Dr. Forbush Thinks

Should schools teach religious explanations for creation in addition to Darwin's theory of evolution? Is the concept of "intelligent design" religion or science?

In order to answer this question we need to revisit the reason we have public education in the first place. The people of the community believe that an educated citizen will produce an educated electorate and an educated electorate is needed to produce a fair and free democracy. The people also believe that there should not be a state religion. The fine distinction between using universal overarching religious ideals and using faith specific dogma is where most of the argument lies.

People want a government that is moral and ethical. People also tend to tie their ideals of moral and ethical behavior to the specific faith that they follow. People actually tend to go further than wanting a moral and ethical government to the generalization that they would like to have a moral and ethical society. Religious people tend to believe that morals and ethics are tied to their religion, finding it hard to believe that people could choose to behave morally or ethically without God telling them to. Non-religious people do behave morally and ethically without the fear of God’s wrath. Most non-religious people are convinced that moral and ethical behavior will keep them out of jail. And, non-religious people that are higher on the development scale actually believe that moral and ethical behavior makes the society a better place to live.

So, are morals and ethics taught in public school? This question does not have a clear-cut answer. If you believe that giving rules to children and punishing them for not following the rules is a form of moral or ethical education, then yes morals and ethics are taught in public school. However, if you believe that teaching morals and ethics consists of taking down the Bible and going over the Ten Commandments and the Book of Leviticus, then morals and ethics are not taught in public schools.

From this description of how morals and ethics are taught in public schools we should get a glimpse of how other issues with religious components should be taught. The overarching ideals of morals and ethics are taught in school without pointing to the specific implication to ones specific faith. The child is not taught that stealing is specified in the Bible, but rather stealing is not allowed at school. Similarly hitting, spitting, chewing gum and a list of other things are also forbidden at school. Does the school defend its position on gum chewing from a Biblical reading? No, gum chewing is simply not allowed, because the discarded gum often makes a mess.

Similarly, inside the school halls students are expected to learn what scientists have learned from their years of observing our Universe. Science is simply the collection of observations organized in a way to understand our world. All of the observations need to fit together without contradiction. When two observations contradict each other, then  a new way of looking at the evidence could be needed to explain the discrepancy. Some questions hang in the air for years before they are understood, but the experimental observations still remain observations.

One simple example of this is the way in which light can behave like a particle or a wave. Similarly and electron can behave like a particle or a wave. This observation has been demonstrated over and over again in experiments, but it not completely clear WHY this observation is always made under the different conditions. Not knowing WHY does not stop scientists from making new observations and designing new experiments.

Similarly, the observations of evolution have been made over the last hundred years. The fact that these observations are made in our Universe is a fact. All of these observations fit together in the context of the Theory of Evolution. The Theory of Evolution is a scientific Theory, which means that all the observations fit into the theory. When a well-studied piece doesn’t fit in the current theory, then the theory can be modified in order to maintain consistency.  The theory never addresses why the Theory explains all of the evidence, only the fact that it does.

“Intelligent Design” is an attempt to answer the question “Why” the evidence from all of the scientific observations fit together in the context of the Bible. The Bible tells the religious person how the creation happened and these people feel the need to fix the discrepancy between their religious understanding, and the scientific observation. The problem with getting specific about reconciling religious teaching with scientific fact is that not all religions agree with the premise of how the universe was created. The “Intelligent Design” premise assumes the Judeo-Christian story of creation. This story tells the reader that there was an organized creation.  But, there are creation stories from the Greeks and Romans that claim the creation was the result of a war between the Titans. Native American stories of creation tell how man was created as a result of a tragedy. Some religions explain how people morphed out of other animals. Therefore, offering “Intelligent Design” as an explanation of scientific evidence ignores the “Random Design” theory of other religious creation stories.

I would suggest that “Intelligent Design” could be taught in school as one of many creation stories. But, having “Intelligent Design” stand as the only explanation for the scientific observations would be wrong and would not be an over arching religious ideal. The options would be to teach multiple creation stories from a world religion point of view, or to leave teaching the reconciliation of Evolution with religion to the parents or churches. After all, since “Intelligent Design” concerns the mostly religious sector of our society, the issue should be resolved within the religious community.