A Century Since Scopes: Teaching Evolution in the US Public Schools: In the Courts

Creationists were, needless to say, unhappy with the Epperson vs. Arkansas decision that they viewed as yet another blow against religion (the first being the outlawing of public school prayer in 1962).  In addition to developing their own science, creationists began writing their own textbooks to compete with the BSCS inspired books that were gaining wide acceptance.  This led to the publication in 1970 of Biology: A Search for Order in Complexity that was published by the Creation Research Society.  Much of this text reads like a normal biology textbook until we reach chapters like “Weakness of Geologic Evidence”, Evidences from Similarities”, “Early Man”, “Problems for Evolutionists”, and “Limited Variation versus Unlimited Change” which present a highly skewed reading of evolutionary biology and the superiority of creation science.  Henry Morris, who wrote the introduction to this book stated that it was

"a textbook about biological science"

but that

"it is explicit throughout the text that the most reasonable explanation for the actual facts of biology as they are known scientifically is that of Biblical creationism."

Creationists also shifted their legal efforts from statehouses to local school boards.  At the local level they frequently either ran for office themselves or lobbied school boards.  Typical pitches were to either use the creationist textbooks as the sole biology text or to expand curricula to include “alternative theories” to the organization of the natural world since they believed evolution was “only a theory”.  The latter idea was one of “balanced treatment”.  Two court cases in the 1980s, McLean vs. Arkansas Board of Education (a federal court case) and Edwards vs. Aguillard (a US Supreme Court case) were decided against the idea of balanced treatment of creationism and evolutionary biology.  Both courts similarly found that creationism was not science, but rather a particular form of religion and thus, could not be taught in the science classroom.

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