Truth
Eugenie C Scott on Teaching Science in Schools
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 30 October 2002
What Sort of Materialism?
Eugenie C Scott, writing in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, (June 24, 1996), says that the vast majority of Americans are believers, and want to be. She thinks Christians need to be assured they can retain their religious beliefs and still accept evolution as science. Scientists have to recognize this.
Christian theology has struggled to accommodate evolution, but most denominations have done it. Theologians of most Christian churches tell their flocks evolution is not contrary to Christianity. Anglicans, Catholics, non-fundamentalist Protestants, and Conservative and Reformed Jews mostly believe that God is the Creator, but that evolution is His chosen method. Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, the United Church of Christ and many other denominations do not believe that Creation occurred literally as described in Genesis. Most Christian seminaries do not teach a biblical literalist creation.
Only those who accept the literal truth of the bible have any problem with evolution. Christians in small, independent denominations believe most strongly the literal truth of Genesis. The leaders of these groups usually have little or no theological training. They are, in short, usually ignorant. They hate above all Catholicism, yet behave like the Catholic cardinals of 400 years ago who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope. Most Christians in the world don’t mind evolution at all, and those in the US who still do are either peculiarly obtuse or peculiarly stupid. They want to deny that religion itself evolves in the face of social reality.
Scott urges scientists to avoid confusing the methodological materialism of science with metaphysical materialism, because US Christians don’t mind one but they do mind the other. These Christians oppose evolution being taught in schools because they fear teachers are serving up, not just science, but materialism in their lesson on evolution. The truth is that the very effectiveness of science means that its methodological materialism must reflect something more. It is that the world is material! Yet science teachers do not have to teach materialism, and rarely do. It emerges from the science when students grasp it. That is really why Christian bigots are opposed to science. They know that ultimately it refutes superstition, and that is all the bigots have to offer.
Scott’s aim is to ameliorate this Christian fear. She notices that scientists who are Christians “decouple philosophical and methodological materialism,” all the time so that they can go about their work without having to bother about God. She deduces from this that science does not need materialism as a philosophical base.
This is rather like saying that modern science does not need to assume order in nature to get explanations. It does not need to assume order, but after, say, observing the planets or the heavens as a whole for a few years, order will force itself on to the observer. The moon goes through its cycles in an orderly fashion. The constellations are found to be in the same places every year. Planets are found to repeat their positions in the heavens regularly. The early observers who noticed these facts did not assume order. It came out of their observations.
So it is with materialism. It need not be assumed by science but it comes out of the observations—millions of them by now. There came a time when methodological materialism could be accepted as a practical assumption. This is the stage Scott thinks that science is now at. Methodological materialism is a working hypothesis, and that is all the Christian needs. But, what more evidence do we need to go further? Surely, after this degree of confirmation, it no longer is just an hypothesis. It has been so well verified in practice that it becomes stiff-necked not to recognize that it is the way Nature is! It is metaphysical materialism to anyone who is rational, and there is no good reason why rational people should dilute their views to suit unreasonable people like Christians.
Unreason and Christianity
The amount of unreason in the mightiest country the world has ever known is astonshing and frightening. Half of all Americans, 150 years after Darwin, reject evolution. Yet, evolution is a basic component of science, and essential to biology and geology. How can anyone understand science if they do not understand evolution? The reason that so many Americans reject evolution is that only one in seven Americans have rejected Christianity—only backward Catholic and Moslem countries have fewer disbelievers.
Many believers in God denigrate logic and reason, and reject science as a way of knowing anything, in favour of an ancient book of tales and rules. They do not seem to reject cars, TVs, mobile phones or computers, not to mention modern housing, electricity, man-made fabrics, detergents, insecticides, anaesthetics, disinfectants, medical treatments and so on. All of these are products of science. Unless angels brought all of these from God in the strange world of these rejecters of reality. Against this, how many souls can Christians prove they have saved? These people ignore or deny empirical knowledge in full or in part, though readily accepting its benefits while accepting utter fantasy. What could be more unreasonable?
Christianity is an opinion and nothing more, and it is shown in Christians’ selective choice of data. Opinions and values are more important than facts and reason. It is the opinion of some people that God came to earth to save mankind. There is no evidence that this is true, yet Christians base their lives, and worse, try to base other people’s lives on their opinions. When evidence is ignored and conclusions are based on opinion, then knowledge suffers and our rational society is endangered. That happened in the fall of classical society and its replacement by the Christian Dark Ages. That is the seriousness of Chistianity.
Christianity rejects science, logic and reason. In the face of so much anti-science, supporters of science and reason are concerned about the replacement of empirical and logical evidence with religious and dogmatic belief. Religions may be based on evidence, but most often they are not. The trouble is that religious people take their religion to be more true than anything based on experiment and sound assessment. Thus empirical knowledge is replaced or denied by religion. The sensible thing for people to do is to ensure that whatever religion attracts them is soundly based on evidence, but they will not. It is never scientific or even sensible to accept what seems as though it ought to be so, without testing. Most often what seems sensible is not what it seems to be in reality. Belief is incompatible with skepticism, and skepticism is necessary for science.
Science
Science emphasises empirical information, and that the hypotheses inferred from it must work in practice. Any proposition must be distinguished from opinion by being tested empirically in the material world. If it were possible, it could be tested in the spiritual world too, but no Christians so far have been able to show that this is possible. The material world has to suffice. Outside of science, everything that is information cannot be tested, and it can be contradictory, so people also need to be taught how to weigh up information based on other information known to be reliable. It is testing against established knowledge rather than the real world. It cannot be as good as experiment, but is often necessary in life.
Science is open-ended, and conclusions are accepted as tentative, subject to revision. Explanations are rejected, not on opinion, authority, or assertion, but by better data. It is not always neat and tidy but it has given us more knowledge than ever before. Science has higher standards than other forms of knowledge, especially religion which derives its standards from ancient books that were even wrong when they were written.
The scientist interprets moral standards as social constructions suiting the needs of human societies. Religions are the way rulers in pre-policed societies induced people to be lawful. They attributed the laws to God, and told the believers that God would punish them for disobedience. They built myths and theologies to explain why the laws came about and how they should be interpreted, and appointed a caste in society to ensure that the people remained faithful, and therefore law abiding. Different races and tribes had different opinions about these matters.
Christians who criticize science for changing its hypotheses in response to new evidence, actually themselves divide in many factions on the issue of Creation. It is too boring and futile to list these 57 varieties of nonsense for that reason—they are all nonsense. They divide into even more factions when other aspects of their God-revealed and therefore perfect religion are taken into account. There are over 30,000 Christian denominations. That’s a lot of revelations, or are they just theories? Whatever they are, every Christian thinks all the denominations they are not in are wrong, and even Satanic!
The only God compatible with science is the idea of a prime mover who started off a chain of events then went away, went to sleep, or stood back to watch, but otherwise resisted the temptation to waggle his finger about in his nesting box he had made. Such a God can be safely ignored, as all proper science does in fact, whether it is done by an atheist or a devout believer.
Scott says science cannot refute the supernatural. She says that anyone who concludes there is no God, might do it with the assistance of science, but ultimately the decision is philosophical, not scientific. These assertions might be true but in this context are absurd as well, in that nothing that is imaginary can be disproved. God cannot be disproved but neither can Peter Pan. God and Peter Pan are conceptually equal. If students are to be taught science, it is hard to see how an elementary truth like this cannot be taught at the outset. All science is done with no need to have recourse to God. Laplace said to Napoleon that he had no need of the hypothesis of God, and all science has remained the same since.
Scott also says science is a “limited way of knowing.” This is nothing but a false limitation imposed, in all likelihood, by Christians in the nineteenth century. If it has been true that science has been limited, then it is time that it was extended, and time that people in different fields took up scientific methodology. They will find it beneficial.
Pandering to Supernaturalists
Scott is pandering to supernaturalists on the grounds that a majority of Americans are in the supernatural camp but the simple point can be made that science has never found anything supernatural. Whatever science has successfully addressed has been explained naturally, and whatever has not been successfully addressed at first, has later been explained naturally. Some Christians tried to say that whatever science could not explain must be what is supernatural, and therefore God’s responsibility. It is the “God of the Gaps,” and has proven woeful to Christians as the gaps have one by one been filled by natural scientific explanations.
Scott also thinks that evolutionary biologists should compromise on purpose. G G Simpson in his famous introductory text on evolution, The Meaning of Evolution, wrote:
Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned.
Christians might respond that no one knows what God’s purpose is or what he planned, but normally they know precisely what God’s intentions are. Needless to say, Christians cannot agree on how they know, but know they do!
The authority in Catholicism is the Church itself, or rather its doctors and divines who interpret matter of doctrine. God Himself as the Holy Ghost initiated the apostolic succession, settting up the Church as a continuous authority on doctrine. Doctrine has to change according to circumstances and the system God set up, through the authority of the Church, allows it to do so. Individual Catholics can be wrong on doctrine but errors are smoothed out over time and through discussion, and from time to time the Pope feels confident enough to issue an infallible ex cathedra statement of doctrine. These doctrines then become mandatory on all Catholics. This evolutionary method has allowed modern Popes to agree to biological evolution.
None of this is accepted in Protestantism which had decided that the Catholic Church had wandered too far from the Puritanical principles of Christ and the first Christians. Those were supposedly described with the infallible authority of the inspiration of the Holy Ghost in the Christian bible, and so Protestants took the bible to be authoritative. Any doctrine not specified in the bible is optional only, so some Protrestants will not accept evolution. Not that everything in the Protestant bible is compulsory. Protestants, like Catholics, feel free to discard what they do not like in it, or to find theological reasons why plain commandments of their incarnated God can be ignored. Despite this some treat the bible as if it is God dressed up as a book, and often insist upon the most futile and outdated laws of Judaism.
Other Christian denominations, such as Quakers, accept neither of these, but instead leave God to act directly through the personality and conscience of the individual believer. They think that parts of the bible are of dubious moral standing, and much of the history of the churches is, so ultimately the individual has to decide what is right. They then can decide to accept evolution as a matter of conscience and common sense.
Finally, many smaller Protestant sects, feel none of the above will do for them, and instead place their faith in some leader considered charismatic who will do all the thinking and moralizing for them, though usually they say God’s intentions are plain from the books they call holy and infallible, yet ignore them themselves. They are biblical literalists in matters they decide are important—not in others, such as giving everything to the poor! These leaders become latter-day Christs, and not infrequently lead their disciples into disaster.
The truth is that Christians think whatever they fancy about God’s intentions, so it should not be too hard for them to conclude that he set evolution going and then went for a long snooze. If this God had a purpose in starting evolution, the system He devised is purposeless.
To talk about purpose is to accept that it is something’s purpose, that the something is God, and that He is directing evolution and not allowing it to proceed. That might help a Christian to accept an evolution lesson but it offers them and the teacher a load of problems. For the Christian the problem is why should a good God operate such a cruel and wasteful method of creation. The teacher who has admitted purpose into the lesson will have to field the questions thus suggested without offending the Christian. It is more honest and easier to admit that evolution has no place for purpose and therefore no place for God.
Some shrink from the conclusion that the human species was not designed, has no purpose, and is the product of mere material mechanisms—but this seems to be the message of evolution.D Futuyma
Scott says that “there is no purpose to life” is not a scientific statement but a philosophical one. She is fond of making this fine distinction, but science allows observers to draw conclusions based on their observations. Laplace drew the conclusion that we can scientifically accept. A cosmic purpose requires God but science does not. A supernatural outlook cannot be scientific.
Anti-Evolution
Christian creationists are anti-evolutionists. Evolution they call “evilution,” to remind them that it is an evil idea not suitable for children. If they actually read the monstrous things that God permits and even does Himself in the Old Testament they would think the same about their religion. They cannot accept any form of evolution because it inevitably means that man evolved out of the same stock as animals, and these poor creatures want to feel that they are above the animal level. To feel that they are special, they have to feel that God created them specially, and to give an excuse for the crucifixion, Adam and Eve had to be historic to disobey God. It really is this puerile.
Some Christians demand that the evidence against evolution should be presented in science lessons as well as evolution. They must mean Genesis because there is no scientific evidence against evolution coherent enough to be presented. It is like flat-earthers saying that the evidence against the earth being a sphere should be taught as well as the evidence that it is one. Is this what parents want? Science classes should reflect what scientists call science not what religionists call science.
Other Christians have tried the tack of changing the name of creationism to Intelligent Design Theory (IDT), and pretending it is scientific. It is so scientific there is no scientific evidence for it—just Christian opinion! The fact is that these people do not understand science. They ought to be examined by psychiatrists because they have a comprehensional problem, like colour blindness or dyslexia. To call something a theory and scientific is not to make it so. What has been found out by science has been found out by observation, hypothesis and testing, and it melds into the whole of the rest of the scientific base because it is real.
Some Christians argue that evolution is just a theory, and intelligent design is another theory about the same thing, so both should be offered as equals in the classroom. But IDT is not a scientific theory and cannot be tested as a scientific hypothesis. It is merely an opinion—a belief. In 1987, The US Supreme Court agreed. It affirmed that creation science was religion not science. It is just another name for the myth of divine creation in Genesis.
Can any Christian natural science be scientific? Can a supernatural religion be scholarly? Nothing in Christian explanations of creation are free from a willingness to subvert science to opinion. Some Christians try to argue that singular events cannot be studied by science, only events that are repeated. Yet, “historical” sciences like history, geology, palæontology, forensics, and astronomy can be studied scientifically, and even experimentally. Singular occurrences have consequences and these can be studied to give information about the event. That is what happens in cosmology, evolution and earth science. The relationships of species can be studied from fossils, comparative anatomy, biochemistry, and such. So, it is not true that singular events cannot be studied by science, simply because no one could do it at the time.
Some Christians want science to allow for the supernatural. Christians tell us, “God’s supernatural action would be willed at His pleasure and not in a recurring manner.” They must then be treated as singular phenomena, and studied from their consequences. They will therefore look like natural phenomena that are singular or rare. The scientist will not know that they were supernatural, and will treat them as natural for the purposes of study. How then does anyone decide that they are supernatural except by a prior assumption? Non-recurrent events may be more difficult and challenging to study than repeated events, but that is not sufficient reason to call them supernatural.
Are Scientists Doing Enough?
Are scientists doing enough to encourage people to accept evolution and counter Christian pseudo-science? Christians promote themselves ruthlessly. Scott says the Campus Crusade for Christ targets college and university faculty members. Its affiliate, Christian Leadership Ministries, claims to be on more than 800 US campuses. Its newsletter, The Real Issue, encourages faculty members to stand up for their academic freedom to express religious beliefs. Why do not more academics stand up for their own right to express scientifically established belief instead of having to put up with Christians fanatics and fancy?
Ruthlessly? A bit strong? Scott tells us Christian professors try to convert students to Christianity in the classroom, in violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment clause. One professor of the University of Alabama tried to make Christian converts in class, and taught IDT in an optional class that students felt they had to attend because it was the last one before the final exam. A professor at California University of Pennsylvania, used fundamentalist and religious right publications when he was supposed to have been teaching a course in media resources. In fact he was teaching that secular humanism in public schools violated Christian principles. Never mind that it is the Christianity that is wrong.
Mostly they do not get caught, and often the administrators do not mind. A lot of colleges are Christian ones. The same is beginning to happen in the UK under the leadership of the Vicar of Albion, Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Emmanuel College in Gateshead—a Christian-run school near Newcastle upon Tyne, praised by Bishop Blair—is teaching creationist ideas as science. If Christians are allowed to continue to undermine proper knowledge, the US will not remain at the top of the heap in the modern world.
For the United States to remain a technological leader, we have to understand what science is—and teach it.Sean B Carroll, molecular biologist
University and professional scientists must engage this task in the face of the barmy Christian right. They have to start campaigning against these lunatics. There is no room for complacency. Scott calls for American science literacy in the world outside the campus to match its rate within. She is right about that!
But she wants scientists to humour the Christians, by accepting that their prejudices are compatible with science. They are not. She notes, disapprovingly, that vocal proponents of evolutionary materialism such as William Provine at Cornell, Paul Kurtz at SUNY Buffalo, and Daniel Dennett at Tufts vigorously argue that Darwinism makes religion obsolete, and encourage their colleagues to do likewise. They are correct. Scientists should not copy Christians. They must be honest. Pussy footing with Christian ignorance is like taking a stroll with a crocodile. Christianity does not have a noble past.
Eugenie Scott’s article can be found at the NCSE website.
