Religion, Evolution, and Education

by Roy Clouser

 

In August, 1999, the Kansas Board of Education dropped the requirement that evolution as grand theory be taught in the public schools. As a result, the long-standing debate about the relation of religious belief to science and education has been restoked to a blaze. Dozens of media articles have offered opinions on why the decision was wrong and what should be done about it. Most of the articles I have seen denounce the Kansas decision as a deplorable intrusion of religious belief into science and into public education.

 

But what is intruding where? Is public education religiously neutral? Is the grand theory of evolution science? Many who believe evolution is supported with a high degree of evidence are fighting for that theory to be taught in the schools in the name of defending science. Those who believe that the theory is incompatible with their understanding of the Bible are fighting against it in the name of defending their religion. Have the battle lines been properly drawn?

 

To argue about whether a particular scientific theory or a particular religious teaching is true or not requires clarity about a prior question, namely, the relation between scientific theories and religious beliefs. Central to every religion is a teaching about what is divine—about what is regarded as utterly independent and on which all else depends. No matter what or whom any religion considers to be divine, that is what it recognizes or defines as the unconditional reality. The divine, in other words, is whatever people consider to be uncaused and unpreventable—as "just there."

 

The crucial point for our discussion is that this definition of religion makes clear that ideas of divinity are not confined to traditions most people recognize as "religious." Some people trust various parts of this world as divine. For example, some ascribe unconditional or uncaused status to matter, or to mathematical, logical or biological laws, or to the universe as a whole. From a biblical point of view this is idolatry, treating something as God that is not God. Nevertheless, this is certainly religious, even though, from a biblical point of view, it is false religion.

 

Whatever is regarded as ultimate, independent reality thereby has the status of divinity, no matter how it is conceived and regardless of whether it is worshipped. Worship is not essential to religion; there have been beliefs in gods that did not include worship and there still are versions of Hinduism and Buddhism that include no worship.

 

Understanding religion in this way also allows us to see that there are many more religious beliefs involved in scientific theorizing than are generally recognized. No matter how thoroughly some people avoid all organized religious traditions, worship, doctrines, and practices, and no matter how sincere they are about being atheists, they still have a religious belief insofar as they regard anything as being utterly independent or uncaused while all else depends on it.

 

It is also important to notice that while anyone who believes in God, in Brahman-Atman, or in the Tao is almost certainly aware of doing so, many other beliefs often take the form of unconscious assumptions. A belief that certain aspects of the universe are divine, or that the universe as a whole is divine, often has this character. A person may be unaware that he or she is presupposing that matter is the ultimate, independent reality. But that does not make such a belief any less a religious one, and it still renders any theory based on that assumption a religiously guided theory. Any theory, therefore, whether scientific or otherwise, can be understood only when its basic presuppositions are examined, and there are as many possible versions of a theory as there are religious beliefs that it can presuppose. So the idea that a theory can be religiously neutral is an illusion brought about only by calling an entire range of religious beliefs "secular."

 

The conclusion is this: it is neither possible nor desirable to eliminate religious belief from science or education. All scientific theorizing presupposes religious belief. The proper public policy question, therefore, is simply how to do justice to the teaching of science, recognizing that all scientific theories are grounded in religious beliefs. The just and proper answer to this question cannot be one that perpetuates a winner-takes-all political battle between "science" and "religion" for control of what is imagined to be a secular or religiously neutral school system. Those battle lines reflect a mistaken understanding of the relation between religious belief and science.

 

[Dr. Roy Clouser is professor of philosophy at The College of New Jersey, and the author of The Myth of Religious Neutrality (Notre Dame University Press) and Knowing With the Heart: Religious Experience and Belief in God (InterVarsity Press).]
 

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