Trust our founding fathers; keep God out of the classroom - March 16, 2004
By Christopher W. Cluff
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For 200 years or so, people have been using increasingly sophisticated instruments to answer questions about the origins and structure of Earth and the universe, in disciplines ranging from astronomy to organic chemistry and physics to zoology.
The scientific method, a peer-reviewed process whereby hypotheses (i.e. answerable questions) are tested through experiments that have readily measurable outcomes, has allowed discoveries which led to the development of countless technologies we take for granted every day. None of these accomplishments was achieved through guesswork and supposition; each required thousands of small experiments conducted by a multitude of scientists, each seeking the truth about some small aspect of reality.
Using the same scientific method that allowed these great discoveries and inventions, investigators from the same diverse range of disciplines, often with no idea that their findings might support the concept of evolution, have provided overwhelming evidence that the universe started from a single point in a "big bang" approximately 15 billion years ago, that the earth formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago, that life arose as single-celled organisms approximately 3.5 billion years ago, and that the extremely slow process of natural selection, driven by the ability of DNA to mutate and thereby promote adaptation of organisms to new environments, led to the evolution of a constantly changing variety of highly-specialized species, including humans.
The evidence for these conclusions is not tucked away in some great vault, accessible only to scientists with a secret code; it's available to anyone who is curious and knows how to read. I urge people who think like Andrew Larson, who has expressed his views in this newspaper several times and falsely claims no evidence for evolution exists, to open both books and their minds. The transitional forms they seek have been found in the fossil record in spades and are described in enough books to fill a substantial library.
Like all theories that are eventually proven to be true, such as the "theory" that the earth revolves around the sun, the scientific community now considers evolution to be a fact. There is no real controversy (or conspiracy) in this regard, no matter how many times fundamentalists say otherwise.
Granted, arguments continue over certain aspects of evolution, such as whether natural selection works at the level of the individual or the population, or whether the process works gradually or in spurts, but those who have analyzed the data from even a fraction of the available multi-disciplinary studies conducted to understand Earth's history unanimously agree that evolution is sufficient to account for all complex structures observed in biology and is the only driving force behind the appearance of new living species.
Keep in mind, science has provided no information regarding how or why the universe began, and it probably never will. I personally believe God set the ball in motion at the moment of the big bang knowing that sentient beings would eventually appear. In fact, most of the people I've spoken with who agree that evolution occurs also believe God created the universe.
If the idea can be considered that the stories in the Bible were written as allegories by men of God, and not God himself, then God can still be considered the creator whose goal was human existence, with the caveat that he used an extremely elegant biological system and the process of evolution to get us here. The bottom line is that creationism and evolution are not mutually exclusive.
Regardless of what you believe, public school science class is a place where students should only learn about the scientific method and the information generated by it. The idea that God created the universe is not currently amenable to hypothesis testing, so it remains a belief. Beliefs with no data to support them are religion, not science. Religion, for reasons well understood by our brilliant founding fathers, must remain separate from government (and, hence, the public school system).
Please respect the foresight of the great men who wrote the one document that binds us together as a nation, the United States Constitution, and leave God out of the classroom.
For those who would like to learn more about natural selection and evolution, I recommend a recently published book by Ernst Meyer titled "What Evolution Is." Also, for those who have a hard time believing that complex biological structures like the eye could evolve, I recommend a book by Richard Dawkins titled "The Blind Watchmaker." Both are written with the layperson in mind and each is a good jumping off point for those who want to learn more about one of the greatest discoveries of all time, evolution.
Christopher W. Cluff, Ph.D., DVM, lives in Hamilton.
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