PERSPECTIVES ON EVOLUTION / CREATION : Can 80% of Us Be Dead Wrong? : Since most people believe in some divine force, why can’t schools teach the difference between philosophy and science?

Those wicked fundamentalists on the Vista school board in San Diego County are at it again! This time they’ve passed a resolution allowing discussion of divine creation in social studies and English classes, such discussion being banned by law from science classes. Worse still, they want to permit “exploration and dialogue” concerning scientific evidence that challenges prevailing scientific theories, and they think that students should not be required to believe any theory presented in the curriculum.

In short, the Vista board has endorsed non-coercion of belief and freedom of discussion about alternative answers to the big questions of life. That sounds like liberal education to me, and even the spokeswoman for the State Board of Education agreed that the policy is lawful if in practice it fosters discussion of all religious viewpoints. Nevertheless, the Los Angeles Times story said without qualification that the board’s policy is “in defiance of California educational guidelines” and that the ACLU immediately threatened lawsuits. What’s going on here?

The creation/evolution dispute is one of the most pervasively misunderstood issues in our culture wars, largely because so many powerful persons in education and the media have a vested ideological interest in keeping the public confused. When science educators today teach that “evolution is a fact,” they do not mean merely that the Earth is very old and that life developed gradually from simple to more complex forms. Evolution in science education means naturalistic evolution--that only purposeless material forces like random mutation and natural selection were involved in biological creation.

That means that “evolution” as taught in science classes contradicts not just the Genesis story; it denies that God had anything whatsoever to do with our existence. Evolution guided by God for the purpose of producing human beings is not really “evolution” as contemporary educators use the term. Evolution to them means what the preeminent neo-Darwinian authority George Gaylord Simpson said: “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”

Evolution in that sense is a very controversial doctrine. Polls show that more than 80% of Americans believe either in a sudden creation by God or in a God-guided evolution. Only about 9% accept what is considered to be the scientific meaning of the term: a completely purposeless material process in which God played no part. In a profound sense, all of the 80%-plus are creationists, because the important issue is not whether God chose a sudden or gradual method. The issue is whether God created us at all, or whether we are products of a mindless process that cares nothing about what we do.

Of course, 80% of Americans could be dead wrong. In the majority’s favor, however, is the fact that naturalistic evolution is based primarily on philosophy rather than on scientific observation. Science is defined today as the working out of naturalistic explanations for phenomena, and the most plausible naturalistic explanation is awarded the status of “scientific knowledge.” Any supernatural influence upon the natural world, including God-guided evolution, is ruled out from the start.

Also out is the possibility that science does not know how complex organs like wings and eyes and brains could be created without the participation of a creator. Although direct evidence that mutation and selection have the required creative power is lacking, science presumes the adequacy of the Darwinian mechanism until a better naturalistic alternative is found. That no naturalistic mechanism for making complex organs exists is philosophically unacceptable, and so this very realistic possibility may not even be discussed.

The so-called creationists in Vista and elsewhere who want to challenge the reigning dogmas of evolution are not necessarily Christian fundamentalists. Some are, but many others see the conflict as involving two sets of fundamentalists, one set being the Darwinists who control the science curriculum.

The Darwinist fundamentalists also control the science departments in many universities, and in some cases biology professors have been forbidden to tell students that there is any reason to doubt the claim that mindless material processes could and did create the wonders of biology. This claim is based not on proof, however, but on a philosophically loaded definition of science. Evolutionary biologists may like to assume that God played no role in creation, but why should everyone else be required to assume it?

So the question is not whether fundamentalists should be allowed to foist some dogma upon other people, but whether students may hear well-founded objections to misleading presentations of evolution that slight the difficulties. Let evolution be taught in the schools, of course. But let the problems with the Darwinian theory also be honestly acknowledged, and let students be taught how to tell the difference between what biologists really know by observation and what they fervently believe because it fits their philosophy. Teaching the difference between philosophy and science isn’t creationism; it’s good critical thinking.