November, 2005

Karen Bellavance-Grace
Keene Unitarian Universalist Church

Smart People and Intelligent Design

My son is a young man of limited, but well-defined faith. He believes in science, he has a great deal of faith in what he can see and feel and describe through his own senses and in what scientists have been able to see, feel and describe. As for what cannot be explained by science, well, he has great faith that science will one day find the answer. So I was a little surprised recently when I asked him what he thought about the movement to teach Intelligent Design alongside evolution in some school districts.

His answer was, “It’s only fair. They should be able to teach it.” His faith in science came butting right up against his sense of fairness, and in a way, I am glad that his justice-loving side won out, even if I disagree with his conclusion. Kids have a heightened sense of fairness, and tend to view their world very starkly in terms of fair and unfair, but there is not always a universal arbiter of ‘fair’. In my youngest son’s Fair World, all kids would have the same bedtime. In my oldest son’s Fair World, big kids get to stay up later than little kids. It’s only fair, they would each say.

Intelligent Design advocates also bring up fairness when discussing their theory of the birth of the universe and the development of life on earth. Since there is no eyewitness testimony to the beginning of time, they say, all theories must be given equal weight, a ‘fair’ hearing. Theories are, after all, unproven ideas. They are confusing the terms of the argument; they are using the word ‘theory’ as it would be understood in an Agatha Christie novel, not the specific meaning it has in the specialized world of science and mathematics. And while they clamor for the fair teaching of other ideas in this case, the same I. D. advocates would rail against ‘moral relativism’ if their school district wanted to teach about the spectrum of family diversity instead of sticking to the binary world of Dick and Jane.

I believe, as most parents, scientists and school boards outside of Kansas believe, that Intelligent Design does not belong in public school science classrooms. I admire and respect the I. D. movement as a way for people of Christian faith to try to understand their faith in the context of the 21 st century world; a way to hold onto a faith based on miracles and mystery in a place where so much has been made explicit. But I also believe that the I. D. advocates have momentum, and a strong infrastructure of conservative activists around the country, and that the controversy will be coming to more and more school boards and college campuses in the next few years.

Our religious education classrooms are an important place to engage this debate. The curricula we are using make no mention of Intelligent Design; it is too new a theory, too new a creation story to have been included yet. But we can and should think about introducing it when we discuss creation stories from other faiths. We should, and we will, engage our older children in thinking critically about I. D. both as theory and as a creation story. We can talk to them about the different criteria used to distinguish a good story as opposed to a good theory.

Next year, one of our older classes will be studying Neighboring Faiths, an excellent place to introduce this controversial topic, but you don’t have to wait until then to engage your own children, grandchildren, neighbors, nieces or nephews. Have you asked them what they think about the theory of Intelligent Design? I would be interested in hearing about your conversations with your children. Once our students leave the shelter of our Sanctuary and Sunday School, they will very likely meet people of strong belief who will want to engage them and sway them to their own beliefs. We cannot and would not tell our children what they must ultimately believe, but we can and we should give them every tool at our disposal to do what Walt Whitman encourages, “to re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, (and) dismiss what ever insults your own soul.”