Teach the Controversy

In recent years, Christians have had some success in different parts of the country calling for schools to "teach the controversy", referring to the controversy between two competing theories of origins, intelligent design and evolution. Most young people currently only learn about evolution in schools, and some Christians argue, what could be the harm of presenting opposing views and letting the students decide for themselves? (Some people might argue that this pedagogical philosophy is difficult to square with conservative calls for
abstinence-only sex education and disdain for comprehensive sex ed, which presents abstinence and other views and lets students decide for themselves. Speaking candidly, "some people" would have a heck of a point. But that pedagogical incongruence sits outside the scope of this blog post, so we shan't go there. Just to be clear, though, I'm a big believer in abstinence prior to marriage.)

What's the harm, people argue, of presenting someone with an informed viewpoint, so they can make their own fully-informed decision? Generally, this is a good idea, and incidentally, this is why it's important that the internet be kept fully free of government or service provider content control. In a classroom, I suppose one could argue that the "harms" might be that taking time to teach intelligent design takes away from the content students are intended to learn, or that intelligent design is not a testable, verifiable scientific theory, that teaching religious ideas is not the role of secular government, or that our science classrooms do not have sufficient time to do both sides justice. But I'm not here to argue any of those things. I'd rather teach the controversy. I'd rather introduce people to things they'll find controversial, so they can make their own fully-informed decision. Here goes.

There is no controversy, disagreement, or doubt about the theory of evolution. There's also not an anti-God conspiracy pushing scientists away from either creationism or intelligent design and toward evolution. There are facts. Ironclad, irrefutable, mountains of facts. For the longest time, I believed, even knew the opposite to be true. If scientists could kick off their anti-God blinders, forget what they know, and objectively consider the evidence for a young, designed earth, they would see immediately that they were mistaken. But gradually, over the last few years, my creationist/intelligent design blinders have been taken away, until at one point I saw immediately that I was mistaken. Evolution is true the same way gravity is true or Newton's laws of motion are true, and everywhere scientists are looking they find more strong evidence supporting it. Most likely over the next 100 years, scientists will refine and improve the details of evolutionary theory, but there is absolutely zero chance that they will experience the instant "fact-based" conversion I once thought they would.

Creationism is just not the direction the evidence points; not only that, it's not the direction the "weight of evidence" is moving. That is to say, when I was a creationist, I had the impression that evolution was full of problems, more problems were cropping up all the time, and the theory was in a state of crisis. What science actually shows, across disciplines and types of evidence (biology, paleontology, genomics, geology, and astronomy, to name a few), is vast evidence matching evolutionary expectations, and new things being discovered all the time that further support and confirm the common descent of living things. If you'd like to learn more about this evidence, from like-minded, conservative Christians, spend some time here.

So, if evolution is true, and it is, what does that mean? Does it mean that God doesn't exist or the Bible has been disproven? Does it invalidate our faith? No. This doesn't mean that the Bible is mistaken, or that inerrancy is untenable. It simply means that Genesis 1 was not written to give a pre-scientific culture a leg up, thousands of years later, in understanding physics, astronomy and biology. The Bible is not a science book, it's a truth book. And it doesn't set out to teach science, it reveals to us, and judges, the "thoughts and attitudes of the heart" (Hebrews 4:12). That's not to say the Bible is scientifically wrong; I don't believe there's a single error, of any kind, between Genesis 1:1 and Revelation 22:21. It just means that the topic of Genesis 1 is not science, in the same way the topic of Matthew 5:29-30 is not the proper care and maintenance of our bodies. Both teach us about man and his relationship to God.

Now, in Christian circles, that's controversial, and I hope for most Christians, that's because they believe the facts support creationism or intelligent design. But they don't. I certainly believed they did before I found out that evolution is based on evidence, not bias, group-think  or an atheistic vendetta. But the more I learn about evolution, the more I learn about how life actually came to be, the more I believe something bigger about God. I don't believe he sat down at his workbench for six days, and carefully crafted every living thing. That wouldn't be so impressive, for God. Rather, I see him as so omniscient, so far above us, that he came up with a mechanism which he knew would craft for him every living thing. It's the difference between making toast in the toaster, and making a toaster. It's the difference between being intelligent enough to vacuum the floor well, and being intelligent enough to invent a Roomba. The error of the creationist or intelligent design proponent is not one of believing too much of God, but too little. When God told us, in the book of Isaiah, that his thoughts are higher than our thoughts, and his ways are higher than our ways, he wasn't kidding around.

So if you've ever looked at creation and marveled, as I have, at how great our God is, just keep right on doing it. But bump it up a whole lot. Because while it might take a lot of intelligence to design a flying squirrel, a person, or a hummingbird, it takes supernatural omniscience to design, from scratch, an unthinking tool that will design them for you. Of course, no Christian would deny God's omniscience, but evolution shows us that his omniscience is even bigger than we knew. Teaching the "controversy" undermines truth, and it sells short the greatness of God. You see, the world and its creatures aren't intelligently designed, evolution is intelligently designed, by a God whose thoughts are so high above our own, we cannot understand or comprehend them. Which makes it all the greater and more amazing that he cares for us.