Creationism: It's not just in Kansas anymore

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Creationism: It's not just in Kansas anymore

By Peter Schrag, Sacramento Bee, November 23, 2005

Pity the poor citizens of Dover, Pa. No sooner had they rid themselves of the embarrassment of a school board that tried to write intelligent design into its biology classes than Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson pronounced a fatwa on the whole town.

Woe to a community that votes out a board that squinted toward creationism and replaces it with a new one.

If some disaster befell Dover, said Robertson on his TV show, "Don't turn to God. You just rejected him from your city." For the lawyers who had been trying to defend Dover's policy in a federal suit by arguing that intelligent design was not creationism and so did not represent an attempt to write religion into the science program, Robertson's statement couldn't have been very helpful. The suit will now probably be moot. But if there's another case challenging intelligent design, Robertson will make a great witness for the plaintiffs.

It was pure coincidence that on the very same day that the Dover board was dumped, the Kansas Board of Education took a big step in the other direction. Not only did it approve new science guidelines that invited challenges to evolution, but it wrote its own definition of science so that it would no longer be limited to natural explanations of natural phenomena. Where is Henry Mencken when we so desperately need him?

The new Kansas guidelines, as expected, came not in the name of religion but of free inquiry. One of the six members voting for the new guidelines said he was pleased to be "on the edge of trying to bring some intellectual honesty and integrity to the science classroom rather than asking students to check their questions at the door because it is a challenge to the sanctity of evolution." But why should students have to check their questions at the door, anymore than they'd have to check their questions about Santa Claus or where Cain's wife came from, or about what all those millions of creatures ate on the ark? They'd just have to learn that those questions have nothing to do with science.

Yet if everything's not up to date in Kansas, California isn't immune. Twenty years after creationists ran the last full-scale campaign to write their "science" into California's curriculum, Calvary Chapel School in Murrieta, the Association of Christian Schools International and six students hoping to go to the University of California are suing UC. The charge: that the university, in denying credit for some of the religiously oriented courses the students took and the texts they used, practices "viewpoint discrimination" and "hostility toward religion."

UC thus violated their First Amendment rights. "They are trying to secularize private Christian schools," the school's lawyer told the New York Times. The plaintiffs also contend that UC has no evidence that Christian graduates fare any worse than those from public schools.

UC requires applicants to have completed a sequence of courses - the "a to g" requirements - in English, math, the sciences, social studies and other fields. UC's faculty committee on admissions does not recognize certain Calvary Chapel courses as satisfying those requirements.

Among them are science courses using what UC regards "as primarily religious texts," something the books themselves acknowledge. One, "Biology for Christian Schools," published by Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist institution in Greenville, S.C., says its authors "have tried consistently to put the Word of God first and science second. To the best of the author's knowledge, the conclusions drawn from observable facts that are presented in this book agree with the Scriptures."

In expressly prioritizing religion over science, said UC, "a course relying on these texts as core instructional materials does not meet the faculty's criteria for the subject "d" laboratory science requirement." UC also rejects a course in "Christianity and Morality in American Literature" using a book called "American Classics for Christians" as not meeting its standards for an English course because students do not read whole works of literature. Whether such courses are any thinner academically than many of the nice-sounding public school courses on UC's approved list is a question that probably no one can answer.

UC officials point out that the university offered admission to 18 Calvary students in the past three years, that it recognizes most of Calvary's courses and that it has no interest in influencing what Calvary teaches. UC officials also point out that the university has accepted many of the school's science courses and that UC also allows students who haven't taken all the required courses to be admitted by exam alone.

Still UC is taking the suit seriously, concerned that it might compromise its right to set its admission standards. More important, according to UC spokesperson Ravi Poorsina, is the worry that the suit will create an impression that the university doesn't welcome students from Christian schools, something that she says simply isn't true. It could also bring another fatwa from Pat Robertson.

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