Teach The Controversy?

A few years ago the Dover, PA school board ordered teachers to read a statement to high school biology students suggesting there was a reasonable alternative to evolutionary theory called intelligent design. Intelligent Design is actually the same old creationism (in disguise) that had failed many times to get itself inserted into science curricula but keeps on trying. Then President George W. Bush weighed in stating we should "teach the controversy". In reality, of course, there is no controversy and it's unfortunate that anyone who didn't know that could be elected president. If biologists were asked to line up on one side or another I'm pretty sure you would see many thousands on the evolution side for every 1 or 2 fringe opponents on the other side. But when the public is asked creationism wins by a huge majority. Evolution is as much a fact as any other rigorously tested field of science. Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist and author, said that every year the National Science Foundation asks the public a question, true or false: the earth goes around the sun and takes a year to do it? Apparently, only about 50% get it right. He puts the evolution/creationism debate into perspective by saying (facetiously, of course) that perhaps we should teach the controversy about whether the earth goes around the sun or vice versa.

Gloom and pessimism, perilously close to despair, settles over me at times when I hear from the front lines of these battles that pop up with some regularity over issues like evolution versus creationism. Or healthcare. Or gun control. It's difficult to have productive conversations when emotion and beliefs seek equal status with reason. And it's difficult to understand how lay people with no expertise in a particular field of study can disagree with near unanimous conclusions from experts in that particular field. Most distressing is the way people seem to think that belief trumps reason.

I recently listened to a conversational forum with Lawrence Krauss gently taking Richard Dawkins to task for being too in-your-face in rejecting religious belief which he argued alienated people he was trying to persuade. Although he is an atheist, Krauss argued that believing in evolution didn't require being an atheist and quoted another physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, "science doesn't make it impossible to believe in God, it just makes it possible to not believe in God". (Weinberg is widely quoted. Another one I've heard: with or without religion, good people will do good things and evil people will do evil things; but for good people to do evil things - that takes religion.)  Krauss can point to scientists such as Ken Miller, Christian and biologist who argued for evolution in the Dover case, and Francis Collins, Christian and author of The Language Of God , and Director of the National Institute of Health.

Personally, I think Miller and Collins simply showcase the ability of people - properly motivated - to hold two opposing ideas in their mind at the same time. They have intimate knowledge on a molecular level of biological processes and obviously came to the inescapable conclusion that evolution powered by natural selection explained those processes. There is no natural process one could examine with the scientific method to lead to an equally inescapable conclusion that supernatural events are responsible for all of existence. It seems equally obvious that Miller and Collins took a leap of faith and are able to believe in magic. I see no way to get there without that leap of faith and and that leaves me out.