We Can't Be in Kansas Anymore - Kansas Board of Education - "creation science"

Humanist, Nov, 1999 by Joseph Chuman

Is it a laughingstock or an omen of things to come? Under the unrelenting pressure of "scientific" creationists, the Kansas Board of Education voted in August 1999 to make the teaching of evolution optional in that state's public schools. By downgrading evolution and opening the door for creationism, some may argue that Kansas is merely acting in the spirit of tolerance. "Let all views be heard" might be the rallying cry of those who applaud this recent decision. However, to so conclude is a dangerous mistake. Far from treasuring a respect for intellectual diversity, the move by Kansas education officials and their lobbyists more closely resembles a leap into religious obscurantism engineered by homegrown American ayatollahs.

The consensus of the scientific community continues to emphasize, and the courts have confirmed, that "creation science" is not science. It is a literal interpretation of Genesis disguised in language and argument to appear as a contending theory of the origin of the universe and the emergence of life, including the human species. A constant refrain of creationists is that evolution is merely a "theory," not established fact, and consequently their theory deserves equal time.

This assertion deliberately overlooks the reality that all science is theoretical and subject to change. That its truths are never more than provisional is an assumption at the very heart of the scientific process. Creationism, by contrast, is rooted in religious doctrine and therefore immune to change when confronted with opposing evidence. Its truths ultimately are given, not discovered. Its claims are unalterable. Whatever it may be, creationism is not science. If it has a place in public school curricula it is in courses on comparative religious mythologies, not as a replacement for or alongside of evolutionary science.

The persistence of creationism is remarkable, and we do well to ask how it claims victories 140 years after Darwin's Origin of Species and almost seventy-five years after the Scopes trial. I see three forces at work.

The Declining Prestige of Science

From the middle of the nineteenth century until about thirty years ago, science wielded commanding authority. Modern geology, biology, physics, and the social sciences came to maturity in the late nineteenth century. During the twentieth century, the fruits of science helped the United States achieve victory in war, launched humans into space, and created the technological marvels we enjoy today. Through the 1950s, science was generally acclaimed as a benevolent genie creating an ever more bountiful future.

Yet the hazards of nuclear power, growing ecological devastation, and global problems still unsolved have chastened science's utopian promises in the last few decades. Many now see science as a two-edged sword to be used with caution, its reputation tarnished. Science is often taken for granted or disparaged. Too easily forgotten is that fact that our planet now has six billion mouths to feed and that scientific development still provides our best hope of meeting our global needs.

The loss of prestige, together with a complexity far beyond the understanding of nonspecialists, has weakened science's ability to capture the public's imagination and assent as it once did. Scientific illiteracy is on the rise in the United States, and the action in Kansas will give state-sanctioned legitimacy to this dangerous trend. In the wake of its diminished authority, an intellectual vacuum has been created permitting pseudoscience, occultism, and religion to provide explanations previously within the domain of science. Where science has retreated in the public mind, creationism has rushed in.

The Relativization of Knowledge

Multiculturalism is a welcome and necessary corrective for the exclusion of minorities from the mainstream of life in the United States. But it does bring problems, among them the relativization of knowledge.

Multiculturalism, especially as interpreted by postmodern thinkers, suggests that beliefs are powerfully shaped by the culture in which people are reared. All knowledge, according to this view, can only be subjective, and objectivity is a chimera. Indeed, objectivity such as science pursues is understood as the creation of a distinctive cultural subgroup--in this case, European males who flourished during the Enlightenment when the principles of modern science were being developed.

While this approach has overwhelmingly been rejected by those who work in the hard sciences--including geologists and evolutionary biologists--it has helped boost the authority of those grounding their belief in the soil of genuine cultural expression. The influence of such postmodern thinking, at a minimum, has placed those who invoke objective principles, including scientists, on the defensive. The intellectual climate has been softened and creationists have been able to take good advantage of it. It has empowered them to call for equal time in science curricula or, as in Kansas, to weaken the standing of evolution altogether.