GALVESTON COUNTY DAILY NEWS
Texas' Oldest Newspaper
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Original article: http://www.galvnews.com/story.lasso?wcd=8880Copyright © 2003 Galveston County Daily News
No Way To Choose a Textbook
By Heber Taylor
The Daily NewsPublished March 26, 2003
In the 17th century, Archbishop James Usher calculated that the Earth was created on Oct. 22, 4004 B.C. Usher looked at genealogical chapters in the Bible, which tell how old a patriarch was when his heir was born, to come up with the date.
Usher, a brilliant but combative man, took every line of the Bible to be literally true. He added up the numbers and insisted on this date as biblical fact.
The problem is that most of the modern sciences, from archaeology to astronomy, are based on theories that make that date impossible.
If you believe that elements such as hydrogen and carbon behave in consistent ways, you are committed to the view that that stars are millions of years old. If you believe isotopes decay at predictable rates, it's hard to imagine that dinosaur bones and the remains of ancient humans could fit into Usher's schedule.
The problem is compounded by the fact that we use a lot of this basic science in our everyday lives. We use these theories in developing medicines and in measuring the cleanliness of drinking water. It's hard to say that these theories are highly speculative or without value to society.
Usher lived in an age when some of the world's most famous scientists and physicians wrote treatises on chemistry and witchcraft without seeing much of a contradiction.
Since then, many people of faith have discovered a certain tension between their religious beliefs and scientific views. They've handled that tension, individually, in countless different ways.
One way not to handle that tension is to let people with strong religious beliefs decide what will be published in scientific textbooks that all our children will have to read.
That approach has been tried recently in parts of the Islamic world. Forced to choose between the views of modern science and some medieval views of Islam, some leaders took their communities back into the Middle Ages.
That was a sad, awful mistake. It would be a sad, awful mistake if it were repeated in Texas.
Incredibly, there's a serious discussion in the Texas Legislature about House Bill 1447, which would allow the State Board of Education, rather than the Texas Education Agency, to decide how textbooks will present scientific information to students.
State school board members "have the responsibility to adopt textbooks," said the bill's sponsor, State Rep. Charlie Howard of Sugar Land, "so they should have the authority to edit the content."
The State Board of Education includes some people who believe, as Usher did, that the Bible is literally true and that scientific theories ought to be edited in light of these biblical facts. That idea is not silly or misguided. It's dangerous.
People of different faiths have handled the tension between their religious beliefs and scientific views in different ways. No one group should be allowed to impose its approach to the teaching of science on others simply by getting a majority on the State Board of Education.
As long as we have the freedom of religion in this country, we'll have disagreements about faith. Allowing those disagreements to spill over into our schools would be a sad, awful mistake.