Faith is a wonderful thing.  We hold on to beliefs that are manifestly not true but hope and believe that there will be some kind of divine intervention to make bad things go away.  We will soon revisit one of the most divisive periods in U.S. history when fundamentalists holding their Bibles aloft declared that their belief in those books was absolute despite what their sense and science had shown them.

In the town of Dover, PA there will be a reenactment of the Scopes “Monkey” trial where reason, science and just plain intelligence faced the obduracy of religious belief about how, when and why the universe came about.  We still don’t know how life was started.  Our ancestors certainly believed it began a lot of years before Bishop Usher stated with great certainty was about 4,004 years ago and linked to the birth, life and death of Jesus, known as The Christ.

There is nothing we can do to escape this farcical trial over “creationism” vs. science except to wait it out and see what the backers of supernatural intervention will come up with.  I should not have said creationism although that is what “Intelligent Design” actually is.  In either case, creationism or intelligent design is here and there are a great many otherwise intelligent people whose faith tells them that there cannot be life without “GOD”.  I praise their hewing to their beliefs for it must be hard to continue a belief when so many educated people think otherwise.  I would hate to hold a vote about whether intelligent design should be taught in the schools as an antidote to science, but I suspect that the vote will overwhelmingly be in favor of traditional science and notions about natural selection and evolution.

Just what is taught about these controversial subjects in religiously oriented schools?  I know a little about this because I once had a graduate student whose background was home instruction and a Bible College.  She was indoctrinated (although she claimed the indoctrination was on the part of my public school education) with ideas that clashed with casually mentioned facts about evolution of ideas and the importance of the scientific method in the study of education and every other subject that was available in a school curriculum.

What was frightening to me back then and frightens me now is that the subject is not dead and buried but alive and threatens to remake the way we must think – instead of thinking, we must believe! The power of that belief is such that it steals headlines and occupies our time when we should be teaching children to think for themselves and do so free of the confines of narrow thinking imposed by religion. It is irrelevant to worry about whether we descended from monkeys or if GOD exists outside of the pages of a Testament.  We better start thinking realistically and not whether God is involved with putting these words on this page.