Science and Faith: Mutually Assured Destruction?

There has been much debate in the b'sphere over the last week with regard to the relative roles of science and faith in our lives and especially in our classrooms. This after court cases in WI and GA that essentially seek to replay the Scopes Monkey trial.

In the GA case, the Cobb county school district had placed thousands of stickers on biology textbooks in"an effort to get past conflict and to teach good science." However, the ACLU is now challenging that decision based on the idea that the placement of stickers reading:

"This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."

indicates an endorsement of religion, and therefore violates separation of church and state.
I just don't know where to begin. First of all, both Cobb county and the ACLU are wrong. And right. Evolution is a theory. BUT evolution is also a fact.

The theory of evolution, as postulated by Darwin, is that all organisms arise from more primitive organisms, and that as creatures evolve, they become better adapted to fit in their own niche, where niche indicates habitat, symbiosis (where applicable), and predator/prey interactions. Therefore all life is interrelated and arose from a common ancestor shared with even the most primitive prokaryote.

The facts of evolution are that evolution is ongoing. Evolution is the adaptation of species to their environment and is a well-documented, active process usually described as "the survival of the fittest". I could cite several examples of this, including the marine iguana of the Galapagos and the dome-shelled or saddle-backed varieties of Galapagos Tortoise. But my favorite example is the British Pepper Moth. In a census of pepper moths conducted by Oxonian scientists before the Industrial revolution, the majority of these moths were found to be very white with tiny black spots on the wings (as if they had been sprinked with pepper). Many years later, another census of these creatures found them to have significantly more black spots than their ancestors. The reason? Because Pepper Moths live on the walls and roofs of buildings and in the tops of trees. Before the IR, they could camoflauge themselves on the white walls of buildings or light colored bark of some trees. After the IR, these buildings and trees were significantly darker due to soot deposited from early factories. Darker moths were less likely to be obvious prey for passing birds, and therefore were more likely to survive and pass their genes along than whiter moths.

Another great example of evolution in action is the FACT that we humans share 99.5% of our DNA sequence with Pan paniscus, the Bonobo Chimpanzee (click on the link to meet Kanzi, a remarkable guy that I've met) and about 99% with Pan troglodytes, the Common Chimpanzee.

Yes, a theory is open to debate. Yes, parts of it are reassessed every time we add something to the fossil record (the new hominid find in Indonesia, for example), but somethings we know. For example, we know that getting a flu shot prevents getting the flu (Sorry, Gandelman), we know that regulating your blood sugar level keeps you alive longer if you are a Diabetic, and we know that DNA is the recipe for you and me and the Elephants and the Trees and the Bacteria on the sink.

This is something that Mitch touches on here. It's the difference between asking a question you can answer and a question you can't answer. Sadly enough, it's a distinction that I wasn't taught until Graduate School, and one that most people would do well to grasp in these days of my politics and your religion and Black and White and 60,000,000 morons.

We can ask: Are humans related to mice? When did humans arrive in North America? Where do we come from?

Question 1 and 2 are questions we can answer, Question 3 is not. That doesn't make it a rhetorical question, though. It just means we can't answer it now, we don't posess the technology, and we have theories, which are open to revision.

But that poses an interesting problem for those of us who are Christians and who are scientists. What are we to believe? You might think that this is not an issue, that most scientists are not particularly religious, but in my experience, the opposite is frequently the case. Albert Einstein famously said "God does not play dice" with regard to the Universe, and Stephen Hawking has stated more than once that "Science does not disprove the existence of God". Many great scientists and mathematicians are deeply religious, and their drive to understand the nature of the universe comes from their desire to understand the great and mysterious works of God.

So what about evolution? I can only say for myself that one theory doesn't preclude the other story. The fossil record, to date, supports the order of creation according to Genesis for the most part, except for the timeline, and with a few notable additions (dinosaurs, for example, are nowhere to be found in the Bible. Ask any 7 year old boy). If you see creation in Genesis as a story, or even as an allegory, it's not hard to reconcile theory and story, but if you are a literal believer, that is, if you believe that the entire universe was created in 7 EARTH days, you've got more of a problem. Of course, then you probably also believe that Methuselah was also 900-something when he died, which I have never been able to understand.

But where does any of this leave science education? Do we teach children that evolution is a theory with out mentioning creation? Can we avoid the subject altogether?

The most obvious answer is for the last: of course we can't. Our students are already the dumbest in the western world, depending on which test results you believe. But then some would have you believe that we must go about the task of teaching our students without stepping on anyone's toes. This is patently false, and that should be dead obvious. Evolution in the origins of life is the only issue that raises so much controversy based on religion. Certainly there have been a lot of debates about various forms of sex ed based on religion and morals, but no one disputes the veracity of the information being taught based on religion. And no one raises a stink when we teach our children that antibiotics will help an ear infection or strep throat, even though Christian Scientists believe that prayer alone can heal.

Furthermore, I find it disturbing that we CAN teach children about adaptation, about sexual selection, and about "survival of the fittest", yet according to the state of GA we have to tell them that it's possible that this phenomenon spontaneously generated a couple of hundred years ago, and fossils of dinosaurs with wings and beaks and feathers don't tell us that birds developed from dinosaurs. This idea of educating around the offense of everyone doesn't leave us with much to put in the textbooks.

It seems to me that this line of reasoning has only one possible outcome: that kids who learn that science is only partly true and that faith is only partly important will learn nothing about either science or faith, and especially nothing about how we use both science and faith as guiding principles in our lives, regardless of what we believe in.

(h/t to Deb and Juliette for links to some of the works cited above)