"Can you tell us, sir, how old you believe the Earth is?" the lawyer, Pedro Irigonegaray, asked William S. Harris, a chemist, who helped write the proposed changes to the state standards.
"I don't know," Dr. Harris replied. "I think it's probably really old."
If the state board adopts the new standards, as expected, Kansas will join Ohio, which took a similar step in 2002, in requiring that students be taught that there is controversy about evolution. Legislators in Alabama and Georgia have introduced bills this season to allow teachers to challenge Darwin in class.
Do these people who "challenge Darwin" actually know Darwin? What are they really trying to challenge? I think it's their own perception of Darwin that contains the evil they are trying to eliminate, not Darwin.
When I was little, one of the questions in the little blue book was, "Where is God?"
The answer, as I remember it, is: "God is everywhere."
"God is everywhere." and "Where your heart is, there your treasure is."
We find God in that which we know, love, and pursue our greatest interest. People who embrace family and responsibility find God in that pursuit, and will probably define God with words from their personal experience. People who embrace Church, in its depth and fullness of potential, will certainly own a rich vocabulary to speak of God. People who find God, as Kepler did, in the harmony of the heavenly bodies, define God's goodness in the vocabulary of their love: science. People who find God in reason can speak of God in reasonable ways.
The problem only becomes a problem when someone of one branch of God-experience looks at the other's words and says, "They must be wrong. They have faith in empty words, or empty deeds, or meaningless images," mistakenly ascribing their own emptiness of that particular God-experience to the other person.
From their own point of view, the Creationists are correct to say that Science is wrong to teach that randomness drives the universe, with no love, no personal direction, no caring, no afterlife.
They are "correct" because they equate "randomness" with "meaninglessness." They don't understand that randomness is the key point at which all life and all value is generated. Randomness is that cherished point at which love functions most fully.
Science & reason are not opposed to creation. They are merely a bigger vocabulary. A different image.
Where is God? God is everywhere.
If you truly believe in God, you should be able to stop fighting about things you don't understand, and go about your own life, walking with God wherever God is found.
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