Welcome to round six of Atheist Digest.
In this series we're going to explore philosophy, science, theology, psychology, epistemology, and a whole slew of other silly elitist things. We're going to challenge each other to think, we're going to inadvertently insult some people, and hopefully we'll end the day battered, bruised, confused, but just a little more thoughtful and tolerant than before.
Previous diaries in this series:
Atheist Digest: Diary Series Introduction
Atheist Digest Two: Semantics
Atheist Digest Three: Belief
Atheist Digest Four: Science, and Scientific Method
Introduction
The lay public's view of the Theory of Evolution (ToE) is a benchmark for the understanding and acceptance of science and the scientific method. In most countries, science education is robust, and the acceptance of ToE is high. Unfortunately, as seen through a number of polls taken here in the U.S. over the years, the story is not so rosy.
Seen through the lens of a series of Gallup polls taken over the years, the number of people who, in total, do not accept the Theory of Evolution in its purely mechanistic form, is a majority.
(More detail of the polls and breakdowns of the details can be found here.)
Why is this a problem? So what if a majority of Americans do not accept a purely mechanistic, non-deity-driven view of the development of humans and other life on Earth? And why is it a problem if close to a majority believe humans have only been around for about 10,000 years?
The answer is simple: the lack of acceptance of so fundamental a concept as ToE requires a rejection of science and the knowledge it has given us, and the substitution of a world-view so at odds with the truth of the world around us, that the consequences are profound. Imagine, as an alternative, that the majority of Americans rejected the precepts of chemistry. Not only would this rejection fly in the face of all that modern chemistry has given us, but it would open the doors to alternative, bogus views of the world, such as a belief in alchemy and the transmutation of base metals to gold. In addition to the fact that much energy, time and money might be wasted in commercial pursuit of the mystical gold-production process, the implications of rejecting a well-established, mechanistic view of chemistry would likely bleed into other areas of science. Witch doctors, anyone?
Why has a scientific concept as a well-established and fundamental to our understanding of so many areas of science--biology, genetics, geology, cosmology, and others--come to be rejected by so many people? Thereby hangs a tale of a battle between religion and science, politics, and control of the education system in the U.S.
Some Definitions
Before getting to the meat of the discussion, let's define a few terms, so we have a common base of understanding.
Evolution:
In the biological sciences, evolution is a scientific theory that explains the emergence of new varieties of living things in the past and in the present; it is not a "theory of origins" about how life began. Evolution accounts for the striking patterns of similarities and differences among living things over time and across habitats through the action of biological processes such as natural selection, mutation, symbiosis, gene transfer, and genetic drift. Evolution has been subjected to scientific testing for over a century and has been (and continues to be) consistently confirmed by evidence from a wide range of fields.
National Center for Science Education
Creationism:
"Creationism" refers to the religious belief in a supernatural deity or force that intervenes, or has intervened, directly in the physical world. Within that broad scope, there are many varieties of creationist belief. Some forms of creationism hold that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth. Such "anti-evolution" creationists have been leading opposition to the teaching of evolution since the 1920s.
National Center for Science Education
Theory:
As used in science, a theory is an explanation or model based on observation, experimentation, and reasoning, especially one that has been tested and confirmed as a general principle helping to explain and predict natural phenomena.
Any scientific theory must be based on a careful and rational examination of the facts. A clear distinction needs to be made between facts (things which can be observed and/or measured) and theories (explanations which correlate and interpret the facts.
1996, Frank Steiger
(Note that this definition is distinctly different from the common, everyday use of this word--in that domain, "theory" is generally taken to me "a guess" or "an untestable assertion based on belief". This difference between scientific usage and common usage is critical to the arguments made by supporters of Creationism, as we shall see.)
The History of Creationism
The history of Creationism is as old as human thought and religious belief. Virtually every religion has a "Creation Story"--a story which attempts to explain how the observable world came to be. All of those stories posit a deity or deities which took action to bring the world, and the creatures in it, including Man, into existence.
These stories are often fascinating in themselves, and tell anthropoligists and other scientists quite a lot about the culture in which the Creation Story emerged. For instance:
The Maasai of Kenya in their creation narrative recount the origin of humanity to be fashioned by the Creator deity from a single tree or leg which split into three pieces. To the first father of the Maasai, he gave a stick. To the first father of the Kikuyu, he gave a hoe. To the first father of the Kamba, he gave a bow and arrow. Each son survived in the wild. The first father of the Maasai used his stick to herd animals. The first father of the Kikuyu used his hoe to cultivate the ground. The first father of the Kamba used his bow and arrow to hunt.
Wikipedia
From the time Creation Stories first emerged, they provided the best explanations for the world around us, at least until the time science began to hold sway. From that time onward--at least from the time of Darwin's work 150 years ago--Creation Stories began to give way to what science could say about the natural world. However, to a greater or lesser extent, where science's finding conflicted with religious dogma--in particular, where fundamentalist readings of Creation Stories conflicted with what science had to say--there ahave been, to varying degrees, attempts to make Creation Stories the dominant explantion, either by indoctrination in such stories or through the denigration or complete removal of scientific theories of creation from educational systems, or both.
It is here that our story concentrates on what has happened during the 20th and early 21st centuries with regard to teaching Evolution and alternatives to it, in the public school system.
Evolution versus Creationism in the Classroom
The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) divides the history of efforts to control the teaching of evolution and replace it with creationism into the following four phases:
- Efforts to ban the teaching of evolution (1922–1968)
- The rise and fall of "creation science" (1969–1987)
- The rise and fall of "intelligent design" creationism (1987–2005)
- Stealth creationism (2005–present)
These periods are nicely bracketed by court cases relevant to the Creationism/Evolution issue, which we will summarize next:
- From the Scopes Trial to the Epperson v. Arkansas SCOTUS decision
- From Epperson to the Edwards v. Aguillard SCOTUS decision
- From Aguillard to the Kitzmiller v. Dover case
- From Kitzmiller to now
The Scopes trial, which most of us learned about in school, pitted the state of Tennessee against a school teacher. As summarized by the NCSE:
In 1925, the state of Tennessee passed the Butler Act, which outlawed the teaching of "any theory that denies the divine creation of man and teaches instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." The ACLU offered to defend any teacher accused of violating the Act, and John Scopes agreed to incriminate himself by teaching evolution.
With William Jennings Bryan among the prosecutors, Clarence Darrow among the defense, and journalist H.L. Mencken covering the proceedings, Scopes' "Monkey Trial" focused an unprecedented amount of public attention on the creationism/evolution controversy. However, the case had little impact on the actual legal issues involved. Scopes was rapidly convicted, and upon his appeal the Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed the Butler Act to be constitutional; but the court also overturned his conviction on a technicality, blocking any chance to take the case to the Supreme Court of the United States.
After the Scopes trial, and until 1968, the law of the land was that states could choose to teach Creationism, Evolution, some combination of the two, or nothing at all. Most states tended to teach a mixture of the two.
In 1968, the Epperson trial took place. Again, as summarized by NCSE:
In 1968, in Epperson v. Arkansas, the United States Supreme Court invalidated a 1928 Arkansas statute that prohibited the teaching of evolution. The Court held the statute to be an unconstitutional attempt to advance a particular religious viewpoint:
The law's effort was confined to an attempt to blot out a particular theory because of its supposed conflict with the Biblical account, literally read. Plainly, the law is contrary to the mandate of the First, and in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution."
This case established the precedent that a state curriculum could not "be tailored to the principles or prohibitions of any religious sect or dogma." This case brought to an end the enforcement of "Scopes era" laws or the passage of new ones prohibiting the teaching of evolution.
The Epperson case served notice on the forces supporting Creationism that a watershed had been reached--no explanation of the origins of the Universe or Man could be spring from existing Creation Stories. This was not unalloyed good news for the forces of science--it spurred the defenders of Creationism to find a new way to force their explanations to be taught in schools.
The Creationists responded by attempting to add the veneer of science to their version of the origins of Mankind, by creating "Scientific Creationism". This, in general, consisted of attempts to provide "scientific" explanations for things--for instance, the apparent old age of the Earth and the existence of the fossil record--by postulating either a different behavior of laws of physics in the past, or bending known scientific principles to their own ends--for instance, the concept of "hydrological sorting" to explain the existence of different fossils in different strata of rock. In all such cases, the explanations were never subject to the scrutiny of the general scientific community, and generally failed to provide consistent explanations. But, until 1987, this tactic worked well in a number of states.
However, in 1987 the playing field changed again with the Aguillard decision.
In a landmark ruling in 1987 in Edwards v. Aguillard, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the state of Louisiana's "Creationism Act" was unconstitutional. This statute prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools, except when it was accompanied by instruction in "creation science". The Court found that, by advancing the religious belief that a supernatural being created humankind, which is embraced by the term "creation science," the act impermissibly endorsed a particular religious viewpoint. In addition, the Court found that the provision of a comprehensive science education is undermined when it is forbidden to teach evolution except when creation science is also taught.
The Creationists were stymied again--this time, in a quite clear and unequivocal manner--Evolution was the coin of the realm in science, and attempts to prevent or modify its teaching by including any explanations lacking scientific rigor or based on religious principles, was impermissible.
Would that this were the end of the story. But, there were now agents in play whose academic credentials and understanding of the politics of the situation gave them useful insights in how best to get back on track.
In 1991, a UC Berkeley Law professor made it his cause to work to remove materialistic explanations of the origin of Man and the Universe from the classroom and from science, and replace them with "God centered" explanations. In 1991 Phillip E. Johnson published Darwin on Trial, an attempt to undercut a materialistic explanation of human creation (Evolution) and suggest it be replaced with something else. The "something else" was left pretty much undefined, but Johnson's work served as the hook on which Creationists could hang a new, "scientific" explanation of the world.
Based on the trailblazing work of Johnson, the Creationist movement came up with "Intelligent Design", a supposedly scientific means of essentially saying the following: "too many things in the natural world are too complex to have arisen by the 'random' processes of Evolution, and so must have been created". In order to avoid the "it's religious in nature" trap, the supporters of Intelligent Design refused to say who or what this Creator was, just that he/she/it must exist, and must be the proper explanation for what we see around us.
Intelligent Design--or ID--held sway in a number of states and schools as an alternative to Evolution, or in addition to it. However, in 2005 a trial was held in Dover Pennsylvania which tested the limits of ID as a proper explanatory mechanism.
In the legal case Kitzmiller v. Dover, tried in 2005 in a Harrisburg, PA, Federal District Court, "intelligent design" was found to be a form of creationism, and therefore, unconstitutional to teach in American public schools.
As the first case to test a school district policy requiring the teaching of "intelligent design," the trial attracted national and international attention. Both plaintiffs and defendants in the case presented expert testimony over six weeks from September 26 through November 4, 2005). On December 20, 2005, Judge John E. Jones issued a sharply-worded ruling in which he held that "intelligent design" was, as the plaintiffs argued, a form of creationism.
Any summary of the Dover case, as it has come to be known, would not do justice to the absolutely devasting blow to ID and Creationism dealt by Judge Jones. Not only did he find that ID was just Creationism dressed up in the cheap tuxedo of science, but that it was not science, and that a number of defendants in the case lied about their motives and actions.
Was this the blow from which Creationists/IDers would never recover? Was science teaching now safe in the United States?
Only time will tell--but the Creationists are now hard at work on a new strategy, and seem to be making some headway. The new strategy is to "teach the controversy"--a position which attempts to make the case the because Evolution is "just a theory", there are other theories that are just a good, and that even scientists themselves are embroiled in arguments about the truth of Evolution. For these reasons and others, ID or something similar can be appropriately taught, as long as no mention of deities or discussions of the creator are included in such teaching, they say.
The Creationists also have stealth programs underway to replace Evolution-supporting school board members with their own people, who them vote to put ID into the curriculum. Cases in Texas and other states have shown this strategy to be somewhat effectively--at least in introducing doubt about Evolution among the general public, if not outright getting Creationism/ID textbooks and materials introduced in science classes.
Summary
It is unlikely, given the forcefullness and stealth of the Creationists, and the generally low level of science knowledge among the general public, that Creationism will soon cease to exist as a force to be reckoned with. For this reason, in addition to many other actions which need to be taken, progressives who are committed to an "evidence based" and scientific view of the world need to take steps to help speed the demise of Creationism.
Attend local schol board meetings where Evolution curriculum is being discussed, vote for school board members who are "evidence based" in their views and state a clear preference for teaching science, and only science, in the classroom. Donate to the NCSE and other worthy organizations who fight this battle.
Comment threads are now open. Enjoy.
Dominant Agents in the Creationism/Evolution Wars
The Discovery Institute
National Center for Science Education
Links to online articles of interest:
Wikipedia article on Evolution
Wikipedia entry on Creationism
Wikipedia article on Intelligent Design
Wikipedia article on The Discovery Institute
Wikipedia article on the Kitzmiller v. Dover case
Books relevant to Evolution, Creationism, Intelligent Design and Court Cases:
The Origin of Species
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
Scientific Creationism
Of Pandas and People
Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism
The Devil in Dover: An Insider's Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-Town America
Here is the schedule for the remainder of the Atheist Digest series:
Sunday August 16th – Topic 6 – Common Arguments and Misconceptions about Atheists - (Superbowl XX)
We run into some of these pretty frequently. A big one we need to discuss is "morality comes from religion." Another we must tackle is the "U.S. was founded by Christians/based on Christian principles" myth. We are reassuring Christians that we are not out to ‘get’ them and eat their babies, and discussing why we even need to reassure them. We will address irrational fears that Christianity is somehow being oppressed by ‘militant secularists’ and the gays.
Tuesday August 18th – Topic 7 – Creation, Cosmology, Deism, and the Space-Time Continuum. - (Chicagoa)
Chicagoa: This will be "a diary on cosmology - physics, logic, and theory - to explain to the haughty deists why we don't accept their First Cause or Kalam Cosmological arguments for the existence of a non-interventionist designer deity." This will possibly include a discussion of the philosophy of infinite/finite time and space, and explore the common misperceptions of Einstein’s and Hawking’s views of "God."
Thursday August 20th – Topic 8 – The Other Side of the Fence: Faith and Spirituality, (Rebuttal?) - (Colorado is the Shiznit)
Colorado is the Shiznit will lead the charge on this one, because the rest of us aren’t really qualified. We would like to have some discussion on what benefits many feel they get from faith and/or spirituality, and why they hold these beliefs. We would also like to get some kind of survey of religion/spiritual people’s perspective of Atheism/Atheists.
Sunday August 23rd - Topic 9 - Growing up Atheist - (WarrenS)
WarrenS talks about growing up in a family of atheists (all right, grandparents on one side were churchgoers, but that's it). How did his parents (both scientists) teach morality and ethics? How did growing up atheist affect his relationships with religions and religious organizations? How did it affect his relationships with religious people? Now that he has a child of his own, how will he approach these questions? Expect lots of stories and thought-provoking digressions in this one.
Tuesday August 25th - Conclusion: ‘Why We Care So Much’ - (XNeeOhCon, with input from all)
This one is pretty simple, but needs more attention. We need to make everyone see why we are so ‘obsessed’ with religion and what it really means to be Atheist in the United States. Within this section we will restate why we felt like participating in this series, and what we hoped to accomplish. We’ll try to tie up as many loose ends as possible and we will get some brief concluding statements from any of those who participated that would like to submit them.