...The challenge with teaching evolution in 2025 is the same each semester, says Elizabeth Barnes, who is now approaching her fifth year on the biology faculty at Middle Tennessee State University.
"I would say one of the biggest things that we face when we go to teach evolution is this perception that in order to accept evolution, to actually believe that evolution is a real thing, that you have to be an atheist or reject religious belief," Barnes says.
A national survey of biology students conducted by Barnes and other researchers in 2022 showed that 50 percent of the respondents believed acceptance of evolution was a rejection of God.
"That's just a misunderstanding of the nature of science," Barnes says.
Although the Butler Act was repealed in 1967 and there's no current move today to ban the teaching of evolution in Tennessee's public schools, introducing students to the subject remains challenging. But it's a challenge the 38-year-old assistant professor has accepted, determined to convince her students that the topic doesn't have to negate science or God.
Thomas Huxley, a contemporary and friend of Charles Darwin, coined the term "agnostic" in 1869 as he was trying to find a way to settle debates about the religious or antireligious nature of science, Barnes notes.
"Huxley said that science is a process that doesn't have the means to determine whether or not something outside of the natural world is influencing the natural world."
In other words, science says that evolution happened. How it happened, well, the debate continues and likely will: everything from the creation narrative found in Genesis to the cosmological slow dance of creation that followed the Big Bang.
"But these ideas of deistic, theistic, agnostic and atheistic evolution are equally compatible with what we know from science, because it's not really science's job to tell you whether God exists or whether God had an influence on the natural world," Barnes says.
Science's job, she adds, "is to determine what did happen in the natural world."
Although students in Tennessee's public schools are exposed to evolution in high school biology classes, per the state's science standards, Barnes has found that many of her students don't have a firm understanding of evolution when they arrive at her classroom. That may be because students took biology early in high school and did not retain the material. But many, she says, have concerns about reconciling their faith with science.
Barnes was introduced to evolution in a biology class at a community college. She calls it "one of the most beautiful, amazing ideas that I ever heard of." At the same time, Barnes says she also "learned that about 60 percent of the United States doesn't think that evolution was real."
A year or so later, when she was taking upper-level biology classes at Arizona State University, she was confounded by research professors who "were talking about evolution in a way that kind of put evolution and religion against one another." Although Barnes is not a person of faith, she recognized that fellow students who were churchgoers were wrestling with this teaching approach, sometimes to the point of dropping the class.
"It seemed to be very conflict-inflating," Barnes says.
She wondered if there wasn't a better way. That prompt led to a major focus of her research: teaching evolution in a manner that reduces conflict.
In the Bible Belt, many students bring religious values fashioned by teachings that are opposed to evolution, Barnes says. Through her research and teaching, Barnes says she's learned it is possible to nurture scientific inquiry without being dogmatic to the point of negating someone else's faith.
"What we really want them to be able to do is evaluate scientific evidence, you know, apart from their personal biases," she says. "What I've said [to students] is that I don't come in here and teach you science just so you can learn the facts and not be able to do anything with them."
Her job, she says, is not to make students accept evolution. Every semester, Barnes tells her classes: "It's not my job as an instructor to grade you on what your beliefs are. Or to judge you on what your beliefs are. My job is for you to understand the science."
She's confident her approach has made a difference.
"I get emails from students, or they come up to me after class, you know, talking about how they have been so relieved to not have to pick between their science and their faith."
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