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In all my
student years, I never thought the teaching of biological
evolution was anti God or religion. Even when I studied
the two creation stories in the Bible’s first
book, Genesis, it didn’t seem as if they forced
anyone to choose between God and evolution.
Later
when Pope John Paul II agreed that a Christian could
be a theistic evolutionist, many thought that he made
good sense. Right-wing Protestants such as radical commentator
Cal Thomas criticized him, accusing the Polish Pope
of embracing Communism for doing so. It became obvious,
then, that the Pope was more theologically and scientifically
nuanced than such fundamentalists.
I
certainly wouldn’t have respected my own beliefs
more if my public school had taught them. As kids we
made fun of so much of the national piety the schools
already taught (“I pledge allegiance to the wall,”
I can still hear kids laughing.), that mandatory prayers
would have probably encouraged another set of childish
mocking.
We
kids respected those who died for our country –
those stories intrigued us. But we sensed something
shallow in schooltime’s compulsory rituals.
I
certainly would have thought that our teachers praying
at the beginning of classes was hypocritical. My teachers
were dedicated, honest, moral, and hardworking, but
I never expected them to be models for my spirituality.
It
took the politicization of right-wing, Republican-Party-style
Christianity to revive the political argument that teaching
evolution in science classes (along with such dangers
as gay people, female control of their own bodies, and
racial equality) was a major cause of crime, disease,
and the declining belief in the fundamentalists’
Judgmental-Divine-Father-way of seeing the Universe.
Fundamentalists
created another debate that they framed in the simplistic
political way they defined most things — in either/or
terms. You were either for them or against them. There
was no place for the relatived intellectual sophistication
of Pope John Paul.
Then
they went further. In a new testimony to their unbelief,
they wanted the government to push their sectarian religious
ideas. Having so little faith that God could do it successfully,
or that their arguments could win on their own merits,
fear-filled leaders began to fight for the backing of
political institutions and human governments to see
to it that their beliefs would win. So much for “WWJD.”
I
doubt if up to this point there had been even one public
school science teacher in the whole county who had spent
a single minute of classtime arguing that evolution
proved that there was no God. It would have been out
of place and unscientific. I haven’t even heard
of any urban legends – the fabricated kind the
right-wing usually passes around -- about this.
The
radical religious right-wing wants that all changed.
Unable
to get a sectarian Christian creationism taught blatantly,
their think-tanks came up with something called “Intelligent
Design.” They want their claims that scientific
evidence implies an intelligent, Divine Designer to
be taught in tax-payer-funded schools as if it’s
a viable scientific option, not merely a dogma from
their faith.
The
result would be that public school science classes would
have to present “evidence” for the fact
that the human body, for example, is so well and intricately
made that an “Intelligence” must be responsible.
They want teachers to teach that these things couldn’t
have developed merely by chance.
So,
a new type of discussion must take place in science
classes. Teaching evolutionary theory as a scientific
explanation to understand and predict biological change,
is no longer enough.
The
new mandate that results is one that requires teachers
in the end to start presenting arguments against the
existence of an Intelligent Designer, too. It actually
requires schools to argue against the right-wing’s
view of God.
The
first new question about which the schools will be required
to present “both sides” is: Does evidence
such as the human body, for example, actually prove
in any way that an intelligence has designed it?
The
right wing apparently assumes a "yes" answer.
In their hope to prove that there is a God like theirs,
they assert one of the classic religious “proofs”
-- that the universe is so ordered that we must conclude
that there is a Designer. They assume there’s
an order that other philosophers have questioned.
With
the new mandate, science classes will also have to present
apparent evidence that argues that nature, the “product,”
is scientifically flawed enough to conclude that there
may be no Designer, or that the Designer was sometimes
asleep at the switch, mentally flawed by designing lapses,
short-sighted, or just plain stupid.
This
follows from the latest strategy for inserting the right-wing
position in science curricula.
The
strategy sounds fair enough at first. Frame this as
just a matter of presenting all sides in the way Bush
did in response to a question asking him if the public
schools should teach “Intelligent Design.”
"I
think that part of education is to expose people to
different schools of thought," Bush said on August
1st. "You're asking me whether or not people ought
to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."
Science
teachers now will have to point out what would be “design”
flaws such as the human spine, the existence of the
appendix, the susceptibility of human beings to viruses
such as the common cold, the fragility of certain joints
in the body, the fact that human bodies at some point
flip into a non-renewable mode. They’ll have to
teach how people use such evidence to conclude that
there is no Designer at all.
Right-wing
religion may explain the stupidity as the result of
sin, evil, the Devil, or even the Designer’s desire
to make us fragile and see to it that we all will die.
But that’s not science at all. It’s more
dogma.
The
atheist can explain this as the result of chance, the
absence of a Designer, even proof that there is none.
But
the result of the “Intelligent Design” mandate
will be that schools will now need to point out to students
the evidence that argues that there is no Designer.
That
would be scientifically fair, wouldn’t it?
© The Fairness Project, October
1, 2005.
May be reprinted in full with full credit and notification
of The Fairness Project.
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