The year was 1999. The Kansas State Board of Education’s decision to strike evolution from the state competency examinations had scarcely drawn its first breath, and already turbulence rocked the cradle. The Board’s action generated so much national publicity - much of it erroneous and condescending – that upon installment of newly elected State School Board members eighteen months later the decision was promptly reversed.
Did Kansas reverse its decision simply to dodge the taunts of a hostile media and national commentary leveled by ‘experts’ near and far? (A sting so painful as to effectively quash any discussion of this same item in 2003).
The irony is this: never was it said in the 1999 decision that Kansans could not and should not believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. It was simply determined that it was not necessary to emphasize evolution in testing at the state level. In a national climate that fosters the expression of every freedom guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, many citizens are now asserting their First Amendment rights by rejecting the state’s attempts to eliminate God from the worldview of their children. Implicit in the state’s actions is the prohibition of open student discourse and debate about the state’s worldview, Darwinism, as the definitive interpretation of life’s origins. Naturalism is the only paradigm tolerated by the state.
It is dust that spawns the storm when it comes to humans reckoning their origins.
Evolutionary accounts describe the water and the dust of the earth combining in a precisely correct atmosphere and in the presence of a proper catalyst, so as to form the amino acids that eventually transformed into something meeting the criteria for life.
The biblical account of creation states that God took the dust of the earth and formed it into man, and, Himself being the catalyst, God breathed life into the man He had formed, and the man became a living thing.
Either way you slice it, we’re dust.
Since we cannot know with certainty in either case, evolution or creation, our only recourse is to believe. It is offensive and unacceptable for our government to determine for us via the public education system which tale of origins, which worldview is worthy of our credence and our tax dollar.
By adopting evolution as the national scientific standard for explaining the origins of life, we are making a public declaration of a national belief, principally that life arose exclusively by chance.
To say that the beginning of life and its subsequent evolution are autonomous and undirected is to tacitly embrace atheism. This is a direct contradiction to the beliefs of millions of American schoolchildren and their taxpaying parents. Further, if God does exist, and He indeed created the universe and all of life, then teaching otherwise is in fact political indoctrination at its most heinous: it is the attempt by the state to hide the truth by deception and to replace it with the state’s dogma.
Looking back, Kansas failed to respond thoughtfully to its critics. We instead capitulated in knee-jerk fashion, seeking pacification of those who had no vested interest in our state, yet used our state school board’s 1999 decision to castigate us absent any legitimate rationale for doing so.
In the fall of 2002 the state of Ohio likewise revamped their standards, creating new ones that allow for ‘critical analysis’ of evolutionary theory, while giving latitude to the individual school districts concerning intelligent design theories. Their prescience is laudable. It is a decision whose continued existence, however, rests in the resolve of present and future school board members, and parents, to stand firm in the face of government-backed opposition.
Presently the state school board of Georgia is engaged in similar dialogue regarding its stance on the question of evolution’s place in the education objectives for their students. May they opt for a sensible course of action - one that speaks to the true needs of its students - and in the process model leadership, open mindedness and good old-fashioned backbone. Something Kansas failed to do.
The chronicles of science are filled with men and women who bucked the prevailing and ingrained doctrines and widely held beliefs of their day. They followed expanded, farther-reaching beliefs - their hypotheses - and in the process enlarged the realm of knowledge and the richness of the human experience. Using the tools at their disposal, and the empirical evidence at hand, they pushed against academic and intellectual frontiers and grew them, rather than imprison the intellect within immovable boundaries of improvable theories. By their inquisitiveness and persistence they demonstrated leadership.
Kansas did not think broadly enough on the issue at hand, and, when the flames of opposition grew too heated, demonstrated an unwillingness to step up as a leader in an emerging ideological debate, a debate that is far from over. Leadership not infrequently flies in the face of prevailing thought. Leaders are people intent on discovering the truth, knowing all the while that whatever their contribution to the advancement of these qualities, and to the human race, it is merely another starting point for discovery and not a firm and final conclusion. These are the people who leave an indelible strand woven in the collective fabric of our daily life experience.
People like Charles Darwin.
J.K. Decker
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