Once again, Christian fundamentalists have managed to convince a school board to shoehorn creationism into the curriculum.

On Thursday, September 26, the school board of Cobb County (in suburban Atlanta, Georgia) approved a policy change which allows "alternative views about the origin of life" to be taught in its classrooms. Here is the policy, as published on CNN's web site:

It is the educational philosophy of the Cobb County School District to provide a broad based curriculum; therefore, the Cobb County School District believes that discussion of disputed views of academic subjects is a necessary element of providing a balanced education, including the study of the origin of the species. This subject remains an area of intense interest, research and discussion among scholars. As a result, the study of this subject shall be handled in accordance with this policy and with objectivity and good judgment on the part of teachers, taking into account the age and maturity level of their students.

The purpose of this policy is to foster critical thinking among students, to allow academic freedom consistent with legal requirements, to promote tolerance and acceptance of diversity of opinion, and to ensure a posture of neutrality toward religion. It is the intent of the Cobb County Board of Education that this policy not be interpreted to restrict the teaching of evolution; to promote or require the teaching of creationism; or to discriminate for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, religion in general or non-religion.

Source: Cobb County Board of Education

Notwithstanding the wishy-washy disclaimer that the policy is not intended to promote the teaching of creationism, it's difficult to find any other areas of purported academic dispute which would be of interest to the fundamentalists. They've been crowing about the victory on the talk shows, gleefully misrepresenting the nature of the debate over evolution as a hotbed of academic furor.

The new trend in creationist arguments is so-called "Intelligent Design" theory, which is of course merely Christian creation mythology poorly disguised by a thin layer of secular phraseology. Boiled down to its essentials, it is a restatement of the one of the hoariest arguments used by creationists: "Living systems are too complex to have arisen in nature by chance; an intelligent designer must have been involved in creating life."

This argument is in and of itself unscientific. A scientific hypothesis must be testable. It must be possible, at least in principle, to demonstrate the truth or falsehood of the hypothesis. Intelligent design "theory" proposes nothing that can be tested: it merely states as an axiom that life is too complex to have arisen naturally. At its simplest level, it is the old "I don't believe it because it's just not possible" argument. It is, prima facie, an unscientific proposition. As such it doesn't belong in a secular, scientific curriculum.

The question of whether living systems could have arisen by chance is still open. A famous experiment by Harold Urey in the 50s indicated that the chemistry of the atmosphere of the early Earth could easily create organic compounds such as amino acids, integral components of proteins. Even interstellar space contains a myriad of organic compounds. Water and numerous organic compounds could have been brought to the Earth by cometary impacts. Ribonucleic acids have been shown to possess the ability to autocatalyze their own duplication. Even simple minerals such as clays can act as templates for the production of complex organic compounds. The exact origin of the first living system is an historical fact, and the probability that we will uncover its precise nature is very low. But we are continually improving our understanding of the conditions under which complexity can arise from simple conditions. Complexity and chaos theory may well provide the answer to this question. But it is presumptuous to claim that living organisms could not have arisen from purely natural causes—all the more so for people who are unfamiliar with the facts. To claim positive knowledge that living organisms cannot have arisen naturally is to cite facts not yet in evidence, again, an unscientific claim.

Scientific hypotheses should have predictive value. That is to say, if I hypothesize a mechanism for evolution which explains the origin of both variation and speciation, there should be testable or verifiable consequences of that hypothesis. I.D. "theory" proposes nothing. Evolutionary biology, on the other hand, holds that the genetic blueprint for living things, DNA and in some cases RNA, is affected by mutagenic agents (chemical, viral, or ionizing radiation) which can cause changes in the genetic code and the products of those genes. On occasion that mutation is passed on to an offspring, and on rare occasions may have a beneficial effect (helping the organism to survive more easily to breeding age). Whether the effects of those variations are helpful or harmful to the organism depends on the exact nature of the variation and the circumstances the organism finds itself in as it grows to breeding age. The likelier it is to reproduce, the likelier its descendants will survive to reproduce. The beneficial mutation proliferates, changing the nature of the descendants—sometimes so much so that its descendants are unable to interbreed with formerly compatible organisms which lack that mutation. A new species is thus created.

This hypothesis is testable, and indeed, has been tested many times, creationist denials to the contrary. The growing medical problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a direct consequence of genetic variation and natural selection. Creationists don't like bacterial examples because they're not as complex as eukaryotic, multicelled creatures like humans. Bacteria also reproduce via fission rather than sex, although they can exchange genetic material with each other in other ways. But biologists recognize that humans and bacteria are subject to the same influences that cause variation in all species.

Bacteria are poorly shielded from their environment, and are easily mutated by ionizing radiation and chemical agents. They also have incredibly short generation times, requiring days and sometimes only hours to go through many reproductive cycles. Deleterious mutations cause the defective bacteria to die; neutral variations have no effect on the organism's ability to reproduce; beneficial variations, such as those in the structures of the cell which are most susceptible to antibiotics, can drastically improve the ability of the organism to survive even the harshest medications. This has in fact occurred, and represents a growing threat to humanity. It is a natural evolutionary process, requiring no intervention by a thinking being.

Or does the Intelligent Designer carefully monitor all of the quintillions of bacteria on Earth, changing this gene and that one by its undetectable powers, carefully nurturing those which cause humanity the greatest harm? If so, perhaps we can sign a petition to get the Intelligent Designer to lay off, maybe get him to pester another planet for a while.

The same process of variation and selection applies to all organisms, regardless of scale or complexity. As with bacteria over the course of days and weeks, so with humans over the course of millenia. That creationists find it objectionable that humans are thereby "reduced" to the level of other animals is merely human chauvinism at work. It riles the Bible thumpers that humans don't have a privileged position in nature, as far as science is concerned. They want to restore humans to primacy over nature. But the egos of creationists are completely irrelevant to scientific exploration. They may find it distasteful to be simply another part of the natural world, but as the French say, "c'est la vie."

The Cobb County of Education is not working to ensure that children are exposed to areas of academic dispute. It is trying to open the door for Christian mythology to be taught in the classroom. Only creationists claim that there's a huge fight over evolution in academia. Indeed, the only ones fighting it are creationists! There have been a number of books published in recent years that make grandiose claims about the growing number of reputable scientists who take issue with the entire concept of evolution, but the "scientists" who provide all of the quotes work for places like the Creation Science Institute. No doubt there are many scientists who've managed to reconcile their religious beliefs with evolutionary theory in some fashion or other, but I have yet to encounter a serious student of biology who absolutely refuses to acknowledge the usefulness, the power, and the beauty of the concept of speciation through natural selection.

It's a little hard for some people to grasp the idea that even though a scientific theory may be hard to understand, or even to believe, that it can still be true, at least as far as we know. Perhaps it is the very contingent nature of scientific "truth" that irritates creationists. All scientific theories are houses of cards, built upon a body of evidence and logic that must pass incredibly intense scrutiny before they are accepted. Unlike religious dogmas, all scientific theories are subject to further review. All scientific theories must be testable; it must be possible, at least in principle, to find that a cherished idea is false. Inadequate theories are replaced with more adequate theories, ad infinitum. Eventually the theories get pretty good.

People who want absolute truth don't generally find it in science. This makes them uncomfortable. Sometimes they try to impose their brand of "absolute truth" on science, with predictably poor results. Only through a cycle of logical analysis and experimentation, where every premise can be questioned, can science arrive at a better approximation of the truth.

That is the fundamental difference (if I may be permitted to use the term) between scientific and religious views of the origin of humanity. It is not possible, even in principle, to say that an Intelligent Designer was NOT involved in the creation of our species. The claim in and of itself is not scientific, because it cannot be disproven. No amount of evidence would suffice. It is merely a statement of belief. As such, it is unscientific. As such, it cannot be held up as an a scientific alternative to evolution in the classroom. It's that simple.

"You may have tons of fossils and biochemical studies and genetics research and all that," a fundamentalist Christian might say, "but you still can't prove God didn't create man."

True enough. It's hard to prove a negative statement. I can't prove the Earth won't be vaporized by Vogons to make way for an interstellar bypass, either. The burden of proof is not on science to prove that God didn't do it. If creationists want to play in the same ballpark as science, they have to provide the evidence that God did do it. No weaselling out of it by saying "I don't have to prove it, it's what I believe." Whether you believe it or not is completely irrelevant. It's what you can prove that makes the difference. If creationism is to be given equal standing to evolution in the classroom, then the same canons of evidence should be applied to both. And extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I make this proposal only facetiously; I don't think for a minute that creationists would welcome this sort of in-depth scrutiny.

Intelligent Design "theory" can't even be discussed without bringing up its basis as a statement of religious belief. You can't even ask the most basic question about the Intelligent Designer, namely, "Who or what is this Intelligent Designer, anyway?" without immediately bumping into religion. And that, dear friends, is where the Cobb County Board of Education runs squarely into separation of Church and State. Sorry, Cobb County Board of Education! Your blatant attempt to open the curricular door for creationists was witnessed by millions of people. It may take a few months, perhaps a year or two, but you're going to have to get rid of that resolution at some point. Why not speed up the process and do it tomorrow? Why not, huh? Save yourself some time.

I wonder how quickly the creationists would be protesting that very same board if it decided to let all of the different creation myths parade through the school curriculum as ostensibly scientific alternatives to evolution? Maybe after seeing the wild variety of different creation mythologies, children would be able to come to the same conclusion I did (at the age of seven): none of these religious stories make any more sense than any other. But evolution, well, that makes sense. It's big and complicated and puts humans in perspective as just another animal, albeit an animal with a marvelous and capable brain, but it makes a lot of sense. And when you study it, I mean really study it, as I have, science as a way of understanding the world makes infinitely more sense than the myriad crackpot religions that have plagued the world since time immemorial

What creationists never seem to grasp is that science is just a method for understanding the world. It's not a religion. It doesn't substitute for a religion. It doesn't purport to answer the question of "why", just "how". Whether there is an Intelligent Designer skulking behind the facade of the world is not a question that can even be asked in a scientific way, because it is an untestable premise. But science is the most effective way of determining "how" that humans have ever devised. Scientists have been exploring the question of "how" our species arose for centuries, and evolutionary biology ties together so many disparate kinds of evidence in such an elegant, useful, and predictive way, it has become accepted as the prime theory of the mechanism of the origin of life.

That evolution occurred is not seriously debated in scientific circles. Creationists frequently claim that it is, but it isn't. Scientists argue about how evolution occurred, but to challenge the fact of evolution is similar to challenging the fact of the quantum nature of matter, or the fact of relativity. Evolution happened. It doesn't matter whether you or I believe it; it did happen. The evidence is uncovered by paleontologists all the time. But exactly how it occurred, now that's an interesting question, and still not completely answered. But to bring in the Supreme Being as the literal deus ex machina to solve this little scientific riddle? That steps outside the realm of science and lands squarely in the middle of religion.

Creationists are generally pretty irritated by the separation of Church and State. They very much want to make sure their beliefs are given the same credibility in the school system as scientific theories. Christian beliefs, of course; no Navajo or Greek or Norse or Hindu creation stories for them. Fortunately, the separation of Church and State is so firmly established in America that they can't simply barge in and say "Here, teach this, public schools!" State-sponsored religion is a definite no-no. Thank goodness. If anyone needs an example of the dangers of state-sponsored religion, consider the radical Islamist governments in the Middle East. I don't want the US to become a similar bastion of intolerance and superstition. Opening the door to religion in the schools, even as marginally as the Cobb County Board of Education has done, is a dangerous and ill-considered move. Fortunately, vigilant people who understand the law will bar their way.

Instead of pussyfooting around the issue, why don't creationists just cop to their tactics and acknowledge that they're trying to get religion back into public schools? As much as I would fight against that attempt, at least I could have some respect for the directness of people who know what they want and know that they want it. Creationists are always lurking around in the shadows, looking for opportunities to gull the gullible into passing legislation that lets them foist their religious view of the world onto children who have every right to expect that a secular education is completely secular, end of story.

The reason the Founders separated Church and State was to allow everyone to worship freely. It's hard to do that, or to opt out of it altogether, when the Christian fundamentalists keep trying to pass their beliefs off as science. They misrepresent the facts in evidence, misstate the scientific arguments, mistake scientific theories for religious beliefs, and misunderstand the nature of the scientific theory. They even misapply the term "theory" to Intelligent Design. It's not a theory; it's a belief.

Give it a rest, Bible thumpers. Teach your myths to your children at your church or your home, if you must. But quit lying to us about how you're just trying to foster academic freedom when you foist creationism on us in the guise of science.

Jeff Kirk

September 30, 2002

PS: For a succinct and devastating critique of Intelligent Design "Theory" (still can't bring myself to write it without the quotation marks), see Massimo Pigliucci's excellent essay on the CSICOP web site. Dr. Pigliucci also maintains a personal web site with many interesting articles and essays. Here's another slightly less academic essay of his, also critiquing ID.