The Sticker, The Sticker, The Blasted Sticker

*Donning flame retardant clothing in anticipation of some potentially nasty responses*

Much discussion abounds in the blogosphere about the Federal court ruling that declares stickers placed by a Georgia school district on science textbooks as "unconstitutional".  There's quite a lengthy comments thread over at Wizbang, with plenty of folks taking either side of the Creationism vs. Evolution debate.

This debate has raged for more years than most of us have been alive, and I don't think it's going to be settled in our lifetime.  What it boils down to - although many get bogged down in nitpicking and semantics in the evolution debate - is that same old "separation of church and state" thing, but with the added element of folks who feel like they're in the right because they're taking the side of science.

Let's talk about evolution for a little bit.  I'm not a scientist, no.  I'm a pretty smart person, but I didn't even take chemistry in high school because my interests did not lie in the direction of science, and my chosen career path did not require a thorough understanding of scientific principles.  I have a very rudimentary understanding of physics.  I did, however, take biology, and have read a lot of opinions on this topic from folks who have a much deeper scientific understanding than I.  I'm not getting into nitpicking details here, and my terminology is going to be woefully unscientific, but I'm not trying to sway anyone here with my brilliant scientific mind.  This part of the post is going to be pretty basic.

As I understand it, the word "evolution" when it comes to scientific theory and observable facts has three different connotations.

First, at the level that is observable in a human timeline and is reproducible in the laboratory, there is the aspect of mutating genes and creation of different species of the same type of animal.  It happens in plants, it happens in animals, and it's observable.  This is the aspect of evolution that really can be considered "fact", because we can watch it happen in our lifetimes and we can cause it to happen in a laboratory.  Truthfully, I don't know a single Christian individual who disputes that this aspect of evolution is a fact.

Second, there is the aspect of evolution that involves one species developing from another.  This is basically the "man came from monkeys" and "fish turned into lizards" kind of theory.  From what I understand, this supposedly happened over millions and billions of years, and there is no proof that it's true.  Don't get your panties in a wad, folks.  There isn't.  Say all you like about the fossil record, there are no fossils that show us demonstrably that one type of life evolved into another.  The only fossils that have been produced to this effect, allegedly transitioning between primates and humans, were recently proven to be all human.  And when this all supposedly happened, there were no scientists around to observe and record it.  Nobody's ever been able to replicate it in a laboratory either.  Now, a lot of folks think this is a pretty good explanation of how all these types of living creatures got here.  They base it on the fact that we can observe smaller mutations as described above.  They figure this is the best scientific explanation available, and perhaps it is.  Creationism not only hasn't been proven, it's really not possible to prove it conclusively.  We can't drag God into a laboratory and have Him demonstrate the fact that He created fish, reptiles, cows, pigs, monkeys and humans individually.

There are even some Christians - not all - who believe that this process of evolution is how God created the earth.  Since it is theory, and not proven fact, I choose to keep an open mind.  However, I believe in God, and I believe that the only way we can reliably learn about God is through the Bible.  Sure, there are questions that can be raised about the events in the book of Genesis and whether they happened literally as they are written, or whether those first few chapters detailing the creation and the flood were ancient legends of the Hebrew culture.  You know what?  I don't consider it necessary for my faith to understand every little thing about how God created the world - young earth, old earth, whichever - there are arguments on both sides.  I don't consider it dangerous to my faith that other people believe in this form of evolution either.  My faith in God is not threatened by the existence of other global flood legends from other cultures.  If Noah and his family were not the only humans on the entire planet that escaped the flood, it doesn't change who Jesus is and what He did.  What it means to me is that the book of Genesis is merely what it was intended to be: a history of the early ancestors of the Jewish people, detailing the intervention of God in the course of their history.  Some of it is probably a transcription of stories, maybe even legends, that were passed down from generation to generation until it was written down.  *Gasp!*  Heresy!  But you know what?  I also believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God.  That means to me that if every story in the book of Genesis isn't literally proven to be 100% factual, then it's still in our Bible for a purpose - we can learn from these stories.  For instance, we can learn what God is like by the stories of His interaction with His people.

What I'm saying is, if someone someday is able to prove conclusively that one type of creature evolved into another, long long ago before there was human life on the planet, that doesn't mean that God isn't real and that Christianity is false.  We Christians probably do need to chill out a bit, because to those who believe in evolution at this level ("man came from monkeys") we sound like we're desperately trying to defend the foundations of our faith against what they see as merely rational science.  Some of these people have difficulty acknowledging the fact that this aspect of evolution is a theory.  They feel it is the closest thing to fact as you can get in science.  I think they feel this way because of what I described above - while Creationism can't be proven scientifically, evolution on a smaller level is a provable fact.  That doesn't necessarily mean it translates to this larger scale, and it requires a leap of faith (albeit a relatively small one) to take it there.

We run into a real problem when we take the whole evolutionary theory back to the beginning, though.  They can go back through all different forms of life and theorize about what other form of life it evolved from, but at some point they get back to "well, where did that initial form of life come from?"  And nobody knows.  Christians, Jews, and other religious folk believe that God was the origin of life - to what extent evolution was involved in creating the forms of life that we see around us today, that's debatable but not provable.  The really huge leap of faith is involved in the origin of life itself.  Those who refuse to belive in God (in whatever form) have to take that giant leap of believing that, against astronomical odds, somehow life began out of non-living matter.  Abiogenesis, they call it.  This is differentiated from the term "evolution" because it's not only unprovable, it's remote enough from the smaller-level observable form of evolution that you can't even say they're related.  Any hypothesis on the origin of life is going to be either dictated by religion or it's going to be purely speculation.  Abiogenesis is basically merely man's attempt to explain the unexplainable (how life itself came to exist) without acknowledging the possibility that there is a God.  And we've recently seen a noted atheist come to the conclusion that this theory is so implausible, he declared that he now believes that there must be a God of some sort in order to explain how life began.

As a side note, I used to have a tape of a Christian comedy group called Isaac Air Freight that included a skit called "Are You a Fool?".  At one point in this skit, there's a "dim bulb" type gentleman being interviewed by someone who's trying to determine his intelligence, and he's asked about the Big Bang Theory.  He explains the Big Bang Theory: "There's a big bang, and all these squiggly things in a lake turn into fish.  Then the fish walked out of the lake and grew hair, then they shaved off their hair and became truck drivers.  That about it?  Hey, good thing there ain't another Big Bang, or we'd all turn into office furniture!"  That always cracked me up.

So back to the discussion of evolution.  To sum up my points above, we have...
Level 1: Evolution as a fact - observable on a small scale, and reproducible in laboratory.
Level 2: Evolution as a theory regarding the origin of different types of life.  Not proven, and a bit of a stretch from the observable "Level 1" form of evolution.  It could be true, or there could be other explanations - Intelligent Design being the primary one that comes to mind.
Level 3: Abiogenesis - or, as most folks understand it, the "Level 2" theory of evolution attempting to explain the origin of life itself while denying the existence of God.  This has even less proof (and ability to be proven) than "Level 2" evolutionary theory.

To bring this back to the classroom, I (and most Christians that I am aware of) have no problem with "Level 1" evolution being taught as a scientific fact.  What many of us have a problem with is "Level 2" evolution and/or its extension, "Level 3" abiogenesis, being taught to our children by those they are supposed to trust as teachers without any sort of tempering statement that this is not proven scientific fact. 

Sure, there are a lot of scientific theories that have not yet been conclusively proven... and yes, there is a religious motivation for singling out this specific theory for a disclaimer.  Many kids who are raised in Christian homes and believe in Creationism (or Intelligent Design, or however you want to phrase it) are led to believe - and even flat-out told - that their religious beliefs are incompatible with proven scientific fact because of the theory of evolution.   Nobody tries to infer to a young, impressionable teenager that God doesn't exist because of the theory of relativity, or any others.

You heard me, I agree that there is a religious motivation for those stickers that the good folks in Georgia decided to put on their science textbooks.  However, the judge's ruling that it was unconstitutional is complete bunk. 

For one thing, it shouldn't even be a Federal issue - the only provision in the U.S. constitution that the much-quoted "separation of church and state" can be based on is the "establishment clause" in the First Amendment, which refers to acts of Congress.  This should have been left at the state level, if it even got that far.  A locally elected school board, representative of the taxpayers in their school district, made the decision to add the stickers.  They must have been acting on behalf of the members of their community - and if their community had a problem with that action, their community was free to vote out the existing school board and vote for others who didn't agree with it.

For another, even if you think it's properly a Federal issue, how does this violate the establishment clause?  As I understand it, the science teachers weren't being forced to teach Creationism as a scientific theory on equal footing with evolution.  The students were just being given the disclaimer that "Level 2" evolution and "Level 3" abiogenesis (evolution as an explanation for the origin of life) are not scientifically proven fact and that they should be considered with an open mind.  Because they should.  It's not forcing kids to subscribe to the Biblical account of creation, or even hear about it. 

As I see it, the stickers are a courtesy to Christian taxpayers who have no choice but to allow their tax dollars to fund public education (unless Georgia has school vouchers), and don't want their children taught (even implicitly) that evolution is the only possible explanation for how life came to be when it isn't.  A local school board being courteous to the religious beliefs of local taxpayers without even forcing the schools to present any alternative hypotheses on the origin of life cannot be considered unconstitutional.  Not if you're reasonable about it.

The problem is that so many folks in this country aren't willing to be reasonable.  None of us has the right not to be offended here.  The atheists and agnostics that are offended by the concept that evolutionary theory shouldn't be taught to our children as hard scientific fact need to realize that it's not, and we are allowed to believe that there is an alternative explanation without being complete idiots.  And Christians who are threatened by teaching evolution in the schools should realize that our God is bigger than that.  We need to teach our children our beliefs and we need to know ourselves how to answer for our faith in the face of the world's teachings, and not just in this area.  Who else is going to teach them how to live a Christian life?  Certainly not the public schools.

Comments

[Morrighan]

From someone with a graduate degree in biology: you are wrong in stating that there is no proof for the so-called second aspect of evolution. Monkeys turning into men is not the only, or even the most commonly referenced, example of evolutionary lineages. The most common: the evolution of Eohippus (a two and a half foot tall critter that looked like a cross between a beagle and Bambi) into both modern horses and several species of deer. Another example: Archyoptyrrx (I may not have spelled that correctly), a creature with the bone structure of a lizard and feathers of a bird. These intermediate forms abound in the fossil record, and are widely regarded as proof of species-to-completely-different-species evolution over extremely long periods of time. The acceptance of the 'second aspect of evolution' isn't so much a small leap of faith as a simple study of the evidence that we have. To reject the idea actually requires several dubious logical leaps, because a person must find a way to explain away well-documented transitionary forms such as the Eohippus lineage.

[jon]

You might check out this info on Eohippus: http://www.bible.ca/tracks/textbook-fraud-dawn-horse-eohippus.htm

Or this site on Archaeopteryx: http://www.users.bigpond.com/rdoolan/arch.html

Of course, you will find arguments both ways on the web, but it just goes to show it is not a slam-dunk either way.