A VICTORY FOR SHALLOWNESS

Author: By James Carroll

Date: TUESDAY, September 7, 1999

Page: A15

Section: Op-Ed Page

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

That students in Kansas should be schooled in a shallow notion of the origins of the universe is tragic, but another terrible effect of the Kansas Board of Education's August decision to remove the teaching of evolution from its classrooms is that students all over the country are having their most shallow notions of both science and religion reinforced.

This dispute, and much of the commentary it has generated, resurrects the image of religion and science as locked in conflict, as if adherence to the former condemns one to a kind of mushy mindlessness, while commitment to the latter implies an unambiguous worldview hemmed in by rigidly defined ``facts.'' This is a double-edged Enlightenment caricature which does an injustice to the complexities that most religionists and most scientists (groups that overlap) take for granted.

Those defending ``creationism'' against ``evolution'' are understood to be defending a literal, or fundamentalist, reading of Biblical texts against those who treat them as ``merely'' symbolic or metaphorical. But is that really what is going on here? Apparent problems between religion and science have arisen in the context of Biblical interpretation before, most famously when Galileo's assertion that the Earth revolved around the sun seemed to contradict the image of Joshua stopping the sun in the sky. That the Galileo dispute has been commonly understood as a conflict between knowledge derived with certainty from the Bible and conclusions based on scientific observation through a telescope gives us a nicely polarized way of understanding the problem. But what if the Joshua story from the Bible had itself become a symbolic buttress not to a religious doctrine, but to a prior scientific hypothesis?

What was really at stake in the argument was not what the Joshua tale asserted, but what a second-century Greek astronomer named Ptolemy had described. His view that the Earth was the center of the universe, which meshed with Christian glorification of humankind as the pinnacle of creation, but which was also based on more than a millennium's worth of scientific observation of celestial bodies, was in the process of being overturned by the theory of Copernicus, and the perceptions of numerous astronomers, one of whom was Galileo. The point is that the Ptolemaic system had long served as an elegant way to account for what thoughtful people had seen with their own eyes -- the sun rises, afterall -- and it so represented the absolutely conventional view that theologians, too, took it for granted. A challenge to Ptolemy could feel like a challenge to the most certain thing there was, the revealed word of God.

The irony is that the religious figures whom history remembers as the antagonists of Galileo, were quite accustomed to the ideas that Biblical narratives always have to be interpreted, and that, however absolute one's faith in the Bible, interpretation inevitably moves one into the realm of the contingent. In other words, those who condemned Galileo, apparently for violating a doctrine of the Bible, were not Biblical literalists. They did not believe, for example, that because the dying Jesus said, ``Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,'' God was a being with palms, fingers, and thumbs.

Now, I have not spoken to the six Kansas School Board members who voted to eliminate evolution from the required curriculum, but I doubt that they are radical Biblical literalists either, believing that God is a being with thumbs. The Bible is commonly understood, even by fundamentalists, to have metaphoric, perhaps fictional content. That creationists insist on the literal, ``factual'' meaning of Genesis does not mean that they apply the same rigid reading to everything in the Scriptures, which raises the question of why they do so here.

The religious fundamentalists who have displayed such hostility to the metaphoric character of Scripture in Kansas are, although without knowing it, using the Creation account of Genesis as their own metaphor. This is not an argument about what the Creator did ``in the beginning,'' nor anything else having to do with religion. It is an argument about change. ``Creationism'' functions as a symbol of an imagined bygone era when life was certain, and a person's place in the order of the universe was clearly defined.

The ``theory'' of evolution, of course, assumes the permanence of change as such, and makes a nice target for those who long for a static universe. Far more than religious, there are social and political aspects to this dispute, and the deadly edge of racism -- the origin of species in Africa? -- cuts through it, too. Religion and science are not the categories in conflict here, no matter what the school board says. Indeed, the question of ultimate beginnings, whether pursued through fossils in time, telescopes in space, or the Biblical imagination, invites a similar response from scientist and believer alike, which is to bow before the essential mystery of what is.

Despite Kansas, the religious impulse and the scientific impulse are related. Both are at home with the inevitable experience of uncertainty, which, for faith, compels a restless desire to be with God, and, for science, drives the mind farther into what it does not know.