The Rev. Pat Robertson fears for the people of Dover, Pa., because their school board will not follow his suggested curriculum. On Election Day last week, eight school-board members who had promoted “intelligent design” in biology classes were voted out of office.
Some folks would consider that good old American democracy at work, but not Robertson. “I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God; you just rejected him from your city,” Robertson said on his 700 Club TV show. “Just remember, you voted God out of your city.”
That’s a bit of a stretch. Unless there is some sort of conspiracy by the mainstream media at work, God remains in Dover, as much as ever. I haven’t read of any churches being shuttered in Dover. No mass round-ups of believers, no one arrested for possessing a Bible or a tract, no persecutions of the devout, no evidence at all that God is being removed from Dover.
Indeed, if Robertson is referring to the same God I learned about in Sunday School, removal would be impossible. We were taught that he was omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent – that is, all-knowing and in all places, far beyond any human power to remove.
The Dover saga began before the election. The old school board tried to require a statement about intelligent design in biology classes. Some parents sued, saying that was an effort at religious indoctrination in public-school classrooms. The court has yet to announce a verdict.
It can be argued that there’s nothing inherently religious about intelligent design – it’s just another scientific theory which holds that the complexity of earthly life can best be explained by positing a designer, rather than time and chance. In itself, it says nothing about whether the designer was the God of Genesis or some cosmic archfiend whose perverse sense of humor shows in mass extinctions, lethal pandemics and frail human anatomy.
But Robertson doesn’t provide any support for that argument, since he claims that removing a mention of intelligent design from the biology class is the same as ejecting God from the community.
On further analysis, though, this whole controversy is rather pointless. On one side we have some right-thinking devout people who fear that if only the theory of evolution is taught in biology classes, then children will absorb that and grow up to be not just followers of the scientific method, but Darwinists, maybe even social Darwinists who believe the strong should rule and the weak should have no rights – that is, modern Republicans.
On the other side, there are parents who fear that a few minutes’ exposure to intelligent design theory will turn their children into slaves of ancient superstitions with no regard for reason or intellect – that is, crystal fondlers or necromancers or the like.
But in reality, both fears are groundless. Consider that schools spend a lot of time teaching history. History is not without its controversies between revisionist and traditional or triumphalist camps.
But both sides agree, for instance, that the American Civil War occurred from 1861 to 1865, and that American schoolchildren ought to know that. Yet there are surveys which claim that 80 percent of high-school seniors can’t tell you which decade the Civil War occurred in.
Schools spend a lot of time on math, too. In a 1998 survey, American high- school students ranked 17th in mathematical skills among 18 nations.
Given that record of non-accomplishment, why would Pat Robertson or any other fundamentalist care what’s taught in a biology class where the vast majority of students are not going to remember it anyway? If you need further confirmation, catch a “Jay Walking” segment on the “Tonight Show.”
Furthermore, the clever students will thwart their educations anyway. The great skeptic Voltaire was educated by Jesuits. Charles Darwin had a devout Anglican education. Robert Ingersoll, the famed American atheist of the 19th century, was raised and educated by a Congregationalist minister.
The real lesson in all this might be that if you don’t want kids to learn about evolution, teach it every day in every classroom, K-12.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
