Democracy in Action

"Let the market decide..."

"That's a local control issue..."

"Let the legislature do its work..."

"Activist judges are ruining our country..."

You hear that kind of thing all the time these days, primarily from religious conservatives. DO you think anyone will be lauding the action of the electorate in Dover, PA? Seems pretty clear that the market there decided fairly clearly.

New Dover board's task not enviable

In a patriotic display of public opinion, the voters around Dover, PA made a fairly clear statement regarding "Intelligent Design" and school curriculum by voting out their entire school board of Republican Creationists and voting in a entire new board of Democratic Evilutionists.

Thank God.

You know, while I listened to this story on the way home from work tonight I actually became more upset about the meta-issue than the issue. This board decided that a four paragraph statement regarding intelligent design had to be read in all science classes. Where does any board get off exercising that kind of intrusive control into any classroom about any subject? Do they have any sort of curricular training? Even if they were experts in the field they were meddling with, the decisions about what is or is not covered in a classroom to that level of specificity ought to be the unfettered responsibility of the teacher. It's a fairly long way from "you must teach the US Constitution" to "you must read these four paragraphs verbatim."

Also, just sort of sport-doing this argument, if they really want to introduce the story of creation into science classes they are shooting at the wrong subject. Even with whatever "holes' there are in the theory of evolution, the theory does stand up pretty well. If they want to get this stuff in, they ought to shoot at cosmology, not biology. The big bang is much more suspect in this arena. "What happened before the Big Bang?" and "Where did the roiling cloud of gases come from?" are natural lead ins to God. I had this very conversation with my uncle years ago. He was a computational physicist and was working on the question of the formation of spiral galaxies at the time. He was also a man of faith as well as a man of science, and at the end of a typical adolescent string of "what came before that?" questions he simply said that science does not have those answers and at some point many scientists turn to faith.

As a person of science myself, I have no problem with people turning to faith in the absence of science. Shouldn't that be enough for the classrooms? Do we need to have the two concepts in conflict when they can so easily co-exist? I am not sure any clear minded teacher would oppose that kind of characterization, even in a science class, as long as we don't try to outshout one idea with another; and as long as the notion of faith being used as an explanation happens in those arenas where science doesn't have an answer; and as long as the discussion of faith isn't discriminatory.

That's a lot of ands. Maybe it is best left discussed in other venues.