August 12 1996

ARTICLE TOOLS

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The National Science Foundation recently announced the results of a survey quizzing Americans on basic scientific facts, such as whether light travels faster than sound. Did I say facts? One question did not cover facts but philosophy: "True or false: Humans developed from earlier species of animals."

Fewer than half the respondents gave the "right" answer, which was "true." Should we wring our hands over those who got it "wrong" and declare them scientifically ignorant? Of course not. They know the official line on human evolution; they simply disagree with it.

The fact that so many Americans disagree over human origins explains why it is a controversy that refuses to go away. Noisy debates are breaking out in school districts across the country--from Vermont to Ohio to California. The scientific establishment portrays dissenters from Darwinism as backwoods rubes trying to inject religion into the science classroom. But protesters assert that religion is already in the classroom. Darwinism is the foundation for a philosophy of naturalism, which is implacably opposed to any form of theism.

Many Darwinists are brutally honest about the religious implications. Francisco Ayala of the University of California says natural selection "exclude[s] God as the explanation accounting for the obvious design of organisms." And Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins says Darwin "made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

This atheistic presupposition is easily picked up by kids in the classroom. But in case it isn't, the National Association of Biology Teachers has explicitly declared all life the outcome of "an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process." A popular high-school textbook published by Prentice ...