In this short clip, Congressman Roy Blunt, (R - MO) sounds reasonable enough, and many politicians today might say something similar if asked about evolution and science education in public schools. But as Governor Rick Perry and the Texas Board of Education may soon find out the hard way, in practice Mr. Blunt's advice is impossible to follow.
Perry made a national splash when he appointed Don McLeroy, a Bryan dentist sympathetic to creationism, to head the Texas BoE in 2007. After the state legislature rejected McLeroy for a second term in May of this year, Perry named Gail Lowe as interim Chairwoman. "Same song, second verse," said Dan Quinn of the political watchdog group Texas Freedom Network. "If Gov. Perry had appointed her during the legislative session, senators would have had the same objections to her nomination as they did to McLeroy’s. She’s a strict ideologue who’s far more interested in promoting ‘culture war’ battles than in making sure kids get an education based on sound scholarship."
Creationist activists have repeatedly pushed for their arguments to be heard in front of federal courts where, so far, those courts have found creationism to be religious in nature and thus unconstitutional. If Mr. Blunt wants futures cases to be purely a matter for Texas or any other state to decide, Congress will have to successfully amend the US Constitution and overturn decades of federal precedent. Until then no state, not even one as independent and influential as Texas, can begin to accomplish what Blunt prescribes.
As far as discussing various theories, in science a theory makes testable predictions. Young Earth creationism predicts the universe is less than 10,000 years old or the geological record is best explained by a recent global flood for example; predictions it failed to meet. Intelligent Design (ID), as advertised by proponents like Lowe or McLeroy, is a more vague concept which relies on logical fallacies and long discredited criticisms of evolutionary biology. Outside of that, "ID makes two primary assertions," explained Dr. Ronald Wetherington, a professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. "One, that there are organs and systems that are irreducibly complex -- meaning they cannot be explained by natural selection operating on incremental changes over time – and two, that such complexity can only be due to an intelligent designer. The former is testable, and all of ID's examples have thus far been falsified. The latter could be considered religious or philosophical in nature, but it cannot be tested."
There is an important qualitative difference between a claim that is religious in nature and a scientific theory that has religious implications. The Big Bang proposes that the universe had a beginning. It is therefore consistent with and has profound implications for any religion which includes a creation story. But the Big Bang, like evolutionary biology, is neither downplayed nor promoted in science classes because of those implications. Rather both are taught because, like all scientific theories, they unite numerous empirical observations and the results of laboratory experiments into a single, testable, explanatory framework.
In an ideal world, the Big Bang and evolution, along with Young Earth, and Intelligent Design creationism would make great illustrations of currently accepted theories, a failed hypothesis, and a topic in philosophy, respectively, to develop key concepts in science and methodology for the benefit of K-12 students. Related topics in geography, government, and civics would be wonderful ways to breathe life into lessons about the Bill of Rights, American history, and the co-equal branches of government. But that's a far, far cry from the classroom discussions creationists hope to usher in by brute political force.
Indeed, if Texas follows Mr. Blunt’s past advice and Gov. Perry’s current lead, it’s a fair bet that many religious Texans will find themselves less satisfied than they are now, a certainty that educational resources already stretched to the breaking point will be strained even further, and entirely possible that local school districts will end up embroiled in expensive, bitterly fought lawsuits pitting neighbor against neighbor in the midst of a sharp economic recession. Regardless of who wins those hypothetical legal showdowns, Texas students, teachers, and taxpayers will be the losers. And, because of the influence Texas has on the national textbook market, as goes Texas, so goes the nation.