Evolution and Science Under Attack.

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Spiritual progressives can easily align with liberal secularists to oppose attempts to teach alternatives to the theory of evolution in science courses. The Religious Right's agenda is transparent: to reintroduce the biblical story of creation as an alternative scientific explanation of the universe. Happily, the School Board that tried to discredit evolution in Dover, Pennsylvania, did not get reelected, and there will certainly be popular challenges to the Kansas State Board of Education, which has sought to change the definition of science so that it is not limited to teaching natural explanations.

Science is a powerfully important intellectual and experimental enterprise, using observations and hypotheses that generate predictions, critical experiments, and empirical observation. It has made important contributions to the human race and ought not to be crippled by the need to please religious fundamentalists.

Yet there is another danger if progressives make the scientific account of evolution the only acceptable explanation of the origins of nature. Evolution is the only legitimate scientific narrative, but not the only acceptable account, because there are other ways to understand reality that science cannot reach.

In his new book, The Left Hand of God: Taking Our Country Back from the Religious Right, TIKKUN's editor Rabbi Michael Lerner calls for support for the integrity of science, but challenges scientism, the view that all aspects of reality can be adequately described by empirical verification, and that everything else is myth.

A scientist need not be scientistic--and many are not, recognizing that science has its own limitations. Science cannot provide answers to the meaning of life, its value and its beauty, nor can it account for human freedom or consciousness. There are dimensions to reality that are not the domain of reason.

When liberals respond to the ideological claims of the Religious Right with an unflappable faith in science as the only way to understand the world, they actually strengthen the claims of their opponents. To the extent that liberals seem to be saying that the only things worth knowing are taught by science, they confirm the suspicions of many Americans that liberals are totally out of touch with the spiritual dimension of life, the very dimension that most people believe to be the most important aspect of their experience.

Spiritual progressives don't have to fall into this trap. We can affirm both science and the spiritual and/or religious experience of human beings, and not attempt to engage in crude reductionism or subordination of one to the other.

That's why Rabbi Lerner's book suggests another path on evolution: that we insist that alternatives not be taught in science courses, but instead be taught in mandatory courses on world religions and philosophy. In the context of such courses, the biblical creation story should be taught alongside the creation stories of Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, Scandanavia, India, China, Africa, and Native American cultures, and they should be assessed in terms of how well they provide foundations for a framework of meaning to our lives.

Don't be surprised that many fundamentalists won't be satisfied with this solution, because underlying their demand that we teach an alternative to science is not a desire to provide students with the widest possible range of ideas by which they may understand their lives, but rather a desire to impose the exclusive claims of their faith. If liberals and progressives called for the teaching of a "world religions and philosophies of life" course, they would expose the true agenda of the Religious Right and separate them from an important source of their support: those who are hungry for a meaningful life and cannot find that in a world created by global capital.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)