Students debate creationism and evolution

By GERRY WARNER
Staff Writer
The Big Questions. That's the title of the textbook for an exciting new philosophy course being taught at Mount Baker Secondary School in Cranbrook, B.C. and they are not kidding about the questions.
Free will vs Determinism, Aristotle's Metaphysics, Denial of Evil, the Meaning of Meaning, God as Transcendent, Empirical vs Necessary Truth, the Ontological Argument -- Socrates, Descartes, Spinoza -- they're all there. When I was there in class Tuesday, the students were deeply engaged in one of the thorniest philosophical issues of all time -- evolution vs creationism, Darwin vs God and William Jennings Bryan vs Clarence Darrow in the Scopes monkey trial, one of the most sensational and emotionally charged court room battles of all time. Who says these kids aren't learning anything interesting these days?
Brian Conrad, who teaches the Philosophy 12 course which he designed himself, said the students are really taking to it. And well they should because they're putting their young minds to existential issues that have troubled mankind since the dawn of time and even serve as fodder in the American election campaign. On Tuesday Conrad, had Baker Vice Principal Gary Toyota and biology teacher Grant Duchscherer in class to re-enact the creationism vs evolution debate in 1925 that galvanized the United States, and much of the rest of the world, during the infamous Scopes monkey trial. The debate question was: "Be it resolved that scientific creationism is a viable alternative to biological evolution." Toyota, a well-known member of the Cranbrook Alliance Church, took the affirmative side in the debate while Duchscherer, who leans to the scientific side of the issue, took the negative. And just like that infamous week in Dayton, Tennessee 79 years ago, Toyota and Duchscherer hammered away at each other in verbal pyrotechnics reminiscent of the trial made famous by Hollywood in the Spencer Tracy movie, Inherit the Wind. (they also showed the movie to the kids)
Now this is "education" the way it should be and it impressed me for a number of reasons. The very fact that they would stage something like this for the students speaks well about an innovative approach to learning, or as Conrad puts it, "not being afraid to live on the edge a bit." Lets face it, this is still an incredibly touchy and volatile issue in society today, so much so that I believe the teaching of evolution is still banned in some parts of the American Bible Belt while creationism belief is similarly banned from the classroom in most parts of Canada and recently caused a huge uproar in one of the Fraser Valley school districts when it was suggested for classroom teaching there. And let me make my own views clear on this divisive issue. I'm not really in either camp, but I would remind many of you devout believers in the immutability of science that Darwin's famous book, "The origin of the Species," is about the "theory," read that again, the "theory" of evolution. In other words Darwin himself was not trying to write a tome to replace the Bible. He was advancing a scientific theory to explain the presence of life on this blighted planet and he accumulated a lot of evidence to back up his -- there's that word again -- theory.
What I'm trying to say, however imperfectly, is that there's a legitimate issue here, an issue that intelligent, civilized people can genuinely disagree about . What better material to have in the classroom?My experience in the past has been that many scientific types get a tad arrogant about the evolution vs creationism debate and tend to deride creationist believers as kooks and wackos and would not allow creationism to be even mentioned in the classroom. I would remind them that two of the greatest physicists of the 20th Century -- Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking -- have both said that science and physics only take us so far and there comes a point where "evidence," the bread and butter of the scientific community, no longer provides an explanation for many mysteries of the cosmos. And that's where faith, spirituality, belief, religion -- call it what you want -- comes in. And both Hawking and Einstein are on the record as talking about a "spiritual" reality. This isn't debunking science, a futile task indeed, but it is saying that mankind with all his science, computers, radio-telescopes, string theory and all, still doesn't know it all, or as Hawking put it hasn't developed "A Theory of Everything."
And frankly I find that both humbling and comforting. There's still a lot to learn out there and I commend Mount Baker High School for trying to get this message across to the kids.
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