Here they go again.
Just when we think the Tennessee Legislature has run out of hare-brained ideas, here they come with its anti-intellectual, anti-science legislation hoping to get creationism’s foot in the door of our state’s classrooms. The proposed bill is the latest Trojan Horse aimed at giving equal footing for the pseudo-science and double talk of creationism.
We reprise a post from August 16, 2005:
There are times when the Religious Right would try the patience of Jesus Christ Himself.
The growing battle over “intelligent design” is the latest evidence of the literalism that threatens the independence of school districts by imposing the religious beliefs of a few onto the education of the whole. We predict that any day now the Shelby County Board of Education will wade into the religious thicket and try yet again to inject Christianity into the school curriculum.
Faithless
It seems a strange irony that the Religious Right, the professed people of faith appear to lack any faith at all. Rather than have faith to accept and worship the Bible as a sacred book, they instead are compelled to insist that it is a science book and a history book. Oh, ye, of little faith.
It’s hard to believe that on the 80th anniversary of the Scopes’ “monkey trial” in East Tennessee, we are heading toward another showdown with the fundamentalists determined to impose their religious views on every one else. We could only imagine if Muslim-Americans, or even Jewish-Americans, were trying to do the same. The outrage from the Right would be deafening.
But people engaged in holy wars rarely reflect objectivity. Rather, they claim everything is evidence of anti-Christian bias and use the word, agenda, to bludgeon anyone who disagrees with them. There is the gay agenda, the atheistic agenda, the liberal agenda and the anti-Christian agenda.
What is most remarkable of all is that they make these kinds of inflammatory, simplistic statements in the most religious country in the history of humankind – the United States. If there is indeed an anti-Christian agenda that is undermining this nation, it would represent the greatest upset since David beat Goliath.
Silly Science
But, back to creationism, excuse me, I mean intelligent design…in about a month, scientists and creationists will battle in Dover, Pennsylvania, over the teaching of evolution in public schools. You may have thought that we had already resolved this issue. After all, the courts have ruled over and over that these religious-based theories about the origins of the species are violations of separation of church and state.
Then again, the Religious Right discounts the principles of separation of church and state, too. It’s a myth created by Godless liberals (like Jefferson). Once you can dismiss historical precedents this easily, science is relatively simple.
“Intelligent design” is the latest disguise for that good old-fashioned favorite of the Religious Right — creationism. Proving that they have learned the lessons of Karl Rove, they have dressed up creationism in new clothes and given it a new name. At the same time, they attack anyone who has the temerity to question them.
Of course, creationism did need some updating, since it was based on the argument that our world is 6,000 to 10,000 years old; the fossil record shows they are off about 4.6 billion years old.
Bait and Switch
This time around, no one argues such a wrong-headed position, and proponents calmly suggest that “intelligent design” should be taught in the interest of fairness, because Darwinian evolution is nothing but a “theory.” Of course, so is gravity and the atom, but that fact doesn’t slow down their efforts in treating textbooks like rap cd’s. They would label them with a warning: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”
It sounds so reasonable and so fair…until you look under the hood. There lurks the latest pseudoscientific version of creationism. Actually, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. Darwin uses the word, evolution, precisely one time in On the Origin of the Species. (By way of comparison, the Bible never uses the word, rapture, even once, but that’s another story.)
In truth, it is hard to understand why Darwin’s writings engender such visceral rhetoric from the Right. The central proposition of evolution is this — millions of years ago, a species of primates split into two branches. One became chimpanzees and the other become humans. In other words, humans did not evolve from chimpanzees, but from the common ancestor for both of chimpanzees and humans.
(At this point, it’s hard not to hear the voice of Mark Twain saying: “It now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one…the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.”)
Going Ape
Our connection to ancient ancestors seems obvious. Our appendix, the thin coat of hair that vanishes shortly before we are born (apes keep theirs and it becomes their fur) and the vitamin C in our diets unlike most mammals are vestiges of our genealogy. Or consider the oddity of goosebumps; coming as a response to the cold, they are intended to fluff up our fur to keep us warm. Such peculiarities certainly don’t point to intelligent design, because the presence of these characteristics is meaningless in modern humans. More to the point, the presence of these peculiarities indicate the evolutionary process that is still at work.
In response to such obvious facts supporting evolution, the intelligent design school offers up Of Pandas and People, offered up as a textbook. The book doesn’t mention religion, but it might as well. The name, “intelligent design,” begs the obvious question: who was in charge of such intelligent design? The book trots out old creationist fiction that organisms appeared spontaneously and have remained unchanged since their creation.
Every high school student knows this is not true. Different organisms and animals appear in different fossil records. First, bacteria; then algae; then animals with shells and marine life; then the Cambrian explosion that produces an array of life including vertebrates. The timeline is about three billion years.
The truth is that never have we had so much historical, physical evidence of the evolution of living organisms as we do today. The fossil record is rich in details and gives no support to the view of instantaneously created species that remained the same since their sudden appearance on the scene.
Praying for Reason
In light of the insistence of intelligent design advocates, it would stand to reason that its theory would be the subject of intense scientific research. That is hardly the case. Virtually no research has been done, and that is the strongest reason that it can find no respect from the scientific community.
In the end, intelligent design is not the solution to a scientific problem. It is the latest response to a religious problem among fundamentalists whose faith is not strong enough to countenance anything short of a literal interpretation of the Bible.
The latest evolution case comes up for a ruling in a few weeks, and at least some of us will be praying for reason to prevail.
We remain baffled as to why so many right wingers think there is any contradiction between evolution and belief in God. To us, evolution is the most intelligent design of all.
Correction: Gravity is a law not a theory. Anything that can not be recreated and reproduced in a scientific experiment is a theory. Yes we have lot of genetic evidence for evolution but it’s not a law yet.
Sadly, creationists have a very limited very of creation: design and evolution should be viewed as companions/tools or subsets built into blue prints of the creation . In the same light, evolutionists “worship” the evolutionary mechanism without acknowledging who created that mechanism.
In reality, the two theories could happily coexist in the classroom if there was not such an antagonism between the two camps.
How you view our origins is simply a function of your belief system and until both camps acknowledge that, each will remain entrenched claiming exclusive rights to the truth when in reality both hold keys to how we truly evolve and were created.
Thanks, Aaron. Shows how long ago we went to high school. Back then it was called a theory and theory and law were often used interchangeably, which is not the case.
Thanks also for the comment. Our faith is big enough to concurrently hold religion and science without one suffering from the other. We see no conflict between the two, but we do see a conflict when one person’s belief system – whether it is creationism – results in our children being told fictions.
Perhaps, you or another scientist with strong faith can be the bridge that accomplishes what you say is possible by coalescing the keys of creation.
I think it highly dismissive of rabbits to compare their mental faculties to those of the Republicans on this issue. In reality, they are much smarter–the rabbits, that is.
If the creationists accept that God’s creation of earth in 6 days is not literal and that God used millions of years of evolution, then Jesus and his divinity might not be literal. This would cause a lot of uncertainty among the world’s religions who are waiting for a (the) messiah.
FH-
As I have heard it spun before, creationists can actually accept both the literal 6 day interpretation as well as the billions of years put forth in both the big bang theory as well as evolution. In Genesis, God apparently did not actually create the “day” until midway through the process meaning that the small beings that we are have imposed our own concepts of time on this explanation. I have also read the perspective that the 6 days mentioned in the biblical account do not actually represent “days” as in our own terrestrial 24 hour periods (even then we know the rotation of the earth and thus the day has been variable), but represent epochs. Third, as a family member will account, the imposing of the 24 hour standard day on a being assumes that in whatever realm God exists, the day is also 24 hours. That is quite a large assumption and is very narrow minded. Finally- we must remember that the Bible was written in an age and time when the vast majority of the population was totally ignorant of the Earth’s position and relation with the universe. If the Bible were to provide any story of creation beyond that given, these followers and scholars of ancient times would not have been able to move beyond the opening chapter of the good book. That is to say, how does one explain that atomic theory and time scales to those who know nothing more than the rising and setting of the sun? Then again, to be mired in the opening chapter misses the point of the bible and its message entirely, doesn’t it?
The diehard creationist do not accept that the earth is several billions of years old, which is the problem with them teaching their religious beliefs to our kids. The first time we remember the God’s days are longer theory was in the Scopes monkey trial by the defender of the law in an effort to explain away the discrepancy between science and the Bible.
As we say, the people who wear their faith on their sleeves are the ones who don’t seem to have enough faith to accept the Bible as a sacred book, not a science book. When you get on the train of literalism, it’s hard to get off.