Intelligence Resigns

I hope everyone checked out the Blues News this morning. Thanks Neil for the great piece from the Onion.

I'm not sure how I feel about schools teaching Creationism. I suffered through 12 years of Catholic education, and sadistic nuns, and I don't think it hurt me too much. At some point in my young life, I suggested to Sister Vincent DePaul that perhaps the story of Jonah and the Whale might be more easily digested (no pun intended) if it were told as a parable, and not the literal truth. The cranky old sister (we called her sister VD) became so enraged that I thought she might have been momentarily possessed by one of those Biblical spirits. Religion never really spoke to those of us who could not take that blind leap of faith, it doesn't address the questions that arise from discoveries of stars and archeological ruins. Most religions remain rooted in a system of beliefs established centuries ago, and view science and knowledge as a threat to the absolute control that the church has over it's members.

Faith is a good thing to have. Suppression of information and scientific knowledge is not. Our schools have already fallen behind most industrialized nations, and once our educational standards have been lowered, the ability to compete economically in the world will follow. In the practice of medicine and health science, the restriction of stem cell research has put us a decade behind other industrialized nations. India has already surpassed us in information technology, high paying tech jobs are disappearing from the employment pages. The dollar is depreciating, our kids are uneducated, and in the next decade, Americans will be immigrating to Europe and China to work in factories and send yen home to families because the American dollar buys less every year. Why do we want to encourage the teaching of stories from 2000 years ago when the future sits brightly in front of us? Unless Jesus is coming back in January, and does that fish and loaf miracle, we still need to be able to support ourselves and our families with good jobs.

I think I even believe in some sort of Intelligent Design. When I see pictures sent from light years away, pictures of Mars or a supernova, I feel an immediate awe of the complexity life. When I am kayaking across the Potomac, and it doesn't smell so bad, I get a sense from the laws of gravity, and the motion of water that there is Something out there, somewhere, who knows these secrets of science and physics that we are only beginning to grasp right now. Simplifying the extraordinary complexity of life and space, and explaining it in a fairy tale from long ago does not do justice to the wonders of life, or the Creators, it demeans the miracle of our existence.

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