Roger Olson puts his finger on the problem with high school science textbooks: in the name of religious neutrality, they too easily err in the opposite direction.
Now I want science textbooks to stick to science. So do many others involved on the “creationist” side of this debate. Neither I nor they are anti-evolutionists. The issue for some of us is not whether life forms evolve; the issue is whether science, as science, can state that all life began with chemical interactions.
The issue is, for some of us, that some scientists like to smuggle philosophy, metaphysical beliefs, into science. The classic case of this, of course, was scientist Carl Sagan’s opening statement in his book and film series, read and shown in thousands of public school classrooms, that “The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.” Few people realized that, at that moment, he was speaking as a philosopher, out of his own life and world view, and not as a scientist. Science cannot establish that metaphysical belief as fact.
True science, of course, has nothing to say about what happened before the universe was set in motion, or who or what set it in motion. (Although to say it was self-caused is, in my opinion, more of a leap of faith than saying God caused it!) This is the question of existence itself, which is and will always be a metaphysical question. Why something and not nothing? To say that there were chemical interactions begs the question: Why were there there chemicals to interact with one another? Why was there an environment in which chemical interactions could take place?
And this is the problem with the question, Do you believe in evolution? I have to ask, What do you mean by “believe in.” If by “believe in” you mean, Do I believe that strictly natural processes account for how we got here? then, no, I don’t believe in evolution.
Do I believe that life evolved gradually? Sure. Like most of the universal church, I have no theological reason not to believe that. Life evolved gradually, but it was directed and sustained into existence at every moment by God. Which is another way of saying that I fully embrace our United Methodist position on science, from ¶ 160 § F of the Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church:
We recognize science as a legitimate interpretation of God’s natural world. We affirm the validity of the claims of science in describing the natural world and in determining what is scientific. We preclude science from making authoritative claims about theological issues and theology from making authoritative claims about scientific issues. We find that science’s descriptions of cosmological, geological, and biological evolution are not in conflict with theology.
“We preclude science from making authoritative claims about theological issues and theology from making authoritative claims about scientific issues.” Exactly! But in our current political climate, the former mistake is far easier than the latter.