Creationism v. Evolution Decided

The Debate is Over

America is one of the most religious countries in the world.  At least 46 percent of adult Americans attend church on a weekly basis according to a University of Michigan poll, which compares favorably with 14 percent of adults in Great Britain, eight percent in France, seven percent in Sweden and four percent in Japan.

Religion has had a major affect on our nation’s politics and policy in recent years, and among those influences is the divide between those who follow the tenets of evolution and those who believe in creationism or its pseudo-intellectual sidekick, intelligent design.  Now it seems as though the Catholic Church is not interested in entertaining the debate at all.  Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s cultural minister, recently said that evolution was, “… not incompatible with the teachings of the Catholic Church or the Bible’s message.”

Charles Darwin, author of “The Origin of Species.”

In fact, the Vatican feels so strongly about it, they won’t have any proponents of intelligent design or creationism at their upcoming international conference in Rome this March 3 - 7 to celebrate the 150^th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s publication of “The Origin of Species.”  Nor did they invite strictly scientific supporters of evolution.

Many bloggers have made claims of victory about this issue, but I won’t.  Spirituality is a deep and sacred thing that should never be paraded on the public stage as some kind of contest or wrestling match. 

Yet, as someone who lives within a stone’s throw of Dover, PA where fervent members of the school board literally tried to ram their ideology down student’s throats without so much as a shred of evidence other than their own theology, I feel a particular need to speak about this issue.

We’re in a gruesome and awfully expensive war with “radical Islam,” and I have to ask the question whether or not there’s an equally dangerous element of “radical Christianity” afoot when a school board can be so poorly guided as to endorse a curriculum based more on theological tenets than facts. 

When the Catholic Church in effect says, “Yes, you are misguided, and we won’t have any part of it,” it’s more than time to rethink where America is going. 

When a federal judge adjudicating the case says the following words publicly, I can tell everyone as a journalist with more than 20 years experience covering these people that it’s highly significant. 

 ”Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on [intellectual design], who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.”

But, and I reiterate, this is no cause for anyone to be elated or happy.  We, the people, have won nothing.

I’m personally not a believer in creationism, because it leaves out dinosaurs, and quite frankly, if you think about how mankind must have been procreated through three men and one woman as recorded in Genesis, it’s not a pretty idea. 

It would explain a lot about the Dover case, but I digress.

In my career, I’ve had to explain many, many things from asthma to zoology, but I know my limits.  Shortly after making the hardest decision of my life, I was at 14,500 feet looking at the stars as a snowstorm slid past us about 1,000 feet below in the Montana wilderness.  To this day, I believe that’s the closest I’ve ever come to God. 

There’s really only one thing I know after my many experiences.  I’m just not big enough to understand it all, and I never will be.  But I’m smart enough to appreciate it.

And when we get to the part of the Bible that says, “Thou shalt not judge, lest ye be judged.”  That part makes a lot of sense.

It’s time to let go of the bad idea called intelligent design, and it should not and does not reflect badly on anyone to do so.