Withdraw License of Creation Science School, Panel Urges

A State Board of Education evaluation team has recommended that state approval be removed from a school in San Diego County that is the only creation science school in the country offering master’s degrees.

The team’s report recommends stripping the mantle of state legitimacy from the Institute for Creation Research in Santee.

The report “seems reasonable to me,” State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig said, although he will not act on the recommendation for a month or so.

Withdrawal of the state license might mean the end for the institute, which has provided some of the intellectual underpinning for the argument that God, not scientific forces, created the Earth.

John Morris, administrative vice president of the institute, said the report was part of “a very insidious plot” on Honig’s part to “establish a state religion in California” that would be “anti-creationist” in nature.

Morris said he had received no word of the evaluation team’s report but added, “obviously we’ll appeal if the ruling goes against us.”

The institute has been authorized to grant master’s degrees in biology, geology, physics and science education since 1981 but has awarded only about 20 degrees in that time, Morris added.

For more than a year Honig has been trying to drop state approval because he thinks the school teaches religion, not science.

The evaluation report, written by a team of five college and university scientists who visited the institute for several days last August, touches only lightly on this controversy but does find that the institute’s offerings are not comparable with other higher education institutions.

The institute curriculum “is not consistent in quality with curricula offered by appropriate established accredited institutions,” the report says, and its courses “are not comparable to the courses required of graduates” of accredited schools.

The report says the faculty has produced little reputable research, the library and laboratories are inadequate and the courses do not prepare students to be science teachers, which is one of the institute’s main goals.

Although the evaluators generally sidestepped the creationism issue, they did mention some of the problems involved in trying to do creation science research.

For instance, the report said that the institute’s attempt to prove that the Earth’s geological state was caused primarily by the flood of Noah described in the biblical book of Genesis fails to address these questions: “Where did all the water of the flood come from? How did it come down? Where did the water eventually go after the flood?”

Honig said the negative findings, and the recommendation that state approval be lifted, were unanimous on the part of the five-member team, which included two science faculty members from UCLA, one from UC San Diego, one from California State University, Long Beach, and one from Cedarville College, in Cedarville, Ohio.

But the report states that Leroy E. Eimers, professor of physics and mathematics at Cedarville College, disagreed with some of the findings and recommended that state approval be continued for the master’s degree programs in geology, physics and science education but not in biology. Eimers was named to the evaluation group at the suggestion of the Institute for Creation Research.

This is Honig’s second encounter with the forces of creation science in recent months.

In November, after a dispute that lasted several months, the State Board of Education adopted curriculum guidelines for science textbooks that stress the teaching of evolution as theory but delete references to evolution as scientific fact.

NEXT STEP

The evaluation team’s recommendations next go to the Council for Private Postsecondary Educational Institutions, an 18-member body that will meet in late February and will recommend that Honig accept or reject the report. If Honig agrees with the recommendations, state certification will be revoked.