By Terry Vanderheyden
TOPEKA, Kansas, November 9, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A 6-4 vote by the Kansas State Board of Education Tuesday means that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution can now be examined critically by teachers in state schools.
Secularists were quick to condemn the move. The Campaign to Defend the Constitution condemned the decision as a “threat posed by the religious right to American democracy,” while Dr. Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science called the measure “A vote to mix science and faith in public school science classrooms.”
Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, in a lecture delivered in 1999 at the Sorbonne, countered an attempt by evolutionary scientists to claim that any mention of faith in the context of how life begins is “unscientific.”
“Every explanation of reality that cannot at the same time provide a meaningful and comprehensible basis for ethics necessarily remains inadequate,” Ratzinger said, according to a Zenit report. “Now the theory of evolution, in the cases where people have tried to extend it to a ‘philosophia universalis,’ has in fact been used for an attempt at a new ethos based on evolution.”
“Yet this evolutionary ethic that inevitably takes as its key concept the model of selectivity, that is, the struggle for survival, the victory of the fittest, successful adaptation, has little comfort to offer,” he explained. “Even when people try to make it more attractive in various ways, it ultimately remains a bloodthirsty ethic. Here, the attempt to distil rationality out of what is in itself irrational quite visibly fails. All this is of very little use for an ethic of universal peace, of practical love of one’s neighbor, and of the necessary overcoming of oneself, which is what we need.”
Meanwhile, the Dover, Pennsylvania, Area School Board that was the first region to allow the teaching of Intelligent Design alongside evolution initiated in January has been voted out of office.
The Kansas Board of Education’s decision differs from what Dover attempted, though, according to Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education. Kansas educators “[believe] it will be legally more viable to say ‘evolution is really crummy science,’” rather than openly advocating an Intelligent Design position, she said, according to a Medill News Service report.
See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Pennsylvania School District First in US to Offer Alternative to Debunked Darwinian Evolution
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/jan/05011808.html
Astonishing 88% of Americans Believe in Creation or God-Directed Evolution
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/oct/05101705.html
Evolution/Creation Debate Now Science vs. Science not Science vs. Religion
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/oct/05100605.html
See also:
Cardinal Ratzinger’s Thoughts on Evolution
https://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=75841