Teach Them Science

The following are comments that I shared at a press conference in Austin on Jan. 15, 2008 as part of a team announcing the kickoff of a website to encourage Texans to not allow creationist propaganda to replace science in Texas classrooms. [This is not yet the final copy of what was shared. I'll replace this with the polished copy ASAP.]

In the great sweep of time, it was only yesterday, a mere 500 years ago when Copernicus first wrote his On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres and related to his shocked readers that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our solar system. He proposed a theory for how the planets all revolved around the sun that was so elegantly simple that one wonders why it wasn’t thought of earlier.

The truth of the matter was that it had been suggested earlier by a number of people, but you know how it goes, an earth-centered cosmos better suited the narrow vision Europeans held until that time. Then in the early 16th century with that other form of revolution in the air everywhere, it was finally time for the populace to be able to hear and take in a strange and yes, challenging truth.

The Church wasn’t thrilled with the challenges this new way of understanding brought, but it adapted. Today I’m happy to say that I don’t know a single soul who has lost his or her faith because they couldn’t accept the formerly unthinkable notion of the earth revolving around the sun.

Is that situation much different from ours today? I don’t think so. The science that underlies evolution is impeccable. Month by month more and more corroborating evidence mounts. We have with all the new DNA testing demonstrations of the actual genetic changes that move species to new species. Amazing, isn’t it? Every step points to the underlying truth of the theory of evolution that Darwin first pointed us toward.

We shouldn’t be surprised that some in the some religious communities aren’t thrilled by this challenge, either. It is one more in a long string of adjustments religions have had to make in a constantly changing world. But just because we can understand their reticence in letting go of cherished old ways of understanding that does not excuse them of the necessity to do so. Especially, when the children of Texas will graduate from high school and will have to compete for the same spot in a science program of a college or university along side other young people from Michigan and California and New York who were actually taught what scientists understand today! Their young people will know that the earth revolves around the sun and that evolution describes our genesis and they won’t have wasted time and focus on outmoded, antiquated understandings.

I suggest it is the sacred duty of a parent and of a society to provide its young people with a solid cultural education and also a solid scientific education that will help them understand their world, be competent in it and be able to compete in it.

It is not betraying faith to welcome science’s fully orbed evolutionary picture of how varieties of life forms have slowly branched over millions of years into the wondrous multiplicity we enjoy this day. Many a person of faith can see in that very process the slow, steady hand of God arching all the way from simple single-celled life to the soaring heights and complexity of a self-conscious humanity.

It is not betraying faith to welcome science’s answers to the questions of “how?” Nor will science be able to touch religion’s answers to “why?”

But, let us be clear, it is betraying our children to pretend the Book of Genesis chapters 1&2 are literal renditions of how we got it here.