• scientists are getting more arrogant and no longer see room for religious explanations in science
• religious opposition to evolution is more determined but trying alternative approaches
  
• rapid progress in science and technology is becoming more important to economic growth--science is seen as more important in society and more powerful (atomic bomb)
  
• eugenics is no longer scientifically respectable
  

• they did see science supplanting religion
• but others continued to be faithful members of a religious tradition, though this diminished somewhat by the 1960s

New biology text, BSCS, Biological Sciences Curriculum Study

• not the first to include evolution, but made evolution more central to how all of the teaching of biology was organized (they can do this now they have the modern synthesis)
  
• part of an effort to improve teaching by getting leading scientists involved in developing textbooks (new math was another example)
• WW2 gave science a lot of prestige
• both because of the cold war and because people see new science leading to new products and economic growth, scientists are able to argue that we need more scientists and therefore better science teaching in schools
• how to improve science teaching in schools?  improve textbooks
• there were three original versions of the new textbook: An Ecological Approach, A Molecular Biology Approach, and a Cellular Biology Approach
• now there is An Ecologyical Approach and a Human Approach
  
• textbooks written by scientists to prepare student better for advanced science courses bring in a lot of new concepts that aren't accepted easily
• should local communities decide what students should be taught or should the federal government step in and make sure students get what they need to be well prepared for college
  

What is changing on the religion side? theologically and socially conservative churches are growing, their positions on creation are changing, and they are concerned about education

Theologically conservative churches were growing faster than mainline churches

• theologically conservative:
  
• the bible is authoritative or infallible, against re-interpreting the bible for modern society or on the basis of critical scholarship
  
• we are all sinners and salvation is only possible because Jesus bore our punishment (substitutionary atonement)
  
• Evangelical (authoritative) and Fundamentalist (infallible, every word is literally true)
• socially conservative: against ordination of women and women's equality, against abortion in all (or almost all) circumstances (and increasingly against contraception, more recently against same-sex marriage
• another take on the history of the religious right
  
• they put much more emphasis on the idea that the first creation account in Genesis must be taken literally
• dominant conservative Christian view in the late 19th century was day/age theology--each day in Genesis was actually a geological age
• in the early 20th century the Scofield Reference Bible assumed a gap between the creation of heavens and earth and the creation of modern life forms
• that the Genesis account was a complete history without gaps, a theory initially called Flood Geology and now young earth creationism, did not catch on until the publication of The Genesis Flood in 1961 by Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb
• they objected to new public school biology textbooks that used evolution as an organizing scheme
• scientists said it is fine to believe in the bible, but it doesn't belong in science classes
• so conservative Christians set out to explain God's creation in a way that would fit in science classes
  

• The goal was to produce something that could be taught in science classes without violating the establishment clause (the first amendment to the constitution says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ...")
• humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, one catastrophic flood created the geology we see
• Evolution is an unproven theory
• they argued that schools should give equal time to creation science and evolution (they argued both are unproven theories)
  
• Laws were passed by struck down by judges convinced that creation science was a form of promoting the beliefs of one religion
• having lost the fight to teach creation science in public schools, the creation science movement turned to creating a curriculum for Christian schools

the next attempt to provide a Christian alternative to the teaching of evolution in public schools was the theory of Intelligent Design, revived in the 1990s

• this was deeply a reaction against materialism--we should not explain the world by naturalism alone, trying to keep out anything supernatural
• modern version of 19th century arguments that some systems are too complicated to be the result of random evolution