As Adam Frank sees it, the time has come for America to move beyond “the exhausted and fruitless debate over evolution and creationism”:

It’s time to put a definitive end to the futile, misguided school board curriculum battles. Evolution happened. We must fight to ensure that the forces of restriction never restrict that truth.
At the same time, however, we have to find the creative will to speak to the many ways humans encounter the True and the Real, including the sense of sacred. In a century sure to be haunted by climate change, resource depletion, and a variety of terrorisms, we will need all the tools of wisdom we can get. Science and Religion, at their best, can both be sources of wisdom. At their worst, well, we all know what that looks like.

He adds:

We have an extraordinary line of enlightened and enlivened thinking about religion in this country. From Thomas Merton to Martin Luther King to Philip Kapleau, we have had our share of great innovators in the domains of religion. Most importantly, there has been ferocious American creativity in developing new sensitivities between Science and the domains of spiritual endeavor. It stretches from Thoreau, Emerson, the great William James and on to our time. That is powerful mojo to draw on as we try to imagine what’s been missed as Creationist polarities have sucked all the air out of the room.