Patricia Corboy
I attended a Nov. 10 lecture sponsored by the biology department hoping to come to a better understanding of the theories of Evolution and Intelligent Design. Instead, I left with a prime illustration of the need for humility in public discourse.
Dr. Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, gave a presentation titled “Creationism, Intelligent Design, Evolution—What should be taught?” in which she explained that evolution is “not a fact, not a belief. It is much more than a fact. Evolution is a theory, and in science a theory is greater than facts. It is the accumulation of many facts and an explanation of those facts.”
Yet the main evidence Dr. Scott provided for this greater-than-facts theory was that the mainstream scientific community is in support of it and only those with a “narrow, sectarian” agenda support either Creationism or Intelligent Design theory (“Creationism Lite,” as she called it.)
I had hoped to hear a serious argument examining objectively the claims of all three positions. Scott instead delivered a disdainful treatment of the views she and her colleagues see as both non-science and nonsense.
It was clear by the way Scott ridiculed pages of Creationist textbooks and cavalierly dismissed the arguments of Intelligent Design scientists that she is accustomed to audiences who agree with her, who do not even need to hear Intelligent Design arguments to dismiss them. It is enough to know that their source is a Bible-thumping minority intent only on imposing their religion on a ‘neutral’ public.
As Scott argued, the chief flaw of creationism is that it seeks to use science to prove Genesis. While there is some validity in this opinion, it would have carried more weight had she also admitted that many atheists use science in exactly the same manner: to advance their own claims about man and his origins.
This is the real problem people of faith have with teaching evolution in the schools, and an honest discussion of the two views was what I had hoped would draw some lines between science on its own terms and science used as an ideological tool.
Scott did mention there are both theist and atheist evolutionists, but she did not discuss where they agree and differ in their views of evolutionary theory.
She also neglected to mention just how prevalent atheists are in the National Academy of Sciences (72 percent), or how Haeckel’s materialistic interpretation of Darwin’s selection theory is often taught in evolution classes as a world-view attempting to account for the whole evolution of the cosmos by means of chance “survival of the fittest.”
In other words, Scott failed to explain the philosophical distinctions between the simple theory of evolution, which believers can embrace, and Darwinism, the branch of evolution which is as much naturalistic religion as it is science.
Scott also neglected to discuss the lack of actual proofs of the descent of man’s body from animals, particularly in the field of paleontology. She ignored the absence of evidence for the common genetic descent of all plants and animals from a single primitive organism and the greater number of botanists and zoologists who therefore favor a polygenetic evolutionary theory over a monogenetic one.
Scott admitted that “science is limited” and could not answer questions of a philosophical nature, yet she presented evolutionary theory as if it were unquestionably deserving of its current status as unassailable dogma, and she said that parents who have problems with it should “send their children to private schools.” After all, as she put it, “We have to leave God out of scientific thinking.”
I am convinced that we can and should study science on its own terms as distinct from theology. I do not believe that the Bible was meant to be a science textbook taken literally to mean that the world was created in six 24-hour periods.
I do believe that the world was created by a loving and intelligent Designer and that everything honest scientists can discover about that world gives evidence of his mind, and so to “leave God out” of the discussion is far more absurd and detrimental than to say that the Flood created the Grand Canyon.
I did derive one consolation from Dr. Scott’s lecture, however: If evolutionary theory holds true, we can hope that one of the characteristics of the species that will necessarily change through time will be the hubris of the modern scientist.
Corboy is house director of The Suites at Hillsdale College.