To: The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Date:  December 12, 2002
Subject: Teaching children about the origin of life
Result: not printed

Dear Editor,

Why can't they just tell the truth in educating children about the origin of life? We cannot possibly know how life began and how we ourselves came into being.

I'm not a religious person, but it is tempting to believe that life could not have started from a bunch of loose chemicals swimming around and then blindly evolved into the incredibly complex beings that we are. There would have been so many zillions of propitious accidents that would have been required that it doesn't seem possible.

It's not like suddenly one individual in a species gets something - an eye, an opposing thumb, 2 beings with complementary sex organs - then suddenly everybody's got it. Each of those innovations - each little component of them - would have to accidentally occur many separate times in different individuals for any particular feature to take hold in the evolutionary path. It would all happen without reference to the fact that it had occurred in any other individual, and be totally random with no design-based reason for any new development.

To go a little further with this, something like an eye doesn't just spring up fully formed and ready to go. Each single part of it would have to evolve in a stand-alone manner until finally, someday, somehow, all the parts would come together and form an eye. That would include the supporting connections and structure within the brain to be able to receive and transmit and process the visual signals. Then only after the fully-functioning eye had emerged would nature get the chance to determine whether this was something that would be advantageous for survival.

I am not just talking about human eyes here. I'm no biologist, but I think that even the simplest kind of eye and the suitable brain and connections to make it work would still be pretty complicated.

It takes faith to believe in God. But to categorically assert that God did not have a hand in the spectacular engineering feat that life is, that takes great faith indeed. Nevertheless, for all we know and can know, everything could have been just a big blind accident after all - as fantastic as that proposition seems to me.

If God does exist, perhaps evolution was the mechanism that he chose for the development of life. He set the process in motion, and then backed off and watched as life evolved in the way that he designed and planned.

But the fact is, the evidence for evolution, whether blind or under God's direction, is far from definitive. With regard to the evolution of man from lower animals, a big problem with that theory is that, with all the many complete dinosaur skeletons we have from more than 65 million years ago (when the dinosaurs became extinct), there ought to be at least a pretty good fossil record of early forms of man as we evolved over just the past few million years. Whereas what we have is basically nothing. I believe the record for the middle stages between all the major species is very deficient.

You can't know how we got here. Just tell it like it is.

I have one other thing concerning what can and should be taught in schools about the origin of life, and about religion in general. In speaking of the separation of church and state, the Constitution does not take a position on how life came into being, or any other religious issue. Its concern is only that religions, whose adherents often believe that they are God's chosen people - a belief that can easily lead to abuse - cannot impose their beliefs and morality on others. It affirms that the only legitimate universal moral values are those that pertain to thou shalt not do harm to others and shalt let them live in peace.

There is nothing in the Constitution that should preclude children from learning about religion in school. They ought to learn what others believe, and it might behoove them to examine their own beliefs from a perspective other than the one they get at Sunday school. This will assist them in their navigation of a world that is full of different kinds of people and beliefs.

Of course biology class is not the place for religious studies, but even there you can't be telling people that there are all kinds of absolutes going on when there are not.

Thank you, John Vehon

_____________________________________________________________

author's note: this letter was modified from the one originally submitted