Turning back the tide at Dover

Apr 16, 2005 Alun Politics, Science 3 Comments Creationism, Evolution, Pop Culture, Religion

I’ve got a Google News Alert set for “dover evol­u­tion”, fol­low­ing the accept­ance of cre­ation­ism (known in Amer­ica by some people as Intel­li­gent Design) onto the cur­riculum of a school in Pennsylvania. The plan is/was to write up a short piece on event for TUP, along with the car­toon below from a site which offers hours of juven­ile fun. The art­icle hasn’t been writ­ten yet because it is a con­tro­ver­sial sub­ject and I thought it a good idea to read a little around it on both sides of the sub­ject. I still haven’t writ­ten it a few months on because there’s a lot to read. It seems the big issue most people con­cen­trate on is whether an altern­at­ive to Dar­win­ism should be taught at high school. In fact it could be much more serious.

It’s going to be a dif­fi­cult sub­ject to tackle. I can see three ways of approach­ing it. One is to tackle the obvi­ous Irre­deem­able Stu­pid­ity in the argu­ment for Cre­ation­ism. It does sound a simple task There’s not one shred of evid­ence Cre­ation­ism. So Cre­ation­ists try and muddy the waters with a grab bag of non-sequiturs. The idea is that if they cast enough doubt on Nat­ural Selec­tion the Cre­ation­ism becomes reasonable.

Ima­gine meet­ing a Cre­ation­ist on a blind date:

Hi, is your name Mary?

Umm… no sorry.

In that case you must be Sue Weston of Manchester, because my min­is­cule ima­gin­a­tion can­not con­sider there could be another alternative.

Actu­ally no, I’m someone else. I think you’ve made a mistake.

I don’t think so, you did say you weren’t Mary didn’t you?

Yes, but…

Then logic­ally you must be Sue Weston of Manchester. By the way that’s a bible in my pocket, but I am pleased to see you.

Frankly the Cre­ation­ists could prove that Dar­win got it wrong, but no amount of evid­ence against Dar­win will prove Cre­ation­ism right. There’s another side issue that Cre­ation­ists haven’t got any evid­ence against Dar­win. The best they can do is try and void evid­ence for evol­u­tion like the entire fossil record as a con­spir­acy. It is a prob­lem, but this angle has been done to death (or rather I wish it had died a death) and done a lot bet­ter by other people. Also I won­der really how import­ant sci­ence is to creationism.

It’ll prob­ably be this second tack I take. The cre­ation­ists clearly have no interest in sci­ence. I’ve recently been told that the cre­ation of sub­atomic particles in super-colliders proves Cre­ation. Clearly fact-based reas­on­ing has left the build­ing. I think that ana­lys­ing the meth­ods and reas­on­ing of the Cre­ation­ists could be use­ful. Why do they reject Nat­ural Selec­tion, and also why do they feel the need for Cre­ation­ism to be acknow­ledged as a Sci­ence? There’s a lot to read and it will take time. I’ve got Creationism’s Tro­jan Horse: The Wedge of Intel­li­gent Design by Bar­bara Car­roll For­rest and Paul Gross to read. From the bit I have read it’s fas­cin­at­ing. It argues there is a con­cer­ted polit­ical effort called the ‘Wedge’ to intro­duce cre­ation­ism into the classroom, using Intel­li­gent Design to smuggle Chris­tian­ity into sci­ence. I stuggle with the san­ity of this.

Wil­liam Demb­ski argues that Intel­li­gent Design is not cre­ation­ism, but a ser­i­ous sci­entific chal­lenge to Darwinism.

the nature of [the] cause–whether it is one or many, whether it is a part of or sep­ar­ate from the world, and even whether it is good or evil–simply do not fall within intel­li­gent design’s purview.

He’s wrong. By his own logic he’s wrong. If life is irre­du­cibly com­plex then let’s say design is nat­ural. What of the designer? If she was designed, then what of her designer and so on. Turtles all the way down is not an explan­a­tion. If she was not designed by simply sprung into being then she exists as a super­nat­ural force. Intel­li­gent Design there­fore can­not be sci­entific either offer­ing the explan­a­tion “That’s just the way it goes”, or else “The Magic Pixie did it.” Explan­a­tions invok­ing Pix­ies are rarely con­sidered sci­entific. So sci­en­tific­ally Intel­li­gent Design poses no prob­lem. But theo­lo­gic­ally it’s a poison.

Intel­li­gent Design, done prop­erly, becomes a theo­lo­gical dis­cus­sion of how little evid­ence there is for the Chris­tian god. There is, based on the evid­ence, not more reason to believe in the Chris­tian god than a singing Rain­bow Snake in the Aus­tralian out­back as the ulti­mate cre­ator. It is not a tool for put­ting spir­itu­al­ity into sci­ence, but for extract­ing Jesus from Chris­tian­ity. Chris­ti­ans are not uni­ver­sally stu­pid people. If Intel­li­gent Design is get­ting sup­port from the Chris­tian fun­da­ment­al­ists then it must be based on Chris­tian theo­logy. Which brings us back to the ‘Wedge’.

Intro­du­cing Chris­tian­ity into schools is, from an Amer­ican per­spect­ive, a Bad Thing as it flouts the con­sti­tu­tion regard­ing the sep­ar­a­tion between church and state. There’s not a major puzzle about why reli­gious fun­da­ment­al­ists want to over­turn the con­sti­tu­tion. Reli­gious fun­da­ment­al­ists of any stripe are eager to estab­lish theocracies.

Another issue which is per­haps less fre­quently raised is why intel­li­gent people in gov­ern­ment are happy to tacitly sup­port this. This applies to the UK too where Tony Blair is happy with Emanuel Col­lege, Gateshead teach­ing Cre­ation­ism. Why?

Politi­cians want to get re-elected. The more options they have to pur­sue to do this the bet­ter. Sci­ence is poten­tially is a bar­rier to this. If you take it ser­i­ously it can stop politi­cians from doing whatever they choose. How do you deflect that? You reduce sci­ence from a ques­tion of fact to opin­ion, belief and feel­ing. Polit­ic­ally in the short-term curb­ing sci­ence is an excel­lent strategy. There are imme­di­ate gains in doing what you want and the charge is fois­ted onto the next polit­ical gen­er­a­tion. In the longer term there will be a price to pay. Nature doesn’t care what fun­da­ment­al­ists think. Cre­ation­ists are rather like King Canute try­ing to hold back the tide. Are a bunch of Canutes the best people to set a sci­ence syllabus?

I don’t have a solu­tion, but I should note that I did go to a school that taught an altern­at­ive to Dar­winian Evol­u­tion and there was never any ten­sion between sci­ence and non­sense. The altern­at­ive I was taught was Lamar­ckian Evol­u­tion. The les­son as I recall went some­thing like “Lamarck thought gir­affes evolved by stretch­ing their necks and passing the longer neck to their off­spring. Can any­one explain why this is rub­bish without refer­ring to Three Blind Mice?” Can we teach Cre­ation­ism as a sci­ence and demon­strate why as a sci­ence it is an utter fail­ure. The prob­lem and it’s a big­gie with this is that it opens Chris­tian­ity to ridicule, which requires brave teach­ers in a land where fun­da­ment­al­ists are either armed or worse, law­yers. On the plus side it would lead to fun­da­ment­al­ists cam­paign­ing to have Cre­ation­ism removed from school syl­labi.
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