By Spencer Michlin, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX – Sometimes it looks like Texas has become a permanent battleground. Redistricting, Proposition 12 and now redistricting again. Meanwhile, an ancient fight with potentially even greater and more lasting consequences continues over how our textbooks deal with the topic of evolution versus creationism.
At the heart of the battle is the simple fact that textbook publishers market their books nationwide, and Texas buys enough textbooks that what's taught here pretty much gets taught all over the country. Both sides realize this and are putting enormous pressure on the State Board of Education, which must decide the issue in November.
The problem with evolution is that it's a slow moving process that is best demonstrated circumstantially. Ask any trial lawyer and you'll be told that circumstantial evidence is usually stronger than eyewitness evidence. The problem with creationism is that is that it's based on the ardent but idiotic notion that the universe is approximately 4,000 years old. The creationists disparage evolution as being merely quote a theory. Then they ask us to teach our children that a literal interpretation of the Bible is not only fact, but the only fact that counts.
Now comes a new wrinkle, a public relations move that creationists are floating called - quote - "intelligent design" that proposes that, well, maybe it wasn't only 4,000 years but either way God is behind it all. You know what? I kind of believe that myself. I find it equally easy to believe the scientific evidence supporting evolution and to believe that a creator set the whole thing in motion. Want to see for yourself? Just go to the nearest zoo or aquarium. If you can walk among that abundance of life and not get a sense of the relationships within and among various species or see how the various families evolved along various paths, then you are truly blind. On the other hand, if you are able to ascribe this incredible tapestry of existence solely to some random collision of atoms, then I think that you're as benighted a true believer as the most doctrinaire creationist.
So what's wrong with teaching intelligent design in our schools? Everything. First of all, just because I believe it doesn't make it so. It's far more theoretical than evolution. Before it can be taken as fact, it would have to survive the rigors of the scientific process, which most of the evidence supporting evolution has done. Worse, this is, as I've said, a public relations move. From the same kind of effective Orwellian propagandists who have filled our national political rhetoric with misleading euphemisms and made dissent a synonym for treason. The theory of intelligent design demands a dumbing down of our science books and is intelligently designed to lead to the eventual teaching of outright creationism.
I believe in God although I can't begin to speculate on God's nature. And I believe that among the greatest of God's gifts to us is the human curiosity that brought about science. Photosynthesis? The human genome? Gravity? I believe that God created them all, but they're no less miraculous because scientists can analyze and quantify them and offer irrefutable proof that God worked his magic a lot longer than 4,000 years ago. Get down to the zoo and see for yourself. But meanwhile, let's keep my religious beliefs and yours in our hearts - and not in our textbooks.
Spencer Michlin is a writer from Dallas.