Christian medical students want anti-evolution lectures

Medical student John David Johannessen and the leader of the Christian Medical Students Circle have petitioned the medical faculty at the University of Oslo for lectures "that not only argue the cause for evolution, but also the evidence against", student newspaper Universitas reports.

"The theory of evolution doesn't stand up and does not present enough convincing facts. It is one theory among many, but in education it is discussed as if it is accepted by everyone," Johannessen said.

"Of course one has to know the theory of evolution, it is after all part of the curriculum. But certain lecturers demand that one believe it as well. Then it becomes a question of faith and not subject," Johannessen said.

Johannessen told the newspaper that he and his fellows are often compared to American extremists. Besides not being taken seriously or being able to debate the topic relevantly, Johannessen said that 'evolutionists' practically harass those who do not agree with them.

Dean Per Brodal said it was regrettable if any university staff were disparaging to creationists, but that there was no reason to complain about a lack of relevant evidence. Brodal also felt that evolution had a rather minor spot in medical education.

Biology professor Nils Christian Stenseth argued that instead of indulging an 'off-topic' debate the medical faculty should offer a course in fundamental evolutionary biology, saying that nothing in biology could be understood out of an evolutionary context.

The Christian Medical Students Circle want three basic points to be included in the curriculum:

1 According to the theory of evolution a mutation must be immediately beneficial to survive through selection. But many phenomena explained by evolution (for example the eye) involve so many, small immediately detrimental mutations that only give a long-term beneficial effect.

2 There is no fossil evidence to indicate transitional forms between, for example, fish and land animals or apes and humans.

3 Evolution assumes too many extremely improbably events occurring over too short a span of time.

Yeah, I know. Ear bones suddenly appear inside jaws and this proves we came from boneless fishes. Seriously read this:

THE EDUCATIONAL DEBATE OVER DARWINISM

John Angus Campbell
University of Memphis

The debate over teaching Darwin's theory in public schools has been a feature of American public life since at
least the Scopes trial of 1925. Drawing on the liberal arts tradition centered in rhetoric and civic argument, this
essay argues that science education should not merely prepare tomorrow's scientists, but also educate scientifically
articulate citizens. It offers the Origin of Species as a model for educational strategies that would protect the
integrity of science, while addressing the objections of students and their parents to Darwin's ideas. Darwin's
work belongs in the great tradition of two-sided humanistic argument central to Western education since antiquity,
and exemplified in John Milton and John Stuart Mill. Debate between Darwin's theory and its alternatives, whether
young earth creationism or Intelligent Design, is recommended as a means to teach Darwin's theory and train
students in the central role of critique and argument in scientific reasoning.

FELICITY, DELIBERATIVE COMMUNITY AND DEMOCRACY

Deliberative community is a necessary condition for human felicity (Aristotle 1941: 1129). As long as human
beings must address practical questions of policy, value, and definition, which, even when they touch on matters of
science, elude science and demonstration, they must deliberate (Aristotle 1941: 953, 1028, 1331). Community, and
the felicity proper to it, therefore cannot be a scene of peace beyond difference, but must address and accommodate
difference (Garver 1994: 66-67; Sloane 1997: 1-2, 11). Oddly enough to contemporary ears, the classical art most
immediately focused on achieving public felicity is the art of rhetoric. Central to this art is the discovery of the means
of persuasion (Aristotle 1941: 1328-29). Rhetoric advances the aim of political science, to establish the good life, by
persuading a polity to reorder its values and address emergent needs. According to Aristotle, rhetoric encompassed
all contingent subject matters without itself having a subject matter (1941: 1325, 1337). All practical knowledge was
its province, but it "ruled" that province, in its most dignified expressions, from the standpoint of the common good
rather than from that of an interested party. What guaranteed that the common good rather than factional interest
would generally prevail was the transparency of public argument (Aristotle 1941: 1327-28). Everything of public
import, the expedient, the just, the noble, and the base, could be debated in public forums (Aristotle 1941: 1335-36).
As for the objection that rhetoric could be used to advance evil, "that is a charge which may be made in common
against all good things except virtue" (Aristotle 1941: 1328).

Rhetoric in its settings, a raucous debating assembly in ancient Athens or even a spirited discussion among
colleagues in a faculty meeting, might not be anyone's first notion of felicity, yet any politics worthy of the name
requires such exchanges. The social importance of the capacity to be heard as though one's opinion counted and
could make a difference constitutes one of the lasting contributions of Aristotle's Rhetoric to anthropology. For
Aristotle and the citizens of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., as for those of Republican Rome, and for
Renaissance humanists, rhetoric was an essential "human function" (Garver 1994: 236; Vickers 1990: 276). Its
by-product was political friendship, the capacity to deal with those with whom one differs to achieve common goals
and values (Garver 1994: 111; Vickers 1990: 271). If political friendship is to be a living social practice, and not a
pious ideal, the mind-set of rhetoric is essential both to education and public life (Cicero 1976: 11; 1986: 13).
Rhetoric and its counterpart, dialectic, are central to education, since learning to see how the same body of fact,
value, definition, and tradition (whether cultural or disciplinary) can prove opposites is an indispensable mental skill
applicable to any subject (Cicero 1976: 21). Rhetoric is central to public life, at least in a democracy, because the
rationale of public policy must be intelligible to all who are to be governed by it, and whose tax dollars support it.

If rhetoric is essential to democracy, the relationship of science to democracy has been ambivalent (Fuller 2000a:
12, 28; 2000b: 8, 43). From the time of Plato, the inability of the average citizen to master technical knowledge has
been an argument against democracy. The idea that ordinary people should judge science seems flatly anti-scientific.
Yet in a time of limited resources, when cost-benefit analyses determine priorities even among technical research
projects, when funding is not only public but a combination of private and public, only certain kinds of science will
be funded and laypersons will set the budgets. Health professionals increasingly deliberate with patients about their
modes of treatment, and vice versa. Universities have human subjects review boards representing many disciplines
to hold science accountable to common values. Clearly, science education in our time must not only train future
scientists, but also citizens to appreciate, value, and judge science. And this is why evolution, from the 1925 Scopes
trial until now, is such an instructive flashpoint in American education. Science must teach Darwin's theory, yet
Darwinism conflicts with the religious beliefs of many citizens (Larson 1997: 256-58). Can science adapt to its
public, or does evolution mark the point where democracy and science part company? This essay argues that the
challenge of teaching Darwin's theory exemplifies how science education must rethink its strategies and become
more self-consciously rhetorical if it is to preserve its own integrity and educate tomorrow's public and scientists for
democratic citizenship. It presents a model for how science education can reconcile technical ideas and cultural values
to improve both scientific and cultural literacy.

HOW WOULD DARWIN TEACH HIS THEORY?

The central problem with the traditional debate over Darwin's theory is the way it has been framed (Eger 1989:
291-94; Campbell & Meyer 2003). There can be little doubt that there are parents who want the public schools to
supplement Darwin's theory with the teachings of creation science (Overton 1996: 307-31; Ensign 1993: 94). A
more recent scientifically grounded and philosophically sophisticated challenge to Darwinism comes from Intelligent
Design (Campbell 1998: 469; Campbell & Meyer 2003). When science teachers insist that neither creation science
nor ID is science, and Darwin's theory is, they are met with the proposal that both Darwin's theory and challenges to
it be taught and students be left to make up their own minds (NAS 1998: 9). Science teachers understandably
respond that science is not democratic, and the curriculum of a science class cannot be settled by citizens dictating
what will qualify as science (Scott in USCCR 1999: 208; NAS 1998: 9).

Indeed, some of the most prominent and weighty philosophic voices on the "Darwin only" side of the debate are
adamant on this very point: "there has to come a time when we have to cry `finis' to the teaching of certain ideas . .
. . It is an act of bad faith even to present such ideas as a possible basis of belief" (Ruse 1982: 328-29). The
insistence of science educators on a "Darwin only" approach to teaching biology is grounded in philosophy and
practicality. Philosophically, many science teachers believe that teaching alternatives to Darwin is irresponsible.
Additionally, since time in the crowded school year is limited, teachers must set priorities (Scott in USCCR 1999:
224). Best leave broader questions to the humanities.

The "Darwin only" approach, while motivated by a laudable desire to preserve the integrity of science, violates that
integrity by overprotectiveness. Eugenie Scott and others are correct in insisting that science is not democratic. But
this is far from saying that only confusion would result if teachers used discussion and debate to teach why creation
science and ID are rejected by most scientists. Nor can the want of time, coupled with proliferating examples of
controversial topics that would allegedly overwhelm the curriculum, be accepted as a basis for dismissing the idea of
critical inquiry into scientific first principles as educationally legitimate. A teacher, of course, would have to prioritize
what question(s) would be debated and the topic might change with the semester. But the question, why do some
ideas count as science and others not, is as pertinent a question as one can ask in a science class.

As Stephen Meyer shows, the usual philosophic disclaimer that science carries no metaphysical or philosophic
baggage, since science assumes methodological as opposed to metaphysical naturalism, is tendentious, and
unwarranted by Newton's example, routinely used to support it (in USCCR 1999: 223-25). Since science involves
assumptions and employs diverse modes of reasoning, from controlled experiment and quantification to dialectic and
rhetoric, any education that deliberately discourages students from raising issues that might place current science in
question comes at a steep price (Pera 1994: 11; Austriaco 1999: 143; Meyer 1999: 29). Though science educators
target creation science and ID as enemies of science, their real opponent would seem to be the late philosopher of
science, Thomas Kuhn. So strongly is what Kuhn called "normal science" identified with science in the
contemporary classroom that to most students Kuhn's idea of "scientific revolution" would seem like an oxymoron
(1970: 23).

In a disturbing and deeply informative essay, Martin Eger (1989) contrasts today's dogmatic Darwinism with
values clarification, which requires critical questioning of even the most "unquestionable" values. The assumption of
values clarification is that students' moral beliefs should be backed by good reasons; otherwise, they rest on mere
prejudice, which is unacceptable. Even if, as predictably happens, deliberating about values creates friction between
parents and teachers, the teachers defend their practice for they regard the point at issue as a matter of professional
integrity (Eger 1989: 296-97). When we see that professional "integrity," the point in defense of which the
humanities teachers go to court, means teaching critical thinking, we realize that the model of the mind currently
presented in many public schools, dogmatism and the unquestioning acceptance of authority in science, versus
skepticism and critical questioning in the humanities, is flatly incoherent (Eger 1989: 300-1).

Particularly in a time when science affects so many aspects of life, and raises questions about what is in our food,
to how it is grown and processed, to health care and the integrity and meaning of research on breast cancer, to
questions of human reproduction, and even national security, the public is ill-served by any approach to science
education that discourages critical thinking and rewards deference to authority. True, there are technical features of
science that must be learnt by rote, and relevant experts deserve a respectful hearing. But in the process of learning,
any significant idea, whether it be the interpretation of the human condition encountered in Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas,
John Milton, Herman Melville or Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Richard Dawkins or Richard Rorty, larger questions
occur. One would think that educators, whether scientists or humanists, would welcome whatever questions are
raised by their subject matter and be eager to make links between the sciences and the humanities, and vice versa, as
well as note distinctions. Least of all should anyone dismiss the "consumer protection" interest in encouraging a
critical attitude toward science. A recent New York Times Magazine (16 March 2003) cover said it all: "Half of
What Doctors Know is Wrong." But how can one teach science, that is, instruct novices in the basics, while
encouraging debate over technical material, let alone educate about "paradigm shifts" and the implications of science
for world views? Happily, we have a model for how to do precisely this: Charles Darwin's classic On the Origin of
Species (1859).

A STRATEGY FOR MOVING THE DEBATE FORWARD

Darwin suffers from being at once famous and unknown. Darwin is famous for his theory of natural selection and
the scientific standing which that theory gave the older thesis that living things have changed (evolved) via descent
with modification from previous living things. But Darwin is too little known for the careful thought he gave the
anticipated reception of his work by his colleagues and his culture, and the careful teaching strategy he developed to
enable his readers to find within their own experience the premises that would allow them to embrace his ideas--or to
go with him at least part way. Darwin, like Galileo before him, was twice great. He had the conceptual gift to see the
world in terms radically different from those in which his contemporaries saw it. And the practical gift to recognize
that if his ideas were to be effective he would have to present them in a manner his contemporaries could understand
(Campbell 1986: 352; 1989: 56; 1994: 65). The structure of Darwin's Origin is his response to the question of how
to turn the controversy over "the development hypothesis" into an invitation to think again and differently. This is the
very challenge faced in science education today.

There are many ways of putting Darwin's thesis. The usual way is to summarize it as a set of universal
generalizations. Here is Stephen Jay Gould's version: "1. Organisms vary, and these variations are inherited (at least
in part) by their offspring; 2. Organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive; 3. On the average,
offspring that vary most strongly in directions favored by the environment will survive and propagate. Favorable
variation will therefore accumulate in populations by natural selection" (1977: 11). Gould's account is useful as far
as it goes. But even a helpful definition may come at a price. Martin Rudwick puts the matter well when he observes
that formalizations "are intellectual tools far too crude to do justice to the subtle diversity of reasoning and judgment
that is found in all real scientific argument" (1970: 101). Consider how differently the central mechanism of
Darwin's theory sounds when we encounter it in the language Darwin himself used in the Origin:

As man can produce and certainly has produced a great result by his methodical
and unconscious means of selection, what may not nature effect? Man can act only
on external and visible characters: nature cares nothing for appearances, except
insofar as they may be useful to any being. She can act on the whole machinery of
life. Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which
she tends. Every selected character is fully exercised by her, and the being is
placed under well-suited conditions of life. Man keeps the natives of many climates
in the same country, he seldom exercises each selected character in some peculiar
and fitting manner; he feeds a long and a short beaked pigeon on the same food; he
does not exercise a long-backed or long-legged quadruped in any peculiar manner;
he exposes sheep with long and short wool to the same climate. He does not allow
the most vigorous males to struggle for the females. He does not rigidly destroy all
inferior animals, but protects during each varying season, as far as lies in his
power, all his productions. He often begins his selection by some half-monstrous
form; or at least by some modification prominent enough to catch his eye, or to be
plainly useful to him. Under nature, the slightest difference of structure or
constitution may well turn the nicely-balanced scale in the struggle for life, and so
be preserved. How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! How short his time!
and consequently how poor will his productions be, compared with those
accumulated by nature during whole geological periods. Can we wonder, then, that
nature's productions should be far "truer" in character than man's productions; that
they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and
should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship? . . . It may be said that
natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the whole world,
every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and
adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working wherever and whenever
opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its
organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in
progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapses of ages, and then so
imperfect is our view into long past geological ages, that we only see that the forms
of life are now different from what they formerly were (1859: 83-84).

What is the difference between these two accounts of the "same" thing? One could say that Gould's version is more
literal. But Gould is summarizing an idea that is already established, whereas Darwin cannot merely instruct but must
simultaneously instruct, delight, and persuade. Darwin is not being cavalier, for in later sections of the Origin he,
too, is literal. Telling the "truth," in the sense of advancing an important new idea that calls into question a previous
way of thinking, is never easy. Part of the responsibility of a truth-teller is to use linguistic license to help an
audience see the new in the familiar.

Darwin's care in presenting his argument so his readers could understand it is made particularly clear by its
arrangement. The foundation of Darwin's colorful description of natural selection in Chap. 4 is carefully laid by the
stair-step pattern of his first three chapters. Chap. 1, "Variation Under Domestication," described the role of variation
and selection in domestic breeding; Chap. 2, "Variation Under Nature," described how the variation grounding
selection under domestication also operates under nature; Chap. 3, "The Struggle for Existence," describes the role
of competition in nature in producing differential adaptation; Chap. 4, "Natural Selection," unifies the themes of all
these preparatory chapters and brings them into focus.

A clear challenge Darwin faced was to get his reader to add up the evidence he presented along the lines his theory
requires. Darwin's audience knew that there were two kinds of causation: direct agency causation--what we call
"creation"--and "secondary causation," or what we call explanation by natural law. Darwin does not argue that
agency causation does not occur. Both in the fly-leaf of the Origin, and at least twice in his text, he refers to primary
or agent causation. His key challenge is to get his reader to recognize the capacity of secondary causes to bring about
what previously had been regarded as immediate acts of a divine agency. Darwin proceeds to use a well-received
principle of established science to radicalize science as it was then understood. Isaac Newton, in the course of
differentiating his science from that of the Middle Ages, with its empirically unverifiable "substantial forms," had
revived the term "vera causa." This principle, summarized by John Herschel in Preliminary Discourse (1830),
made a "true cause" subject to three tests. First, the proposed cause had to be shown to exist independently of the
phenomena it was to explain. Second, it had to have sufficient power to bring about the effect to be explained. And
third, it had to provide reasons to believe it had brought about the effect claimed (Kavalovski 1974: 40-72). Though
the pattern is sometimes obscured in the actual organization of the Origin, anyone familiar with it could find vera
causa argument in Darwin's text (Hodge 1977: 245). Clearly, Darwin wishes to present domestic breeding, that is,
"selection," as a vera causa, and show via the "struggle for existence" and differential adaptation that whatever man
could do by domestication nature could do better--though without conscious intent.

One of the most remarkable features of the Origin, in sharp contrast to the attitude of so many contemporary
science educators, is its welcoming attitude toward skepticism. Starting with Chap. 6, Darwin anticipates his reader's
doubts, affirms their legitimacy, and proceeds for the next several chapters to address every objection he has come
across in twenty years of research. Darwin's eagerness to address objections gives the middle chapters of the Origin
something of a "Perils of Pauline" quality, as he poses what seem like show-stopping objections--organs of extreme
complexity, like the eye of the eagle, or the geometrically exact honey combs of bees, or sterile worker ants--and
offers what seem, intellectually speaking, like hair-breadth escapes (1859: 186-89, 224-42). Each of his rebuttals but
rehearses the basic elements of his explanation from Chap. 1, based on the transformations in plants and animals
known to be possible through domestic breeding. Again and again, when Darwin is hard pressed for an explanation,
he uses the analogy of domestic breeding to situate the issue in the context of his reader's common sense.

Darwin's willingness to anticipate objections, and place his theory at risk, gives the Origin much of its
readability. The inherent drama of his material becomes even more interesting when, in increasing frequency in later
chapters, Darwin contrasts the assumptions required by his theory with those required by the theory of his
adversaries. In the course of the Origin, Darwin contrasts his theory with that of direct agent causation no fewer
than 108 times, with 63 of these occurring in the final four chapters. This crescendo of contrasts reaches its climax in
the final paragraphs of the Origin, when Darwin predicts that when his views are accepted, "we will no longer look
at nature as a savage looks at a ship" (1859: 485). Though clearly a ship is a result of intelligent design, what Darwin
evidently means is that his theory will place within science what had seemed beyond it. The final sentence of the
Origin presents his new view of the relation of primary to secondary causes: "There is grandeur in this view of life
with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one and that whilst
this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, endless forms, most wonderful and most
beautiful have been and are being evolved" (Darwin 1859: 490). Eloquent as is the Origin's last sentence, an
equally, or even more, important sentence is the first of that same chapter: "This whole volume is one long
argument" (Darwin 1859: 459).

As the title of David Depew and Bruce Webber's Darwinism Evolving (1997) indicates, Darwin's argument
today is not where Darwin left it in 1859, but continues to be an adapting, developing legacy--a work in progress, if
ever there was one. So vibrant and sprawling is this legacy, with sharp contemporary differences over the adequacy
of Darwin's mechanism of natural selection, that Stuart Kauffman in his mammoth The Origins of Order even has a
few kind words for young-earth creationists for insisting that "design" could not be explained away by Darwin's
mechanism (1993: 643).

What is clear to anyone conversant with various continuing controversies within evolution between Darwin's heirs
(Sterelny 2001), or between Darwin and his critics (Behe 1996), is that Darwin never chose his words better than
when he summarized his work as an "argument." "Argument" accurately describes Darwin's legacy and the
intellectual, moral, and pedagogic responsibilities that all of us--scientists and humanists alike--assume when we
teach him. The "fact" of evolution cannot be observed, its reality is nothing less or more than the confluence and
force of various lines of argument--as in a strong legal case, or a well-constructed detective story. Donald Kennedy
and the authors of the National Academy of Sciences guidebook for teaching about evolution could not be more
correct than when they stress the difficulty of teaching young people that Darwin's theory, like any generally
received theory, is much more than speculation (NAS 1998: 56; Kennedy 1998: A48). Yet Kennedy and his
colleagues miss an important point, when they fail to realize that their "Darwin only" approach is precisely what is
preventing their students from grasping the meaning of "theory." Only when students understand the force and
meaning of argument, and through this when they grasp how the fruits of arguments become "facts," will they
understand the power, meaning, and limits of "theory"--Darwin's or any other.

THE TRADITION OF ARGUMENT-CENTERED EDUCATION

Much as Darwin deserves credit for presenting the thesis of his book in a way that would be intelligible,
accessible, and as persuasive as possible to his contemporaries, the tradition of inquiry and argument manifest in the
Origin did not originate with Darwin. Darwin's classic exemplifies on every page a tradition Darwin inherited. For
over 2,000 years, the central feature of Western education was training in the twin inventional and disputational arts
of rhetoric and dialectic (Vickers 1990: 8; Sloane 1997: 1). Darwin was steeped in this tradition not only through his
own early education, which was thoroughly classical, but by the polemical and argument-centered works of theology
he read as a divinity student. Argument was equally central to the training he received in science (De Beer 1983:
31-33). Francis Bacon wrote on rhetoric, and Darwin read him, yet one has only to open John Herschel's
Preliminary Discourse, which filled the young Darwin with "a burning zeal to add even the most humble
contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science," to find that Herschel's rationale for science develops Cicero's
case, inherited from Protagoras and Isocrates, for the social benefits of the study of oratory (Herschel 1987: 1).

The riches of so prominent, varied, and central a tradition reached Darwin by many channels simultaneously. The
author whom Darwin carried with him into the jungles of Brazil, while on the Beagle voyage, was John Milton.
Milton was not only a great poet-theologian, but an author of a treatise on rhetoric when it was at the height of its
influence in European education (Fish 1971: 67-68; Vickers 1990: 196). Given Milton's training, it is hardly
remarkable that his great poem is also an epic argument. The conclusion of his invocation reads: "What in me is dark
illumine, what is low, raise and support, that to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal providence
and justify the ways of God to man" (1982: 47; emphasis added).

Now Milton's use of the term "argument" is no more accidental, or merely decorative, than it was in the opening
sentence of Darwin's final chapter in the Origin. Milton's poem, like Darwin's Origin, features an epic contest
between opposed principles. That Milton's argument is theological and allegorical, while Darwin's is scientific and
"literal," makes no difference to the teaching methods of the two authors, which are strictly, and rigorously,
symmetrical. Precisely because Milton is earnest about his Christianity, he gives the devil his due. It was not for
nothing that William Blake claimed Milton was of the devil's party and did not know it (1971: 150). As Milton
wrote:

. . . and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: one who brings
a mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than hee
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free . . . .
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven (1977: 240).

Nor is the contrast in any way lessened, when one hears the speech Milton gave the Lord. Noticing the devil making
his way toward earth, God observes to his Son:

For man will hearken to his glozing lies,
And easily transgress the sole command,
Sole pledge of his obedience; so will fall
He and his faithless progeny: Whose fault?
Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to had stood, though free to fall . . . .
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.
Not free, what proof could they have given sincere
Of true allegiance, constant Faith or Love,
Where only what they needs must do, appeared
Not what they would? What praise could they receive
What pleasure I from such obedience paid,
When will and reason (reason also is choice)
Useless and vain, of freedom both despoiled,
Made passive both, had served necessity,
Not me (Milton 1977: 291).

The reason for this contrast in effectiveness between the two speeches was famously pointed out by the Milton
scholar, Stanley Fish, in his classic of critical scholarship, Surprised By Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1971).
The devil's speech is an example of rhetoric--it is supposed to move us. God's speech is dialectic, its "plain speech"
speaks to the mind, not to the will. The logic of the contrast, as Fish points out, is precisely for the reader to realize
his or her complicity in the devil's argument.

Taking a page from Fish, one might well imagine a book entitled, Surprised By Science: The Reader in the
Origin of Species. What this book would illustrate is the way Darwin, following the analysis of his teaching
strategy, continually surprises the anti-evolutionist reader with the instability of anti-evolutionary premises. Darwin's
argument may similarly de-stabilize the evolutionism of the merely conventional adherent, when he or she realizes its
inadequacies. But whether reading Darwin would strengthen or weaken one's commitment to his theory, the
symmetry between Milton and Darwin should now be clear. Argument in utramque partem is not just the imperious
voice of truth--whether that truth be founded on revelation or science. Two-sided argument engages the play of
opposed voices to enable the reader to understand and exercise informed choice. The issue in play is more than
classroom decorum. The leading maxim of Ciceronian education is also the earliest rationale for freedom of the
press. As Milton eloquently put it in Aereopagetica: "that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary"
(1977: 167).

SCIENCE EDUCATION AND DEMOCRATIC CULTURE

Milton and Darwin's argument, one might call it the central educational premise of Western culture (Sloane 1997:
1), that not by information alone, but by information presented through two-sided argument are minds prepared for
reasoned choice, was powerfully reinforced by that other great classic, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859). Mill's
treatise, appearing twenty-seven years after the Great Reform Bill of 1832, and nine years before the Reform Bill of
1868, which granted nearly universal manhood suffrage in England, was motivated by his fear that democracy could
become another form of tyranny. Part of Mill's work presents the now familiarly cold--if nonetheless liberating--face
of liberalism in his insistence that self-protection was the only valid reason for the state to interfere in the life of an
individual. A civic and "warm" side to Mill's liberalism, however, is to be found in his conviction that a democratic
society can prevent its settled opinions (even if grounded on truth) from becoming mere prejudices by encouraging
the practice of public argument.

Mill's liberalism owes much to Milton, and may justly be regarded as a secular extension and radicalization of his
views. Mill extends Milton by applying the latter's notion of freedom of opinion and debate among Christians to all
citizens regardless of religion; Mill radicalizes Milton by making open discussion the defining cultural practice of a
free society. No less than many contemporary American science teachers or religiously conservative parents, Mill
was concerned with the potential ideological abuses of power, whether stemming from the many or the few (1980:
74). Though Mill was primarily motivated by the tyrannical potential of democracy, he was no less skeptical of the
intelligentsia, particularly those who, like August Comte, affected to speak in the name of science: "And some of
those modern reformers who have placed themselves in strongest opposition to the religions of the past have been no
way behind either churches or sects in their right of spiritual domination" (1980: 73).

Mill's hope for a society informed by science, and which was also democratic and free, rested on the Ciceronian
premise that freedom requires the play of opposite opinions. Mill's vision seems at times to be a kind of reversal of
Plato in that, for Mill, the life of the mind does not depend on an elite class of guardians, but on the practice of
controversy to shape the character of an entire people. Mill begins an important passage by seeming to speak of an
elite: "No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect
to whatever conclusions it may lead" (1980: 95). Then, in mid-stream, he draws an unexpected conclusion. The
point of a free society is not to encourage the development of an elite, for "great individual thinkers" can flourish in a
closed society: "But there never has been, nor ever will be, in that atmosphere an intellectually active people" (Mill
1980: 95).

The key to Mill's scientific-civic vision was not just the passive toleration of error--you are free to speak but why
should I listen?--but the active hope that debate would communicate a self-renewing energy to the most ordinary
convictions (1980: 97). Nor did Mill exempt science from the judgment of popular discussion. Mill saw debate over
science as vital to a society that would be open and democratic: "Even in natural philosophy, there is always some
geocentric theory instead of heliocentric, some phlogiston instead of oxygen; and it has to be shown why that other
theory cannot be the true one . . ." (1980: 98). At the conclusion of Chap. II, "Of the Liberty of Thought and
Discussion," Mill summarizes four grounds for the freedom of opinion and its expression:

1. "If any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny
this is to assume our own infallibility.

2. Though the silenced opinion be an error, it may and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth.

3. Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is,
vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice.

4. [Unless it is questioned] the meaning of [a belief or doctrine] will be in danger of being lost or enfeebled, and
deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct . . ." (1980: 115-16).

The implications of Mill's views for contemporary education in general, not excluding science education, could not,
it would seem, be clearer. Yet today they are far from commonplace, particularly, and most lamentably, among those
ostensibly most eager to advance the teaching of Darwin's theory.

TEACHING DARWIN'S THEORY AS AN ARGUMENT

Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, contends that nothing should be
taught in the science classroom that has not gained full acceptance by the scientific community, and thus both creation
science and contemporary ID theory should be excluded (in USCCR 1999: 224-26). The argument in favor of this
view, supported also by the National Academy of Science, is both philosophic and practical, as teachers are limited
by time and, of course, must set priorities (NAS 1998: 9). However justified this position may be pragmatically, it
cannot provide an adequate philosophy for science education in general, let alone an ideal toward which science
education should aspire. The aim of science education is neither merely to "cover" prescribed material, nor even to
train future scientists--proper to its mission as is each of these goals. A significant aim of science education in a
democracy is to prepare scientifically literate citizens (Fuller 1993: 29-32). To prepare scientifically literate citizens,
science must teach students to reason critically about facts and theories, and know how theories are certified or
rejected, not just what they are.

In a fast-changing intellectual landscape, in which today's conventional wisdom is tomorrow's nonsense, learning
how to demarcate science from non-science is an important, and open, dialectical/rhetorical question to be taught as
part of science, and not to be relegated to the humanities or social sciences. If some students end up rejecting
Darwinism because they are not persuaded of its truth, or reject or accept creation science or ID, having had an
opportunity to examine the facts, and hear and read the arguments on all sides, these outcomes must be counted as
successes of an open, liberal system of education. The point, after all, of science education in a democracy is not to
convince students of the truth of current scientific theories, but to teach them what they are, and why they are
current, and by sharpening student minds through argument, qualify students, as citizens and future scientists, to
judge and see possible alternatives.

Science as a body of conventional wisdom to be held in reverence is not the science Darwin practiced--and in spirit
it is not science at all, whatever "accidental truths," as Mill might put it, it may enunciate. Darwin challenged the
received methods, theories, and philosophy of science of his time. It is a historical irony that the most prominent
defenders of Darwin's theory wed the teaching of this theory to the exact reverse of the teaching philosophy he
practiced and espoused. The cultural distrust raised by this narrow, outdated, positivist, and reductionist philosophy
makes it among the greatest obstacles blocking instruction in Darwin's theory in American education today. Yet there
is a clear alternative to a policy that has divided us as a culture and that is materially contributing to the stand-off
which makes it impossible to teach Darwin's theory in some parts of the country at all. One-hundred and forty-four
years of science teaching divorced from Liberal Education is enough. Darwin deserves better, science deserves
better, and as American educators we know better (Cobern 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000). Teach the controversies? We
owe no less to ourselves, our students, our tradition, and our profession.

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John Angus Campbell teaches rhetorical theory and criticism at the University of Memphis, Memphis, TN
38152.

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