It’s one of the oldest and most important questions we have been asking since humans have started walking the earth.
It’s a choice that everyone makes: we either believe that everything is here by chance or that an intelligent design is behind it all and that someone, or something, has created it.
On Jan. 31 , the Indiana Senate passed the SB89, a bill that will allow creationism to be taught in public schools alongside other life theories. SB89 will broaden students’ knowledge on such possible theories.
It has become a common argument among critics that this bill violates the First Amendment. In the Establishment Clause, the First Amendment denies the government the power to create any “law respecting an establishment of religion.” From this, many skeptics believe that all religion should be excluded from public schools.
The best way to refute such criticism against SB89 is to understand the Establishment Clause in the context it was written. As people would later discover, the “endorsement of a religion,” is a rather difficult concept to define, as it can be interpreted in many different ways.
When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution in 1787, it was over 70 years before the theory of evolution would be introduced to America. According to www.answersingenesis.org, in the meantime, schools naturally taught that God created the world. This is the setting in which the Constitution was written.
With most schools teaching creationism and many of the Founding Fathers believing in God themselves, it would seem quite radical to claim that they would create a law which would prohibit creationism from being taught in schools.
The dispute over the true meaning of the Establishment Clause carried on until 1971. According to cases.laws.com, in the case of Lemon V. Kurtzman, the Supreme Court finally established a bill that would settle the controversy behind the Establishment Clause once and for all. This law, known as the “Lemon test,” has three requirements that must be met in order to permit any form of religion to be taught in the public schools.
According to cases.laws.com, first, it is required the that all religious activity that is taught in schools should have a secular purpose. Second, the activity is not permitted to either advance or inhibit religion. Finally, it is required that it must not result in excessive government entanglement.
The Lemon test proves that SB89 is, in fact, constitutional when used in a secular context. By merely introducing creationism with other religious theories of life and evolution, it is clear that no single religion is being endorsed nor prohibited by any of these standards.
Contrary to the popular belief that SB89 is an unconstitutional bill, the law points otherwise. On the contrary, teaching evolution by itself as the only theory to life may be a direct violation of the Lemon Test.
Acccording to creationeducation.org, teaching evolution in public schools both endorses atheism and represses creationism. It’s high time evolution is taken off its high pedestal and given the same the equal treatment as creationism and other such theories of life.
Links:
http://cases.laws.com/lemon-v-kurtzman
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2005/01/31/evolution-american-education
