Let Them Teach ID — In Comparative Mythology

Posted on February 28, 2006 in Evolution & Creation

An interesting proposal from the Letters to the Editor pages of the March/April 2006 issue of Skeptical Enquirer:

Proposals to include Intelligent Design in school curricula, especially to complement evolution, can appear to have a superficial fairness, and arguments against the inclusion can be difficult to present, especially to an audience predisposed to believe otherwise.

A more effective response, it seems to me, could be concede immediately that other religions around the world teach many different versions of how the universe and human life came to be. In view of this, we might propose, we have no fundamental oppostion to students in our schools being introduced to the varying beliefs about this that are held in other cultures, not only around the globe, but even within our own country.

Studying these creation myths — widely differing creation myths — held by other people just like ourselves, will, we can argue in full sincerity, give our children a needed understanding of the diversity of beliefs in our increasingly globalized world. These beliefs, however, quite evidentally belong in the history or social-science curricula, not with the physical sciences, which are demonstrably uniform around the world.

A proposal like this, one can be pretty sure, will not be happily received by those who support ID, with the term “creation myth” being especially unwelcome. But this approach, which appears to be, and in fact, is, a quite legitimate one, puts them on the defensive. With globlization in the headlines daily, should our children not learn something about the widely differing beliefs of people with whom they will have to work, trade, and hopefully live in peace?

I suggest we’d be better served in those debates by putting forth a positive and genuinely reasonable counterproposal and forcing others to be on the defensive against it, rather than having to argue against a purportedly balanced proposition from the other side. Simply putting such a proposal forward, noting a few of the major creation myths in the process, will serve an important educational purpose — and probably receive attention in the news coverage of the resulting discussion.

Anthony E. Siegman
McMurty Professor of Engineering Emeritus
Stanford University
Stanford, California

Carl Sagan would be proud.