These are busy times for those who fight the teaching of creationism in public schools. It’s like playing a giant game of

Whack-a-Mole: In January alone, anti-evolution forces first raised their heads in North Carolina. Whack. Then Kentucky. Whack. Then Ohio. Whack. Then Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas. Whackwhackwhack.

The fight continues. And I encourage everyone to support those who want our kids to grow up in the real world, which is so beautiful and surprising and rich.

Anyway, there’s a nice little piece of snark that has popped up from the more atheistic side of the pro-science forces. This group of folks has noticed that, since the creationist and intelligent design crowd (they’re the same crowd) want creationism taught in the public schools, it’s only fair that the supporters of real science should ask: Well, can we teach evolution in your churches?

I think that’s a mighty fine idea.

Why Go to Church?

By way of explanation, consider the question: Why do people go to church? I mean, besides the fact that churches often make dandy country clubs, besides the fact that going to church is a highly effective method for keeping us Christians from facing the facts about ourselves (“I’m at church, see? I’m one of the good ones! See?”), and besides the fact that no human being can resist doing something for the simple reason that it’s always been done?

What I mean is, are there genuine social or intellectual or spiritual reasons for going to church?

Yes. Underneath all the nonsense and pomposity, there are some good reasons: community, meaning, connection with the past. But I would like to suggest that, ultimately, people go to church because of mystery. This is not mystery in the sense of Whodunit?, or “What makes a rainbow so pretty?”; instead, this is the very mystery of existence itself; it is the bare fact of us showing up, without even having been asked, on this loneliest of planets in this strangest of universes. All people who attend church—conservative, liberal, whatever—do so, at least in part, because of mystery. They may never use that word, but there it is nonetheless.

This is not to say that all are motivated by mystery in exactly the same way. Some people attend church in order to receive answers to the hard questions life throws at them, to shield them from the dark realities of modern life, to seek reliable absolutes by which to measure the world. That is, those in this group attend church in order to escape mystery. Because mystery means not knowing, and people must know.

This is broad generalization, to be sure, but many, many people are powerfully motivated by the fear of the utter mystery of life. It is, after all, the great unknown. And to not know is to give up control, to be shut out in the dark, to drift, to face the abyss with no armor. Flight is an utterly human response to mystery.

But sometimes the need for control, absolutes, and knowledge careens out of control. To wit: Those who desire to have creationism taught in our nation’s public schools. They know, because the Bible says so; and what’s more, they know so well that they’re going to take control of the educations not only of their own children, but of everyone else’s, too. After all, isn’t it good to know the truth, and isn’t it good to share it, even if that means stacking school boards and inciting legal battles? It’s the truth, and nothing justifies like the truth.

Facing the Unknown

But some churchgoers do not attend every Sunday in search of answers. These people understand the church not as a provider of answers but as a poser of questions. That is, for these Christians the task of he church is not to clear away mystery, but to deepen it; to teach its congregation how to bear mystery—and “the truth”—lightly. The unknowns of life may be terrifying, but this group knows that facing them squarely can be fantastically liberating.

It is under this second understanding of the church that its teaching of evolution makes a lot of sense.

My earliest experiences that could be called “religious” were delivered to me by the hands of science. When I was in third or fourth grade my dad showed me a geologic timeline in aTime-Life book on natural history. My eyes followed its epochs, periods, eras, and eons down the page until they converged on the dark Hadean eon, marking Earth’s very assembly 4.5 billion years ago.

I was stupefied. With its boxes and numbers and colors and fine print the timeline seemed to me a thing of great elegance. The words—Ordovician, Silurian, Jurassic, Eocene—were themselves rare discoveries, whatever they signified. Yet standing at the edge of that precipice was, for me, secretly scary. It was profoundly disorienting. It made me feel utterly empty, like I was an absolute nothing. Like I was a ghost.

But it also made me feel giddy, joyful, and free. I could not take my eyes from it. Night after night, I took the Time-Life book to bed with me and I read it until I could read no more.

This quiet but transformative introduction to deep time started me off on a terrific three-year-long obsession with dinosaurs and evolution and geology and astronomy. Other encounters with nature had similar effects on me: They made me feel empty, terrified, and utterly happy and free; and I wound up being a physicist and astronomer. And the irony is, it was science and the natural world—and not the church—that introduced me to mystery. Or, to be more direct, it was science and the natural world—and not the church—that introduced me to God.

Mine is not an isolated case. Over time I have come to know many others with similar experiences. Many of these are scientists who, like me, entered the scientific world out of their love of nature. Yet unlike me, most of them were, and still are, agnostics or atheists. They know the wonder, they know the profound amazement, they know the jaw-dropping disbelief that comes with even a modestly scientific view of the world. Whatever their theological position, they know something about what we religious sorts call mystery. And they don’t have to give it the same name I do to know what I’m talking about. I suspect many atheistic scientists know more about mystery—about God, even—than most “believers,” but they would never call it God.

small-god-ism

The church, in its ignorance of and hostility to evolution (and science in general), is passing up one of its greatest opportunities to apprehend the very God it claims to represent. This irony is due to a terrible case of what may be called “small-god-ism” and is, unfortunately, encouraged by much popular theology. This theology makes claims about scripture and church practice that reduce God to a cheerleader, or a cosmic vending machine, or some domesticated and pale image of our own confused selves. Such a god is clearly not sufficient to contain all of reality. And in the face of the challenge posed by modern science, instead of rejecting whatever idea of God one has constructed, reality itself is rejected. So evolution is like sex—it’s there, all right, but it is not to be mentioned in church. What would decent people think? What would God think?

If “God” is not large enough to contain this universe in all its immensity and complexity and age, then it’s just not God. God is not a thing; God does not exist like we exist, or like the moon exists. God is like nothing we can know in language or image. God transcends these things and all we can know or imagine. This includes what we know of evolution, cosmology, geology, and any other science. Christians have absolutely nothing to fear.

Here’s another irony: None other than the late great atheist Carl Sagan has said all of this already. In his book Pale Blue Dot, he wrote,

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed”? Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.”

Rather sentimental people often argue that the more science one knows, the less mysterious and wondrous nature becomes. But this is simply not so. The insistence that the wonder of nature is reduced by scientific knowledge is no different than the insistence that scripture can only be understood literally; both are fixated on appearances and are based in the fear of the unknown. At the initial stages, historical criticism may seem to needlessly desiccate the Bible. But over time the effect of study is a radical deepening of the text. Careful and sustained attention releases a kind of wonder from the pages of scripture; this has been attested to by many over the centuries. But this level of appreciation does not come from a literal reading; it comes by digging deeply and patiently in order to find the meaning that is found beneath and between the words on the page.

The “book of nature,” as the natural world is sometimes called, is no different. Beauty in nature begins at the surfaces but compounds rapidly beneath. All scientists know this. Keeping this beauty and wonder and mystery from those who come to church in search of God is simply unfair. By keeping the best of modern science out of the church, a disservice is done not only to those who come looking for God, but to society at large.

Who knows—it may be that, by teaching evolution in the church and presenting it in the context of the Christian faith, we may help, in some small way, to shut down the great national game of Whack-a-Mole.

Source: Religion Dispatches

Members of the earth’s earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.

According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization.

“I do not understand,” reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. “A booming voice is saying, ‘Let there be light,’ but there is already light. It is saying, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass,’ but I am already standing on grass.”

“Everything is here already,” the pictograph continues. “We do not need more stars.”

Historians believe that, immediately following the biblical event, Sumerian witnesses returned to the city of Eridu, a bustling metropolis built 1,500 years before God called for the appearance of dry land, to discuss the new development. According to records, Sumerian farmers, priests, and civic administrators were not only befuddled, but also took issue with the face of God moving across the water, saying that He scared away those who were traveling to Mesopotamia to participate in their vast and intricate trade system.

Moreover, the Sumerians were taken aback by the creation of the same animals and herb-yielding seeds that they had been domesticating and cultivating for hundreds of generations.

“The Sumerian people must have found God’s making of heaven and earth in the middle of their well-established society to be more of an annoyance than anything else,” said Paul Helund, ancient history professor at Cornell University. “If what the pictographs indicate are true, His loud voice interrupted their ancient prayer rituals for an entire week.”

According to the cuneiform tablets, Sumerians found God’s most puzzling act to be the creation from dust of the first two human beings.

“These two people made in his image do not know how to communicate, lack skills in both mathematics and farming, and have the intellectual capacity of an infant,” one Sumerian philosopher wrote. “They must be the creation of a complete idiot.” 

Source: The Onion

The majority of public high school biology teachers in the U.S. are not strong classroom advocates of evolutionary biology, despite 40 years of court cases that have ruled teaching creationism or intelligent design violates the Constitution, according to Penn State political scientists. A mandatory undergraduate course in evolutionary biology for prospective teachers, and frequent refresher courses for current teachers, may be part of the solution, they say.

“Considerable research suggests that supporters of evolution, scientific methods, and reason itself are losing battles in America’s classrooms,” write Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer, professors of political science at Penn State, in the January 28 issue of Science.

The researchers examined data from the National Survey of High School Biology Teachers, a representative sample of 926 public high school biology instructors. They found only about 28 percent of those teachers consistently implement National Research Council recommendations calling for introduction of evidence that evolution occurred, and craft lesson plans with evolution as a unifying theme linking disparate topics in biology.

In contrast, Berkman and Plutzer found that about 13 percent of biology teachers “explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design by spending at least one hour of class time presenting it in a positive light.” Many of these teachers typically rejected the possibility that scientific methods can shed light on the origin of the species, and considered both evolution and creationism as belief systems that cannot be fully proven or discredited.

Berkman and Plutzer dubbed the remaining teachers the “cautious 60 percent,” who are neither strong advocates for evolutionary biology nor explicit endorsers of nonscientific alternatives. “Our data show that these teachers understandably want to avoid controversy,” they said.

The researchers found these teachers commonly use one or more of three strategies to avoid controversy. Some teach evolutionary biology as if it applies only to molecular biology, ignoring an opportunity to impart a rich understanding of the diversity of species and evidence that one species gives rise to others.

Using a second strategy, some teachers rationalize the teaching of evolution by referring to high-stakes examinations.

These teachers “tell students it does not matter if they really ‘believe’ in evolution, so long as they know it for the test,” Berkman and Plutzer said.

Finally, many teachers expose their students to all positions, scientific and otherwise, and let them make up their own minds.

This is unfortunate, the researchers said, because “this approach tells students that well established concepts can be debated in the same way we debate personal opinions.”

Berkman and Plutzer conclude that “the cautious 60 percent fail to explain the nature of scientific inquiry, undermine the authority of established experts, and legitimize creationist arguments.” As a result, “they may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists.”

The researchers note that more high school students take biology than any other science course, and for as many as 25 percent of high school students it is the only science course they will ever take, even though a sound science education is important in a democracy that depends on citizen input on highly technical, consequential, public policies.

Berkman and Plutzer say the nation must have better-trained biology teachers who can confidently advocate for high standards of science education in their local communities. Colleges and universities should mandate a dedicated undergraduate course in evolution for all prospective biology teachers, for example, and follow up with outreach refresher courses, so that more biology teachers embrace evolutionary biology.

“Combined with continued successes in courtrooms and the halls of state government, this approach offers our best chance of increasing the scientific literacy of future generations,” they conclude

Source: Science Daily

A Christian group has said it wants the creationist theory reflected at the planned Giant’s Causeway Visitors Centre.

The Caleb Foundation said it wanted equal prominence for its religious viewpoint.

Last month, it emerged that the Culture Minister Nelson McCausland had written to museum officials arguing for greater prominence for creationism.

An SDLP MLA said such an exhibition at the Causeway would be “inappropriate”.

The chairman of the Caleb Foundation, Wallace Thompson, has met the tourism minister Arlene Foster to discuss its request.

“All we are asking for is that the views that we hold, which are based on the Word of God, are at least respected and taken on board,” he said.

“A Christian politician in a position of power can make a difference.”

SDLP MLA Alban Maginnis said he was opposed to a creationist representation at the new facility.

“You are talking about a visitors’ centre which will attract people from all over the world,” he said.

“It will be dealing with the natural sciences in relation to the Giant’s Causeway.

“I do not think it would be appropriate in these circumstances to have a very narrow religious view expressed.”

Source: BBC