Group’s religious views may hinder its degree accreditation

DALLAS?The Dallas-based Institute for Creation Research’s (ICR) drive to get its online master of science education degree accredited by the state of Texas has brought a new round of wrangling in the nationwide controversy between materialistic and creationistic science.

“We’re teaching the same science as other schools,” ICR CEO Henry Morris III said. “We even use the same textbooks in a lot of cases. ? Really, what else can you do at the chemistry table?”

The difference, Morris said, is that students who study with ICR get a biblical theology and are exposed to a Christian worldview in addition to core science curricula.

The state board will have a public hearing on ICR’s request for accreditation April 24. According to published reports, there has been a flurry of activity on both sides of the issue to sway the board’s decision, including an editorial against accrediting ICR’s degree program in the science journal Nature.

The magazine noted that ICR teaches a literal Genesis flood and “the creation of fully functional major groups of animals.”

“For the last 25 or 30 years, the scientific establishment has decided that science equals naturalism. That is, all of science must begin with the idea that there is no God,” Morris said. “That’s just not true. But the effect has been similar to telling the same lie 100 times?eventually people begin to believe it.”

The master of science education program has been offered through ICR since 1982, and until last year was accredited through the Transnational Association of Colleges and Schools (TRACS). When ICR moved from California to Texas in 2007, the school had to apply for accreditation through the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board because Texas does not recognize TRACS accreditation.
Morris said about 80 percent of the students who completed the program did so in order to teach in a Christian school.

“We’ve had about 20 percent who are believers who came back to school to kind of get our perspective on things,” he said. “But the Christian school movement has been steadily moving in the direction of getting more accreditation from the states, which requires that the teachers who work there get their degrees from accredited institutions.”

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Edward Pauley has been offering “fraternal advice” to the Dallas-based institute as they navigate the accreditation process. Pauley said the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board sent a team to inspect the program and they came away impressed, but opponents of creationist science charged that the school would be teaching religion as science.

“When the folks got back to Austin, they gave a favorable report, but immediately began getting a ton of heat from people who are opposed to ICR’s petition on ideological grounds,” Pauley said. “At one point, there was a proposition floating around to let them offer a degree in creationism. It only got ugly when the word ‘science’ was involved.”

Morris said the last round of hearings in January brought out the worst in some of the institute’s opponents.

“There were people writing editorials in newspapers that asserted that if we got our accreditation people wouldn’t want to come to school or teach in Texas because the state would be a laughingstock,” he said. “Most of their arguments are of this kind, and frankly, I don’t find them convincing. I would imagine that if we get our accreditation, things will go on as usual in other institutions.”

In January, Morris sent out a request for prayer and petitions to the board on behalf of the institute’s programs.

“It almost seems like those petitions just fired up the other side more than they were already,” Morris said.

Far from being merely an academic debate, Morris said he sees ICR’s mission as crucial to enabling Christian parents to help their children form a biblical worldview by getting the same message from the church, the school and at home.

“All of the things we normally worry about as evangelicals in the public square come down to not having a biblical understanding of life and the value of it,” he said. “Our children are better equipped to make good decisions when they understand that they are children of God rather than thinking they are children of accidents.”