First, I don’t think a religious variety of creationism should be allowed. Creationists: hear me out. Evolutionists: don’t sound the victory trumpets yet.
Now, Holly is most certainly mistaken in qualifying “creationism and evolution can coexist peacefully” with the clause, “in a personal worldview.” There are simply too many world-class philosophers, atheists and all varieties of theists who have either made a philosophical case for the inadequacy of evolutionary theory or for a divine account of the creation of the universe, respectively.
Powerful minds like Alvin Plantinga of Notre Dame even go to such lengths as to describe evolution in terms of logical possibilities and probabilities, mathematically weighing the likelihood of our current account of evolution having happened without some sort of supernatural account. It doesn’t look good.
Yet, there is the respect in which creationism should be taught in public schools: as a philosophical ideology, non-specific to any religion — arguments for there being a divine being who instantiates the universe. The counterarguments should be given as well – for they are numerous and powerful as well.
A philosophy class, as distinguished from any specific religion class, would be a wonderful theater of ideas and conversations, encouraging students to really think for themselves by providing them with all manner of philosophical schools of thought and argument: theism and creationism, atheism and naturalism, moralism and nihilism, Kant and Hume.
It’s never enough to simply cut out unhealthy foods in a diet – you’d starve. They must be replaced with healthy food. If Holly wants students to stop “being force-fed anti-science garbage,” then let her also provide a diversity of mental nutrients to raise healthy, free, and independent minds, minds brave enough to ask questions beyond the small mind’s God: science, beyond which there is none greater.
Will Nowell is a sophomore philosophy and computer science major from Southaven.
