Disagreeing Better

We are currently in the centennial year of the Scopes “Monkey” Trial, which took place in Tennessee in 1925, and many people may well think that the issue of evolution education has long been resolved. However, research over the last decade or so from around the world has shown that this is not the case, and that in fact evolution is still a sensitive issue in many contexts – largely revolving around the concern that there is friction between religious commitments and the scientific theory of origins. ¹The issue is not always literalism, but rather questions about values. John H. Evans offers a good explanation of these issues with framing in his book, Morals Not Knowledge: Recasting the Contemporary U.S. Conflict between Religion and Science.

Due to the constitutional separation of religion and state in the U.S., American public school classrooms are not the space where students get to debate their questions regarding the interface of evolution and religion. However, in other countries, such as Israel, where we, the authors of this article, live, the issues of religion and state are structured differently.

In Israel at the moment we are currently consumed with life-and-death issues surrounding the war. Yet, learning how to confront subjects that people disagree about is still on the minds of many of us. ²This could be seen, for instance, when the family of Rabbi Avi Goldberg z”l made a moving call to have opposition and coalition MKs attend their shiva together. Therefore, in this spirit of trying to “disagree better,” we would like to share some of our findings from our research regarding views on evolution in the Israeli education system.

To begin by briefly introducing ourselves, we are a diverse team of researchers who have conducted a 3.5-year study exploring the views of contemporary Israeli students, teachers and policy makers regarding evolution, entitled “Dialogue in Science and Religious Education: Evolution Instruction in a Diverse Society using Pedagogy of Difference.” ³This project was supported with a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF). Views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the TWCF. Our interest in the subject originates in a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. ⁴Some of us are science educators and science education researchers from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology (Tsaushu, Laslo and Dagan); another is a philosopher of education with a specialty in religious education (Alexander); one has a background in Science, Technology and Society studies (STS) and has researched Jewish responses to evolution (Pear);# and another is currently writing her PhD on Muslim views on evolution at the University of Haifa (Kadan). Some of us identify as religious and others as secular. Thus, we had several different angles on the associations and understandings Israelis have regarding evolution, Genesis (Breishit), and our origins.

In Israel, like many countries as referenced above, evolution seems to be a culturally and religiously loaded subject among Jews, who comprise close to 75% of the population. The spectrum of religious observance runs broadly from Haredi (“ultra-Orthodox”), Dati (“religious”, often translated as Modern Orthodox), Masorti (“traditional”) and Hiloni (“secular”). A Pew survey published in 2016 indicated that only 11% of those who consider themselves “Dati” said that they accepted evolution (and that is not including those who considered themselves Haredi!). ⁵Among Haredim, only 3% agreed with the statement “humans and other living things have evolved over time.” Therefore, we wanted to both document the views of experts regarding how these subjects should be addressed in schools, while also beginning to provide tools that could assist teachers in the classroom with a daunting task – teaching a subject of which they suspected their students may have conflicting views.

Background on the Israeli School System

The Israeli school system is organized into a number of different streams. State general schools serve mostly secular and Masorti/traditional Jewish students. This general stream is often colloquially referred to as the “secular” stream, but many students who identify as traditional attend these schools as well. In parallel, state religious schools serve dati students, and to a lesser extent, some traditional students. These two streams were part of our study. The study also examined the Arabic-language stream, which serves Muslim, Druze and Christian students. However, we will not discuss the results from the Arabic-language stream in this brief article, as they are still being analyzed. Ultra-Orthodox students are served by ultra-Orthodox independent schools, and these schools were not part of our study. (Of course, all of these categories are quite porous and internally diverse.)

Some disciplines in the school system vary significantly across streams. For example, for literature and history, the Hebrew-speaking general, religious, and Arabic-speaking streams each have their own curriculum, with distinct supervisors and advisory committees. On the other hand, other subjects, such as science, English language, and math have a unified curriculum across all streams, with the same supervisor, advisory committee, and content, with the ultra-Orthodox Jewish stream being the main exception. With the way the educational system is structured, it follows that Bible education is different in different streams: the subject is taught from a secular-academic perspective in the Hebrew-speaking general stream and from an Orthodox Jewish perspective in the religious stream. In the Arabic-speaking stream the equivalent subject is called Religious (usually Islamic) Education. So, while Bible education is a mandatory subject within both the general and religious Jewish streams, the topic of Genesis is taught in each stream through a different curriculum. 

Study Methods

Our full study included collecting both quantitative and qualitative data, through in-depth interviews and surveys with experts from the subjects of Biology, Bible and Islamic Religious Education, ⁶While it might seem more logical to confront the evolution-creation interface in Jewish philosophy class rather than in a class on Genesis, this project chose to examine Bible class because it is a uniformly mandated subject in both the general (mamlachti) and religious (mamlachti dati) education streams, albeit with a different curriculum in each. Many subjects, like literature and history, are also bifurcated in this way, and one trope we heard repeatedly from Biology educators was that they want their subject to stay united! as well as through questionnaires answered by teachers and over 1,000 students in three streams of the Israeli State Schools—general, Jewish religious and Arab. ⁷The questionnaire used was one that has been employed around the world for the past two decades called the MATE (Measure of the Acceptance of the Theory of Evolution). Over 1,000 students answered this questionnaire in the study. Student responses to the questionnaires showed a significant correlation between religious identity and views on evolution, with secular students having more pro-evolution views and religious students having more negative views. In this short article, however, we would like to mostly discuss our initial findings from interviews with Jewish Bible education experts working in various educational streams. ⁸Three academic articles on this project are currently completed and under review, with more anticipated.

A majority of our interlocutors from across the educational landscape agreed that evolution should be addressed, rather than avoided, in Bible class. Though this was the overall consensus, the results, especially from secular Bible experts, were far from unanimous. Many secular experts who agreed that evolution should be discussed in Bible class assumed it was mainly for their traditional students who would be interested in the subject. And a few secular educators saw the Bible purely as a literary and cultural text stemming from the ancient Near East, with absolutely no relevance to modern science, and so discussing an interface with evolution would be absurd.

The interviews and surveys also illustrated a gap between what secular Bible experts thought religious Bible experts’ views on evolution to be, and what the latter’s views actually were. The religious Bible educators had come to a consensus that there is no conflict between traditional Judaism and evolution – a consensus that the secular Bible experts did share. Some secular Bible experts thus projected a rejection of evolution onto the religious experts that did not actually exist. This type of projection of the so-called “conflict thesis” has been found in many places around the world, so while it is not a distinctly Israeli finding, it is important to understand as a wide-spread phenomenon. 

Other secular experts were worried about what they perceived as their colleagues’ dichotomizing perspective, and were interested in a more expansive approach that explored the various Jewish responses to evolution, rather than erroneously monolithic views about “the religious perspective versus the scientific one.” 

A related insight came from some experts who were particularly self-reflective and aware of the cultural context that perpetuates the loaded nature of discourse surrounding evolution. They called for addressing their view in the school system in a way that generates productive dialogue and does not flatten issues down to the level of “slogans” seen elsewhere in society. 

Lastly, both secular and religious experts pointed to larger cultural themes that hook into conversations about evolution and Genesis, which in turn make the subject so religiously and culturally loaded. While many of us are instinctively opposed to ideologies that reject teaching evolution, we might not be aware that others have opposite associations regarding the uncritical espousal of pro-evolution stances and the misappropriation of evolutionary ideologies. For example, two experts mentioned the connections between evolution and Nazism, indicating that a discussion of how the historical misuse of science is important. ⁹From what we have seen of the Muslim students’ responses, the association between evolution, war and racism was also present.

Other skeptical perspectives expressed concerns about hubris that can emerge from a secular perspective. One secular expert expressed concerns about “a secular arrogance that sets up an equation that religious belief is primitive and secular science is progressive.” The ideological polarization that results from this is more than just an abstract concept, as it can cause very real rifts in families and communities. A religious expert pointed to the “religious fear” regarding the large percentage of children who grow up in the religious community and leave. He additionally raised questions about the educators who teach evolution: “Are you trying to… [teach evolution in a way that] they can return to their community religious but also know evolution… or are you trying to teach them a theory that if they understand it to the end, they will see that their religious project is nonsense?”  

This last comment touches on much of the tension we encountered — the issue of (mis)trust. There have certainly been great religious figures who have argued that there is great confluence between evolution and Judaism, perhaps most famously Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, but also Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik and many others. There are also certainly many scientists who promote possible compatibility and see no need for tension between evolution and religion. Perhaps we need to direct more attention to these positive examples.

Recommendations

Despite these disagreements, evolution is not considered one of the most central hot-button controversies in Israeli society. This topic could therefore function to help schools practice dialogue on subjects that may be controversial. In this way, students would develop the skill of discussing issues with people with whom they disagree. Current events continue to drive home how important this is for a shared communal life within a heterogeneous society.

It also seems there is some work to be done in fostering trust amongst educators. The imaginary “straw-man” conflict that many experts projected onto their colleagues distracts from the actual existing issues and disagreements. For instance, discussions on the implications of evolution would likely be informative and productive, whereas talking about the false dichotomy of science vs. religion would not be. 

Despite their disagreements and mutual suspicions, our interlocutors offered many successful examples of embracing plurality of opinion among their students, and avoiding the flattening and “slogans” mentioned above. Many found success when giving students more room to direct conversations. For example, one secular educator, who for years had included a unit on evolution in her Genesis class, turned the classroom over to her students, who brought out the most meaningful subjects that emerged for them from the interface with evolution, including, for instance, vegetarianism.

However, there also continue to be scientists and religious leaders who perpetuate a mistrust of the other. Promoting mistrust is clearly not unique to evolution and religion — in Israel, and around the world, there are so many topics that are difficult to address in schools due to their loaded nature. The question we posed in this study is whether, perhaps, we can take this one particular issue and try to see if we can move the needle a tiny bit, and if we can, what that might mean about other topics? ¹⁰We would like to increase trust in the classroom so that sensitive and controversial subjects can be engaged with rather than avoided. Members of our team created a digital learning environment on the topic, with the goal of making a subject previously sidestepped by teachers into one that can be approached through dialogue founded on trust and incremental learning. For an article by our team in Hebrew about a pilot Professional Development course for teachers about the new environment, see https://tinyurl.com/TORAEVOLUTION. Of course, further study will be needed to assess the success of the initiative.

(This post is part of Sinai and Synapses’ project Scientists in Synagogues, a grass-roots program to offer Jews opportunities to explore the most interesting and pressing questions surrounding Judaism and science. Dr. Rachel Pear is the co-founder of Shir Hadash in Jerusalem and is part of a team of researchers – including Hanan A. Alexander, Nigmeh Abu Toameh Kadan, Masha Tsaushu, Esther Laslo and Netta Dagan – conducting a 3.5-year study titled “Dialogue in Science and Religious Education: Evolution Instruction in a Diverse Society using Pedagogy of Difference.”)