The Church of Evolutionism

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I'm finishing up my liberal education requirements this semester by fulfilling the Civic Life and Ethics theme with a class called Understanding the Creationism Evolution Debate. It's through the biology department, and it came highly recommended, looked interesting enough, and wasn't public speaking or political theory (which constitute most of the classes fulfilling this particular requirement), so I thought that I'd fill half of my lib eds for my last semester of not exclusively taking science classes with a science class. Although, I would like to take more liberal arts classes, because I generally enjoy them and it's fun to learn about something outside of the sciences (except feminist/social theory, because I do like what I learn to have a purpose), I just don't think I'm going to have time in my schedule after this semester to take any more.

A couple of days before term began, the professor sent out a survey for us to take, which consisted of detailed questions about evolution to test both our knowledge of it and our views about its validity. It is a biology class technically, so it does make sense to get a feel for how much knowledge we have on the topic, as well as gathering data about public schools teaching evolution and creationism.

The first thing the professor did on the first day of class was to point at people and ask why they took the class. People's answers were pretty much what you'd expect from what seemed to be primarily bioscience majors: they wanted to know more about the creationism side of the debate and why people are so passionate about not teaching evolution, a proven scientific fact. Right away atheism got mentioned as well as liberal religious backgrounds. When he got to me, I mentioned by Catholic education and being taught evolution in biology and a form of creationism (the type that includes evolution) in religion class. My point was that I'm interested in seeing why the debate has become so polarized because I was educated in a system where they aren't mutually exclusive, but because the professor launched into a lecture about the Catholics and how in the state of Minnesota you are more likely to learn a comprehensive form of evolutionary theory in a Catholic school than in public school, I'm pretty sure all anyone took away was that I went to Catholic school and thus must be Catholic.

This sort of bothers me, and always has, which is why I don't often bring up my educational background with people, because they automatically assume that either a) I am a religiously conservative Catholic or b) I must have hated high school because it was an ultra conservative environment (I have gotten the "I'm sorry" response to telling people I went to a Catholic high school far too many times to count). The fact is, I am about as far from religiously conservative as it is possible to get without actually considering myself an atheist, partially because I'm just not wired to blindly believe what people tell me I should if it doesn't make logical sense to me, and partially because the best way I have seen to discourage practicing Catholicism is a Catholic education. I liked my high school, and chose to go there because I liked the academic environment, not because my parents forced me to. They made me go to a parochial grade/middle school, but they gave me free reign to pick my high school. The school I went to was more liberal than a lot of public schools in this country, and was fairly accepting of everybody. Yes, we had mandatory theology classes, but they included things like Intro to Philosophy and Comparative World Religions, which were both fairly interesting. And yes, we had to wear a uniform, but they only part of it they really cared about was having our shirts tucked in, and they let me wear ties to school on a regular basis. I liked my high school, even though I didn't enjoy religion classes most of the time, and I don't like that people automatically assume that Catholic schools are really conservative and/or I must be a conservative Catholic because I went to one.

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Anyways, today in class we discussed the idea of Intelligent Design and why it's such a popular concept. The comments that people made about it, as well as about Creationism in general, seemed to me to convey the idea that they thought that people who believed in it were stupid, or just didn't understand the science well enough or something. And so, attempting to argue the other side of it, I made a comment about how I think ID is so popular because it allows people to reconcile science with faith in a way that acknowledges both. There is nothing mutually exclusive of evolution and creationism, excepting Young Earth Creationism, and I think that people who fervently argue on the side of evolution and science, tend to equate all forms of Creationism with the Young Earthers, who do deny most of biology and good chunks of geology as well. But the fact is that a lot of people believe that something set life on Earth in motion and gives it purpose, because it brings meaning to the chaos and randomness that is the physical world and keeps people sane in the face of the meaningless abyss that is the universe. Most of these people aren't stupid, and many of them understand and accept evolution and the age of the Earth and really all of science.

And now I think most of that class thinks I'm a creationist, because I went to Catholic school and had the gall to defend Intelligent Design, which is funny when I think about it. Personally, I accept all of evolutionary theory as fact, although I don't claim to understand the origins of life or if there is some soft of creator/designer. Religiously, I consider myself agnostic, because I have no idea whether a God exists or not, and I think it's kind of a meaningless question to ask because it is so far outside of the realm of anything we can ever hope to understand. There is no way to prove or disprove the existence of a supernatural deity; if there was, it wouldn't be supernatural, it would just be natural. Frankly, hardcore atheists annoy me just as much as religious fundamentalists, but I try to respect everyone's right to believe whatever they choose to.

I'll see how this class goes, because it seems really interesting so far, but I may not do a very good job convincing people that I'm not a creationist, because I don't think that they're stupid, just that they have a different value system than I do. Theirs puts religious faith over scientific evidence, which isn't wrong, just different. I certainly don't think Creationism should be taught in public schools, but that's a completely different issue.