Unsought Input

Creationism. It’s been finding its way into schools by hiding behind the facade of intelligent design. We’ve written about it in the past.

One argument in particular seems to appeal to all the rational, open minded people out there. The Creationists ask, why can’t we tell both sides of the story? We can teach the controversy and let people make up their minds for themselves.

This sounds nice and democratic and all but the argument has several fatal flaws:

1. We don’t teach Chinese in Spanish class because, although Chinese is great and kids should be able to learn it if they want, Chinese is not Spanish. Creationism posits that there are supernatural, unexplainable causes for things and that’s the exact opposite of the scientific method.
2. There is no controversy to teach. Among anyone who has actually studied biology or genetics there’s really no controversy. The controversy is between virtually all the experts on one side and a very loud group of non experts on the other. To go back to the Spanish example, would you let someone write the Spanish language text book if they admitted they don’t speak the language, had never spent any time in a Spanish-speaking country, and they disagreed with what native speakers say is the proper grammar?
3. We separate church and state for a reason. No one (in the U.S.) ever talks about teaching Hindu creationism or Navajo creationism in public schools. Teaching from one religion’s beliefs and not another’s in discriminatory. Other that counting the warm bodies in the pews, how can we judge which mythical creation story is worth teaching and which isn’t? Some religions have books older than the Bible.
4. Creationism is an intellectual dead end. If the conclusion to every mystery is “God did it,” where can we go from there? We certainly can’t discover DNA, decode the genome, create new drugs and therapies, use evolutionary techniques to create computer algorithms, fight drug-resistant bacteria, etc. To beat a dead horse, it’s like a Spanish class where the teacher answers questions about conjugating verbs in the past tense by saying “it’s too hard, it’s unknowable, you can’t learn it unless God reveals it to you.”

The list goes on. There’s one argument I generally don’t like to make, which is the slippery slope argument - that is, if we allow one thing to happen, that will set society on a slippery slope toward some crazy scenario that no one would be happy with. I don’t think creationism in public schools puts us on an inevitable path to the Middle Ages. But let me ask you this: do you really thing the very religious people leading the intelligent design movement will stop at Creationism?

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