A Times Editorial

Faith versus fact

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 8, 2000

In July 1925, the state of Tennessee prosecuted a young teacher called John T. Scopes for presenting evolution in the classroom. At the time, propagating the theories of Charles Darwin, the great 19th century English naturalist, was against the law. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. The statute affirming the "Bible truth" that God created all life in six days flat, as stated in Genesis, was upheld; the "monkey trial" made headlines all over the world.

Seventy-five years later, we're still fighting this same old battle. Evolution is no longer against the law in Tennessee (the law was repealed in 1967), but many people still behave as though they think it ought to be. Despite the evidence that Darwin's theory of natural selection is the best accounting of how species adapt to their environment, despite evidence that evolution is about the only scientific way to explain how life on this planet works, it can be hard to get this information in public school classrooms. Last year, the Kansas Board of Education voted to delete evolution from the curriculum, though in this year's primary elections, Kansas voters defeated three of the most virulent opponents of evolution teaching, paving the way for knowledge to prevail. Elsewhere the picture is not so promising: Science teachers in many schools in Texas, Arizona, Alabama, Florida and elsewhere are forced to "balance" evolution and creationism. Fundamentalist ministers suggest, in all seriousness, that the world is only 6,000 years old and that God, for reasons best known only to Him, planted "ancient" fossils and dinosaurs to fake us humans out.

There is, of course, a difference between those who believe in an "intelligent design," a force that struck the cosmological match and created matter ex nihilo, out of nothingness, and Biblical literalists who think God made catfish and sea gulls on the Thursday, cows and cockroaches on the Friday, and Adam, Eve and centipede grass on the Saturday. Unfortunately, most creationists tend toward the latter. They will not acknowledge a distinction between science and religion: Science is a matter of theory, of fact, of testing and proof; religion is a matter of faith. God cannot be found in the laboratory.

And scientific truth should not be looked for in the Bible: It holds other kinds of truth, subtler, more numinous truths of the spirit. But for hundreds of years, humans have resisted any knowledge they think might somehow displace God, arguing that it was knowledge that got us kicked out of Paradise in the first place.

In 1600, the Inquisition burned Giordano Bruno for defending the Copernican cosmology that placed the sun, not the earth, at the center of things. In 1925, Americans condemned John Scopes as an agent of evil for displacing Mankind as God's image on earth. Today, even though biologists have shown that human beings and chimpanzees share 99 percent of their genetic material, there are those who reject science altogether or, worse still, blame science for all the evils of the world. Tom DeLay, Republican Whip in the House of Representatives, blamed the shootings at Columbine High School on teaching children "they are nothing but glorified apes."

Ignorance should not be equated with faith. Creationism does not belong in a biology class. Three-quarters of a century after Scopes, we have identified sub-atomic particles, gone to the moon, listened to quasars at the edge of the universe and cracked the Rosetta Stone of the human genome. Surely we can tell the difference by now between faith and fact.

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