Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 7, 2001, Sunday, Pg. A-1

DON'T LET CREATIONISTS CORRUPT SCIENCE STANDARDS

    Look at what happened in Kansas when the anti-Darwin crowd tampered
with public school standards, says Leonard Krishtalka. It could happen in
Pennsylvania

    LAWRENCE, Kan.

    I am sorry to hear that the Pennsylvania Board of Education is
considering new science standards that would open the door for theories of
"creationism" to be taught alongside the theory of evolution. The standards
seek to dump on Darwin and dumb down science -- like the ones enacted in
Kansas. As the saying goes, every time history repeats itself the price
goes up. Judging from the Kansas evolution debacle, the price for
Pennsylvania will be high if these standards pass.

      Mockery will hail down on you, as it did us, from the four corners of
the Earth -- more on this scientific fact later. The media will sentence
Pennsylvania to purgatory for its biblically boiled science standards. The
scorn worldwide will be broad and indiscriminate, tarring you as dense,
dumb and dim-witted.

    Pennsylvania will reap in the economy what it sows in education.
Corporations, venture capitalists, skilled workers and families with
schoolchildren will keep the accelerator floored across the Pennsylvania
Turnpike between New Jersey and the Ohio line. Oh, they might stop long
enough in Philadelphia to visit Independence Hall and consider the U.S.
Constitution and the separation of church and state; or in Pittsburgh to
walk under the magnificent skeletons of Tyrannosaurus and Diplodocus in the
Carnegie Museum of Natural History and marvel at evolution's handiwork. But
they won't set up shop in the state.

    Why? To quote the CEO of a software company that abandoned Kansas,
anti-science education standards will make Pennsylvania and its
schoolchildren "isolated and handicapped in a competitive and unforgiving
world."

    Despite these travails, Pennsylvanians will stay put, their feet
proudly planted on Pennsylvania soil, held there by the weight of sin, if
not gravity. As happened in Kansas, while evolution is being scrubbed by
Genesis, Newtonian gravity will be demoted to a skeptical theory. When
science is cleansed by Scripture, nothing is sacred.

    In Kansas, believers in the biblical version of life on Earth thumped
that our science standards were not Christian enough. Judging from Samuel
Rhorer, one of your state representatives, and Diane Snyder, vice president
of the Butler Area school board, the thumping in Pennsylvania has already
begun. Rhorer condemns evolution as a religious tenet of secular humanism,
Marxism and communism. Snyder wants creationism taught in the science
classroom because "our beliefs in Butler are pro-creationist; our
demographics are very Christian-oriented." Had they read their Darwin, they
would realize that evolution is American free-market capitalism with a
vengeance.

    Pennsylvania will be invaded by "creation-science" experts, an oxymoron
for individuals who abuse science and censor knowledge. They will want
Pennsylvania's children taught that the Earth is no older than 10,000
years, a number divined from biblical begats. To accommodate a 10K Earth,
they will have supernatural forces replace standard knowledge in astronomy,
physics, chemistry, geology and biology. They may even show a film on
"flood geology," which features a lecturer at a service station holding a
gas pump, proclaiming that much of the world's oil resources comes from the
bodies of people who died in Noah's flood. He says he wants you to remember
this every time you fill up. I guess my Jeep is getting 20 miles per
ancestor.

    The creation-science crowd will want to stage evolution-creation
debates, as they did in Kansas. Don't partake. Public debates are about
winning at all costs, and the costs are high. When science and Scripture
are used to stage a circus, both are demeaned. Some of these folks will
lead tours of Carnegie Museum's Dinosaur Hall to demonstrate creationism.
One might as well tour a hospital maternity ward to demonstrate the Stork
Theory of Sex. And some will resurrect a pre-Enlightenment religious
doctrine called "intelligent design theory," which is nothing more than
creationism dressed in a cheap tuxedo.

    *

    In the end, the thinking public will rise up and respond, as it did in
Kansas. Pennsylvanians of all stripes will wonder why only biology is being
fingered for biblical correctness.

    What about the rest of science? Should astronomy expunge the "round
Earth theory" because Isaiah 11:12 and Revelation 7:1 stipulate a
four-cornered Earth and therefore a planet that is flat -- probably a
flat-sided square or tetrahedron? Should mathematics cite 1 Kings 7:23 in
teaching that the value of pi is 3 on the money, not 3 and change, i.e.,
3.1416? Should we make the study of foreign languages verboten because of
the Tower of Babel edict? Should bats be classified as birds instead of
mammals because of a taxonomic blunder in Leviticus 11? Should we teach
that the sun orbits the Earth because it stood still for a while at
Jericho?

    Pennsylvanians will also wonder about the creationists' priorities. If
their reverence for creation is real, why are they spending time and money
pushing Scripture as science? Why aren't they working tirelessly to
preserve the very creation they revere -- our habitats and ecosystems and
Earth's 15 million species of plants, animals and microbes? If creationists
venerate humans and their intelligence as uniquely created, why are they
bashing this God-given ability to explore and discover? Why aren't they
cheering the scientific knowledge that enables us to understand and sustain
their Creator's works?

    I hope Pennsylvanians will heed Thomas Aquinas, who admonished that it
was blasphemous to use Scripture as a scientific text. Why? Because
religion is done no service when the claimed word of God is made to look
stupid. Because we don't need to suppress scientific knowledge of the
universe in order to have a sense of place and purpose in that universe.
And, as one observer put it, because Pennsylvania doesn't need to suffer
"the mental hijacking of an entire state's schoolchildren by sectarian
zealots."

    Lastly, remember the ballot box. In the 2000 election, Kansans ousted
the mental hijackers from the legislature and board of education.
Pennsylvanians should do likewise in 2002. Here's to democracy and the
respect for knowledge that it demands.