sued the University of California over its refusal to certify for admittance biology courses taught using the Bible as an authority over scientific theory (Associated Press 2006). Although not at the center of the controversy, higher education arguably should be a leader in the creation-evolution debate, because it is colleges and universities who train teachers, and whose scientists are at the forefront of research in the biosciences. The scientific community endorses evolutionary theory and advocates its teaching, as reflected in The National Science Education Standards (National Research Council 1996) and Benchmarks for Science Literacy (American Association for the Advancement of Science 1993). The National Science Education Standards lists five "Unifying Concepts and Processes" that are important to all of science. …