If there’s one dominant voice advocating for S.C. schools to teach more than Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution, it’s state Sen. Mike Fair, R-Greenville.

Fair says he plans to mount a major push during the next legislative session to win colleagues’ support for his latest idea to modify standards for teaching science, particularly in high schools.

Public school students, he said, should be told a “full range of scientific views ... exist” when it comes to explaining how fauna, flora and man came to inhabit the earth.

Fair is lead sponsor of a bill filled June 1, a day before the Legislature adjourned, that puts the issue in play when lawmakers return to work in January.

Earlier in the just-completed session, legislators rejected a similar initiative calling for the state Education Department to modify science instruction policies involving evolution.

The state’s current science standards, adopted in 2000, include guidelines for teaching “diversity and adaptations of organisms” in middle school and “biological evolution” in high school.

“Species evolve over time,” the high school standards say, and “natural selection and its evolutionary consequences provide a scientific explanation” for “ancient life forms” as well as current “living organisms.”

Nowhere do those standards suggest or encourage science teachers to broach alternative theories, including that a supreme being is responsible for creating mankind.

Fair acknowledges his critics — and they are legion — “will say all this is a thinly veiled attempt to mandate that creationism must be taught.”

He rejects that as too narrow an interpretation of his intentions.

“We must have our eyes wide open on these issues,” Fair said. “What I’m saying is let’s give the whole story. Let the kids make up their own minds. Don’t be afraid of the truth.”

The Rev. Baxter Wynn of Greenville’s First Baptist Church wrote in a column published March 10 by the Greenville News that “striving to live the Christian way of life has absolutely nothing to do with one’s view of evolution. It is not necessary to choose between Christianity and evolution — they are not mutually exclusive.”

He cited the National Academy of Sciences, which maintains studying life on this planet and the cosmos remains a focus of ongoing scientific investigation.

Fair asserted that “religious people aren’t afraid of what science can prove” and that educators, in turn, “should not be afraid to tell students about the weaknesses of the theory of molecules-to-man evolution.”

Reach Robinson at (803) 771-8482 or brobinson@thestate.com