In the beginning was the light - indescribable, unspeakably bright light. The light of a trillion suns exploding outward from a tiny dot and immediately beginning to expand throughout space. Powered by the sum of the universe's accumulated energy, the spectacle had to have been stupendous, overpowering; but there was nothing there to witness it.
This was our Beginning, our Big Bang. Scientists have deduced its broad outlines by studying the rate of expansion of the universe, and by measuring something called cosmic microwave radiation, both of which are considered to be continuing effects of the original event. Those same scientists tell us that the Bang must have occurred about 13.8 billion years ago - a number so enormous that it is almost meaningless; but maybe this analogy will help to make some sense of it.
Picture a 24-hour clock that encompasses the entire history of the universe, with the Bang occurring precisely at 12:00 AM, and our current date being the stroke of midnight 24 hours later. The formation of the Planet Earth from solar particles was completed about 4.5 billion years ago, or approximately at 4:00 PM on our imaginary clock. Microbial life made its appearance on Earth about a billion years later; say 6:00 PM on the clock. The period since the time that our genus homo separated itself biologically from the rest of the great apes - about two million years - would take up the last six or seven seconds on the clock. The total span of human civilization, dating back to the "Fertile Crescent" about 6,000 years ago, would be contained in the final fraction of a second before the clock strikes midnight.
It is a wonderful story, punctuated by magnificent stretches of time and space. Those enormous spans providing time and energy for billions of failed evolutionary experiments, along with a smaller number of successes - resulting in the world we live in today. Furthermore, no detail of the first three paragraphs is outside the borders of mainstream scientific thought, dating back at least to the early 20th Century. The wonder of this story has inspired thousands of bright young men and women to spend their lives studying its details, and adding to the sum of humanity's scientific knowledge.
Except, that is, in large portions of The United States of America.
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, laying out his understanding of the process of what we call Evolution. Although there was pushback to Darwin's ideas from some religious figures, there were remarkably few dissenters from his main premise within the international scientific community. By 1900, virtually all reputable scientists accepted as fact that all species, including homo sapiens, evolved and are evolving through the process of natural selection proposed by Darwin.
Nonetheless, fundamentalist religious groups, located primarily but not exclusively in the Old Confederacy, were able to get punitive statutes passed through their state legislatures that made the teaching of evolution in the public schools a criminal act. The celebrated 1925 "Monkey Trial" of John Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee, resulted from Mr. Scopes' confessed violation of one of those laws. Teachers in large parts of the US, but especially in the South, understood that any mention of "the E word" in their biology classes would get them fired. This was true even though many of them were teaching from state-adopted textbooks that included significant passages discussing evolution by natural selection.
The struggle between fundamentalist religion and science still continues today in Alabama (among other states). It was not until 2016, (more than 150 years after Darwin published On The Origin) that the Alabama Board of Education finally took some halting steps forward. The BOE reluctantly revised the Alabama Course of Study to read that it "requires our students to understand the principles of the theory of evolution from the perspective of established scientific knowledge."
But even after that bold declaration, the state is waffling. As this is being written in the Spring of 2020, each science textbook in Alabama's public schools has a sticker pasted into the inside of its front cover that promotes skepticism about evolution. The sticker features language calling evolution a " controversial theory that some scientists present as a scientific explanation for the origin of living things". Our Board of Education is trying to straddle the 19th and 21st Centuries without doing justice to either.
The Alabama high school science student finds herself dealing with a vague, puzzling set of standards and course materials. To be sure, the public school students do have textbooks that explain the current understanding of scientists about the world's origins and how species have evolved. However, there is that sticker that adorns the inside cover of their books, encouraging them to doubt and disparage those explanations.
The situation is even worse in our religiously oriented private schools. Many of them teach something called "Creation Science" based on a literal reading of the Bible. This, of course, is not Science at all in any real sense of the word. They are teaching magic. The students might as well be studying pixie dust.
A friend who is associated with the Alabama Department of Archives and History tells the story of a phone call the Department received from the principal of a small evangelical private school located in the northern part of the state. The school was sending a group of students down to Montgomery to visit the Department's museum; but the principal was uncomfortable about some of the exhibits depicting early Native American life in Alabama. Would the Department please cover the portions of those displays that included dates? Some of those dates were earlier than what his school was teaching as the date the world was created.
To its credit, the Department politely declined to alter its exhibits to give comfort to the principal. The school went ahead with its field trip, and, so far as anyone knows, none of the students even noticed the date discrepancy.
When our schools deny the scientific reality of evolution by natural selection, we leave our students open to fuzzy, magical thinking in other parts of their world view.
Global climate change caused by burning fossil fuels? There's no need for us to modify our behavior. God won't let His world, or His Chosen People be destroyed.
Cruel economic inequality in our society, and rampant racial injustice? That's not our responsibility. God created some people to be poor and downtrodden so they can serve the needs of the elite (white) classes.
Until all of our children are taught the truth about our origins, we will continue to be a culture that embraces ignorance and prejudice. Confronting honestly what really happened "in the beginning" is a first step toward becoming a modern, healthy society. Let's teach the facts about evolution in our schools, and teach our children to respect the first chapter of Genesis as literature, not science.
Thomas R. Borden Waugh, Alabama May 12, 2020
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