Laughing at Tulsa

When the New York Times devotes an editorial to events in Tulsa, Oklahoma, you can bet that the editors are not espousing the virtues of midwestern common sense as a template for their readers. It seems that the directors of the Tulsa Zoo voted to supplement a display about evolution with a display about the Genesis account of creation. An ill-advised vote, perhaps. But from the Times' perspective, these votes are the stuff of knee-slapping hilarity:

After the inevitable backlash from bewildered taxpayers warning that Tulsa would be dismissed as a science backwater, the directors "clarified" their vote to say they intended no monopoly for the Adam and Eve tale but rather wanted "six or seven" creation myths afforded equal time. There was the rub: there are hundreds of creation tales properly honored by the world's multifarious cultures, starting with the American Indian tribes around Tulsa.

You want creationism? How about the Cherokee buzzard that gouged the valleys and mountains? And why should Chinese-Americans tolerate neglect of P'an Ku and the cosmic egg at the zoo, or Norse descendants not speak up for Audhumla, the giant cow?

The futility of this exercise was emphatically made clear last week when a crowd of critics demanded reconsideration. With the speed of the Mayan jaguar sun god, zoo directors reversed themselves, realizing they had opened a Pandora's box (which see). In stumbling upon so many worthy cosmogonies, Tulsa did us all a favor by underlining how truly singular the evolution explanation is, rooted firmly in scientific demonstration.

Exactly how is the evolution explanation "truly singular?" Scientists are in an ongoing process of revising, rejecting, and rescinding previous work tracing the evolutionary path. Individuals who strongly believe in evolution strongly disagree about the particulars. And the litany of creation stories cited in the editorial are simply derivations of The Creation Story: the belief that a divine power is responsible for life's origins. It is only disagreement about the particulars that is reflected in the various creation stories. In this sense, we could say "how truly singular the creation explanation is."

Now in all likelihood, the editors meant "truly singular" in the sense of "not religious." And I assume that the many creation stories are more threatening to the editors than the many varieties of the evolutionary pathway because people may be more passionate about the former than the latter (and those believing the former, we assume, are much more prone to unreasonable action than those believing the latter). So as we've seen in our discussion of Noah Feldman's work and the Ten Commandments cases, the specter of divisiveness drives the inquiry. In the Times' view, the existence of many religious beliefs creates an (apparently irrebuttable) presumption that the government-facilitated expression of some subset of those beliefs in the public sphere is illegitimate. Put simply, religious belief is inherently divisive, science is not; organize society accordingly.

To be clear, I would not vote to install a Genesis timeline in the local science museum. But my reluctance stems from my fear that such efforts foster an unnecessary science versus faith tension -- i.e., the notion that kids can believe their science teacher OR they can believe the Bible. I don't, however, buy the suggestion that our society must respond to religious pluralism by pretending in public that no one is religious and allowing science to fill the gaps.

Rob