The creationist controversy: the religious issue

...Prayer," or "Love vs...

...Religious belief in creation is rooted in an awareness of our dependence on mysterious powers that shape our origin and destiny...

...The Judeo/Christian belief in our absolute dependence on the God of Abraham and Jesus is beautifully expressed in the ancient Hebrew creation myths...

...Never mind that many scientists see an evolving universe as an even more magnificent tribute to a Creator than a static one...

...One powerful model for such an endeavor is the late French paleontologist theologian, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who presented cosmic evolution as an illuminating framework for science, humanism, and Christianity...

...The information explosion of this century and rapid technological advances have made us unsure of things we once thought were unquestionable - and this at a time when we are challenged with increasingly complex kinds of ethical decisions...

...Evolution has been made to appear a religious issue by two opposing groups of religious fundamentalists, each proposing a single-lens view of reality...

...Centuries of theoretical questioning produced the various branches of science we have today...

...The crucial insight that is missing is that science and religion are different but complementary ways of knowing, each with its own language and rules...

...Instead of denying the evidence for evolution, they would deny the evidence for the validity of religious experience and knowledge...

...This was a regrettable decision, one that will cost a lot in time, energy, and taxpayers' dollars, not to mention student confusion, before it is inevitably reversed...

...We cannot afford to lose our own or future generations to ignorance and bigotry...

...This group does not seem bent on proselytizing, perhaps because it assumes that those who can leave behind the religious myths (read "fantasies") of mankind's childhood will be limited to the enlightened few...

...It follows that a term like "scientific creationism" is self-contradictory, and about as meaningful as "mathematical love-making...

...It is rooted in the fundamentally religious nature of human persons...

...science, creation vs...

...evolution at this stage of our civilization, as though we could only see through a single lens...

...What is at stake is our survival and growth as a free, pluralistic society, dedicated to the cause of advancing humanity on this planet and beyond, without fear, in the presence of the living God...

...They also might remind everyone that fidelity to the biblical Creator inspires an enthusiastic pursuit of scientific enquiry, not suspicion and condemnation...

...A theory is a tentative explanation of how a lot of facts are related...

...Never mind that their biblicism flies in the face of a century of biblical scholarship and is rejected by the majority of religious denominations whose traditions stem from the same biblical witness...

...The opposite extreme of religious fundamentalism is represented by the "secular humanists...

...The tribal myth, fundamentally religious, indeed religious fundamentalism in its origins, was the certain and secure basis for tribal culture...

...The scientific academy is currently debating the mechanism of evolution, but it is unanimous in its acceptance of the theory of evolution, on the basis of an overwhelming body of confirming evidence...

...anne BRENNAN is the director of the Institute for Academic Knowledge and Public Policy in Florida...

...And, they might caution those who would suggest that religious belief is necessarily opposed to science or is an outmoded approach which science has supplanted...

...Primitive peoples saw their world through the single lens of their tribal myth...

...The needs of critical thought eventually broke through the hard ground of tribal conformity, raising doubts about the adequacy of the myths to explain recurring natural events...

...The discovery and growing ability to use both kinds of lenses is the story of civilization...

...It provided an integrated system of answers to two basic kinds of questions: how do things in our world work relative to our survival...

...The challenge facing us in this age is to integrate a vast amount of new knowledge with authentic religious and moral values...

...The faith in creation expressed in Genesis does not answer our scientific questions about how things in the universe work, but our deeper questions about why there is anything at all, and why we assume it makes sense and is worth mastering...

...This doesn't mean that it's a guess which will become a fact when we're absolutely sure of it...

...2) insuring that scientific method be clearly explained in all science courses from the earliest grades...

...Evolution is not a religious issue any more than creation is a proper object of scientific investigation...

...Nor is it based on scientific evidence, but on the religious experienceof our contingency...

...By contrast, the message of the Bible is that we are called to go beyond our fear-ridden religious impulses and surrender in faith to the God who made us...

...It was an all-encompassing view which fused the practical knowledge of common sense with a religious awareness of transcendent mystery...

...It does reveal how prevalent are popular misconceptions about religion and science...

...It dictated the rituals and customs, the values and lifestyle, that insured tribal uniformity and survival...

...Creationists and evolutionists often argue their cases like opponents in a lawsuit...

...Religious fundamentalism is flourishing in our land, as elsewhere, because of the insecurity we are feeling in the wake of profound cultural changes...

...At the edge of our religious faith are some anxious doubts awakened by the new knowledge and by traumatic experience of evil on a global scale...

...Religious leaders, humanists, scientists, educators - all have a responsibility to help create a more intelligent and better informed American society...

...It is a little like the ten-year-old, the first night in the new house, who clutches the old teddy bear to assuage his reawakened fears of the dark...

...Creationism," which promise as much enlightenment as might debates entitied "Statistical Probability vs...

...In place of the biblical myth, the scientistic fundamentalists propose the "science-is-all" myth...

...and why are so many things beyond our control...

...They should refrain from giving the impression that scientific theories can prove religious beliefs, theistic or atheistic...

...As thinking developed and people began asking how things work in themselves, apart from practical or religious concerns, science was born...

...Scientists, in turn, would be doing everyone a service if they would find ways to help the public understand just what it is they are doing and not doing when they are doing science...

...Divine Providence," or "Penicillin vs...

...They are lying, for only atheists "believe in'' evolution...

...Here is the reverse image of biblical fundamentalism...

...Myth is the language proper to religious experience...

...We want to be sure about our ultimate well-being, however we imagine our salvation...

...Our most primitive religious impulse is to get some measure of control over the mystery that surrounds our existence...

...Evolution is a scientific theory...

...Scientific creationism," however, is a facile attempt at the needed integration...

...Vitamins...

...Equally revealing are debates entitled "Evolution vs...

...That God promises light and life at the end of our quest...

...Carl Sagan has managed to take good scientific material and present it as a religious trip through the heavens, in a cathedral-like ship, enveloped in ethereal lighting and filled with hushed, tremulous tones, interspersed with sophistic sneers at those religious myths of our ancestors which science has displaced...

...It will inevitably fail, because it is true neither to the new knowledge nor to the biblical faith it is trying to preserve...

...Rather than mandate the teaching of religion in science classes, school boards would better serve our society by adopting more fruitful policies, such as: 1) making comparative religion a required subject rather than an elective...

...A perfect metaphor for scientistic fundamentalism is the TV program, "Cosmos...

...But it obscures the real concerns at the heart of the fundamentalist attack on contemporary culture, and so delays any rational attempts to resolve the deeper issues...

...Its widespread use is yet one more indication of what we might boldly call the scientific and religious illiteracy of the products of our nation's educational system...

...We are frightened by our vulnerability...

...We need to develop a new, rich self-image, one that can permeate the "brave new world" of our technology with human intelligence, freedom, and compassion...

...A fact is merely a description of something we have observed...

...And, beneath the excitement of our new conquests in science, there are some disquieting questions about whether our pursuits of meaning and happiness are absurd flounderings in a meaningless world, or whether there might, after all, be some ultimate source of meaning and value outside ourselves...

...The twentieth century mind is the product of a long, irreversible process of development of.jvhat we might call its multiple-lens approach to reality...

...This only reinforces their conviction that they are the righteous few who will be saved...

...They need to make very clear which kinds of questions they can hope to answer and which they cannot, and why...

...Their profound religious insights and literary genius had been obscured by centuries of mistaking superb poetic drama for something akin to the Congressional Record...

...This only proves that scientists are the tools of Satan, using the theory of evolution to spread vice and corruption everywhere...

...RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM, whether biblical, scientistic, or any other variety, will be ever with us...

...We are all afraid of the dark...

...The discovery in the past century of languages and texts from the biblical cultures gave scholars the tools they needed to unlock, at last, the meanings intended by the authors of Genesis...

...Since they are neither secular nor humanistic, in the traditional sense, and their basic premise seems to be that science has displaced religion as the only valid way of acquiring knowledge of the real world, a better name for them might be "scientistic fundamentalists...

...Creation names a divine activity which is certainly beyond our powers of observation...

...But the religious quest can no more be extinguished by their sneers than can the scientific quest by religious dogmatism...

...They function not so much like contradictory pictures of the world, but more like different kinds of lenses through which we can view the world from different angles or in different lights...

...Last year, Florida's Hillsborough County School Board voted in favor of such a requirement...

...It expresses in drama and imagery die otherwise inexpressible awareness of a transcendent Other just beyond the reach of our imagination...

...We need to stop whistling dissonant tunes at each other and turn on some lights...

...3) incorporating into the curriculum at every level exercises in critical thinking and problem-solving...

...Each claims to have an authentic photo of, say, an accident, while charging that the other's contradictory picture has been fraudulently touched up...

...Their biases appear as gratuitous snipes at religion, such as sometimes mar the otherwise lucid writings of Isaac Asimov...

...But, it will have a far longer day in court because our schools have not produced citizens who can understand and think critically about the issues involved...

...After repeated observations and debates, scientists may accept a theory as a reasonably sound and useful explanation of the available facts, knowing that the theory may have to be revised in light of future discoveries...

...Faith in the biblical Creator is not based on such misinterpretation of Genesis...

...Salvation for us all lies in conversion to, or legal enforcement of, the biblical fundamentalists' tribal myth, with its unquestionable morals and mores...

...The fundamentalist grasp for absolutes is an understandable regression to the mythological security of the primitive tribe...

...Religious leaders of the Judaeo/Christian tradition would do the public a service by speaking out clearly against these false prophets, who offer certitudes and guarantees of salvation in place of that relationship with God, full of risk and uncertainty, that is biblical faith...

...SCIENTISTIC ONES The creationism controversy: the religious issues ANNE BRENNAN THE INSTITUTE for Creation Research and the Creation Research Society, with the support of the Moral Majority and similar religio-political groups, have been waging a nationwide campaign to require the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in public school biology classes...

...Never mind that, like the churchmen who refused to look through Galileo's telescope, they must deny an enormous body of scientific evidence for evolution...

...It is a regression for us to be arguing religion vs...

...The biblical fundamentalists, interpreting the creation narratives in Genesis as historical and scientific records dictated by God, are compelled to reject any scientific theory which, like evolution, appears to contradict what God said...

...This sense of radical dependence has found expression in myth and ritual, belief systems, and moral codes...

...They would reject the deepest realm of human inquiry...

...Their creed is the Humanist Manifesto, I and II...