Imperishable Inheritance

I don’t get fired up much any­more over social or polit­i­cal issues. I had my time in the sun glar­ing at the news con­stantly, ana­lyz­ing world reports, and dis­cussing pol­i­tics fero­ciously; but I found my endeavor to ulti­mately be fruit­less. Pol­i­tics, while cer­tainly can be ground in absolutes, has so many “grey areas” that I left it for philo­soph­i­cal and the­o­log­i­cal stud­ies which I felt could be seen as more con­crete. Any­way, there is an issue that has recently caught my atten­tion, and that issue is whether intel­li­gent design should be taught in the classroom.

Recently, an U.S. Dis­trict Court in Penn­syl­va­nia decided that it was uncon­sti­tu­tional to teach intel­li­gent design in pub­lic schools. The judge, John Jones, says the following:

“[Intel­li­gent design advo­cates] have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their schol­arly endeavors…our con­clu­sion today is that it is uncon­sti­tu­tional to teach [intel­li­gent design] as an alter­na­tive to evo­lu­tion in a pub­lic school sci­ence classroom.”

The only thing that the Har­ris­burg school board made hap­pen was that a state­ment was read before teach­ing evo­lu­tion that stated that it was not “fact” and that there are unex­plained gaps. There was not even an in-depth teach­ing upon cre­ation sci­ence, but it was only a state­ment of fact that evo­lu­tion is only sci­en­tific the­ory. It seems as though that the sec­u­lar courts are want­ing to keep “truth” in their sys­tem, but they are actu­ally block­ing truth from being pro­claimed. Evo­lu­tion is only sci­en­tific the­ory, and there are very real gaps that are unex­plained by evo­lu­tion­ary science.

I’m not going to write an apolo­getic for cre­ation­ism any more than I would write an arti­cle defeat­ing evo­lu­tion. I just want to rant and say that if evo­lu­tion is to be taught in pub­lic schools, that’s fine, but they had bet­ter con­trast it with alter­na­tive views. The judges’ quote above (which I don’t know if he real­izes) is that even evo­lu­tion­ary sci­en­tists “have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their schol­arly endeav­ors.” It’s called a pre­sup­po­si­tion Judge Jones.

Here’s a Chris­t­ian going “ACLU” on the pub­lic school sys­tem. The sec­u­lar wing of soci­ety wants to pro­claim that other sides are not being rep­re­sented, but they them­selves are com­mit­ting and push­ing the same error. It’s the sec­u­lar dou­ble stan­dard. If and when I send my chil­dren to a pub­lic school they can learn about evo­lu­tion, because hon­estly it’s unin­tel­li­gi­ble. The sci­ence of evo­lu­tion is rid­dled with philo­soph­i­cal and sci­en­tific dif­fi­cul­ties (con­trast uni­for­mi­tar­i­an­ism and cat­a­strophism).