Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 18, 1994 TAG: 9409210045
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Cody Lowe
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
This time it's been the evolutionists against the creationists.
The letters have been as thick as the primordial soup - or the Garden of Eden underbrush, depending on your point of view.
Promoters of "creation science" argue that the biblical account of the creation should be viewed as a legitimate scientific theory and taught with equal weight in public schools with the "big bang" and Darwin's - or anybody else's - theory of evolution.
So far, the dominant voices usually have taken the absolutist view. Either there is no God and we're witnessing the results of a cosmic accident that happened billions of years ago, or God created everything in an unchanging form a few thousand years ago.
From the tone of the letters you get the same "feel" as the characters in a famous play about the Scopes trial, "Inherit the Wind." In it, the poor bumpkins who actually believed the biblical story were depicted as fools, and - perhaps unintentionally - the arrogant snobs who lose the trial but actually get the better of the creationists come across as godless, heartless, unsympathetic elitists. I might add that the latter are represented in large part by a grating journalist who always speaks in free verse.
So go the letters in this most recent flare-up of the debate.
Notoriously, what they miss is the fact that most religious people - most of them I know, anyway - come down in the middle on this one.
We believe a Creator was necessary to get this whole process going, but that the Creation included "natural" processes, such as evolution. In fact, that creation is on-going.
That idea was dismissed by one commentator who seemed to assume that those who needed a "God of the gaps" were merely ideological fools willing to believe in magic to fill in the areas where science has yet to provide answers that it will assuredly someday find.
Maybe we are fools. The plain fact remains that no human being has yet come up with a demonstrable, repeatable scientific process for the creation of life directly from lifeless materials.
Scientists may argue, plausibly, that perhaps the reason we haven't learned to create life is that we don't have available to us the time or the energy that was available at the creation of the universe. We humans don't live all that long, and that kind of power is almost unimaginable.
But that is what religionists have been saying all along, I think.
Many of us see no inherent disagreement, actually, between the biblical account of creation and generally accepted scientific notions of creation. The Genesis account actually makes a pretty good kindergarten-level version of creation that's compatible with the scientific view. The broad picture is of the formation of a mass, then water, then plant life, then animal life in the water, then birds and land animals, and, latest of all, humans - who had intellectual capacity to control and investigate the rest of creation.
Now as long as we don't get hung up on how long it took - whether God's "day" was the same as our 24 hours - and don't expect a detailed scientific treatise, this is pretty consistent with modern scientific understanding.
The only area we disagree on is how it got started. It seems to me a teacher in most elementary or high-school classrooms only has a couple of options when trying to explain that beginning. He or she can explain that science doesn't know for sure, but that there are several theories about how life could spring from lifelessness. Spell out the theories. And the teacher can explain that many people believe that a Creator - or "God" - initiated the process. Spell out that this is a matter of faith, not a conclusion of scientific method.
Is that intellectual laziness or dishonesty? I don't think so. Does it compromise religious belief by refusing to teach Genesis as a science text? I don't think so.
I understand this could be hard to teach without getting onto swampy religious ground. But it can be done, just as one can teach about religion without attempting to inculcate dogma. No public school teacher should have to defend "creationism" as a science. Nor should one have to deny that some intelligent, thinking people accept it.
Acknowledging in the classroom that most Americans believe God created the universe doesn't have to be scientific heresy or shatter the wall of separation of church and state. On the contrary, it appears intellectually dishonest to refuse to admit that - among we poor lay people, at least - newer scientific theories about the forces of creation are less widely accepted than the oldest one.
Teaching Genesis and evolution - it's isn't that difficult
by CNB