Creationism In Schools?

Creationism is scientism.

Scientism is the belief that the only objectively true knowledge is that derived from the application of the natural-scientific method. It is ruinous of science, since that method can only function on certain presuppositions which it cannot prove, but rather must (and, historically, happily did) accept on higher authority.

Creationism is a form of scientism, which has accepted the scientistic argument and then applied it to Genesis. Creationists may seem to be the polar opposites of Stephen Hawking, Peter Atkins and Richard Dawkins. But, in fact, they are all of a piece.

I would not teach the works of Dawkins - wholly incompetent in the field that he has long chosen to colonise - in schools. Nor would I teach creationism. For exactly the same reasons in both cases.

That is one of the many reasons why I am not, and have never been, New Labour. New Labour was and is happy to teach Dawkinsian scientism to its own children and creationist scientism to other people's, at public expense all round. I am not happy with the teaching of either of them to anybody.

Nor am I happy with the assumption that teenagers are so thick that they can be fobbed off with "the fossil record": of course, the fact that two species inhabited the same place at different times and resembled each other does not prove anything at all, still less that the later one was descended from the earlier one. With teaching like that, it is no wonder that, once you take out the Don't Knows and adjust accordingly, the creationist proportion of the British population is comparable to the creationist proportion of the American population, and growing.

There is really only one thing about evolution that truly interests the popular mind. That is the common ancestor of Man and the great apes. No such ancestor has ever been found, and children should be taught that fact, for fact it is. And as long as fact it remains, it further remains perfectly legitimate to believe that, whatever might have gone on or be going on among plants and animals, the first man was created directly from inanimate matter, and the first woman from out of the first man, exactly as the Bible teaches.

Why not? If that was what happened, then science, which is purely descriptive, would just have to deal with it. And it has produced no reason whatever to disbelieve it; no other species from which we are demonstrably descended.

Likewise, since the emergence of the first living cell from inanimate matter remains wholly incapable of repetition, then there is no scientific reason whatever not to believe that that, too, was a direct act of creation. Who can show that this is scientifically impossible? Who can say what really happened instead?

Of course, whether or not God exists at all is not a scientific question.