I’d like to do another riff on the science and religion thing, so bear with me.\u00a0 I largely don’t bother going on about this issue anymore, except in those instances where there may be an audience of undecideds.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One of the things about Americans in small groups is that by and large we will listen and we will weigh what we hear before making up our minds.\u00a0 It comes down to the slickness of the rhetoric or the overwhelming honesty of an argument.\u00a0 That’s on us, we who bother to make such arguments.\u00a0 It helps to remember that we do this for those who haven’t made up their minds yet.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Evolution vs Creation Science.\u00a0 The arguments are settled, the science is in, there’s no real dispute except on the Culture War Front.\u00a0 Evangelicals simply don’t like the program.\u00a0 When the truth destroys a cherished myth, print the myth.\u00a0 An old newspaper adage from the 19th Century.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve been having this crap now for a couple of decades at least, in Kansas back in the 90s, and the issue is well-enough known and the stakes thoroughly understood by enough folks on both sides that anyone moving to circumvent the Supreme Court decision (Edwards vs Aguillard, 1987) is doing so with the knowledge that they are being duplicitous.\u00a0 They have decided that, as they cannot win their case on the basis of fact and reason, and since they believe they are right and everyone who disagrees with them is wrong, any tactic by which they may advance their cause is just fine.<\/p>\n
Science, meanwhile, is hamstrung by its in-built integrity–not that scientists themselves are not often duplicitous or even insidious, but they work with a process that, sooner or later, ousts the B.S.\u00a0 This is a point the Creationists seem to miss about science.\u00a0 Or maybe they don\u2019t, but they just don\u2019t care.\u00a0 (Or, a third possibility, that they have a definition of Truth which simply rejects revision or the possibility of being in error–that if something is True, it\u00a0must always be true, no matter what may seem to refute it<\/em>–which makes any possibility of admitting to changes in fact remote.) \u00a0Scientists, in other words, end up having to play by the rules, because the rules are well-defined and function well enough that fraud is inevitably discovered and error corrected.\u00a0 Bad science doesn\u2019t stand because of that process.<\/p>\n While it is true that there have been scientists whose work has been vilified by fellow scientists, this proves nothing.\u00a0 Eventually, if their work is sound, they are vindicated by the very process that will then discredit that bad or incomplete science blocking their work.\u00a0 This has happened time and time again.<\/p>\n Likewise, it proves nothing to hold science up as some sort of religion with its own dogma, barring the radical and guarding the gates of orthodoxy like Cerberus, because in time the watchdogs are put down and good work has its day.\u00a0 Consider the rather shameful episode of Immanuel Velikovsky, whose book Worlds In Collision<\/em> suffered censure and open censorship when it was published. The scientific community reacted so negatively to the book that it went through its own period of HUAC stupidity in its treatment of Velikovsky.\u00a0 Carl Sagan, in an exercise of integrity, righted this by having a forum of scientists give Velikovsky and his work serious consideration.\u00a0 The result was the book Velikovsky Reconsidered<\/em> , which is a collection of papers done on Velikovsky\u2019s ideas. Velikovsky was shown to be in error.\u00a0 But some good science came out of the forum, most especially with regard to Venus.<\/p>\n Point being, science changed its mind.\u00a0 Not about the validity of Velikovsky’s work, but about the egregious manner in which it treated him–and thereby went on to discover some things it didn’t know before because it took a second, third, and fourth look.<\/p>\n Religion can\u2019t really do that.\u00a0 At least, the religiously dogmatic can\u2019t, not without throwing over their dogma and admitting what they believed was in error.\u00a0 And that\u2019s why it doesn\u2019t mix with science.<\/p>\n On the opposite side of the Dover issue, Kansas once more entered the field by reinserting Intelligent Design in their curriculum and changing the description of science as it is to be taught in the schools along the way.\u00a0 (This has subsequently been undone, but doubtless will have to be done again, because that’s the way this seems\u00a0to work.)<\/p>\n It prompts one to ask: What Is It With These People?<\/p>\n Now you must ask, then, which people am I talking about?<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There are two elements involved in this specific issue that can\u2019t get around each other.\u00a0 The specific issue I refer to is the place of religion in public education.<\/p>\n One element–those who are pushing the Intelligent Design aka Creationism inclusion–believe that part of our problem today is a lack of religious instruction.\u00a0 We have, they say, banned god from the classroom.\u00a0 This has led to immorality and decay, degeneracy and national weakness.<\/p>\n The other element\u00a0comprises those who adamantly refuse to allow religion into public schools at any level, anywhere.\u00a0 They fuel the fires of the debate–the barred will clamor for inclusion till the gates break down.\u00a0 This is Americanism at its core, we can\u2019t deny it or avoid it and we try to maintain an exclusionary posture at our peril.\u00a0 Because if we can\u2019t hold those gates shut–and we can\u2019t–when they do finally give way, we\u2019ll have no control whatsoever on what comes through it.<\/p>\n I take issue with the false syllogism of the religious advocates that we are in the grip of immorality because of the ban on teaching religion in public schools.\u00a0 I take issue with it because I can\u2019t think of a single period in our history when we haven\u2019t been in the grip of degeneracy and decay.\u00a0 We know this because there isn\u2019t a single period in our history when the critics of society haven\u2019t loudly pointed this fact out to us.\u00a0 We have always lived in a stew of sin and corruption.\u00a0 Even when we did teach religion in the schools.\u00a0 The presence of school prayer, catechism, evangelism, and god in the public schools has made no difference in the level of so-called immorality in our society.\u00a0 None.\u00a0 You can find tracts written at each decade of our nation\u2019s history attesting to the fact that we are Sodom, we are Babylon, we are doomed.\u00a0 Taking religion out of the public schools has had no real impact at all.<\/p>\n Now, it can be argued that the kinds of immorality have probably changed.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t have drug peddlers pushing Ecstacy to grade schoolers in 1890.<\/p>\n But wait a minute–a lot of that is simply opportunism.\u00a0 But when you look at the culture at large, you can see that the roster of national sins has changed a bit.\u00a0 Not much.\u00a0 I\u2019d argue that for a lot of people, things have improved, and perhaps we have a level of common morality more in evidence on the individual level today than ever before.\u00a0 Just check the donations to charity, the kinds of charity being donated to, and the range of civil tolerance we experience today that was impossible to expect in, say, 1954.So that argument, to anyone with any smattering of historical perspective, is patently false.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s another argument that can be made to support a contention that religion ought to be included in school curriculum.\u00a0 We pride ourselves on tolerance, and it is true, we can\u2019t get around it, that the basic principles of tolerance in the West are fundamentally Christian principles.\u00a0 Not church principles, but the ideas that came from Yeshua–Jesus, for those who don\u2019t know who I mean.\u00a0 In fact, the codification of tolerance has its earliest manifestation in religion–everywhere.\u00a0 The idea that we should respect others, that we should regard our fellow creatures as no better or worse than ourselves, is a religious idea.<\/p>\n The irony, of course, is that secularists have in recent times been the best practitioners of it, at least in a public forum, and this\u00a0is lost on most religious ideologues.\u00a0 Pat Robertson and the rest of his ilk wouldn\u2019t be half so irked at Dover, PA, if they weren\u2019t well aware of this seeming contradiction.\u00a0 Consider this quote from the \u201cillustrious pastor\u201d on the occasion of the Dover decision:“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover, if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God. You just rejected him from your city, and don’t wonder why he hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin, and I’m not saying they will. But if they do, just remember you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, then don’t ask for his help, because he might not be there.”<\/em><\/p>\n Wonderful.<\/p>\n But I do have a problem with banning religion from public education and it is that we live in a world of religion, and to ignore it is to invite the abuses of ignorance.\u00a0 You could argue, I suppose, that it is desirable to \u201cprotect\u201d children from strong ideologies until they are of an age and a sophistication not to be overwhelmed by them–but we certainly don\u2019t do that with regards to other aspects of the world.\u00a0 We underestimate both children\u2019s\u2019 capacity to handle complexity and our own ability to present a subject in such a way as to open a child\u2019s mind to possibility and choice along with reason.<\/p>\n So I would put religion in school curriculum–as part of history (I don\u2019t know how you teach about the Crusades and avoid deep religious discussions) and as a part of some form of civics.<\/p>\n This is unacceptable to the Creationist advocates.\u00a0 They don\u2019t want religion taught as a Subject, they want it taught as Truth.\u00a0 They want it to have dominance over all other subjects.\u00a0 To do this, though, would require a distortion of those other subjects, especially science.<\/p>\n Which brings the other element in as counter.\u00a0 Those who would blindly bar religion in toto<\/em> .\u00a0 Seeing the intent of the first group, the latter, in an argument we have seen time and again in politics, claims that to let a little in is to eventually yield the field.\u00a0 This is sometimes called the problem of the camel\u2019s nose.\u00a0 You can\u2019t let the camel poke his nose into your tent, because before you know it the whole camel is in and you\u2019re sleeping in the open desert.<\/p>\n So they sue and countersue and the country must stand by and watch as the issues mangle the subjects.<\/p>\n Now, I won\u2019t be coy about where I stand.\u00a0 Religion is not compatible with science.\u00a0 Sorry, it just isn\u2019t.\u00a0 Faith is subverted by a process demanding proof, and science is nothing without that very process.\u00a0 I think religion is both inevitable and unfortunate in this regard.\u00a0 People seem to require it.\u00a0 If we managed to stamp it out in one generation, the next would rediscover it.\u00a0 It\u2019s my opinion that religion is a kind of emergent property of communities.\u00a0 There is not one culture on the planet ever found that lacked a religion.\u00a0 In all the wild variety human creativity offers, they multiply, and appear as if out of nowhere.\u00a0 The binding commonality of our humanity is indicated by the concerns all these religions share–where did we come from?\u00a0 What is truth?\u00a0 What shall we do?\u00a0 What shall we not do?\u00a0 Is there an afterlife?\u00a0 Who are the gods and why do they have anything to do with us?<\/p>\n More than that, though, a religion is the strongest form of group identity.\u00a0 Everyone believing the same thing, worshiping the same thing, claiming descent from ancestors who also believed and worshiped the same thing–when politics and economics change and even language is suspect one generation to the next, this is a powerful bond.<\/p>\n Of course, it\u2019s based on faith as much as any other element of a religion–how do we know we believe the same way our great great grandparents did?–but the nature of faith being that which cannot be analyzed, proven, or disproved, the bond is potent and all but unassailable.<\/p>\n But, to continue the argument (and exposing the flaw),\u00a0it doesn\u2019t stop at belief.\u00a0 It spills over into everything else.\u00a0 Not only do we believe like our distant forebears, so the reasoning goes,\u00a0we\u2019re no different from them in any way!\u00a0 There is a continuity of conscience and values and even physicality implicit in the religious view.\u00a0 From Abraham to Jesus, The People did not change, outwardly or inwardly, except for the waxing and waning of their faith.\u00a0 But they were in all things essentially the same people.\u00a0 No discovery, no insight, no invention altered them qualitatively in any way.<\/p>\n And there seems to be some comfort in that.\u00a0 Certainly a kind of validation. With science, that\u2019s gone.<\/p>\n Enter the Industrial Revolution.\u00a0 From the 18th Century till today, the one thing for certain is that we are never the same one generation to the next. At least, that\u2019s what it looks like.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s where the core assault on Evolution enters.<\/p>\n First we realized that humans are just one more species on the fecund body of the Earth, biologically no better or worse than any other.\u00a0 An opportunistic organism hell bent (he chooses his words carefully) on dominance of the biome through any means available, the first line of assault being reproduction (which nothing must be allowed to threaten).\u00a0 We secured a position through a particularly large neocortex overlaid on a big brain, and after building cities and colonizing the entire globe, thought of ourselves in our fevered imagination as the ultimate pinnacle of creation–an idea we invented as well to explain the hierarchy we assumed to be \u201cnatural\u201d, which idea itself is perverted by the notion of special creation, with human beings at the crest of it.\u00a0 Our ideology itself was employed in the battle to dominate–our hubris is probably an evolutionary benefit, since it obliterates the kind of humility and sensibility that would check our nature-driven surge for dominance, a dominance not only over the so-called Animal Kingdoms, but over arbitrarily-designated \u201clesser\u201d human breeds.<\/p>\n Right nasty piece of work.\u00a0 When we understood that we were just part of nature and not the divinely-appointed landlords, it didn\u2019t take long for some among us to start looking closely at the long trail of human history and trying to figure out alternative answers to the thorny questions.\u00a0 Many were wrong.<\/p>\n But just questioning that continuity was a chancy practice and got a lot of individuals killed along the way.<\/p>\n Something was awry, though, because the animal kingdoms we thought we understood turned out to be a lot more…unique…than we suspected, and begged more questions than we\u2019d been offering.<\/p>\n When Darwin came along with his little notion of natural selection, well, the whole thing revealed itself to those with clear eyes.\u00a0 There was no \u201cspecial creation\u201d–the whole thing was a continuum, an ongoing round of cede and supercede, new species displacing old, whole genomes transforming, disappearing, transmuting.\u00a0 The animal kingdoms we knew were johnny-come-latelys, emerged in the space left behind by far older kingdoms that had never know Humans at all–because we didn\u2019t exist when they held sway.\u00a0 Which meant that we were only another phase in an age-old process of change and replace and recombine and…evolving.<\/p>\n Which destroyed the cozy sense of eternal continuity we assumed for millennia.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Which has driven certain people crazy.<\/p>\n It amazes me that we still hear the rejection we heard in the 19th century and even in Dayton, TN–\u201dI am not descended from an ape!\u201d<\/p>\n The man in the 20th Century who came to exemplify the fundamentalist response to evolution, William Jennings Bryan, said in his famous Menace of Darwinism speech: \u201c…our chief concern is in protecting man from the demoralization involved in accepting a brute ancestry…evolution in plant and animal life up to the highest form of animal might, if there were proof of it, be admitted without raising a presumption that would compel us to give a brute origin to man.\u201d<\/p>\n As it has transpired in the course of the 20th Century, science has pretty well established that evolution occurs.\u00a0 All the arguments mustered against it, from gaps in the fossil record to the intricacy of the eye and its impossibility of emerging by evolutionary process, have been answered.\u00a0 We have ample evidence in the fossil record and are finding more all the time.\u00a0 That is simply not an issue anymore.\u00a0 The eye has been explained (though perhaps not the “I”).\u00a0 More than that, in the laboratory evolution has been witnessed on the single cell level for decades.\u00a0 The only way to make sense of viral and bacterial mutation is through an evolutionary model.\u00a0 Humans themselves have been instrumental in evolutionary process through selective breeding of cattle, pets, and the manner in which we change environments and displace species. Plus, we keep finding new species.\u00a0 They are emerging all the time.<\/p>\n But the bone of contention (if you will allow me the pun) is with the descent of Man. Up to the present day, beginning with Bryan, people have made a link between special creation and morality–as if without the hand of god having made us in a separate manner from all the rest of creation, we could not possibly evince a single moral principle.\u00a0 Based on a historical reading of our conduct as a species, there isn\u2019t a shred of evidence to support the contention that more religion equates to more morality.<\/p>\n But that isn\u2019t where this rabid assault on science and evolution\u00a0is coming from, I think.\u00a0 I think that\u2019s a dodge. The issue is obsolescence.<\/p>\n The view that religion gives us is that Man (humankind) was the last living thing created, and that it was an act of special creation, different from all the rest of the living world, and furthermore the model used was the Creator Himself.\u00a0 The inescapable implication of this is that we–human beings\u2014 are the pinnacle.\u00a0 We\u2019re It.\u00a0 The Best.\u00a0 The supreme, end result of six heady days of creative exuberance performed by a Being of Infinite power and knowledge and imagination. Better could not be done.<\/p>\n Well.\u00a0 If true, then Evolution is the democratic revolt dethroning us from that position.\u00a0 Because evolution states that we\u2019re just one more species among millions and we have as much chance\u00a0of surviving to the end of time as the dinosaurs–which is, none to speak of.\u00a0 We aren\u2019t special.\u00a0 We can be replaced, and, by the logic of evolution, will be. The king has no throne.<\/p>\n Whether people consciously react to this or not is beside the point.\u00a0 Unconsciously, I\u2019m certain they do. And some reject this process of replacement utterly.<\/p>\n We will not be made obsolete.\u00a0 We will not be shoved off the top of the hill.\u00a0 We will not be replaced.<\/p>\n Our provenance, as descended from a long, long line of other primates, must therefore be rejected, because to accept it is to accept the possibility of our being just a stop along the way to something else.\u00a0 Not even, if we read Darwin correctly, something superior–just something else.\u00a0 We can\u2019t even look forward to a more human human.<\/p>\n The passion of rejection exhibited here suggests no less than a personal stake on the part of those who would see evolution denied. In my humble opinion, this is pathetic.<\/p>\n There are always people who take credit for their ancestors\u2019 accomplishments, people who rely on family name and honor to supply them with the dignity they otherwise haven\u2019t earned.\u00a0 For such people who get by on the stories of greatness achieved by grandparents or great grandparents, people like me–who really could care less what the family did a century ago–must appear odd.\u00a0 To me, they appear ridiculous.\u00a0 Likewise those who plead social incapacitation based on transgression done to forebears, as if the transgression had been done to them.\u00a0 I am by descent German.\u00a0 That does not make me heir to the crimes of the Nazis or the absurdities of Kaiser Wilhelm\u2019s Reich.\u00a0 Nor does it suggest anything about my work ethic, my sense of humor, or my tendencies toward dress, decorum, or music.\u00a0 Yet I have heard this kind of thing throughout my life.\u00a0 \u201cOh, that\u2019s the German in you!\u201d<\/p>\n How?\u00a0 I am an American by birth.\u00a0 Characteristics that have to do with socialization do not transfer genetically–that\u2019s Lamarckianism and it\u2019s demonstrably false–yet there are people who assume they do.<\/p>\n All this is part and parcel of a process of borrowing self-worth–or special pleading–from lineage.\u00a0 If that lineage is long and immutable, well…<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not.\u00a0 To pretend it is is an idea born of centuries of human habit, passed from one generation to the next not by genetic processes but by the stories and customs we carry with us, handed down through families, towns, nations.<\/p>\n Yet there are American born Irish who will pick fights about slights done by the British against the Irish a hundred years ago.\u00a0 Examples abound.\u00a0 This is false self-importance, indulgence in claptrap. And the granddaddy of such claptrap is Special Creation.<\/p>\n Ultimately, if it\u2019s not true, then we\u2019re responsible–utterly and alone–for our own situation.<\/p>\n I suppose that really frightens some people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’d like to do another riff on the science and religion thing, so bear with me.\u00a0 I largely don’t bother going on about this issue anymore, except in those instances where there may be an audience of undecideds.\u00a0 One of the things about Americans in small groups is that by and large we will listen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11,27,6,24,2,39,8,23,3,4,1],"tags":[6450,6441,6457,6436,6454,6430,6469,6438,6453,6431,6433],"class_list":["post-409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-culture","category-cultural-evolution","category-culture","category-current-events","category-education","category-evolution","category-history","category-meaning-of-life","category-psychology-cognition","category-religion","category-science","category-uncategorized","tag-american-culture","tag-cultural-evolution","tag-culture","tag-current-events","tag-education","tag-evolution","tag-history","tag-meaning-of-life","tag-psychology-cognition","tag-religion","tag-science","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}