A regular reader of the Writ sent me this essay about the teaching of “intelligent design” in his school system:
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.” — Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
As a father of three boys under the age of 13, I have a significant stake in the controversy over the introduction of the teaching of Intelligent Design in the public schools. Galileo captured the spirit of my value system well. He carried a faith in a Higher Power, and a confidence that God had endowed him with the will and the intellectual capacities to explore the natural world through scientific investigation. Unfortunately for him, his support of Copernicus’ “theory” that the Earth revolved around the Sun, resulted in the Catholic Church’s Inquisition in 1633 sentencing him to house arrest for the remainder of his life.
Fast forward to 2005. Apparently, things have not changed all that much. The social fundamentalists in the United States, a nation founded on the principals of separation of church and state, secularism in government to avoid religious tyranny, and freedom of religion, have cast doubt upon the “theory” of Evolution and have begun to slowly introduce a veiled form of Creationism back into public education.
One need look no further than Dover, Pennsylvania, where despite teacher opposition, the school board has approved a statement to be read to ninth graders. In essence, the statement says that Evolution is a theory with gaps in the evidence and that “Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view”. Two school board members have resigned in protest. The ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State have collaborated to file suit on behalf of eleven parents who want to protect children from the introduction of religious discussions into public schools. According to ACLU of Pennsylvania Legal Director Witold Walczak, “Intelligent Design is a Trojan Horse for bringing religious creationism back into public school science classes.”
For more evidence, look no further than Cobb County, Georgia (home to the second largest school district in the state), where a federal judge ordered the school district to remove stickers from textbooks that cast significant doubt on the validity of the concept of Evolution. Five parents and the ACLU filed the suit that stymied the Intelligent Design movement in Cobb County.
Here in Kansas, there is a stubborn affinity for diminishing Evolution. As it was in 1999, the Intelligent Design movement is alive, well, and on the offensive. On 2/9/05, Attorney General Phil Kline held private meetings with the six conservative members of the Kansas State Board of Education who support degrading the status of Evolution and introducing Intelligent Design into the science curriculum as an alternative theory. To skirt Kansas open government laws requiring meetings involving a quorum to be public, Mr. Kline held separate private meetings with three board members present at each. Discussions included placing stickers on textbooks questioning Evolution, similar to the ones used in Georgia. Mr. Kline seems to have forgotten two important points. Kansas open government laws prohibit “serial meetings” to get around the quorum requirement, and a federal judge has already ruled against the use of the textbook stickers. Meanwhile, the 6-4 majority on the board continues to advance their agenda to diminish Evolution. The tactics they are employing in the consideration process are running so counter to the Board’s established procedures for the revision of educational standards that three moderate Board members have refused to participate. Due to the 6-4 conservative majority on the Board, it is a foregone conclusion that the science curriculum in the state of Kansas will be altered to diminish Evolution and introduce Intelligent Design. When this happens, it will be a sad day for our children. The one bit of good news is that Kansas is a local control state, so it is not certain that the state school board will be able to enforce their changes to the science curriculum throughout the state.
Evolution is not a threat to the notion of God or of a Higher Power of a person’s understanding. The concept of Evolution does not address the issue of whether or not there was a creator. A person can readily integrate the concept of a Higher Power with the notion that the universe was formed by the “Big Bang” and that life emerged from the “primordial soup” to evolve from simple, one-celled organisms to the complex beings that exist on Earth today. Who is to say that a Higher Power did not write the blue print for the “Big Bang”, initiate Evolution, and stand by to supervise the ongoing process? My belief in the Higher Power is based upon faith, not evidence. Discussion of the existence of a Higher Power, or its contribution to our origin, belongs in a religious or philosophical course, not in a science course. I rely on the mountains of available evidence for my acceptance of Evolution as a truth. Evolution belongs in science textbooks and discussions in a science classroom because it has been demonstrated within the natural and material realm.
Leave science to the public schools and dogma to the churches and other faith-based groups.
Jason Miller
Overland Park, KS
Intelligent design, bah! (sorry, I always react that way to idiotic neologisms.) I support your hypothesis, that is there is a God (and I don’t presume to know or have the need to care one way or the other), then why can’t quantuum mechanics and natural selection be the tools in His toolbox?
Why not? Because too many evangelical fundamentalists must abide by a literalist view of the Bible. “The Bible says it took God six days to create Earth, therefore that’s how long it took.” They can’t follow the notion that the Bible was written in parables and oral histories passed from one scientifically-ignorant rube to another until the literate class wrote it down. You can’t turn to an ancient Israelite and say, “see, through a process of random mutations and the influence of natural selection over the course of billions of years, man came to evolve,” because he would just grunt at you and bang you over the head with a club. But “great Father-spirit in the sky made us all” is something he can grasp.
These modern day rubes are the direct intellectual descendents of those pre-historic rubes. They are completely wedded to that literalist view, and like a husband who stubbornly drives down the back road shouting his wife, “I’m not lost!”, they cannot bear to admit that science does not reconcile with their millennia-old mistranslated political-religious text. For if they were to admit that perhaps the words of Genesis are metaphor, not a word-for-word transcript of God’s actions, then in their mind the Word of God is no longer an infallible guide to life, but rather just another book written by men subject to interpretation and nuance. And if there’s two things an evangelical fundamentalist can’t stand, it’s nuance and the idea that other people’s opinions might be equally as valid as theirs.
Another consequence of denying the literal interpretation of Genesis is that opens the door to denying the literal interpretation of Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and a number of other chapters that provide the blueprint for homophobia, female subservience, censorship, anti-sexuality, repression of others, dominance over nature, and holy warfare. If the Bible is not perfectly inerrant, then other religions might have merit, and then evangelical fundamentalists are no longer unique among God’s chosen people.
Or as I like to put it: if you take the Bible literally, you are missing its point.
Keep up the good writing. And hey, what’s the matter with Kansas? 😉
“Radical” Russ — lucky to have had no roots so I could escape my red state (Idaho) for the great blue Pacific Northwest…
