History of Thought and Evolutionary Science Education

International audienceToday, teaching about scientific origins needs taking account of creationism (Jones and Reiss, 2007). So, teachers' training for evolutionary science education not only refers to biology. To have a good comprehension of some philosophical and theological claims on life is become necessary. In this paper, we try to elaborate an epistemological distinction between diverse approaches of the life. Then we interrogate occidental thinking about the compatibility between creation and evolution. For instance, St Augustine thinks that Earth received from God a capacity to produce plants. After that, God didn't play another part: secondary causes are autonomous. As Augustine, Thomas Aquinas claims a progressive development of plants' species in their specific characteristics. Concerning animals, Augustine thinks that water received the capacity to produce fishes and marine animals. He takes account of spontaneous generation in his worldview. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas considered spontaneous generation as an evolutionary factor, so insects' species didn't exist at the beginning but they were produced by decomposition of living matter. During 17th and 18th centuries, perspectives about a progressive creation were no more understood. A symbolic sense of the bible was lost, so appeared the fixism: God created each living species in a Linnaean sense one after another. During the 20th century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit, tried to elaborate an evolutionary thought about creation. It is important to explain there is no opposition between religion and evolution, teachers and students may accept Evolutionary Theory and believe in God