Read Present at the Future Online
Authors: Ira Flatow
“Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve never seen one. I don’t think they occur on any sort of regular basis. They may, as C. S. Lewis describes, occur at those great ganglions of history where it suits God to make a point of some sort. They’re not randomly shaken into human experience.
“But I don’t think one needs to say, even as a rigorous show-me-the-data scientist, which I am, that miracles are impossible once you’ve accepted the idea that God exists.”
UNWRITTEN TABOO?
How do other scientists see the religious views of scientists like Collins and Gingerich? Collins says they are generally well accepted.
“Robert Jastrow, the noted astronomer, began his own book, God and the Astronomers, with this rather famous sentence: ‘When a scientist writes about God, his colleagues assume he’s either over the hill or going bonkers.’ And I hope I’m neither of those. But I take comfort in the fact that surveys would tell you that forty percent of working scientists believe in a personal God to whom one may pray in expectation of an answer.
“They’re fairly quiet about it. I think there is sort of an unwritten taboo that you don’t discuss this in scientific circles, but there’s a lot of us who share that same view, including, I might add, some prominent evolutionists over the course of the last century, like Asa Gray,
who was the major defender of Darwin in the U.S., and Theodosius Dobzhansky, probably the greatest intellect of the early part of the twentieth century in the area of evolution and who found no controversy or conflict at all between being believers and also those who clearly saw in evolution an answer to a lot of questions about how living organisms are related to each other.”
SPEAKING OUT
In writing books about their faith, in being the cover stories of national magazines, as Collins has, both he and Gingerich have chosen to “go public” with views that they had more or less kept quietly to themselves, or at least had not discussed under the glare of the public spotlight before.
“It’s a bit like taking a public bath, I suppose, but I think Owen would probably resonate with this as well. When you look around us today, particularly in the United States, there seems to be such a battle going on, with the extreme positions dominating the stage. Some of those extreme voices come from our own colleagues who pronounce in shrill tones that evolution and other discoveries of science have rendered God no longer necessary and that any thinking person should now become an atheist. On the other pole, one hears pronouncements from fundamentalist perspectives that science cannot be trusted if it disagrees with an ultraliteral interpretation of Genesis, and anybody who disagrees with them is not a true believer.
“These are troubling times, and if there are those of us who have not arrived at either of those extremes but actually inhabit the middle ground in a very comfortable way, for whom the spiritual and the scientific world view are not only compatible but complementary and comforting, should we not be speaking up about that?
“Because a society in the future that abandons science or abandons faith is not a society that’s necessarily a healthy one. And if we
have the chance to try to preserve both of those in a healthy way, then I think we have some obligation to do so. So yeah, there are risks in being outspoken about this, and certainly Owen and I have encountered some negative reactions about it—although not much. I think most scientists are respectful, if perhaps in some instances a bit puzzled.
Gingerich agrees. “We’re looking for a kind of middle road between two fundamental extremes. You can have fundamentalist scientists who are so absolutely sure they understand it all and who are hard-core atheists, and you can have fundamentalists on the religious side who are prepared to take a literalist reading of the Scriptures that has not been borne out historically. I have been speaking about these issues for some time, but I think there needs to be a kind of a middle voice in this, and I’ve tried to represent that field.”
As for atheists, Collins believes they must have even more faith than many people who believe in God. “They have to have faith in their own intellect’s ability to know so much that they can exclude the possibility of God categorically, which seems to me the greatest statement of faith, or perhaps hubris and arrogance, that one could imagine. So yes, faith, but in what? As I look about myself and the culture we live in and the world we live in, a world without the kind of noble intentions that arise, many times, out of people’s hearts in the consequence of their faith, a world that misses out on a Mother Teresa or an Oskar Schindler, a world where science has to go on in a completely materialist way, does not sound like the kind of world of wonderful humanity and nobility of humankind that I hope will be evolving over the many decades to come.”
“I find it really very offensive to be told that if there is no God, then we can have no moral principles,” says a perturbed Weinberg. “I don’t believe in God, and I think I live quite a moral life. I think in fact our view of what moral principles are taught by religion has been evolving through the change in morality in society.
I mean it used to be thought that there was no conflict between Christianity and the existence of slavery. Today, many people think there is.
“I think the evolution has not been an evolution of religion but an evolution of the general morality of society. And I certainly don’t like to be told that because I don’t believe in God that I therefore must be an immoral person.”
Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Tennessee, That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.
—STATE OF TENNESSEE, March, 1925
All eight members up for reelection to the [Dover] Pennsylvania school board that had been sued for introducing the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in biology class were swept out of office yesterday by a slate of challengers who campaigned against the intelligent design policy.
—NEW YORK TIMES, November 9, 2006
If you thought that the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, in which a Tennessee schoolteacher, John Scopes, was tried, convicted, and fined for teaching the theory of evolution was the final word in the war between scientists, educators, and creationists over the teaching of Darwin’s views in the classroom, you haven’t been paying attention.
The acrimonious debate received renewed vigor after George W. Bush declared that when it comes to evolution, “the verdict is still out.” His conservative supporters redoubled their attack on science that had been bubbling beneath the surface of local school politics in the 80 years since the Scopes trial. In 1999, the Kansas Board of Education voted to remove evolution from the list of subjects to be tested on state achievement exams. Dissatisfied, Kansas voters in 2000 voted out the school board that had sanctioned that proposal. But the tug of war continued. In 2004, conservatives once again gained control of the school board and voted to include the teaching of “intelligent design,” a repackaged version of creationism, in public school biology classes. The pendulum swung once again, in 2006, when pro-evolutionists took control again, in the political tide that returned control of Congress and many state and local elections to centrist Democrats and social ideas.
But it was Pennsylvania, not Kansas, that became the magnet of public attention in the early years of the twenty-first century. In 2004, the school board of rural Dover, Pennsylvania, mandated that teachers include the reading of a statement about intelligent design before teaching evolution. It became the first school in the United States to make such a requirement and in doing so, brought the full attention and focus of scientists, educators, and the media to this small community.
In revolt, some teachers resigned rather than condone the attack on evolution. Incensed, eleven parents challenged the decision in court. A dramatic trial in the state capital, Harrisburg, brought the issue to a surprising conclusion when U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III issued a 139-page ruling saying, among other things, that intelligent design is not science but religion and had no place in the classroom. In addition, Judge Jones, in a broad and scathing decision, said that the requirement violated the First Amendment to the Constitution and “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.” Judge Jones was appointed to the U.S. District Court bench in 2002 by President George W. Bush.
What follows are some of the discussions that framed the issues, focusing specifically on the Dover case. What you will not find here is a debate about the validity of intelligent design. It is a conscious choice, on my part, not to have one. Proponents of intelligent design intend to wedge their theory into school curricula by creating an artificial and clever construct: that scientists are unsure of the truth of evolution themselves, that there is a real “controversy” among scientists about its validity. That teachers would be doing a disservice to their students by not “teaching the controversy.”
But the fact is that there is no controversy to teach. Sure, scientists disagree and debate just how evolution is occurring, but as a rule, they do not disagree about the basics. Therefore, for me as a journalist to conduct a debate about the issue would be, in effect, to “teach the controversy” and grant the creationists a victory.
What I choose to do instead is to listen to the voices of people making the decisions about teaching intelligent design and evolution: politicians, school board members, science teachers, and the rulings of courts deciding the issues who all have valuable personal and professional reasons to be heard. This is an issue that is not going away anytime soon.
On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth.
—GEORGE W. BUSH
Of all the recent challenges to evolution, none is more important—or more surprising—than the Dover School Board case.
In October 2004, the Dover School Board near York, Pennsylvania, voted 6 to 3 to require science teachers in its public schools to include in their biology classes an idea called intelligent design. Proponents of intelligent design say that some parts of life are just too complex to be the products of evolution. An intelligent designer probably had to become involved. Evolution alone, they say, doesn’t explain the origin of species. The intelligent designer, though never specified, is not thought to be a space alien but rather a supernatural being, such as God.
A note on the school board’s Web site noted that the biology curriculum was updated to include the following statement: “Stu
dents will be made aware of gaps, problems, in Darwin’s theory, and of other theories of evolution, including but not limited to intelligent design. The origins of life is not taught.”
Another section said, “Because Darwin’s theory is a theory, it is still being tested as new evidence is discovered. A theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as ‘a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.’ Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book Of Pandas and People is available for students to see if they would like to explore this view in an effort to gain an understanding of what intelligent design actually involves. As is true with any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of the origin of life up to individual students and their families.”
A majority of the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, agreed, and voted that students there should be taught in science class ideas contrary to what the overwhelming majority of scientists believe about the origin of species.
Jeff and Carol Brown were members of the school board who could not support the decision and chose to resign. “After ten years on the board,” explained Carol Brown, “I realized that I was at a point where I could no longer represent the interests of all of the members of the community, because that’s what I was elected to do. Not the interests of a small group or an individual but the interests of all of the members of the community. And I was no longer able to do that.”
The controversy started over the selection of a new biology textbook, which was opposed by the person in charge of the curriculum. “He cited sixteen mentions of Darwin and Darwin’s theories in a 1,400-page textbook,” said Carol Brown, “and he said that he would not present it to the board for approval, and he thought that we should look further.” Brown was surprised at the decision, because “at no point in the textbook, in no chapter of the textbook, is there
any mention of the so-called controversial theory of the descent of man, which Darwin promulgated. The discussion centers about Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which is, in essence, survival of the fittest. If a species cannot adapt, then that species dies out. And that’s all we have ever taught in Dover, and that is what is mandated by the state curriculum.”
Yet despite years of teaching Darwin, the school board was now deciding to eliminate the standard biology textbook and substitute it with a book called Of Pandas and People, which espouses the idea of intelligent design. “I see this as an attempt to put a specific religious viewpoint into the classroom that is contrary to the 1987 Supreme Court ruling.”
When Ms. Brown objected to the book, the school board frequently called her faith into question. “I would never presume to ask anyone what his or her faith is. That’s of no importance in serving on the school board. We’re there to represent all of the members of the community and all of our students, and that includes students of all faiths. And I was asked, actually, on three separate occasions whether or not I was a born-again Christian, whether I had been ‘saved.’ And although I didn’t go off in anger, I was very offended by that, because that is a matter between me and my God, if you will, and my pastor.”