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Science, Religion, and Mrs. Beecher
Linda Ann Kunz
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Linda teaches ESL students in the City University of New York and international teachers in the Multilingual Multicultural Studies of the Steinhardt School of Education at NYU. |
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Here we are, 60 years after the Scopes trial and still itching for a
fight between science and religion. Shame on us! Clarence Darrow,
where are you when we need you? But perhaps we need a mediator instead
of passionate combatants. I think I know one.
In 1962 I was teaching high school biology in paradise, the mountains of coastal Kenya. Biology had not been my college major, but I had the lush, life-affirming home of mankind around me to provide resources. We built walk-in cages for our owls, bush babies and a monitor lizard. I brought a crocodile's head from Tanzania and scared the life out of the workman who discovered it discarding its flesh in our compost heap. I met a Ford Foundation science team in a bar in Mombasa, and they came to my school to tell my students about DNA. The Leakeys had recently found the remains of what might have been our earliest ancestor, Homo habilis, "handyman." It was a thrilling time and place to be teaching science. Thrilling, that is, until I took up evolution. My students were polite, but the missionaries had done their job. One student wrote on a quiz, "Darwin was the man who said there were creatures on the earth before God created it." Enter Mrs. Beecher, a member of my school's board of governors and the wife of the Anglican Archbishop of Kenya. She looked like a proper English lady -- efficient, brusque and intimidating, but she was Kenya-born, and my headmistress said she spoke Kikuyu like the wind. I asked for her help, and she told me to invite my class to my veranda and have them bring their bibles. She was friendly but authoritative; she acted as if we were all on the edge of a great adventure. My students responded well. They wanted to be questioned, tested, challenged,especially by The Archbishop's Wife. She asked one student after another to read from Genesis. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters Then they read about the coming to be of life: first the grasses and herb yielding seed, then the tree yielding fruit, then the waters bringing forth abundantly the moving creatures, then the winged fowl above the waters, then the things that creep upon the earth, and finally man. Mrs. Beecher listened intently, then said, "Do you see how magnificent Genesis is? The ancient Hebrews didn't have the scientific facts that you are learning from Miss Kunz, but they were so inspired in their writing that they knew intuitively how the earth came to be and how life came to be. They even knew the order of living things!" My students were rapt. Without missing a beat, she said, "And turn to Psalms 90, Verse 4. Mwavua, read, please." Mwavua read these words spoken by Moses to God: "For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past and as a watch in the night." "Are we to presume that we know how long God's day is?" Mrs. Beecher said dramatically. "God's day could be a million years -- a billion years, perhaps!" Everyone was nodding vigorously. Though I never taught biology again after those two years in Kenya, I have taught about evolution, and particularly the origin of man, to every college class I've had since then. My international students talk freely about their cultures and religions. The Christians in the class are often surprised to learn that they share the story of Adam and Eve with their Muslim classmates and that Jesus is seen as a prophet of Islam. Sooner or later, someone asks me if I am a believer, and I say yes though I don't talk about any particular sect or practice. I point out that Darwin, too, said in his autobiography that he was a believer. Then I tell the class my speculation. No one says a teacher can't speculate, just that we must not foist our beliefs on our students. I tell them a believer can wonder why an all-powerful creator didn't just wave a wand to make all the wonders around us but instead gave us science, a logical structure and process, and the ability to know at least some of that structure and process. We end with Darwin's last sentence of The Origin of Species, just after he summarizes evolution, which he calls "this view of life": There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. I hope Mrs. Beecher would be pleased. I should mention, by the way, that her maiden name was Leakey, her brother's name, Louis. Not everyone has felt science and religion have to fight. |