CNS STORY: Church needs better evolution education, says bishops' official

CNS STORY: Church needs better evolution education, says bishops' official

- Catholic educators need better teaching programs about evolution "to correct the anti-evolution biases that Catholics pick up" from the general society, according to a U.S. bishops' official involved in dialogue with scientists for 20 years.

Without a church view of human creation that is consistent with currently accepted scientific knowledge, "Catholicism may begin to seem less and less 'realistic' to more and more thoughtful people," said David Byers, executive director of the U.S. bishops' Committee on Science and Human Values from 1984 to 2003.

"That dynamic is a far greater obstacle to religious assent than evolution," he said in a bylined article in the Feb. 7 issue of America, a weekly magazine published in New York by the Jesuits. The article discussed the value of the dialogues with scientists organized by the bishops' committee.

"Denying that humans evolved seems by this point a waste of time," he said without mentioning specific controversies in the United States.

In recent years, conflicts have arisen in several parts of the country questioning whether evolution should be taught in public schools as scientific fact. In January, the public school board in Cobb County, Ga., voted to appeal a federal judge's order to remove stickers on science textbooks which said that "evolution is a theory, not a fact."

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