Not Success, but an Uneasy Marginalization

So years have past, and creationists have been unable to make any intellectual or scientific advances. In spite of the claims of the ID movement, no startling research is forthcoming, no new science at all has come from ID. And in the meantime, evolution continues to be a healthy and useful theory, generating new insights in a host of disciplines, while creationism is stuck repeating the same distortions and misrepresentations it has relied on for the past 30 years and more.

My fear is that what has changed is that a large segment of the population has become marginalized - pulled into home school movements, poisoned against science by their parents and pastors, where propaganda passes for education, and doctrine for academic freedom and inquiry. What becomes of these children, ghetto-ized in the name of God, and shielded from the stark reality of evolution and the complexities of the natural world?

Are we raising a generation of fundamentalist zealots, destined to turn to violence in the name of their vision of God? Does it matter if science and science education is proved right, if a whole segment of our society refuses to face the facts?

What is lacking is not a compelling scientific explanation of the world, but a compelling human vision of what it means to be in the world. Community, meaningful work, direction, quality of life - this is the "answer" to creationism - because folks hold onto creationism as a way of protecting their faith - and cognitive dissonance is a small price to pay (as they reckon), for the assurances of religion.

Evolution is true, and a fundamentalist view of faith is therefore not accurate. To live in the modern world, we have to face this fact. To successfully deny this, we have to revert back to magical thinking about the universe - ignorance. There are any number of folks who, out of mistaken piety or a desire for power, would be happy for us to return to a more pliable ignorance.

Much more is at stake here than a fundamentalist view of God and the afterlife - who controls our ideas, what we can know and how we can express ourselves, what we can discover and make, do and be are are intimately tied to this struggle. Fundamentalists are out to remake our culture in the image of their reading of scripture. It is not an accurate, just, peaceful vision - and it would be a poverty to be drug back to a time of magical thinking and rigid patriarchy.