Last Wednesday, Indiana legislators moved a bill to the full Senate that would allow creationism to be taught alongside other theories in the state’s public school system. This bill is an absolute disgrace.
Not only is it a slap in the face to modern science, it completely goes against Supreme Court precedent and U.S. constitutional law.
This column isn’t a mockery of faith or religious belief. It is the moral and legal right of every American citizen to believe, or not to believe, in any religious faith they choose. And it is exactly this right that the Indiana Senate Education Committee is trampling on with their approval of the bill.
The U.S. Constitution itself says in the First Amendment that the government will not support one religion over another. And, with its American roots in Protestant anti-evolution, creationist theory leans heavily toward the Christian perspective.
Government support for creationism would directly clash with this amendment in the sense that showing preference toward teaching one “theory” of origin excludes those of other religions.
If teaching creationism is supposed to round the view of science students receive in classrooms, why not describe all theories of origin?
Textbooks can discuss that the Earth might have been made from mud by a great female spirit and was then carried around on a giant turtle’s back.
Along with this, in the Supreme Court’s 1987 case Edwards v. Aguillard, it was decided that teaching should “maximize the comprehensiveness and effectiveness of science instruction.” Teaching Christianity alongside evolution would be explicitly “discrediting evolution by counterbalancing its teaching at every turn with the teaching of creationism.”
From all angles, this bill is absolutely illegal.
The creationist theory has almost no backing scientifically. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has continually stated that creationism is a pseudoscience that doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny.
When the U.S. National Academy of Science disputes a theory, you’d think that all support for it should drop automatically.
But no, the Indiana Senate Education Committee thinks it knows better.
Maybe discussing a bill that would also allow schools to teach that the sun actually revolves around the Earth would hold the same rationale. But not even the Catholic Church stands by this falsehood anymore, as of 1992 — a little late in the game.
As a matter of fact, the Church even publicly announced that the teaching and research of evolution was no longer blasphemy long before they announced that they had decided Galileo was right.
So where do we go from here?
The Indiana Senate Education Committee has no legal justification for their actions. They have no scientific evidence to support their claim that creation and evolution theory are equally “worthy.”
They are scientifically behind an institution that took more than 300 years to admit the Earth revolved around the sun.
This bill is a problem, and it needs to be fixed.
