Bad science, bad religion

John Brown's body is a-turnin' in its grave

Personally by Jeffrey Gantz

There's a tornado touching down in Kansas, and it's threatening to do billions of dollars more damage than the usual variety. The Kansas Board of Education has voted that the state's local school districts are not bound to teach the standard theory of evolution -- which means they can offer, as an alternative or even a substitute, the literal, God-made-the-world-in-seven-days Bible version favored by creationists. The argument made by Beverly LaHaye, founder and chairman of Concerned Women for America, in a USA Today "Debate" response on August 16, is that "instead of allowing the state bureaucracy to dictate that every schoolchild be taught one narrow theory of the Earth's origins, the state board of education established standards that allow children to explore various theories in the science classroom."

Which doesn't sound so unreasonable -- except that when 99 percent of the nation's (not to mention the world's) reputable scientists are agreed that the Earth developed through some sort of evolution, it's hard to see how evolution theory can qualify as "narrow." As for the "various theories" LaHaye cites, they're being expounded by "scientists" who have virtually no credibility in the scientific community -- who have in essence accredited themselves. And, of course, high-schoolers aren't really qualified to assess various theories about how the Earth, and our universe, came into being. Instead of getting an education, Kansas students will learn educational protectionism -- how to shut out the rest of the world when it offers opinions you don't want to hear. Instead of learning to seek out the truth, Kansas kids will learn how to hide from it. Generations of Kansas kids will wind up as second-class citizens, unable to enter into any kind of scientific field, including law and medicine, because they won't know how to proceed, or even listen, objectively.

Science by definition doesn't protect itself: knowledge and belief are always at risk. The likes of Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno risked their religious beliefs -- and their lives -- in their quests to understand the universe, and they expanded our horizons by going beyond what the Catholic Church was willing to explore. It's no accident that Frank Baum set The Wizard of Oz in Kansas. Sure, an appreciative Dorothy winds up back home, but only after she's experienced what the rest of the world has to offer.

The Kansas decision isn't just bad science, though -- it's bad religion. The "Christian" right persists in trying to impose on America its static, boring portrait of a paternalistic God who created the universe as a nursery for his human children, a controlled environment where the good are rewarded and the bad are punished and we remain in a state of permanent infancy. All we have to do is act like good little girls and boys and we'll enjoy a similarly static, boring afterlife. It's Heaven as one big crib.

Do these people ever read their Bibles? Genesis tells us that when God looked at creation, "God saw that it was good." The God of Judaism and Christianity is a dynamic God who created a dynamic world and who, when challenged by Moses to state an identity, said, "I will be doing what I will be doing." God's messy, complex universe -- all 15 billion years of it so far, from cosmic inflation and expansion to symbiotic chemistry and autocatalysis to eukaryotes and mitochondria, RNA and DNA, gene swapping and gene wars, the rise of consciousness and language and the word -- is not a nursery but a playground, where God's children test themselves and take risks and compete with one another. Initially, as Darwin observed, the strong feed on the weak, but as we grow, we learn how to pool our resources (reproducing, for one thing) and help one another. Truly religious Americans have no difficulty reconciling evolution and creation -- they understand that evolution is God's creation.

The Concerned Women for America would do well to re-concern themselves with the parable of the talents that's recounted in Matthew, where the servant who invested his talents goes forward while the one who buried his talents in the ground is left behind. God's universe is not for those who bury their heads or their talents or anything else in the sand; it's for those who explore and evolve. If God is indeed a dynamic being, it figures that God's finite image (that's us) shouldn't be standing still. And if God is indeed our parent, God surely doesn't want us to remain children. God wants us to grow up.

One of my distant ancestors, Kansas native John Brown, gave rise to that verse in "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" where the truth goes marching on. Truth, God's or otherwise, will always go marching on. It's just painful to see the good people of Kansas (some of whom I know and care about) getting left behind in the dust.

Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at jgantz[a]phx.com.