Table of Contents | 6. Should a religious view of beginnings be taught in the school room?
I smile when I remember what Humpty Dumpty claimed in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. "I can explain all the poems that ever were invented and a good many that haven't been invented yet." But my reaction is quite different when some self-anointed religious voice seizes the ambitious role of "the great explainer" and attempts to "explain" what is best left to the scientist. Since the election of 2004 and the decision of George W. Bush and his allies to use "family values" and "moral concerns" as a way to maintain political power, isssues such as "intelligent design" to replace the scientific explanation of the origin and development of the cosmos have continued to divide people. Zealous idealogues have chosen reforming the tax code, privatizing social security and strengthening private education as their agenda. The issue of "intelligent design" is a popular item on the list they have chosen to designate as "family values." That conflict of science and religion takes the shape of scientists who are indifferent to religion and religionists who deride the claims of science. Some religious leaders even insist that Genesis is historically accurate and descriptive of the beginnings of life! Therefore, it should be taught in the classroom as "creation science." The latest version has been sanitized and called "intelligent design." But this is a codeword to correct evolution. These persons look at all the theories about origins from the primitive theory of Darwin to the latest version of "the big bang" and are so traumatized that they decide to ignore and evade any thought about the beginnings of this universe. In my judgment, a faith that survives by shutting its eyes is hardly worth my time. In addition, evasion can become a lifestyle and one can live in a fantasy world. Admittedly, scientific evidence does challenge this literal interpretation of Genesis. When one examines Genesis 1 through 11 carefully then it becomes clear that what we have is a poetic and imaginative account of the question of origins. "What matters...is not the doctrine of geology taught in Genesis but its doctrine of creation," suggests Gary Dorrien in The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900. Genesis was never intended to be a scientific interpretation of the beginnings of the universe. Like the Gilgamesh epic of the Babylonians the writer of Genesis takes the literary materials of the ancient world and uses them to convey religious truth. The affirmation is that God is the creative Source. Genesis is a religious document and is concerned primarily with who, not how! Now we are in a position to recognize that the teachings of biblical religion are set in the matrix of a pre-scientific world view. The cosmology of the ancient world is reflected in Genesis. That cosmology saw this universe as a three-storied affair. Heaven was the top story or a kind of inverted bowl over the earth and God supposedly lived in these upper reaches and caused the sun and the moon to journey across the arch every day and night. The earth was the layer in the middle or a flat disk-like object floating in water. The underword or sheol was below and demons and evil spirits dwelt there. This was the Ptolemaic or geo-centric perspective. Although this is clearly the perspective of the biblical writers, we aren't rejecting biblical teaching when we reject this outmoded view. It was simply the vehicle that carried truth and the truth is that God called everything into being. Thus science isn't in conflict with religion and to reject the vehicle that conveys light and insight isn't the same as rejecting the light! The writer of Genesis used the available tools of his day to assert that the entire created cosmos had its origin in the purposes of God. Yet, from my perspective, the alternative of evolution is implied in the creation stories of Genesis. The movement is clearly from simplicity to complexity throughout. In spite of the fact that "the popular view...that we are descended from existing apes, has been largely abandoned," the movement from simplicity to complexity is clearly the default position. We now know that "human life is at the end of an evolutionary line from which monkeys and, later, apes branched off millions of years ago." Therefore, the view that has come to be called "creation science" isn't the only choice for a person of faith. Even the name is misleading. Dorrien's book called The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism aand Modernity has a helpful passage. He writes that "the organic relation of humankind to the material and animal worlds does not wholly determine human nature or destiny. The 'cord of origin' that binds human beings to physical nature does not bind their destiny....If evolution is viewed as a process directed by God's laws of action and not as an unsupervised, inexorable system of mere natural selection, there is no reason to fear evolution...." One other word. If I understand evolution then the one thing that isn't taken into account or is omitted, maybe as inconsequential, is the elan or energy that moves the organisms to adapt and to change. I haven't read any satisfactory explanation for this. Andrew Klavan, in an editorial written for the Los Angeles Times and published in the South Bend Tribune, notes, "It may be that natural selection, as Darwin argues, explains biological complexity, and quantum physics, as chemist Peter Atkins has said, accounts for the creation of matter itself. But the origin and existence of these processes remains unexplained, their spiritual underpinnings open to speculation." Because he is on target, I choose to speculate. I am utterly convinced that the process by which this world comes into being out of nothingness is evolutionary. Zoologist Richard Dawkins and physicist Francis Crick are right when they stay in their areas of expertise. Dawkins declares, however, "The evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design." That's not science. That's speculation. The process would run down without an energy or creativity or power. For me, that creativity is God. So I choose another view than so-called "creation science," I am convinced that the process by which God chose to bring the world into being out of nothingness is evolutionary. Should "creation science" be taught in the school room? Not with my tax money! |