Evolving Kansas

In 1995 the official Position Statement of the American National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) rendered the following explanation of life's origins: "The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments"(emphasis mine).

This is also the pronouncement of atheism, which is simply 'non-belief' in anything supernatural; like science, if one of the five senses can't discern it, it cannot be. This is known as scientific naturalism and is identical to the mandates ordained by and for public education.

NABT removed the two words 'unsupervised' and 'impersonal' in 1997 after criticisms were raised by a philosopher and a religious scholar pointing out that those statements veer off into the realm of philosophy and are not scientifically provable. Those deletions subsequently led to a backlash from many in the scientific community who apparently have deeply held beliefs that evolution is indeed impersonal and unsupervised.

What is remarkable, however, is the unreserved honesty of the NABT's approach as revealed in their original definition of evolution. Few today will publicly profess evolution using its complete and accurate connotation, but instead take the tack of the NABT's revised statement of evolution, steering clear of the incendiary words 'unsupervised' and 'impersonal'. But unsupervised and impersonal are indeed what remain if scientific naturalism is the compass guiding the ship of discovery.

So what does any of this say about our origins as a species? Clearly it states that we are here only by some utterly freakish accident; an unplanned pregnancy of the universe, we might surmise. And then what have we done to God? Some evolutionists, and all institutions of public education, ardently declare that they are not out to depose God. But given evolution's basic assumptions of scientific naturalism and materialism, the only way God can exist is if we have made Him, i.e. he is nothing more than a construct of our own collective imaginations. (This would explain the effort in recent decades to reshape the God of the Bible into a more modern god fashioned after our own, ever changing, image.)

Darwinism has marshaled an implausible army of supporters over the past 145 years since Origin of Species was first published, and Darwinism's hegemony of the public's mind has gone unchallenged for decades. The popular media is in no way a minor player in this stunning rise from theory to undeniable, if not inscrutable 'fact'.

But science has marched on, and the modern discoveries in cell and molecular biology have thrown open the door on a previously unimagined landscape in the origins of life expedition. And things there are not at all as we had thought. Darwin himself had reservations about his theory given certain scenarios which have now become reality.

Science is to be, above all things, an expedition. Assumptions usually serve as the guardian of biases, and biases detract from objective thinking. Certainly thinking is what we must be about.

I am a theist. Not a deist; not an agnostic; not an atheist. I am not threatened by evolution, or by the exploration of its merits - and its shortcomings. I have been a student of science and particularly biology for decades; I am a life-long learner. And one of the things I continue to learn is that no matter how much knowledge we accumulate as a civilized world, it fades into infinitesimal minuteness in the face of what is unknown.

Learning occurs only in the arena of intellectual curiosity. Serving up the close-minded and improvable dogma of scientific naturalism is tantamount to indoctrination: Something - I believe - we frown on in this country.