A Turkish Muslim author’s book, The Atlas of Creation, sent to French schools, in sort of a mass mailing campaign prompted an outcry from WoodMoor Village Zendo in an article titled Turkish Creationist Book.

I agree with the repugnance of religious cosmogony as a substitute for science. I also think this issue is not easily brushed aside as yet another example of ignorant, arrogant “fundamentalists.”

The larger dynamic in society as a whole is a search for ethical values in a world bent on destroying the foundations they have traditionally been built on. It is not science, per se, that is the culprit, but a groundswell of awareness that the older mythologies just don’t cut it very well in the modern world. If you are sick, would you take a pill or go to a scientific doctor, or to a a minister in hopes that the evil spirits causing your cold could be dispelled? No answer is necessary. Prayer as a medical device has been relegated even by religionists to the narrow niche of the final resort when everything else has failed.

As science sweeps religion aside, it offers no substitute foundation for ethical values. Moral cause and effect are not scientific propositions other than the potential effects of getting caught and punished. And this leaves people foundering as they search for some way to establish value, purpose, meaning, and a defensible basis for justice in their lives that is independent of both power and culture.

Buddhism, though different from Muslim and Christian communities, is a religion, and not a philosophy, because of its postulation of moral cause and effect in the form of karma. Without karma, Buddhism is a philosophy of sorts, but not a very compelling one. Philosophy is particularly wimpy when one needs to tap transformative power to change one’s life.

Those who champion science as the solution to all man’s ills are as arrogant as those who insist that their cosmogony should replace science. The questions of good, bad, evil, and all the other really deep questions of life just don’t fit on the scientific plate. Atheists who insist the world is without a deity based on “scientific arguments” are as flawed as the ones who insist that one must exist.

Where do people get their values from? How should a society teach values in a way that isn’t harmful? If values don’t come from religion, where should they come from? These are the questions that should be asked by those always alarmed about creationism. The alarmists are, of course, right in a small way, but they completely miss the underlying wave by focusing on the froth at its crest.