Teach the controversy

By Peter & Helen Evans

The old controversy between the "creationists" and the "evolutionists" has re-emerged, but with a new twist... this time, the evolutionists are on the defensive. In the cover story of the October, 2004 issue of Wired magazine, Evan Ratliff outlines the basic positions of the two sides of this issue. His own position is indicated by the title; "The Crusade Against Evolution," but his bias is not so distorting as to prevent the reader from gaining a valuable insight into the largely unacknowledged battle for the minds of America's rising generation. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/evolution.html

A little background: following Charles Darwin's 1859 publication of "On the Origin of Species," revolutionary scientists of the period seized upon its ideas to attack the monopoly of the religious establishment over the question of "the origin of everything." Their belief became known as the "theory of evolution" and, over the next seven decades, swept all before it. The famous "Scopes monkey trial" of 1925 seemed to nail down the coffin lid of Creationism and relegate the idea of Divine Creation to the realm of "un-scientific superstition."

The 'revolutionary' scientists of the late 19th century have since evolved into an established priesthood, with their own monopoly over today's scientific discourse. This may sound like an innocuous, even progressive, development except that the central tenet of their dominant world view is what's known as "radical materialism." Essentially, this is the belief that, by chance mutation and "natural selection," minerals evolved into plants; plants into animals; animals into humans and that human self-consciousness is merely the latest evolutionary spin off. Simple; no God required. If this concept rings a bell, it should. It is the same deterministic materialism which inspired Karl Marx and the whole, thoroughly-discredited Socialist movement and its horrific mutant offspring, Communism.

Today, we are ridding the world of the last vestiges of the political application of radical materialism. It was just recently blasted out of Iraq and still lingers in North Korea, Communist China, Cuba and, in a watered-down form, in Euro-socialism. But we can't relax yet. Radical materialism is firmly established right here at home in our universities and school system. As recently as 1987, the Supreme Court struck down the Louisiana statute that had, briefly, given "creation science" equal time in that state's schools. And it did so not because radical materialism has a better answer for how "life, the universe and everything" began. No, the Supreme Court ruled that teaching creation science violated the so-called "separation of church and state" as interpreted from the First Amendment, because it is based on the Bible instead of, presumably, "On the Origin of Species" and, thus, "lacked a clear secular purpose."

Enter "Intelligent Design" or ID. Its proponents say that ID opens new ways of thinking about life, its origins and its development. It claims that the enormous complexity of the structures of life (think; eye, wing) couldn't have evolved by the blind incremental 'push' of simpler forms from below, but rather, that evolution must be 'pulled' from above (or beyond) by an intelligence that precedes its physical manifestations.

Now, it seems to us that 'real' scientists would be willing to debate the opposing theories on their merits. That's what scientists are supposed to do, aren't they? But that hasn't been what the establishment materialists have done. Complacent in the continuing superiority of their numbers in the scientific community, they seem content to confront the new revolutionaries with sneering and name-calling. The established priesthood of self-styled 'real' scientists attempt to dismiss it by calling it names like "Creationism in a lab coat" and claiming that it doesn't further our understanding of anything and that "it isn't real science."

Scientific rigor demands proof of its testable hypotheses, but politics just demands numbers, expressed as votes, and by attracting the votes of school board members, Intelligent Design is making significant inroads into the schools, notably in Ohio. More notably, perhaps, its promoters have done so without resorting to God or the Bible, but by drawing attention to the un-supportable over-reach of the evolutionary materialists. While the ID folks admit that natural selection, for example, should still be taught for its importance to understanding how species adapt to changing conditions, but say that 'scientific' claims that the "big questions" are all answered by the theory of materialist evolution are simply bogus. They say that ID offers a legitimate alternative theory and the mantra of their push for ID's recognition in schools is, "Teach the Controversy."

Let's be intellectually honest here. Materialist science emphatically does not have the final answers. It has some theories, like that of "the big bang" that describe with some plausibility "how" the universe developed, but offers nothing to the persistent question "why?" that is the root of human morality, and which can only be answered by an intelligence greater than our own. We have already witnessed the totalitarian horror that results from the belief that materialist science is "all we need to know." For far too long this narrow version of truth has been exercising a dangerous stranglehold on our rising generations and our whole society. We should applaud Intelligent Design in our schools as a step toward breaking free.

© Peter & Helen Evans