UK bans creationism from being taught as science in free schools

“What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say ‘I know’ instead of ‘I am learning,’ and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, the famed Irish playwright and polemicist, in the preface to his play The Doctor’s Dilemma.

To adapt Shaw’s quotation to the current cultural and metaphysical divide between atheists and theists (Jews, Christians and Muslims, to highlight the big three), we might say that the true atheist should also refrain from any similar proclamations of “I know.” An occupation of skepticism’s scientific grounds is much preferred, for no man can positively prove the existence of a singular God or a trinity.

To that end, it seems that the UK government, in a move sure to incite the religious passions of the faithful, has closed a loophole that allowed creationist school founders to use public monies to preach the creationist gospel, or intelligent design, as a science.

This is as it should be: one is perfectly free to ponder the question of whether some supernatural force, endowed with supreme powers, not to mention omniscience, might have constructed the atomic and subatomic detail of the universe; but one is not entitled to teach or, rather, fascistically imprint these ideas upon children’s minds while passing them off as science.

The British Humanist Association had launched the “Teach evolution, not creationism!” idea as a petition, alongside thirty leading scientists and science educators, including Sir David Attenborough, Professor Richard Dawkins and Professor Michael Reiss, as well as five national organizations.

After the UK’s new revision of the model funding agreement for Free Schools, BHA Chief Executive Andrew Copson commented:

We congratulate the government for taking this significant step to prevent creationist Free Schools. There is still further work to be done to ensure that all schools, not just Free Schools, are prevented from teaching creationism, to include evolution in the primary National Curriculum, and to ensure evolution’s teaching in all schools. We look forward to working with the government and all those who care about rational and evidence based education to achieve these additional changes.

Some atheists, however, might argue that creationism should, in fact, be taught in schools — not so much out of any fairness for or appeasement to the faithful, but to ritually kill the idea at the altar of reason by contrasting it with scientifically-testable theory. Children could thus be taught in a public setting that creationism is not a science, and that it is not even a theory, because it can’t be tested.

While there might be some merit to this point-of-view, it seems that the model funding revision does this preemptively and in exquisitely symbolic fashion.

Though the following has nothing whatsoever to do with the science of existence, except for perhaps encouraging skepticism and the pursuit of observable proof, I leave you with a quote from Thomas Paine (himself a deist but a free thinker nonetheless), who wrote in “The Age of Reason“:

Admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.

Science, on the other hand, is neither revelation nor hearsay. Therein lies the difference.