In last Saturday's Ledger, a science-minded copy editor put two stories side by side. The first reported the discovery by NASA's Mars rover Opportunity of a mineral that typically forms in water. The second reported that former President Jimmy Carter is critical of a proposal to remove the word "evolution" from Georgia's public school curriculum.
There doesn't appear to be an obvious connection between these two stories, but there is, according to Prison Fellowship founder and radio commentator Charles Colson. It seems that NASA is full of crypto-evolutionists.
A year after the Columbia disaster, NASA is justly proud of its accomplishments on Mars. The mission has been an astounding success both technically and scientifically.
One of the chief purposes of the two Mars rovers is to learn whether the planet ever contained significant amounts of surface water. If it did, there is a possibility that an elemental form of life — single-celled organisms, for instance — might have existed there. This is science at its most basic. The NASA mission is gathering data about our universe, giving us clues to the conditions under which life may develop.
But not everyone, it seems, is keen to know whether life, however primitive, might have once wriggled its flagellum on the Red Planet. Colson finds a sinister reason behind the exploratory mission — there are those in it who want to disprove God.
"Finding life or evidence of it on other planets is essential to the evolutionist's case," Colson said in his Jan. 9 commentary. Referring to the late scientist known for his anti-religious views, he continued, "Carl Sagan once said that if there's life on only one planet, it could be a miracle; if there's life on two, it proves that life is a natural evolutionary process, and atheists can sleep soundly. That is the motivation that drives this search for life on Mars and fascinates us with Little Green Men."
That brings us to the proposed revisions to Georgia's curriculum, posted on the state Department of Education Web site just a few days after Colson's commentary. State Superintendent Kathy Cox would ban references to "evolution" in middle and high school texts and replace it with "biological changes over time."
Cox insisted that this did not mean the teaching of evolution is being banned. She said at a news conference last week that evolution had become a "buzzword" with negative connotations, and she wanted to take pressure off teachers in communities where parents object to its teaching. That may sound helpful, but when Sadie Fields, the state chairman of the Christian Coalition of Georgia, applauded Cox's proposal, you know it can't be good for progressive education.
Carter, who has an engineering degree from the U.S. Naval Academy and is an evangelical Christian to boot, pronounced himself embarrassed by the proposal. He said, correctly, "There can be no incompatibility between Christian faith and proven facts concerning geology, biology and astronomy."
First of all, Colson and others shouldn't take Carl Sagan's logic so seriously.
The existence of life on other planets doesn't let atheists off the hook. Professor Nancey Murphy of Fuller Theological Seminary, who knows a lot about reconciling science and faith, said recently there will always be a natural explanation and a theological explanation for every discovery we make. Therefore, people of faith should never fear anything that science may learn, because it cannot contradict the God who created the phenomena in the first place.
Look at it this way. The raw data about the nature of the universe is out there, like it or not. Mars is full of information, just sitting in space. If Colson and Fields had their way, we would leave it be, bury our head in the sands of Earth and never try to discover the data. Better not to know, they would say, lest it support — gasp — evolution.
You could say that Colson is afraid to examine the universe that God has placed in his, and our, hands, as if it were an object he is afraid of breaking, rather than a delightful plaything.
Fortunately, Colson and Fields don't direct our science programs. Now, if we could just get them out of our children's science textbooks.