Why Does It Matter? 395Hemant Mehta argues that the regressive social policies of fundamentalists aren’t the only
factors. He points to the fact that younger generations are more likely to learn from the
Internet, and less likely to obey everything their parents tell them, especially when they
have questions for which organized religion has no good answers. Certainly, the virtual
community of Web-enabled young people can explore and learn about topics like secularism
and evolution in a way that would have been impossible in many small religious American
towns just a generation ago. Even if the social pressure of the conservative community cen-
sors or hushes up these topics in school and at the library, the Internet opens a window that
cannot be shut by local authorities—and younger people are more likely to find their own
answers this way than ever before.
For those of us who value science and science education in this country, this is good
news. As I’ve argued in this chapter, the single biggest factor that causes us to fall behind
nearly all the other westernized industrial nations (including Japan, South Korea, China, and
Singapore, along with most of Europe) in science literacy is fundamentalism and creation-
ism. When you break down the polling, it’s always questions about evolution, the age of the
earth, cosmology, and human evolution that nearly always cause Americans to flunk science
literacy tests. These are all questions that reflect the creationist-evangelical influence on our
culture. Thankfully, it is apparently declining. The United States probably won’t become
Denmark during my lifetime, but I’m optimistic that the never-ending battles with creation-
ism in the United States will gradually end as all the old evangelicals die off and they are not
replaced by a comparable cohort of the younger generation that was similarly brainwashed.
One can only hope . . .
Choices for the Future
It is to be hoped that the ID movement, because of the very publicity that it has sought
and achieved, will be seen by the majority of Americans for the giant step backward
that it is. Our children are literally the future of our nation, which will increasingly
need competent scientists and engineers to guide us through the coming technolog-
ical revolutions—revolutions that are already under way all around us. There are
examples in history of the collapse of great civilizations. There is no particular reason
that the United State should be exempt from historical forces. The Visigoths are at the
gate. Will we let them in?
—John Brockman, Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design MovementWhen all is said and done, we have just a few choices. We can let the creationists further
damage our scientific literacy and technological and scientific advantages, or we can try
to bring back rigorous science education in our schools and make it our priority. We can
reject evolution, astronomy, geology, paleontology, and anthropology for some minority’s
religious viewpoint, or we can accept what science has taught us about the world and see
ourselves in this humbling new light. As George Gaylord Simpson wrote in 1961, “One hun-
dred years without Darwin [and now over 150 years] is enough!”
Instead of the narrow, claustrophobic extremist worldview of the creationists, we can
accept the vastness of the universe and the immense length of geologic time and reach
a humbler, less anthropocentric, less arrogant attitude about our place in nature. We can