Today Indiana’s Senate Committee on Education passed bill 89, allowing public schools to require the teaching of Creation Science.
Going by the name of it, it may sound a harmless bill, even a good idea as one may want to really learn about the science of how things were created, right? Well, wrong. You need to know what Creation Science is.
Creation Science attempts to provide scientific support for the story of creation, literally as portrayed by the Book of Genesis. As such, it “includes the scientific evidences and related inferences that indicate:
- Sudden creation of the Universe, energy and life from nothing.
- The insufficiency of mutation and natural selection in bringing about development of all living kinds from a single organism.
- Changes only with fixed limits of originally created kinds of plants and animals.
- Separate ancestry for man and apes.
- Explanation of the Earth’s geology by catastrophism, including the occurrence of worldwide flood.
- A relatively recent inception of the Earth and living kinds.”
Let’s put 1 and 6 in perspective: Creation Science says that the universe, the world, and life, were created less than 10,000 years ago. 2, 3, and 4 tell you that different life forms were created separately, and in case you’re not sure, humans were definitely created separately even from apes. 5 is there to tell you that the reason you see geological formations that look so old, and that old-looking fossils are found all across the globe, is a catastrophic flood that took over the Earth — the Noah story — and not billions of years of gradual change along with gradually evolved life forms.
Poor dinosaurs — they must have died in vein 65 million years ago.
Even the creationalists do not all like this kind of fundamentalism. The movement of “Intelligent Design” is a radically refined and new version of creationalism that tries to be as compatible as possible with scientific findings, such as the age of the universe being about 13.8 billion years. They do not even challenge the idea that humans were developed over time. That’s why traditional creationalists don’t like them much — their account does not tell the tale Bible tells.
What makes this bill more controversial is that in 1981 a legal lawsuit was filed in Arkansas against a bill very much like this (see McLean v. Arkansas). The judge ruled that “the Act was passed with the specific purpose by the General Assembly of advancing religion,” and that it violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Later, the case of Edwards v. Aguillard in Luisiana went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the legislature had a “preeminent religious purpose in enacting this statute” and found it unconstitutional.
It is noteworthy that in support of Aguillard, 72 Nobel prize winning scientists, 17 state academies of science, and 7 other scientific organizations filed amicus briefs which described creation science as being composed of religious tenets.
Even Intelligent Design was ruled unconstitutional in a 2005 case, in which the primary witness of the defendant was Michael Behe, the most prominent name in the Intelligent Design movement. The sued school was smart enough not to appeal. But then the ID movement requires its own post some other time — it’s a huge movement with a political agenda.
It is just amazing that after all this Indiana decides to just turn around and go back more than half a century. But maybe in light of Arizona’s immigration law I should not feel so incredulous after all.
