Orson Scott Card takes a reasonable and refreshing "pox on both their houses" approach to the subjet.
[W]hen you purport to teach science in school, the subject you teach had better be science, and not somebody's religion in disguise.That's the problem with both sides in this squabble. They are both functioning as religions, and they should stop it at once.
If both sides would behave like scientists, there wouldn't even be a controversy, because everyone would agree on this statement:
Evolution happens and obviously happened in the natural world, and natural selection plays a role in it. But we do not have adequate theories yet to explain completely how evolution works and worked at the biochemical level.
That is a true statement, according to our present state of scientific knowledge.
And when Darwinists scream that we do too know how to explain evolution, and it's natural selection, so just stop talking about it, they are dogmatists demanding that their faith -- the faith that Darwin's model will be found to explain everything when we just understand things better -- be taught in the public schools.
There is no reason for science teachers in the public schools to take a single step beyond that statement I made above. It allows the teaching of every speck of scientific biology; and it makes moot the as-yet-unknowable issue of how each specific complex biochemical system came into existence.
In fact, what every school board in this country should decide is to ignore both sides' demands that the schools teach their faith, and allow the public schools to perform their public service: educating children in our shared culture, including what we have learned through the scientific method.
