| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"johac" |
| Date: |
13 Feb 2004 01:34:46 AM |
| Object: |
Nice Darwin Day Op-Ed Piece |
Happy Darwin day, everybody! (even if this might be a tad late.) Here
is an op-ed piece that appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune today and
was reprinted at the Common Dreams site:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0212-05.htm
---
Published on Thursday, Ferbruary 12, 2004 by the San Diego Union-Tribune
Another Attempt to Deny Evolution
by James O. Goldsborough
The state of Georgia last month ordered a ban on the word "evolution"
from its science classrooms. The state school superintendent ordered the
word removed from all textbooks.
Thanks to the intervention of former President Jimmy Carter, schools
superintendent Kathy Cox, an elected official, was compelled to rescind
her order. Charles Darwin's name can remain in Georgia textbooks, along
with those of Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and others who
have made their little contributions to our understanding of things.
One cannot help wonder what would have become of the schoolchildren of
the modern state of Georgia if Carter did not happen to live there. We
like to believe we have come a long way from that steamy Dayton, Tenn.,
courtroom in 1925, when America gave to a laughing world the so-called
"monkey trial" of John Scopes. Scopes was a high school biology teacher
charged with illegally teaching the theory of evolution.
From the back hills of Tennessee and Georgia, to the plains of Kansas
and the foothills of California (Vista), the common complaint against
evolution is that it's "only a theory." So said the Kansas Board of
Education when it banned the teaching of evolution in Kansas schools in
1999, arguing it was no more "provable" than creationism, the Bible's
story of how human life was created.
In each of these cases Georgia, 2004; Kansas, 1999; California, 1994;
and Tennessee, 1925 individuals denying the facts of science sought to
deny them to schoolchildren as well. Misunderstanding that religion and
science occupy separate places in our lives one dealing with facts,
the other with beliefs they made them into antagonists.
One doesn't normally think of modern Georgia as a backwater. But when an
elected superintendent of schools bans evolution because, she says, it's
"a buzz word that causes a lot of negative reaction," we have to wonder
how far Georgia has come since Scopes.
Ask this: How did Cox's action differ from that of the Roman
Inquisition, which demanded that Galileo recant his theory (from
Copernicus) of the Earth's revolution around the sun? Revolution, said
the Inquisition, didn't square with a literal interpretation of
Scripture. For example, Joshua 10:13: "So the sun stood still in the
midst of heaven;" and Isaiah 40:22: " ... the heavens stretched out as a
curtain" above "the circle of the Earth."
Speaking, "as a Christian and a trained engineer and scientist," Carter
accused Cox of "an attempt to censor and distort the education of
Georgia's students." He said the schools superintendent opened Georgia's
education system to "nationwide ridicule." Carter got no support from
Georgia's unenlightened governor, Sonny Perdue, who said it was up to
Cox to make "these kinds of curriculum decisions."
Sorry, guv, it's not. When a statewide education system falls to the
creationists, the governor has a responsibility to remind people we are
not back in 1925, let alone the Inquisition's 1633. The modern state of
Georgia has pretensions. The Georgia Institute of Technology, for
example, bills itself as "one of the nation's top research universities,
distinguished by its commitment to improving the human condition through
advanced science and technology."
Georgia Tech would need to go out of state for its students if Cox had
her way. Ignoring 150 years of advances in biology, Cox objected to
evolution because, she said, people might think Georgia was "teaching
the monkeys-to-man sort of thing."
Teaching biology without evolution, which Cox would have done, is like
teaching physics without Newton or philosophy without Plato. You deny
students the great intellectual frameworks for learning. Darwin called
natural selection "the main means explaining the modification of
species." More than a century later, Stephen Jay Gould called it, "the
genealogical connection of all organisms."
The creationists lose these battles, but keep coming back. They must be
watched. They keep their intentions private, then spring them on
unsuspecting publics, as in Georgia. It took Kansans three years to
replace their creationist school board. It took Vista voters almost as
long.
The "it's only a theory" argument against evolution is rooted in
ignorance. Once science is satisfied that observable evidence through
controlled testing validates a hypothesis, it can label the conclusions
theory or law, it doesn't matter. Newton's laws of motion are the basis
for his theory of gravitation, though it could as easily be the other
way around.
We may not like the idea that homo sapiens are here because our
ancestors crawled out of some prehistoric slime and escaped predators
(rather than popping into existence in Eden), but there is all that
evidence for it.
The latest creationist trick is so-called "intelligent design."
According to intelligent design, natural selection is insufficient to
explain the DNA mutations necessary to create homo sapiens. God must
have directed the process.
The answer to that is a simple: God may exist, who knows? But God isn't
needed to explain natural selection. DNA mutations are quite capable of
getting us out of the slime.
Children can learn about God in church. In schools, we teach science.
© Copyright 2004 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
---
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
"Men become civilized not in their willingness to believe, bit in
proportion to their readiness to doubt." - H. L. Mencken
.
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
