My Son's Teacher Doesn't Believe in Evolution

My son entered an independent study program yesterday. His first assignment for English is 11,000 Years Lost. I put on my best sarcastic voice for the teacher and said, "How can it be 11,000 years when the world's only 6000 years old?" He laughed, but a little later, he leaned in and said "I agree with you about the 6000 years, so you can just think of this book as fiction."

I was shocked. I immediately said, "I was being sarcastic. We are firm believers in evolution." He was pretty quiet for the rest of the orientation.

This morning, I found this email in my inbox:

Please forgive the big hole I dug for myself at our orientation this afternoon.  I totally missed the sarcasm in your comment.  While we disagree on that issue, I hope you will find me to be a fair and knowledgeable teacher who values critical thought and appropriate skepticism.

I look forward to a mutually edifying time with you and Spencer, however short that may be.

You have a fascinating website.  I hope to spend more time there later.

Feel free to email anytime.

My wife and I spent the entire morning crafting a response that we think is fair minded, while still expressing the outrage we feel at people like him (a white male who doesn't believe in evolution in this very Republican area -- CA25 -- is statistically almost certainly Republican, and probably Mormon).

I'm skeptical about how much you value critical thought and appropriate skepticism if you don't believe in the most fundamental scientific theory, which is supported by evidence from a wide array of sciences from biology to geology to cosmology. I do, however, appreciate your effort to assure me that you can work with Spencer without letting your disagreement with us affect that relationship. We have had experiences with people who don't believe in evolution, like my daughter's biology teacher, in which that teacher's beliefs affected her ability to objectively educate our daughter. I get the feeling that you are not like that.

I used to be very considerate of people with opinions like yours. However, since George W. Bush has effectively ruined the future of this country by saddling our children with debt, spending 600 billion dollars on a war based on lies that has made the whole world hate us even more and made us less secure, ignoring climate change and even worsening it, belittling scientists within (and outside of) the government by politicizing and censoring their work, and calling people like me traitors and a terrorist sympathizers, I am a very angry person indeed. Honestly, I never was before. But now I look at every Bush voter with anger. The theocratic takeover of the Republican party has been a disaster for those of us who want to live in a world where facts and science are the most important part of policy and decision making. The founding fathers of this country were deists, yet even they would be shocked to see what this group of leaders have done.

So again, thanks for your attempt to assure me that you can value critical thought. It's more than most people who disagree with me have tried to do. In fact, in the case of most people with whom I've argued, they pray for my violent death. I'm afraid there's no way I can be assured as long as you continue to ignore the mountain of evidence about evolution. All skepticism is appropriate, including skepticism about scientific theories like evolution. A problem arises, however, when your skepticism is of the facts, not the theory. You are questioning the basic underlying facts, like the fossil record, which are indisputable.  If you claim that God put those fossils there to test our faith, you have reached beyond skepticism into faith, and that has no place in science.

Even the Catholic church does not dispute evolution. My background (a BS in Philosophy, focusing on philosophy of science and logic) has taught me that there is no conflict between science and religion, because science is a long way from figuring out how the big bang started. The official Catholic position is that God started the big bang, and his genius created the basic laws of physics which led, over billions of years, to us.

I will leave you with a recommendation for some further reading on evolution. It is very good reading for anyone who truly values critical thought and skepticism. I hope you will read it.

Evolution is, in fact, a theory, not a fact.

Too much? I don't know. I couldn't keep quiet, and my wife tempered the letter quite a bit from my original angry tirade. But I had to say something.

Reading this again before posting reminded me of something my Dad (a mathematician and economic conservative who voted for Reagan and Bush I, liked Clinton OK, but died before Bush II) used to say: "Things that seem one in a million to us would be commonplace if we lived a billion years."