SWNID Corrects Revered Web Columnist

James Taranto, editor of the invaluable and aptly named "Best of the Web Today" at OpinionJournal.com, has for some time made statements like the one in today's column:

Neither the biblical story of creation nor the idea of "intelligent design" is a scientific theory (despite the latter's pretensions), and thus neither belongs in science class, as opposed to courses in history, religion and philosophy.

Mind you, Taranto is no friend of secular evolutionists either. But his attempt to strike a middle ground on the question of teaching origins questions in schools is strikingly illogical, for one reason. Why should the question of origins demand a rigorous observance of the limits of an academic discipline in the classroom, when no other subject does?

To wit:

• English teachers regularly discuss moral/ethical questions raised by the actions of characters in novels, even though ethics is not a branch of language study.
• History teachers regularly discuss questions of ethics and current politics, though neither are history.
• Science teachers regularly discuss public policy questions that relate to the application of science.
• Math teachers regularly talk about the use of math in business or science, though they teach neither.

The truth is that all good teaching is interdisciplinary. That's because knowledge is interrelated.

And the fact is that no one would care about questions of origins if we didn't think that they had relevance to our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. This is not just human curiosity about the world. No one really cares much that dogs are descended from wolves. But we do care that people may be descended from apes. Or that there might be a Creator. That's why origins gets studied, taught and argued about.

So SWNID has boldly emailed to Taranto a challenge on this very point. Step out from behind your slender objection, Mr. Taranto, and face up to the question that you are avoiding! This question of God won't go away with appeal to the so-called limits of science. Give up the illogic that such questions don't belong in the science classroom. No one would stay awake in a science classroom that never breached the methodological walls of science.