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If America is to prosper, it will need its citizens to be well-trained in science. Unfortunately, there is a growing threat to science teaching in the United States. Fundamentalist Christians are trying to force teachers to teach Bible stories as science in the public schools. Even though there is no scientific basis for Creationism, even though nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, even though it is the duty of science teachers to teach science as it is understood by the overwhelming majority of professional working scientists, Christian pressure groups have successfully influenced school boards across the nation, preventing the spread of scientific knowledge in public schools.
HISTORY
Who were our distant ancestors? Was life on Earth
different a long time ago? These are profound questions that have troubled
humans for thousands of years. Storytellers of long ago flattered the vanity
of their listeners by telling them that their families in times past had
talked with gods who created the world for their benefit and cared enough
about them to save them from floods and other hardships. Thousands of isolated
cultures devised their individual stories of origins, each contradicting
all the others. As these campfire stories aged, they hardened into religious
dogma.
In the last few centuries, humans have done something they could never do before. Instead of consulting storytellers, they have consulted reality in trying to learn about the history of life on Earth. When we examine the fossils in layers of sedimentary rock, we find that the deeper we go down the fossil sequence, the more different the fossils are from present-day life. This establishes the fact that evolution occurred, and radioactive dating has confirmed the great age of these layers, and their increasing age with depth. Creationism predicts that no changes in the kinds of fossils could appear at different levels. Creationism utterly fails to match the physical evidence found in the fossil record.
What theory of evolution could explain the fact of evolution seen in the fossil record? Charles Darwin answered that question in his 1859 book Origin of Species. For any species of plant or animal, each individual has a unique set of traits inherited from its parents. Which individuals will survive the struggle for existence long enough to pass on their particular traits? Those individuals that best fit the environment (survival of the fittest). This process of natural selection means that as the environment changes, the species will change. If enough changes accumulate, a new species will have come into existence.
Since Darwins time, this theory of natural selection has been thoroughly confirmed by studies in ecology, genetics, paleontology and biology. It is a certain as any scientific theory can be, and should be taught as such.
THE FAILURES OF CREATIONISM
Curiously, even the Creationists now admit that evolution
occurs! The evidence is now so overwhelming that not even they can disbelieve
it. However, they call all such changes micro-evolution and say that
species can only evolve within the limits of their kind. They say this
to match the language of the Old Testament book of Genesis, not to match
the natural world.
But what do they mean by kind? How many kinds are there? Well, that depends. When faced with the huge diversity of life, we are told that the basic kind corresponds "roughly to the arbitrary category of species"(1), which implies that there are approximately one million kinds of animals. But when faced with the task of loading two of each kind into the ark (only 150 x 25 x 15 yards, with room for a years supply of food as well!) the number of kinds magically shrinks (2) to only 1,544. Are there a million kinds or only 1,544? It varies with the needs of the moment. Since the concept of kinds is a Creationist fiction, the creationists can later its meaning at will. Is this the level of intellectual honesty that we should encourage in our science classes?
The distribution of animals around the world provides another impossibility for Creationists. Australia has many forms of life (kangaroos, for example) which are found nowhere else, because geographical isolation over the past 100 million years allowed them to evolve in novel ways. Creationism demands that all life unique to Australia made a bee-line from the far East and hopped over miles of trackless ocean, with no plant life to eat on the way, and none available on arrival.
Creationists often argue that the complexity of living organisms is evidence of intelligent design, implying the existence of a Creator. "Then who created god?" is all the answer necessary to expose the baselessness of such an argument. In any case, the design of organisms is often anything but intelligent. For example, light passes through the eye to the retina, where rods and cones turn the light energy into pulses sent along nerve pathways to the brain. In an intelligent design, these pathways would be gathered behind the surface of the eye (thats how TV cameras are designed by mere humans), and the squid and the octopus have such eyes, which shows that such eyes can exist. But they don't exist in mammals, humans included! In humans, the nerve pathways travel in front of the retina and gather at the optic nerve. For the eye to work, these pathways have to be transparent. Sadly, for thousands of Americans, these pathways have become cloudy, dooming them to blindness only because of this structural quirk. What idiot of a god would make such a mistake? Evolution can explain such oddities; organs need only function for the organism to survive, as indeed the human eye usually does. It is Creationism that demands that organs not merely work, but show intelligent design reflecting a perfect and omniscient Designer. Creationism is helpless to explain the many patchwork and makeshift arrangements found in living systems.
CONCLUSION
Confronted with their absurdities, Creationists have
split into three different camps (3). The young-Earth" camp insists that
the Earth was created in six 24-hour days only a few thousand years ago,
with the fossil record in the sedimentary layers, including the half-mile
thick, 12 million alternating light and dark layers of the Green River
formation in Wyoming and Colorado (4) formed in a single flood. The day-age
camps disagree, saying that when Genesis says "seven days" it really means
"twenty billion years," an error of merely a trillion times. The gap
camp say that the vast ages found by scientists can be squeezed between
Genesis 1: 1 and Genesis 1: 2! While the Creationists are free to continue
embarrassing the religion they supposedly admire, they must not be allowed
to damage the education of our youth.
REFERENCES
1) Evolution: Its Collapse in View? By H Hiebert, pg.
37 (1979, Horizon Books, Alberta)
2) In Search of Noahs Ark by D. Balsiger and C.E.
Sellier Jr., p. 130 (1976, Sun Classic Books, Los Angeles CA)
3) Creation/Evolution 24, p.1 by T. McIver (1988)
4) Creation/Evolution 32, pg. 45 by K.D. Fezer (1993)