OK in Church but Not in the Schools : Bible-based creationism has its place, even in Alabama

Astonishingly, more than 100 years after Charles Darwin formulated his revolutionary ideas on natural selection and the origin of species and 70 years after the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, the teaching of evolution in the public schools remains a heated issue in certain educational backwaters.

Under political pressure from creationists, Alabama’s education department has ordered disclaimers inserted in all biology textbooks used in the state. These assert that evolution is nothing more than one explanation of life offered by scientists.

Given the global economic competition that pits the American economy against other highly technological and well-educated nations, it is distressing that American schoolchildren are still fed such information. The usual and very tired argument against the Theory of Evolution is that it is “just” a theory, as if it were a novel notion unsupported by solid evidence. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. It may have been just a theory when Darwin first articulated it. But in this case, theory means a wide body of facts and ideas that, taken together, serve to explain the natural world. While there remains some scientific disagreement over the details of how it proceeds, the Theory of Evolution has been amply confirmed by a century’s worth of convincing fossil and other evidence. It is today no more a matter of serious scientific dispute than the older notions that the Earth is flat or at the center of the universe.

Sooner or later, science settles certain issues and moves on. Creationists are sincere people whose arguments are rooted in deeply held religious beliefs. But schoolchildren should not have their educations crippled by dogmatic, politically inspired fealty to outdated, erroneous ideas.