This is the third article in a series about what’s going on in the great schools that are located near colleges whose women’s basketball teams made the NCAA Final Four. On this page, the University of Notre Dame du Lac, a Catholic research university located near South Bend, Ind. Its 2012 enrollment was 12,000, and the university admitted about 24 percent of its applicants in that year.
God creates Adam and Eve
Kenneth R Miller, professor of biology at Brown University, will receive the University of Notre Dame’s 2014 Laetare Medal, the oldest and most prestigious honor given to American Catholics, at Notre Dame’s 169th commencement ceremony on May 18.
“Kenneth Miller has given eloquent and incisive witness both to scientific acumen and religious belief,” said Notre Dame’s president, Rev John I Jenkins, CSC. “As an accomplished biologist and an articulate believer, he pursues two distinct but harmonious vocations and illustrates how science and faith can mutually flourish.”
A cell and molecular biologist whose research concerns problems of structure and function in biological membranes, Mr Miller is a prominent and outspoken critic of proponents of the creationism and intelligent design movements who argue that Darwin’s theory of evolution is inherently atheistic and incompatible with Christian faith. In addition to having written two widely read books on these subjects, Finding Darwin’s God and Only a Theory, Miller is co-author, with Joseph S Levine, of major introductory college and high school biology textbooks.
A rapidly expanding voucher system in Indiana would divert public funds to the teaching of creationism, the Journal Gazette reports out of nearby Fort Wayne.
Five area Christian schools that confirmed students are taught creationism or intelligent design, or included curriculum information on their websites stating that they do not teach evolution, received a combined $3.9 million in state-funded vouchers.
The Choice Scholarship Program — more commonly called the voucher program — has grown from 3,911 students statewide in 2011-12, the first year of the program, to 19,809 students for the 2013-14 school year, according to Indiana Department of Education data.
Legal experts don’t think the teaching of creationism and the failure to teach evolution will stand up in court when public funds are involved. “I don’t see this practice surviving a serious challenge,” the paper quoted Charlie Russo, a University of Dayton law professor who has studied voucher programs, as saying. “To apply these relatively clear principles — can you use public money to essentially pay for what is religious indoctrination? — and the answer is pretty clearly no.”
(Because we covered the University of Connecticut in our men’s Final Four series, we will not repeat the information here. This article, therefore, ends our series, even though only three articles were published for the women’s Final Four.)
