New NC bill on creation and evolution

[Alan Gunn]

  There is a huge pile of evidence consistent with evolution: see, for
example, Gould's "The Panda's Thumb."  The fact that we have no very good
theories of the mechanism of evolution does not make evolution a non-fact,
it just makes it a fact that we do not completely understand.  Long before
scientists had any plausible explanation for how cigarettes cause lung
cancer, the link between smoking and cancer was well established.  I doubt
that anyone seeking to have schools tell kids that the smoking/cancer link
was "just a theory" would (or should) be taken seriously,
  I think Jack Balkin is right in calling the push for "evolution-is-just-a-
throry" religion based, though it would be nice to have the language and
history of the North Carolina legislation, which has yet to appear on this
list.  My own experience of those calling for "creationism" in schools is
that of people who insist that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, that the
world was created in six 24-hour days, and that everything in Genesis is
literally true (a proposition that is hard to entertain seriously, as there
are two different creation stories in Genesis).  It is perfectly
understandable that educators respond to pressures from prople like this
with scorn, rather than sophisticated argument.  I am much puzzled by the
apparent sympathy of many religious people for those who advance these
arguments, as arguments like these give religion a bad name.  One of my
son's 8th grade classmates just failed a science test because, when asked to
evaluate the evidence for and against the proposition that the dinosaurs
were wiped out by an asteroid, he wrote an essay explaining that the
dinosaurs perished because Noah didn't have room on the ark.  As a result of
this episode, I am spending a fair part of my evenings trying to persuade my
kid that intelligent people can be Christians.  The way the debate tends
sometimes to be framed, people (especially children, I fear) sometimes see
themselves as having to choose between religion and science, and if that
really were the choice, lots of intelligent people would choose science.
Fortunately, it isn't.  (In the interest of full disclosure, I
should note that I am a Mainline Protestant: the sort of person who,
according to First Things, anyway, is fast disappearing.  Whatever our
shortcomings, Mainline Protestants seldom had the arrogance to insist that
God had to create the universe in a particular and remarkably simplistic
way.)

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Alan Gunn
Notre Dame Law School