Finding God in the Garden by Balfour Brickner

Author:Balfour Brickner [BRICKER, BALFOUR]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316076494
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

EVOLUTION: THE DEAD DEBATE LIVES

One would have thought that debate would have been resolved long ago in the aftermath of the famous Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925, when Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan went head-to-head over the right of a public school teacher to teach the theory of evolution. Not so. Almost annually, somewhere in this country, someone or some group conducts a poll to ascertain what Americans believe about evolution, and not surprisingly, the results are usually quite similar.

In 1993, a Gallup poll revealed that almost half of all Americans believed that God created humans within the past ten thousand years. On January 19, 1997, the ever popular though hardly scientific Parade magazine reported that “75 percent of Americans cannot pass a basic National Science Foundation science quiz that asks questions like whether… humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time.” Perhaps this lacuna in basic science knowledge is what leads to the desire to cling simultaneously to the two conflicting views of how the world came into being.

Seven years after the 1993 poll, the New York Times reported that a poll of fifteen hundred Americans conducted in March 2000 revealed that while 83 percent of those surveyed generally supported the teaching of evolution in public schools, 79 percent thought that creationism, presented as a belief rather than a scientific theory, should also be a part of the curriculum. David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, thought it “logically inconsistent both to believe in the theory of evolution, that humans did descend from animals, and to believe the opposite, that they were created in their present form.” The March 2000 poll further indicated that about 30 percent of Americans believed that creationism should be taught as a scientific theory, either with or without evolution in the curriculum. Only 20 percent of those polled believed that evolution should be taught in science classes without any mention of creationism. The poll showed that young Americans ages eighteen to twenty-four and Americans with relatively high education levels were more likely to support teaching evolution and less likely to favor teaching creationism.

The astonishing fact is that today there are still states in the Union where only the theory of creationism is taught in the public schools. In Alabama, biology textbooks must carry a warning that reads in part, “No one was present when life first appeared on earth. Therefore, any statement about life’s origins should be considered as theory, not fact.” The specious logic of such a statement should be obvious to all. By such reasoning, one should also argue that because no one was atop Mount Sinai with Moses when he supposedly received the Ten Commandments from God, what is on those tablets should be seen as invalid. That being the case, why try to follow them as though they were a set of divine demands?

In 1996, the school superintendent of a conservative county in western Kentucky ordered that two pages explaining the big bang theory of cosmic origins in grade school textbooks be glued together.

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