Who's your deity?
EvCC body takes a serious look at religion
Issue date: 2/13/09 Section: Features
Six individuals from evcc came together on Jan. 20 to discuss issues concerning religion, creating the Religion Roundtable. Those individuals consisted of two instructors, Jason Ripper and Margaret Riordan and four students, Kevin Cian, Tyeson Pennella, Laura Fairbanks, and John Fenton. The Religion Roundtable originated from a religion discussion the Clipper staff had. We wanted to know how others on campus think of religious conlfict and how they handle religious persecution, if such a thing is present at EvCC. Upon the completion of the Roundtable, we found that the majority of differing religions can, for the most part, come to an agreement to create a positive environment. Within these six individuals, Margaret Riordan considers herself a person of Interfaith, Jason Ripper considers himself in a non believer, Kevin Cian considers himself an Atheist, Laura Fairbanks considers herself a Mormon, Tyeson Pennella considers himself a Catholic and John Fenton considers himself a Christian.
Is religious persecution present at EvCC?
Laura Fairbanks: I know for myself I've never felt any religious persecution, maybe that's because for some of our religions that we have here, there's not a visual signal that says this is my religion so I know for myself because I don't have a visual thing that I wear to show my religion that I have never felt any persecution. I haven't seen any but you know, just cause of the conflict in the middle east, it wouldn't surprise me if maybe there was a little bit, but for myself I know I've never felt it and of course I'm not going to deny that it doesn't exist at all because I've seen it on the street and at the mall and stuff like that, but I think here at Everett, just listening to everybody here, everyone seems to have a really open mind towards all other religions so I guess I would say if everybody at the school is generally like that then religious persecution I think is very small and minimal.
Margaret Riordon: I wonder how the Muslim students feel about this question and I think it's easy if you're not marked as the other, to feel like you can have your own religious beliefs. But I know that there are a lot of students who have a lot of strong anti, you know who have Islam-a-phobia basically, and so I think persecution is probably too strong of a word maybe to identify what's going on but I think there would be some forms of discrimination and maybe disdain and fear…I think that students who are Pagan, students who identify as Wiccan, they experience religious disdain and fear and that there is a kind of a snickering attitude or some people who will see them as being devil worshipers and Satanists so I think that that's another religious tradition that experiences religious discrimination.
Jason Ripper: My sense is that we live in really complicated times. We aren't living 200 years ago when all you had to know were the people in your village and the people in the village over. We live in this interconnected world where we hear about just about everything so we hear the words Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Theravada, Mahayana, non-denominational, Catholic, and Jewish orthodox, you know what I mean? How much time do most people have to investigate the origins of these words, what those words might mean to people so we are really disadvantaged by our possibility. There is so much that we could know and so little of it that most of us can end up experiencing and tracking. Consequently, I think that we do live, just due to that circumstance, I think we live in a great un-informed age, though it's no one's fault in particular. I find that the majority of students in my class will identify as having a Christian background or whatever particular denomination within that faith they align to, people seem to be really hungry and happy just to learn about other religions. Of course you could all speak to that if you learn something new about another religion, then people would know that the country with the most Muslims in the world is actually Indonesia. People say "The Middle East," and of course the Middle East is a fragmented place where you have Persians and Arabs and Druze and all of these different populations mixed together. People in this country are uninformed enough that they just want to say Middle East and leave it at that.
Tyeson Pennella: Touching on what you said about being ill informed, I think that's the main purpose of education, to gain knowledge, and I think how you go about that is most important because I have no problem going to other churches and hearing different perspectives and different views. I think they should apply the same thing to religion in schools. If they have it open-door and they make it sound like no matter what your views are you have a place to come and share your thoughts, learn something new from others versus saying "Oh, Christian club or this club," because then you feel almost singled out.
Is it ethically right to pass laws regarding inherently religious subjects, like marriage or abortion? If so, is there a limit to how far these laws can go?
Tyeson Pennella: It's such a touchy subject but it's interesting how you go about looking at it. Use Prop 8 for example, one religion may say that is unconstitutional and say it shouldn't be allowed and the Bible says this and that. Another religion could view it as constitutional, so how is it ever no matter what majority of what you believe, that gives government or whatnot the ability to say we are going to make a law that this is unconstitutional overall? You're technically only taking a perspective of one spectrum to say that it's unconstitutional but you are leaving a total other side out.
Jason Ripper: I want to play the devil's advocate here. I mean the question, not prop 8. I was totally against prop 8. Everybody should get to suffer the consequences. I'm happily married. But anyway, whatever it is, whether it has to do with abortion or gay marriage, you think about it and have intelligent conversations with other members of your faith or other faiths and come to a decided opinion about something. You decide abortion is wrong, it is killing and taking life. Don't you have a moral responsibility to stand up for that perspective? If you believe that is important to you. Can you separate your religious feelings about something important from your civic secular duties to a non-religious state and should you even do that?
Kevin Cian: I definitely think that you shouldn't blur your civic duty with what your beliefs are. Because at a certain point that is going to influence what you vote for, what you find moral or immoral, so I wouldn't ask people to put that to the back of their mind and say well I have the secular government in front of me, because yeah, your beliefs are definitely going to ultimately affect what you vote for. I guess the biggest thing would be why exactly do they think it is immoral? It almost feels like there is inherent negativity with debate. In general, debating and getting to understand why you believe and don't believe something, that's good. If you are going to vote for something that is going to drastically change someone's life or won't drastically change someone's life, you should at least have a pretty good argument for why. If you aren't able to argue that point, why do you have that belief in the first place? So yeah, you should definitely vote for things that you believe are moral or immoral, but at the same time it has to do with our society. I think it says something about us and how we view [things]. Are we forsaking rational inquiry for just religious pluralism and how far does that go until something like Prop 8 does affect someone's life? And I am against Prop 8, so I do think that yeah there should be a point where if it has to come to a discussion when it is inevitable when it starts affecting other people's lives.
Margaret Riordon: I feel like there are two questions in this question. I think how I would answer this question is, is it ever possible to separate out what we believe morally from what we do politically and would we even be able to do that? I think the other question would be, is the issue of Prop 8 and abortion being decided religiously? In other words, when we are talking about these issues what makes them inherently religious? At what point do things become inherently religious and not about our lives being lived socially and politically together in a peaceful means? I guess for myself I would say, that if questions are being decided strictly on the basis of people's religious beliefs then it becomes tricky. Is the majority simply imposing their beliefs on other people? Then I think that becomes problematic. Or is it something we have to debate because it impacts our social and political lives? Both of these questions can be looked at in both of those ways [socially and politically]. Instead of looking at the question [of Prop 8] religiously, we could look at it as what would be the impact on society of having gays and lesbians marry each other and how is that going to impact our ability to live together as social and political beings?
John Fenton: I'm a Christian and my religion says that to be homosexual is wrong but as far as separation of church and state, it would be imposing your religion on someone else….
Laura Fairbanks: I think it's very hard, I don't think you can ever separate your religious beliefs and your political beliefs because both are so important and so vital. It seems like everyone has been touching on how certain forms of government are based on moral beliefs that came from religion. Our founding fathers, it seems like they put God a lot in everything they wrote. It's why we have In God We Trust on our money and in our Pledge of Allegiance, but I don't think it's possible for someone to think of something such as Prop 8 strictly from a political point of view because your religion, if it is truly what you believe, it is almost impossible to look at political things without having your religious moral views impact your decisions.
John Fenton: People are just too stubborn to separate what is best for the people and what is best for ourselves. Looking at it as the United States, gay marriage should be legal but my personal opinion on it would be different.
Jason Ripper: So you are separating your religious feelings from what you sense as your political self, you have a religious self and a political self here and find that they diverge.
John Fenton: Yes, I guess, but that sounds so evil!
Jason Ripper: If you take the Catholic Church during the early Middle Ages, marriages didn't happen inside the Catholic Church. It wasn't a godly institution. From the Catholic perspective, you weren't being married in the eyes of God; it was only a civil institution and had civic political purposes only. As the Middle Ages went by, the Catholic Church more or less thought to itself, "this would be a good thing to bring inside the doors of the church. This will help us to exact a greater influence on the lives of our Christians." It's a scary plan. In other words, when you get married, who gives you the license? It isn't your synagogue or church, it's the state that's doing that. So legally speaking I think there can be a very good reason for separating these two. The purpose of marriage is entirely civic. Now you can get married inside of your church, but if you don't fill out the legal paperwork, you aren't really married. In this case, we can say, perhaps, the person that thinks as John does, thinks to himself, "I don't like the idea of gay marriage." However, marriage is really a state institution, so can I ask myself how these two gay people getting married to each other will affect the political situation or the social make up of the United States. Perhaps that person will [reconcile their religious beliefs and political beliefs and decide that allowing gay marriage is 'for the greater good.']
Margaret Riordon: If people are defining abortion as murder, as political beings they are stepping forward into the political sphere to say, "I must stop this." If they are defining it as saying that the soul enters the body at the moment of conception then they have imposed a spiritual point of view on other people. There really are two different ways of thinking about it. I do believe it's possible to be morally sensitive and really look at our lives as in line with our morals as we can, that is deeply connected with our spiritual life. I don't think it is impossible for us to separate who we are spiritually from who we are politically. As mature people and as citizens, the very definition of the word which calls up the idea of rationality and reason that we are required to do that. We may choose rationally and reasonably to say I am going to bring my spiritual considerations into the public sphere as spiritual considerations. I think that then at least the debate has moved to a more honest level of discourse and understanding between people.
Jason Ripper: I ask people to always complicate their thoughts. For instance, we say we have different words: execution, murder and killing. We say that murder is illegal in this society, and yet all nations reserve the right to make war and we have the federal death penalty in this country and we also have a number of states besides our own that exact the death penalty, so the state - whatever the state is - this corpus, this body in the eyes of the law that makes the law itself can take life, with no repercussions. So when we say we are opposed to the taking of life and yet as a conglomerate reserve the right to do so, even if it's through a process. I suppose I would challenge us to at least think of the hypocrisies inherent to the system that we want to use to one end or another. Plus in the end, I think we should all think like me, isn't that what we all think? [laughter] Actually, I hope people don't think like me. They would be far too confused.
Should teachers offer alternative explanations for the origin of the universe in science classes like Intelligent Design, rather than just focusing on Evolutionary Theory?
Laura Fairbanks: Well I don't think that is going to hurt anyone. I think we all touched on the point of education being to learn as much as you can, and if you introduce different theories, yet cover all of the theories and evidence behind all those theories, it is just going to educate all of us. About the whole evolution thing, there are so many different theories out there that you know, some are religious, but some are also scientifically based, so I don't think it will ever hurt anyone to explore all those theories and decide what they think is right.
Kevin Cian: I'm sorry, I have to interject. I hope I'm not sounding incredibly hostile towards this. We had a lot of debates about this [in high school] because it was a very hot button issue there. I guess, I'll say it flat out, I don't think intelligent design or creationism should be given the same equal merit as evolutionary theory and I'll explain why. First of all, evolutionary theory doesn't inherently say anything about religion, it has no opinion on religion, I know plenty of religious people who reconcile their religious beliefs with evolutionary theory. There is so much evidence for evolutionary theory that dismissing it or putting it on equal merit with something like intelligent design or creationism, which I'm not trying to offend anyone here, but does not have an equal amount of evidence for. There is a great website called talkorigins.org, there are plenty of different sources out there and its not just a completely biased resource. The thing about the scientific method is that it has no bias. It is unbiased. It is trying to explore the natural world as best as it can. If our observations started revealing things that pointed towards intelligent design - which is the intelligent design argument or the creationist argument - then that would just become mainstream science. The word theory doesn't imply just a hunch. It isn't just a hunch or a guess. There is so much mutually corroborative evidence from so many different fields and it has such an important role in our daily lives that to completely dismiss it is a little more than naive. There is nothing wrong with saying, "I don't believe in it because I don't know enough about it," which I was at that point at one time. I actually used to be a Christian before [the point that I really considered the other point of view], so yeah, you have to really have to think about, "why do I disagree with it or why do I agree with it."
Jason Ripper: I think they could be intelligently put together in one class and harmfully put together in another class. In a biology/science curriculum, creationism doesn't pretend to be science nor should it. I think in a biology class, if we want children in this country to be competitive in a global economy, they should be learning what we call hard science. On the other hand, science shouldn't be without its ethics and morality and it's good to challenge science, science should welcome a challenge. I think there could be hopefully a curriculum that involves looking at these different classes from a variety of perspectives and frame works. The Bible isn't written according to a scientific method, and you know in Pennsylvania it was the judge who dismissed the case that said "Come on, intelligent design is creationism by another name and creationism is fine, but it isn't part of a science curriculum nor should it be." Yes, I think that exploring them in tandem could be beneficial for a lot of people but perhaps there would be one setting that would be better for than another.
John Fenton: Yeah, I don't think that it belongs in science. I don't think creationism belongs in science because it isn't science, but I think it should be brought into like history classes. Not saying that it is history, but I mean you can't prove the Bible wrong, the Bible does have a lot of history in it. Creationism is historic - people have believed it for a long time, so it is part of history but it isn't part of science. So it shouldn't belong in a science classroom but I think it should belong in school. Not as a truth but as a theory, as a history. It is part of history.
Kevin Cian: It's so difficult to understand any of our civilizations without clearly understanding what they believed before. So I mean yeah, in that setting.
John Fenton: I'm not saying like, "day one, God created light," that shouldn't be taught, but the belief of creationism should be [in history].
Jason Ripper: Sure, a class that is taught to understand the relationships between religion and science. There are a lot of prominent evolutionary theorists that are deeply Christian. There are evolutionary scientists who are also atheists and so on and so forth. Some people who examine evolution, the mechanisms, think that God created those mechanisms. So all be it for an omnipotent being to not be able to come up with evolution, right? What a fascinating class that would be. You said science isn't biased, but of course everything is biased. And simply to say, I think I can understand how something works is a bias of rational process. The word has a negative connotation. I know what you were saying, but theoretically science might be the pursuit of objective truth, and yet most scientists are heavily biased. A class that explored that, I think, would benefit people in the same way that Christians and Muslims understanding each other's histories and faiths would benefit people. There is a lot of misunderstanding.
Kevin Cian: I think there is an ideal idea of science being this kind of objective way of exploring what is observational what the natural world is. So in that respect, I wouldn't doubt there are some very biased scientists. But in general, that is the point for peer review. You can't just put something forward and have it go through, it has to go through a lot of different things. The peer review process is probably the biggest force and probably the most convincing force for having that be ideally objective. But of course there are always going to be things that turn out to not be true. But I don't exactly think that means the process that you go about is wrong, or "oh, look, science found out something is wrong, so we shouldn't trust it anymore." There are so many more things that science has proved correct.
Laura Fairbanks: I like what you said about having a class that would teach us about all these things of trying to find a balance or blend the two of religion and science together. You know, I think that is a fabulous idea. I agree with all of you saying that a biology class is the place for biology not a place for us to introduce all these other ideas.
Jason Ripper: I think [these] questions are scary to people but then the point of college shouldn't be that you come out of college ensured that you've learned everything, but that you've encountered more questions and learned how to ask more of your own, and then by whatever process, learned to explore and investigate those questions. So yeah, I don't think we would walk out of a biology class thinking that we understood everything about the process of life or creation.
Is religious persecution present at EvCC?
Laura Fairbanks: I know for myself I've never felt any religious persecution, maybe that's because for some of our religions that we have here, there's not a visual signal that says this is my religion so I know for myself because I don't have a visual thing that I wear to show my religion that I have never felt any persecution. I haven't seen any but you know, just cause of the conflict in the middle east, it wouldn't surprise me if maybe there was a little bit, but for myself I know I've never felt it and of course I'm not going to deny that it doesn't exist at all because I've seen it on the street and at the mall and stuff like that, but I think here at Everett, just listening to everybody here, everyone seems to have a really open mind towards all other religions so I guess I would say if everybody at the school is generally like that then religious persecution I think is very small and minimal.
Margaret Riordon: I wonder how the Muslim students feel about this question and I think it's easy if you're not marked as the other, to feel like you can have your own religious beliefs. But I know that there are a lot of students who have a lot of strong anti, you know who have Islam-a-phobia basically, and so I think persecution is probably too strong of a word maybe to identify what's going on but I think there would be some forms of discrimination and maybe disdain and fear…I think that students who are Pagan, students who identify as Wiccan, they experience religious disdain and fear and that there is a kind of a snickering attitude or some people who will see them as being devil worshipers and Satanists so I think that that's another religious tradition that experiences religious discrimination.
Jason Ripper: My sense is that we live in really complicated times. We aren't living 200 years ago when all you had to know were the people in your village and the people in the village over. We live in this interconnected world where we hear about just about everything so we hear the words Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Theravada, Mahayana, non-denominational, Catholic, and Jewish orthodox, you know what I mean? How much time do most people have to investigate the origins of these words, what those words might mean to people so we are really disadvantaged by our possibility. There is so much that we could know and so little of it that most of us can end up experiencing and tracking. Consequently, I think that we do live, just due to that circumstance, I think we live in a great un-informed age, though it's no one's fault in particular. I find that the majority of students in my class will identify as having a Christian background or whatever particular denomination within that faith they align to, people seem to be really hungry and happy just to learn about other religions. Of course you could all speak to that if you learn something new about another religion, then people would know that the country with the most Muslims in the world is actually Indonesia. People say "The Middle East," and of course the Middle East is a fragmented place where you have Persians and Arabs and Druze and all of these different populations mixed together. People in this country are uninformed enough that they just want to say Middle East and leave it at that.
Tyeson Pennella: Touching on what you said about being ill informed, I think that's the main purpose of education, to gain knowledge, and I think how you go about that is most important because I have no problem going to other churches and hearing different perspectives and different views. I think they should apply the same thing to religion in schools. If they have it open-door and they make it sound like no matter what your views are you have a place to come and share your thoughts, learn something new from others versus saying "Oh, Christian club or this club," because then you feel almost singled out.
Is it ethically right to pass laws regarding inherently religious subjects, like marriage or abortion? If so, is there a limit to how far these laws can go?
Tyeson Pennella: It's such a touchy subject but it's interesting how you go about looking at it. Use Prop 8 for example, one religion may say that is unconstitutional and say it shouldn't be allowed and the Bible says this and that. Another religion could view it as constitutional, so how is it ever no matter what majority of what you believe, that gives government or whatnot the ability to say we are going to make a law that this is unconstitutional overall? You're technically only taking a perspective of one spectrum to say that it's unconstitutional but you are leaving a total other side out.
Jason Ripper: I want to play the devil's advocate here. I mean the question, not prop 8. I was totally against prop 8. Everybody should get to suffer the consequences. I'm happily married. But anyway, whatever it is, whether it has to do with abortion or gay marriage, you think about it and have intelligent conversations with other members of your faith or other faiths and come to a decided opinion about something. You decide abortion is wrong, it is killing and taking life. Don't you have a moral responsibility to stand up for that perspective? If you believe that is important to you. Can you separate your religious feelings about something important from your civic secular duties to a non-religious state and should you even do that?
Kevin Cian: I definitely think that you shouldn't blur your civic duty with what your beliefs are. Because at a certain point that is going to influence what you vote for, what you find moral or immoral, so I wouldn't ask people to put that to the back of their mind and say well I have the secular government in front of me, because yeah, your beliefs are definitely going to ultimately affect what you vote for. I guess the biggest thing would be why exactly do they think it is immoral? It almost feels like there is inherent negativity with debate. In general, debating and getting to understand why you believe and don't believe something, that's good. If you are going to vote for something that is going to drastically change someone's life or won't drastically change someone's life, you should at least have a pretty good argument for why. If you aren't able to argue that point, why do you have that belief in the first place? So yeah, you should definitely vote for things that you believe are moral or immoral, but at the same time it has to do with our society. I think it says something about us and how we view [things]. Are we forsaking rational inquiry for just religious pluralism and how far does that go until something like Prop 8 does affect someone's life? And I am against Prop 8, so I do think that yeah there should be a point where if it has to come to a discussion when it is inevitable when it starts affecting other people's lives.
Margaret Riordon: I feel like there are two questions in this question. I think how I would answer this question is, is it ever possible to separate out what we believe morally from what we do politically and would we even be able to do that? I think the other question would be, is the issue of Prop 8 and abortion being decided religiously? In other words, when we are talking about these issues what makes them inherently religious? At what point do things become inherently religious and not about our lives being lived socially and politically together in a peaceful means? I guess for myself I would say, that if questions are being decided strictly on the basis of people's religious beliefs then it becomes tricky. Is the majority simply imposing their beliefs on other people? Then I think that becomes problematic. Or is it something we have to debate because it impacts our social and political lives? Both of these questions can be looked at in both of those ways [socially and politically]. Instead of looking at the question [of Prop 8] religiously, we could look at it as what would be the impact on society of having gays and lesbians marry each other and how is that going to impact our ability to live together as social and political beings?
John Fenton: I'm a Christian and my religion says that to be homosexual is wrong but as far as separation of church and state, it would be imposing your religion on someone else….
Laura Fairbanks: I think it's very hard, I don't think you can ever separate your religious beliefs and your political beliefs because both are so important and so vital. It seems like everyone has been touching on how certain forms of government are based on moral beliefs that came from religion. Our founding fathers, it seems like they put God a lot in everything they wrote. It's why we have In God We Trust on our money and in our Pledge of Allegiance, but I don't think it's possible for someone to think of something such as Prop 8 strictly from a political point of view because your religion, if it is truly what you believe, it is almost impossible to look at political things without having your religious moral views impact your decisions.
John Fenton: People are just too stubborn to separate what is best for the people and what is best for ourselves. Looking at it as the United States, gay marriage should be legal but my personal opinion on it would be different.
Jason Ripper: So you are separating your religious feelings from what you sense as your political self, you have a religious self and a political self here and find that they diverge.
John Fenton: Yes, I guess, but that sounds so evil!
Jason Ripper: If you take the Catholic Church during the early Middle Ages, marriages didn't happen inside the Catholic Church. It wasn't a godly institution. From the Catholic perspective, you weren't being married in the eyes of God; it was only a civil institution and had civic political purposes only. As the Middle Ages went by, the Catholic Church more or less thought to itself, "this would be a good thing to bring inside the doors of the church. This will help us to exact a greater influence on the lives of our Christians." It's a scary plan. In other words, when you get married, who gives you the license? It isn't your synagogue or church, it's the state that's doing that. So legally speaking I think there can be a very good reason for separating these two. The purpose of marriage is entirely civic. Now you can get married inside of your church, but if you don't fill out the legal paperwork, you aren't really married. In this case, we can say, perhaps, the person that thinks as John does, thinks to himself, "I don't like the idea of gay marriage." However, marriage is really a state institution, so can I ask myself how these two gay people getting married to each other will affect the political situation or the social make up of the United States. Perhaps that person will [reconcile their religious beliefs and political beliefs and decide that allowing gay marriage is 'for the greater good.']
Margaret Riordon: If people are defining abortion as murder, as political beings they are stepping forward into the political sphere to say, "I must stop this." If they are defining it as saying that the soul enters the body at the moment of conception then they have imposed a spiritual point of view on other people. There really are two different ways of thinking about it. I do believe it's possible to be morally sensitive and really look at our lives as in line with our morals as we can, that is deeply connected with our spiritual life. I don't think it is impossible for us to separate who we are spiritually from who we are politically. As mature people and as citizens, the very definition of the word which calls up the idea of rationality and reason that we are required to do that. We may choose rationally and reasonably to say I am going to bring my spiritual considerations into the public sphere as spiritual considerations. I think that then at least the debate has moved to a more honest level of discourse and understanding between people.
Jason Ripper: I ask people to always complicate their thoughts. For instance, we say we have different words: execution, murder and killing. We say that murder is illegal in this society, and yet all nations reserve the right to make war and we have the federal death penalty in this country and we also have a number of states besides our own that exact the death penalty, so the state - whatever the state is - this corpus, this body in the eyes of the law that makes the law itself can take life, with no repercussions. So when we say we are opposed to the taking of life and yet as a conglomerate reserve the right to do so, even if it's through a process. I suppose I would challenge us to at least think of the hypocrisies inherent to the system that we want to use to one end or another. Plus in the end, I think we should all think like me, isn't that what we all think? [laughter] Actually, I hope people don't think like me. They would be far too confused.
Should teachers offer alternative explanations for the origin of the universe in science classes like Intelligent Design, rather than just focusing on Evolutionary Theory?
Laura Fairbanks: Well I don't think that is going to hurt anyone. I think we all touched on the point of education being to learn as much as you can, and if you introduce different theories, yet cover all of the theories and evidence behind all those theories, it is just going to educate all of us. About the whole evolution thing, there are so many different theories out there that you know, some are religious, but some are also scientifically based, so I don't think it will ever hurt anyone to explore all those theories and decide what they think is right.
Kevin Cian: I'm sorry, I have to interject. I hope I'm not sounding incredibly hostile towards this. We had a lot of debates about this [in high school] because it was a very hot button issue there. I guess, I'll say it flat out, I don't think intelligent design or creationism should be given the same equal merit as evolutionary theory and I'll explain why. First of all, evolutionary theory doesn't inherently say anything about religion, it has no opinion on religion, I know plenty of religious people who reconcile their religious beliefs with evolutionary theory. There is so much evidence for evolutionary theory that dismissing it or putting it on equal merit with something like intelligent design or creationism, which I'm not trying to offend anyone here, but does not have an equal amount of evidence for. There is a great website called talkorigins.org, there are plenty of different sources out there and its not just a completely biased resource. The thing about the scientific method is that it has no bias. It is unbiased. It is trying to explore the natural world as best as it can. If our observations started revealing things that pointed towards intelligent design - which is the intelligent design argument or the creationist argument - then that would just become mainstream science. The word theory doesn't imply just a hunch. It isn't just a hunch or a guess. There is so much mutually corroborative evidence from so many different fields and it has such an important role in our daily lives that to completely dismiss it is a little more than naive. There is nothing wrong with saying, "I don't believe in it because I don't know enough about it," which I was at that point at one time. I actually used to be a Christian before [the point that I really considered the other point of view], so yeah, you have to really have to think about, "why do I disagree with it or why do I agree with it."
Jason Ripper: I think they could be intelligently put together in one class and harmfully put together in another class. In a biology/science curriculum, creationism doesn't pretend to be science nor should it. I think in a biology class, if we want children in this country to be competitive in a global economy, they should be learning what we call hard science. On the other hand, science shouldn't be without its ethics and morality and it's good to challenge science, science should welcome a challenge. I think there could be hopefully a curriculum that involves looking at these different classes from a variety of perspectives and frame works. The Bible isn't written according to a scientific method, and you know in Pennsylvania it was the judge who dismissed the case that said "Come on, intelligent design is creationism by another name and creationism is fine, but it isn't part of a science curriculum nor should it be." Yes, I think that exploring them in tandem could be beneficial for a lot of people but perhaps there would be one setting that would be better for than another.
John Fenton: Yeah, I don't think that it belongs in science. I don't think creationism belongs in science because it isn't science, but I think it should be brought into like history classes. Not saying that it is history, but I mean you can't prove the Bible wrong, the Bible does have a lot of history in it. Creationism is historic - people have believed it for a long time, so it is part of history but it isn't part of science. So it shouldn't belong in a science classroom but I think it should belong in school. Not as a truth but as a theory, as a history. It is part of history.
Kevin Cian: It's so difficult to understand any of our civilizations without clearly understanding what they believed before. So I mean yeah, in that setting.
John Fenton: I'm not saying like, "day one, God created light," that shouldn't be taught, but the belief of creationism should be [in history].
Jason Ripper: Sure, a class that is taught to understand the relationships between religion and science. There are a lot of prominent evolutionary theorists that are deeply Christian. There are evolutionary scientists who are also atheists and so on and so forth. Some people who examine evolution, the mechanisms, think that God created those mechanisms. So all be it for an omnipotent being to not be able to come up with evolution, right? What a fascinating class that would be. You said science isn't biased, but of course everything is biased. And simply to say, I think I can understand how something works is a bias of rational process. The word has a negative connotation. I know what you were saying, but theoretically science might be the pursuit of objective truth, and yet most scientists are heavily biased. A class that explored that, I think, would benefit people in the same way that Christians and Muslims understanding each other's histories and faiths would benefit people. There is a lot of misunderstanding.
Kevin Cian: I think there is an ideal idea of science being this kind of objective way of exploring what is observational what the natural world is. So in that respect, I wouldn't doubt there are some very biased scientists. But in general, that is the point for peer review. You can't just put something forward and have it go through, it has to go through a lot of different things. The peer review process is probably the biggest force and probably the most convincing force for having that be ideally objective. But of course there are always going to be things that turn out to not be true. But I don't exactly think that means the process that you go about is wrong, or "oh, look, science found out something is wrong, so we shouldn't trust it anymore." There are so many more things that science has proved correct.
Laura Fairbanks: I like what you said about having a class that would teach us about all these things of trying to find a balance or blend the two of religion and science together. You know, I think that is a fabulous idea. I agree with all of you saying that a biology class is the place for biology not a place for us to introduce all these other ideas.
Jason Ripper: I think [these] questions are scary to people but then the point of college shouldn't be that you come out of college ensured that you've learned everything, but that you've encountered more questions and learned how to ask more of your own, and then by whatever process, learned to explore and investigate those questions. So yeah, I don't think we would walk out of a biology class thinking that we understood everything about the process of life or creation.
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