Dealing with the Entanglement of Religion and the Origin of Life in American Public Schools
This is the Trap the Courts Built: Dealing with the Entanglement of Religion and the Origin of Life in American Public Schools
Jana R. McCreary, 37 SW. U. L. Rev. 1 (2008)
This Article argues that by endorsing the teaching of only evolution, the government is, in essence, endorsing a view on religion: that a higher power does not exist. In doing so, Part II first defines both religion and science and shows the overlap and crossover of the two. It next identifies and defines varying theories of life’s origin by using the fundamental understanding of each theory. Part III reviews the background of the legal arena involving what we teach our schoolchildren, looking at tests used for the constitutional questions at stake, then looking at the case law as it has developed. Finally, Part IV addresses the premise that to embrace the large-scale concept of macroevolution, the concept that differing species share common ancestors, is to embrace a theory of an absence of a higher power. Doing that, in itself therefore, must violate the Establishment Clause.
One Comment
The Catholic Church, and the vast majority of educated religious people, have an alternative view, namely that God’s design enabled macro-evolution as we see it. The real religious and philosophical issue is this: given the causal nature (up to random fluctuation at the quantum level) of material reality, one must postulate a spiritual reality apart from material reality to account for free will, both divine and human. Free will, unlike biological life, is not an emergent phenomenon. It might be helpful if legal theorists paid a bit more attention to this than to false dichotomies like the one treated in this paper.