Let's Have No More Monkey Trials - To teach faith as science is to undermine both

The half-century campaign to eradicate any vestige of religion from public life has run its course. The backlash from a nation fed up with the A.C.L.U. kicking crÃ¨ches out of municipal Christmas displays has created a new balance. State-supported universities may subsidize the activities of student religious groups. Monuments inscribed with the Ten Commandments are permitted on government grounds. The Federal Government is engaged in a major antipoverty initiative that gives money to churches. Religion is back out of the closet.

But nothing could do more to undermine this most salutary restoration than the new and gratuitous attempts to invade science, and most particularly evolution, with religion. Have we learned nothing? In Kansas, conservative school-board members are attempting to rewrite statewide standards for teaching evolution to make sure that creationism's modern stepchild, intelligent design, infiltrates the curriculum. Similar anti-Darwinian mandates are already in place in Ohio and are being fought over in 20 states. And then, as if to second the evangelical push for this tarted-up version of creationism, out of the blue appears a declaration from Christoph Cardinal SchÃ¶nborn of Vienna, a man very close to the Pope, asserting that the supposed acceptance of evolution by John Paul II is mistaken. In fact, he says, the Roman Catholic Church rejects "neo-Darwinism" with the declaration that an "unguided evolutionary process--one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence--simply cannot exist."

Cannot? On what scientific evidence? Evolution is one of the most powerful and elegant theories in all of human science and the bedrock of all modern biology. SchÃ¶nborn's proclamation that it cannot exist unguided--that it is driven by an intelligent designer pushing and pulling and planning and shaping the process along the way--is a perfectly legitimate statement of faith. If he and the Evangelicals just stopped there and asked that intelligent design be included in a religion curriculum, I would support them. The scandal is to teach this as science--to pretend, as does SchÃ¶nborn, that his statement of faith is a defense of science. "The Catholic Church," he says, "will again defend human reason" against "scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of 'chance and necessity,'" which "are not scientific at all." Well, if you believe that science is reason and that reason begins with recognizing the existence of an immanent providence, then this is science. But, of course, it is not. This is faith disguised as science. Science begins not with first principles but with observation and experimentation.

In this slippery slide from "reason" to science, SchÃ¶nborn is a direct descendant of the early 17th century Dutch clergyman and astronomer David Fabricius, who could not accept Johannes Kepler's discovery of elliptical planetary orbits. Why? Because the circle is so pure and perfect that reason must reject anything less. "With your ellipse," Fabricius wrote Kepler, "you abolish the circularity and uniformity of the motions, which appears to me increasingly absurd the more profoundly I think about it." No matter that, using Tycho Brahe's most exhaustive astronomical observations in history, Kepler had empirically demonstrated that the planets orbit elliptically.

This conflict between faith and science had mercifully abated over the past four centuries as each grew to permit the other its own independent sphere. What we are witnessing now is a frontier violation by the forces of religion. This new attack claims that because there are gaps in evolution, they therefore must be filled by a divine intelligent designer.

How many times do we have to rerun the Scopes "monkey trial"? There are gaps in science everywhere. Are we to fill them all with divinity? There were gaps in Newton's universe. They were ultimately filled by Einstein's revisions. There are gaps in Einstein's universe, great chasms between it and quantum theory. Perhaps they are filled by God. Perhaps not. But it is certainly not science to merely declare it so.

To teach faith as science is to undermine the very idea of science, which is the acquisition of new knowledge through hypothesis, experimentation and evidence. To teach it as science is to encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a nation in the thrall of religious authority. To teach it as science is to discredit the welcome recent advances in permitting the public expression of religion. Faith can and should be proclaimed from every mountaintop and city square. But it has no place in science class. To impose it on the teaching of evolution is not just to invite ridicule but to earn it.

They teach music as THEORY too. You gonna claim that music may not exist.

Oh yes...your sooo right. I guess I just HAVE to do that since I am such a simpleton and ignorant of what you know. How convenient of you to divorce what evolution THEORY is and make such a comparison to Music theory. A false argument on its face. Music is much the same as math and with a great amount of work you can PROVE the theory and yet with evolution we have MUCH NOT proven.

Your problem is you either don't know what a scientific theory is. Or you've been told, but you've ignored it.

And your problem is your assumptions.

It's probably the latter. Creationists are remarkably impervious to information.

So then I guess you can PROVE the theory? After all its all that I want. If not totally provable then why is it taught as so much the fact by so many? All else is ok to dismiss but the evolution theory remains. Or is it just more anti-religion bigotry by calling people impervious to "information" as if they are so stupid/ignorant for not believing an unproven theory? Some places at least teach BOTH theories. I guess they are just idiots too.

No, you stop teaching bad science: evolution as if it proves scientific materialism and disproves the existence of God.

As for Hitler, you mean a jibe, but there is more to it than you think. Hitler sincerely embraced extreme German nationalism and the leading New Age and scientific theories of the day: the teachings of Madame Blavatsky and the Ultima Thule society, and doctrines of scientific racism, eugenics, and evolution -- with much of it imported from the US and Britain.

A vulgar belief in evolution was a large part of what fostered and sustained Hitler and the Nazis. Take a look at the War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edwin Black, gives an account of its role.

Here is a useful review by Johannes L. Jacobse:

In War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Edwin Black exhaustively chronicles the rise of the American eugenics movement. Eugenics ("good birth" in Greek) is considered crackpot science today, but at one time it captured the hearts and minds of America's leading thinkers, including social scientists, educators, judges, philanthropists, and clergy.

America in the late 1800s and early 1900s was particularly susceptible to eugenic ideology, writes Black. The divisions between people were marked not by economic class but by race, which compelled social analysts to think in group terms. Crime and poverty were considered ethnic - and in some cases generational - phenomena, rather than individual incidents. The resistance to quick assimilation demonstrated by the eighteen million immigrants between 1890 and 1920 threatened social cohesion. Regional trends like the absorption of Mexicans after the Mexican-American war, the mass influx of Chinese laborers, and the numbers of emancipated slaves affirmed the fear that America was tearing itself apart.

The father of the modern eugenics movement, England's Francis J. Galton, gave the pseudo-science its first taste of scientific credibility. Intoxicated by the ideas of Charles Darwin, the rediscovered genetic theories of Gregor Mendel, and the secularized philosophy of Herbert Spencer, Galton concluded that assembling data about social heredity could predict which families and ethnic groups would produce socially desirable offspring.

Eugenics never found widespread acceptance in England, but in America it was a different story. The American movement found a leader in Charles Davenport, a biologist with a flair for organization, fundraising, and promotion. Drawing upon Galton's work and funded by the Carnegie Foundation, Davenport opened the Carnegie Station for Experimental Evolution in Cold Spring Harbor, New York in 1904.

Davenport wasted no time. In short order, a battalion of social workers fanned into the countryside to chart the characteristics of people they considered undesirable (blacks, poor, infirm, criminals, alcoholics, etc.). Thousands of people were forcibly sterilized (6,000 between 1907 and 1927; 36,000 by 1940). Children were taken from their families. Criminals were castrated.

Some states passed legislation supporting sterilization, and the nation soon found itself considering a federal policy of forced sterilization. The eugenics movement found its poster child in Carrie Buck, the daughter of a prostitute. After giving birth to an illegitimate child, Carrie was forcibly institutionalized and declared "feebleminded by the laws of heredity."

Oliver Wendell Holmes was the chief jurist hearing the case. Carrie lost 8-1. Writing for the majority, Holmes arrogantly declared:

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if we could not call upon those who sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices… compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes… three generations of imbeciles is enough.

It was music to the eugenicists' ears.

Common people were more clear-headed. The arbitrary decisions about what constituted social desirability struck many Americans not only as capricious but as evil. The movement was resisted, critiqued, and mocked at every turn, and justifiably so. It was challenged in the courts and editorial pages. Support for it finally began to wane.

In Germany, the opposite happened. The American ideas were enthusiastically embraced by German thinkers, resulting in the murder of 250,000 disabled Germans between 1935 and 1945 alone. Black believes that the inspiration for Hitler's Final Solution drew more from the ideas of American eugenicists than from Hitler's nationalism. Here the real evil that eugenic ideas could unleash was revealed to anyone willing to look.

However War Against the Weak displays one glaring inconsistency. Early on Black praises Planned Parenthood, but Planned Parenthood preserves the eugenic ideal more visibly than any other American organization today. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and the patron saint of the contemporary abortion movement, was an ardent and unrepentant eugenicist. Black roundly criticizes her, but why he finds it necessary to throw this bone to Planned Parenthood is unclear.

Black concludes his impressive work with an ominous warning:

After Hitler eugenics did not disappear. It renamed itself. What has thrived loudly for decades quietly took postwar refuge under the labels human genetics and genetic counseling.

Genetic data banks, designer babies, and plans for massive social engineering projects are run by a new league of eugenicists that threaten the weak on a scale about which early eugenicists could only dream. Only one precept can prevent a slide into this dark age of war against the weak, cautions Black: "Nothing should be done to exclude, infringe, repress, or harm a person because of his genetic makeup." A simpler commandment will do: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

http://www.townhall.com/bookclub/black.html

Here is the website for the book:
http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/articles.php

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