Being a religious Catholic man, one consideration that I had when choosing a college was its religious environment. Would it be nondenominational, free of religious ties, or would it have a distinct connection to God? Obviously, the choice was made for the latter. To a degree, religion can enrich an education in a unique way, allowing a student to prosper both intellectually and morally. However, as always, there is a group of people who want to take an idea to the extreme. Step aside, oil conspiracy theorists, radical feminists and ACLU-there is a fresh source of anarchy in town. It consists of fundamentalist Christians bent on the instruction of Creationism as a legitimate alternative to Darwinism.
Creationism teaches that life is too complex to have spawned randomly, so the only other alternative is that a metaphysical force created all that surrounds humanity. Fundamentalists are urging lawmakers to require that institutions teach Creationism alongside Darwinism, as both are reasonable “theories.” Creationism really is a nice guess???cute even; it just does not hold any ground, scientifically. As most Saint Louis University students know (everyone being pre-med), to be scientific, a subject must be experimentally verifiable. More simply, according to Karl Popper, a renowned philosopher, scientific theories must be disprovable. Do not mention the fact that they must also make sense. Sorry fundamentalists, but Creationism does not-at least not according to the principles of Biology.
Very unfortunately, the religious faction has enough legal support for their proposal that it is not a laughing matter. The subject prompted Bobby Henderson to write The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a quite amusing book to many. The book is a short gospel of a new religion that worships a monster made up of “noodly” spaghetti appendages, which, according to Henderson, is the creator of all that is holy.
Though the book, at times, becomes a mockery of religion in general, it focuses primarily on how ridiculous Creationism is as a theory to be taught alongside science. In Flying Spaghetti Monster, the chosen people are pirates, there is no doctrine and they accept the entire gospel, regardless of all of the discrepancies in logic. There are mathematical proofs, epitaphs and wondrous graphs. One shows the inverse relationship between the population of pirates and global warming, a topic also under much heated debate. What makes the book so amusing is that, if it is taken as literally as the Bible, no one actually has any reasonable argument or data against Henderson’s propositions.
The true purpose of education is to teach students how to think, once they move out into the workforce, so that they might contribute to society. Biology is intended to inform about life-how to save and prolong it. Creationism does not explain the evolution of animals and bacteria and does not inspire the cure of all sorts of ecological and biological problems. Darwinism does. The point is that no matter how fun, exciting and tasteful Creationism might be, it simply has no connection to the purpose of a scientific education.
The thought of wasting time in already impossibly complex biology classes to discuss the magical theory is sickening. For anyone with a reasonable bone in their body, hope is that these fundamentalists can be oppressed until they die off completely. Darwinism will continue to reign supreme.
