c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C., an author and former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(at)interpath.com)

UNDATED _ Legislators in North Carolina are proving that battles rarely end when they are fought indirectly.

The issue at the state capitol in Raleigh was evolution. The state House voted to require that teachers in North Carolina present evolution as theory, not fact. They immediately defanged their legislation by making it an admonition, not a matter that could lead to criminal charges, as happened in the 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee.

But they had made their point: creationism lives.

Like abortion and punitive measures against homosexuals, the creationism vs. evolution battle is a favorite of the religious right. It has little to do with any meaningful discussions within the scientific community. It springs from the realm of faith.

That alone would make it an unlikely subject for legislation, since it’s hard to imagine matters of faith being resolved by politicians casting votes. But the issue is further obscured by being treated as a question of science.

Let’s be honest. The creation/evolution fight is about the Bible and how one interprets it. Is the Bible literally true, each word given to humanity by God through some unknown process of inspiration? Or is the Bible a complex collection of books that seek to convey one people’s experiences of God and, thereby, to speak to all humanity?

Each side mocks the other as faithless and ignorant. But the issues are profound and, except for the charlatans and bullies who thrive in any religious hothouse, those disagreeing are faithful people trying to know God. The creation story shows the dilemma of biblical interpretation at its most acute.

One view is that the biblical account of creation is literally true. At some point, as Genesis says, God spoke creation into being. God did it in a certain order, then rested. Like the planets created whole out of nothing, humankind was created in full form, in a man and a woman whom we would recognize as like us. When those first humans betrayed God, sin entered the human condition.

Another view is that Genesis was written over a long period of time by a number of authors in an attempt to comprehend God. Its themes reflect Israel’s changing fortunes as a nation. The earliest narrative strand, according to this view, dates from the time of ancient Israel’s ascendancy. In the fullness of that prosperity, Israel expressed its origins in the story of two humans, Adam and Eve, and a God who walked with them in a garden.

Genesis 2 and 3 present a poignant story of humans struggling with freedom and temptations, and of a personal God who trusted, was betrayed, and suffered deeply.

Later, after the kingdom collapsed, Israel inserted another creation story, the familiar seven days of Genesis 1. In this account, God prevailed over the chaos, established order, and showed Israel the necessity of observing Sabbath. Living in the chaos of defeat, these later Hebrews understandably were drawn to a God who was powerful enough to overcome darkness.

Some look for compromise. The six”days”of creation, for example, might mean something other than the 24-hour period we know as day. Another middle-ground view looks to the”big bang”theory of creation and says that was God at work, creating something from nothing through sheer will.

But compromise comes hard to both sides. The multiple-source folks consider it intellectually bogus to date the creation of all matter to merely thousands of years ago, when scientific evidence shows animals and plants existed many millions of years ago. Literalists consider it offensive to God to question a single word of Scripture.

In other words, state legislators have wandered into an argument that goes much deeper than any science of origins. It concerns where faith derives its authority.

When an entire worldview is shaped by rules and beliefs drawn from a literal interpretation of Scripture, or from a desire to probe the Scripture for meaning, there is little room for dissenting data, whether theory or fact.

The fight over evolution isn’t about protecting schoolchildren from bad science teaching. It’s about preserving or shunning a fundamentalist view of Scripture. That’s a lot to load onto overworked and over-ruled teachers, and it’s a misuse of the educational environment.

DEA END EHRICH