Faith and Fact Can Coexist

The sixth and last definition of “theory” in our Webster’s New World Dictionary is “popularly, a mere conjecture, or guess.” That’s the dismissive meaning a majority of the Kansas Board of Education and others who think like them have in mind when they characterize evolution as a theory unsupported by evidence and therefore factually invalid. But as those who have bothered to inquire know, scientists have amassed an enormous body of physical evidence documenting the development and differentiation of life on Earth over the course of billions of years. In voting to downgrade and discourage the teaching of evolution, the board is moving schools in Kansas backward toward ignorance and obscurantism.

The fight to keep evolution out of classrooms is an old one. Its most dramatic battle came 74 years ago when a Tennessee schoolteacher named John T. Scopes was prosecuted for violating a state law against teaching Charles Darwin’s theory. Tennessee finally repealed the law in 1967, but the effort to deny the validity of evolutionary theory has never ended.

The chief objection is that evolution seems to contradict the literal interpretation of the biblical story of creation. More than a decade ago the Supreme Court ruled that public schools cannot be compelled to teach creationism. The point of attack since then, in Kansas and at least half a dozen other states, has been to try to limit the teaching of evolution.

The notion that there is an unbridgeable incompatibility between faith and the facts of evolution is a fallacy. The evidence of evolution--that all life, including ultimately human, derives from the same primordial sources--is not a rejection of divine purpose. Some people are deeply uncomfortable with the biological relationships among living things that science has established. But facts are facts. We know that we share 98% of our genes with chimpanzees. We also know it’s that remaining 2% that distinguishes us as humans, blesses with a conscience, capable of planning and creating and of pondering God’s mysterious ways. And, yes, of persuasively tracing the unmistakable course of evolution.