Teaching Science to Biblical Literalists

Their numbers are increasing, and they’re feeling more empowered. How can we teach without alienating them or compromising ourselves?

By Alvin M. Saperstein

I have taught introductory astronomy and physical science for many years.1 I also teach courses on the application of science to world affairs: the impact of war and technology on the historical development of human society (and vice versa) as well as the “war” between man and nature. I explore the historical development of the sciences as well as the scientific view of the evolutionary nature of the universe and its inhabitants. In recent years, I have noted an increasing number of students who are “uncomfortable” with, or actually object to, such evolutionary paradigms. They state, or hint, that they accept the Bible literally as a historical and scientific text. They believe that fixed biological species were created, together with the earth and its universe, some six thousand years ago. How can I teach these biblical literalists while respecting them and others in my classes and remaining true to the requirements of scientific and educational professionalism and the needs of modern society?

In truth, I’m not sure whether the proportion of biblical literalists in my university has actually increased, or whether I’ve just become more aware of their beliefs and the kind of impact they can have on my teaching. I suspect both are true. The conservative religious segment of the American population seems to have become more vociferous in recent years, perhaps making biblical-literalist students less fearful of standing up for their beliefs in science classes. I also suspect that the few students who openly voice doubts about the processes and results of science and its applications represent a much larger number of silent students. Are they silent because of fear of professorial retribution, uncertainty as to whom to believe, or because they just don’t care?

In my own teaching, I have added more discussion about the history of science and its role in society, including the development of human society, technology, and violence as well as issues relating to energy and the environment. These are all areas of potential discomfort for biblical-literalist students. And I have been doing less lecturing—I now emphasize interactive lecturing—I now emphasize interactive class participation, which permits students to publicly express disagreement and discomfort. The biblical literalists are there, they’re evident, and they’re entitled to respect. Yet the science and its important applications must be taught and learned, also with respect.

The ideal liberal arts education includes mathematics, the physical and biological sciences, the social sciences, arts, and humanities. The need for such education is practical, not theoretical: citizens in a modern democracy must make daily physical-science-based decisions about the environment, communication, transportation, and weather. They draw on the biological sciences in their decisions about food, health, and reproduction. The social sciences guide decisions about economics, crime, education, politics, war, and peace—about how our increasingly dense population might get along with one other in a shrinking world. And knowledge of the humanities helps people support and rationalize, on a human basis, all of these decisions and to deal with the growing threats of violence based on ethnic and religious differences.

Classroom Discomfort

Confronting these tasks is not made easier by the growing presence of biblical-literalist students. Take two examples from my recent teaching experience. First, immediately after the final exam for a one-semester introductory course in astronomy for nonscience students, a serious, dedicated student asked me, “What am I supposed to believe? You have spent the semester explaining to us why we should believe that the earth is 4.5 billion years old in a universe created 13.5 billion years ago. Yet I grew up in a warm, loving, and supportive family and church that taught me that both earth and universe were created about six thousand years ago.” How should I have responded?

Second, at the beginning of a small, interdisciplinary honors seminar, when I was exploring the role of violence and war in the development of “civilization,” I introduced the idea of animal competition and combat to inform the corresponding human behaviors. I asked class members whether they were bothered by my use of animal models to understand human behavior. Two of the fourteen students indicated significant discomfort, one stating quite forcefully that he did not believe in any explanatory models tied to, or based on, evolutionary concepts. He said he did not expect this connection to be made since the class was not in the biological sciences. How should I have responded?

The two problematic examples I just cited come from applications of the historical aspects of the sciences to human concerns—cosmology in astronomy and evolution in anthropology, biology, and geology. I have had no such reactions when teaching physics “as is.” I believe, however, that science is a human endeavor and should be taught as such, emphasizing its historical development. Not only does this approach help students learn the science, but it also ties science to the students’ nonscience studies, strengthening the entire liberal arts curriculum.

The actual biblical knowledge displayed by my lower-level liberal arts students, religious and nonreligious, biblical literalist and nonbiblical literalist, has generally been quite low, even though many say they attend church. When I discuss Galileo’s confrontation with the church, and explain why it was important to Christian religious bodies of his time that the sun move around the earth rather than the other way around, I often mention the Battle of Jericho (“Sun, stand thou still”). Such mention produces blank looks from most of my classes—was that a battle in the Civil War?

No Arguing with the Bible

The problem I am raising is not one of religion versus science. It is that of the biblical literalist versus science. It is the reliance on a religious faith-based text as a source of natural or human history rather than as a metaphorical guide to “the good life”; it is the use of the Bible as a “science book.” It is not clear to me how sophisticated biblical-literalist students are with respect to the Bible. That is, I don’t know whether they entertain the possibility of contradictions between its various sections or whether they are aware of the different meanings inherent in different translations. But it is not my job to teach the Bible, even though students’ perceptions of the Bible clearly impinge on their ability—and willingness—to deal with science.

In my science teaching, I emphasize process over fact—how do we know that we know? It is disconcerting to realize that the sophisticated biblical-literalist student simply denies the scientific process. Such a student will say that the “scientific facts” apparently contradicted by the Bible are only appearances, not “reality.” God makes us believe that the world is much older than it “really” is. He has created the physical laws that allow us to do chronology—for example, the physics of radioactive decay, the astrophysics of stellar formation, or the geophysics of the deposition of geological sedimentary layers—but these laws are only valid after the biblical time of creation. If these laws are applied “illegally,” that is, as if they were valid at all times, they give results indicating prebiblical creations and evolutions. Why God should set things up so as to fool the analytical minds given to us is left unsaid.

Ignoring the Problem

Our science teaching has not persuaded these students to appreciate the foundation paradigm of continuity: if a scientific relationship is expected to be valid for 6,000 years, it should be expected to be valid for 6,001 years in the absence of some alternative scientific relationship or fact, subject to independent validation. Nor have students learned the use of Occam’s razor—the simpler the explanation (of an observation or relationship), the fewer its hypotheses, the more modest its departure from previous results, the more likely it is to be correct. These fundamental tools of thought should be taught in formal science classes (and elsewhere). How willing are we in higher education to develop these paradigms in wide-ranging nonscience courses that make use of the results of science? How much time and effort should be devoted in such teaching to addressing student suspicions of science, especially if we cannot be sure how many of our students might be biblical literalists?

Many of us deal with the problem of the biblical literalist student by ignoring it. We give exams that minimize the need to accept the paradigms of science, and we expect students to answer with what we have taught them rather than what they actually believe. Students have become adept at fooling themselves and us. The result is a “two-brained” student: instead of a left brain and a right brain, they have in-school and out-of-school brains, with little connection between the two. In the most highly educated society the world has ever seen, its postschool citizens often vote and act as if they are unconstrained by scientific realities.

A fundamental difficulty is that many of the students apparently don’t have a sophisticated knowledge of their own religious heritage. They seem unaware of the great body of religious writing by scholars and clergy of all faiths that manages to keep religion in the Bible and the world while not abandoning science. An appropriate response to the biblical-literalist problem might be to point out students’ gap in understanding to them—not to try to teach them their own religious traditions but indicating, with appropriate citations, that most religious traditions are much more complex than biblical literalism suggests. Would it be appropriate for a nonreligious professor to bring up this issue in a science class? Would accusations of sectarianism or antireligious bias arise?

I have not been handling the challenge of biblical literalism well in my own teaching. I’ve been avoiding it until some student raises it explicitly and is joined by others resistant to the idea of science as a process and a tool. It is difficult and time-consuming to deal with these students and their hostility to what I consider the basic principles of my field. In addition, other students often get impatient when I spend class time defending science against biblical literalists. The solution, suggested to me by colleagues who teach religious studies, is to anticipate the issue at the beginning of a course and to point out to the class the possible difficulties that may confront them. Without questioning them about their individual beliefs, I might mention some appropriate references and invite concerned students to discuss the issue further with me outside of class. If after all of these preparations, some students still refuse to accept the processes and results of mainstream science, I can only resort to the “two-language model”: you may be speaking perfectly correct German but you are still wrong—in a French class. In science and nonscience courses, we must hold students to the intellectual standards of our disciplines.  For the sake of their own future, which, of course, is also ours, we have to hope that students who come into college holding to a literalist view of the Bible will come to see that religious faith has never been incompatible with accepting what we can learn about the world from the carefully applied principles of science. If, after the expensive liberal arts education offered to so many students, there still remain many biblical literalist students, I fear for their future, the future of American science, and the future of an American society beset by problems amenable to scientific solutions.

Note

1. This essay was developed from a paper presented at the Twenty-third Crosscurrents Annual Research Colloquium at Union Theological Seminary in New York. I am grateful to the scholar and clergy colloquium participants for their helpful and supportive comments. Back to text

Alvin Saperstein is professor of physics and a fellow of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at Wayne State University. He is also editor of Physics and Society, the newsletter of the American Physical Society’s Forum on Physics and Society, and author of Dynamical Models of the Onset of War. 

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