Pt2
Provine blamed the scientific establishment itself for misleading the public about the absolute incompatibility of contemporary Darwinism with any belief in God, designing forces, or absolute standards of good and evil. Scientific leaders have obscured the conflict for fear of jeopardizing public support for their funding, and also because some of them believe that religion may still play a useful role in maintaining public morality. According to Provine, "These rationalizations are politic but intellectually dishonest."
The organizations that speak officially for science continue to deny that there is a conflict between Darwinism and "religion." This denial is another example of the skilful manipulation of definitions, because there are evolution-based religions that embrace naturalism with enthusiasm. Stephen Jay Gould holds up the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, "the greatest evolutionist of our century and a lifelong Russian Orthodox," as proof that evolution and religion are compatible. The example is instructive, because Dobzhansky made a religion out of evolution. According to a eulogy by Francisco Ayala, "Dobzhansky was a religious man, although he apparently rejected fundamental beliefs of traditional religion, such as the existence of God and of life beyond physical death. His religiosity was grounded on the conviction that there is meaning in the universe. He saw that meaning in the fact that evolution has produced the stupendous diversity of the living world and has progressed from primitive forms of life to mankind...He believed that somehow mankind would eventually evolve into higher levels of harmony and creativity." In short, Dobzhansky was what we would today call a New Age pantheist. Of course evolution is not incompatible with religion when the religion is evolution.
Dobzhansky was one of the principal founders of the neo- Darwinian synthesis. Another was Julian Huxley, who promoted a religion of "evolutionary humanism." A third was the paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson. Simpson explained in his book The Meaning of Evolution that "there are some beliefs still current, labeled as religious and involved with religious emotions, that conflict with evolution and are therefore intellectually untenable in spite of their emotional appeal." Simpson added that it is nonetheless "self-evident ...that evolution and true religion are compatible." By true religion he meant naturalistic religion, which accepts that "man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind." Because efforts have been made to obscure the point, it should be emphasized that Simpson's view is not some personal opinion extraneous to the real "science" of Darwinism. It is an expression of the same naturalism that gives Darwinists confidence that mutation and natural selection, Darwinism's "blind watchmaker," can do all the work of a creator.
Against this background readers may perceive the cruel irony in Justice Brennan's opinion for the Supreme Court majority, holding the Louisiana "balanced treatment" statute unconstitutional because the creationists who promoted it had a "religious purpose." Of course they had a religious purpose, if by that we mean a purpose to try to do something to counter the highly successful efforts of proponents of naturalism to) have their philosophy established in the public schools as "fact." If creationists object to naturalistic evolution on religious grounds, they are admonished that it is inappropriate for religion to meddle with science. If they try to state scientific objections, they are disqualified instantly by definitions devised for that purpose by their adversaries. Sisyphys himself, eternally rolling his stone up that hill in Hades, must pity their frustration.
The Darwinists are also frustrated, however, because they find the resurgence of creationism baffling. Why can't these people learn that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming? Why do they persist in denying the obvious? Above all, how can they be so dishonest as to claim that scientific evidence supports their absurd position? Writing the introduction to a collection of polemics titled Scientists Confront Creationism, Richard Lewontin attempted to explain why creationism is doomed by its very nature. Because he is a dedicated Marxist as well as a famous geneticist, Lewontin saw the conflict between creation and evolution as a class struggle, with history inevitably awarding the victory to the naturalistic class. The triumph of evolution in the schools in the post-Sputnik era signaled that "the culture of the dominant class had triumphed, and traditional religious values, the only vestige of control that rural people had over their own lives and the lives of their families, had been taken away from them." In fact, many creationists are urban professionals who make their living from technology, but Lewontin's basic point is valid. The "fact of evolution" is an instrument of cultural domination and it is only to be expected that people who are being consigned t the dustbin of history should make some protest.
Lewontin was satisfied that creationism cannot survive because its acceptance of miracles puts it at odds with the more rational perception of the world as a place where all events have natural causes. Even a creationist "crosses seas not on foot but in machines, finds the pitcher empty when he has poured out its contents, and the cupboard bare when he has eaten the last of the loaf" Lewontin thus saw creationism as falsified not so much by any discoveries of modern science as by universal human experience, a thesis that does little to explain either why so absurd a notion has attracted so many adherents or why we should expect it to lose ground in the near future.
Once again we see how the power to define can be used to distort, especially when the critical definition is implicit rather than exposed to view. (I remind the reader that to Lewontin and myself, a "creationist" is not necessarily a biblical literalist, but rather any person who believes that God creates.) If creationists really were people who live in an imaginary world of continual miracles, there would be very few of them. On the contrary, from a creationist point of view, the very fact that the universe is on the whole orderly, in a manner comprehensible to our intellect, is evidence that we and it were fashioned by a common intelligence. What is truly a miracle, in the pejorative sense of an event having no rational connection with what has gone before, is the emergence of a being with consciousness, free will, and a capacity to understand the laws of nature in a universe which in the beginning contained only matter in mindless motion.
Once we understand that biologists like Lewontin are employing their scientific prestige in support of a philosophical platform, there is no longer any reason to be intimidated by their claims to scientific expertise. On the contrary, the inability of most biologist to make any sense out of creationist criticisms of their presuppositions is evidence of their own philosophical naivete' The "overwhelming evidence for naturalistic evolution" no longer overwhelms when the naturalistic worldview is itself called into question, and that worldview is as problematical as any other set of metaphysical assumptions when it is placed on the table for examination rather than being taken for granted as "the way we think today."
The problem with scientific naturalism as a worldview is that it takes a sound methodological premise of natural science and transforms it into a dogmatic statement about the nature of the universe. Science is committed by definition to empiricism, by which I mean that scientists seek to find truth by observation, experiment, and calculation rather than by studying sacred books or achieving mystical states of mind. It may well be, however, that there are certain questions- important questions, ones to which we desperately want to know the answers-that cannot be answered by the methods available to our science. These may include not only broad philosophical issues such as whether the universe has a purpose, but also questions we have become accustomed to think of as empirical, such as how life first began or how complex biological systems were put together.
Suppose, however, that some people find it intolerable either to be without answers to these questions or to allow the answers to come from anyone but scientists. In that case science must provide answers, but to do this, it must invoke scientism, a philosophical doctrine which asserts arbitrarily that knowledge comes only through the methods of investigation available to the natural sciences. The Soviet Cosmonaut who announced upon landing that he had been to the heavens and had not seen God was expressing crudely the basic philosophical premise that underlies Darwinism. Because we cannot examine God in our telescopes or under our microscopes, God is unreal. It is meaningless to say that some entity exists if in principle we can never have knowledge of that entity.
With the methodology of scientism in mind, we can understand what it means to contrast scientific "knowledge" with religious "belief," and what follows from the premise that natural science is not suitable for investigating whether the universe has a purpose. Belief is inherently subjective, and includes elements such as fantasy and preference. Knowledge is in principle objective, and includes elements such as facts and laws. If science does not investigate the purpose of the universe, then the universe effectively has no purpose, because a purpose of which we can have no knowledge is meaningless to us. On the other hand, the universe does exist, and all its features must be explicable in terms of forces and causes accessible to scientific investigation. It follows that the best naturalistic explanation available is effectively true, with the proviso that it may eventually be supplanted by a better or more inclusive theory. Thus naturalistic evolution is a fact, and the fact implies a critical guiding role for natural selection.
Scientism itself is not a fact, however, nor is it attractive as a philosophy once its elements and consequences are made explicit. Persons who want naturalistic evolution to be accepted as unquestioned fact must therefore use their cultural authority to enact rules of discourse that protect the purported fact from the attacks of unbelievers. First, they can identify science with naturalism, which means that they insist as a matter of first principle that no consideration whatever be given to the possibility that mind or spirit preceded matter. Second, they can impose a rule of procedure that disqualifies purely negative argument, so that a theory which obtains some very modest degree of empirical support can become immune to disproof until and unless it is supplanted by a better naturalistic theory. With these rules in place, Darwinists can claim to have proved that natural selection crafted moths, trees, and people, and point to the peppered- moth observation as proof.
The assumption of naturalism is in the realm of speculative philosophy, and the rule against negative argument is arbitrary. It is as if a judge were to tell a defendant that he may not establish his innocence unless he can produce a suitable substitute to be charged with the crime. Such vulnerable rules of discourse need protection from criticism, and two distinct rhetorical strategies have been pursued to provide it. First, we have already seen that the direct conflict between Darwinism and theism has been blurred, so that theists who are not committed to biblical inerrancy are led to believe that they have no reason to be suspicious of Darwinism. The remaining objectors can be marginalized as fundamentalists, whose purportedly scientific objections need not be taken seriously because "everybody knows" that people like that will believe, and say, anything.
The second strategy is to take advantage of the prestige that science enjoys in an age of technology, by asserting that anyone who disputes Darwinism must be an enemy of science, and hence of rationality itself This argument gains a certain plausibility from the fact that Darwinism is not the only area within the vast realm of science where such practices as extravagant extrapolation, arbitrary assumptions, and metaphysical speculation have been tolerated. The history of scientific efforts to explain human behavior provides many examples, and some aspects of cosmology, such as its Anthropic Principle, invite the label "cosmo-theology." What makes the strategy effective, however. is not the association of Darwinism with the more speculative aspects of cosmology, but its purported link with technology. Donald Johanson put the point effectively, if crudely: "You can't accept one part of science because it brings you good things like electricity and penicillin and throw away another part because it brings you some things you don't like about the origin of life."
But why can't you do exactly that? That scientists can learn a good deal about the behavior of electrons and bacteria does not prove that they know how electrons or bacteria came into existence in the first place. It is also possible that contemporary scientists are insightful upon some matters and, like their predecessors, thoroughly confused about others. Twentiethcentury experience demonstrates that scientific technology can work wonders, of course. It also demonstrates that dubious doctrines based upon philosophy can achieve an undeserved respectability by cloaking themselves in the mystique of science. Whether Darwinism is another example of pseudoscience is the question, and this question cannot be answered by a vague appeal to the authority of science.
For now, things are going well for Darwinism in America. The Supreme Court has dealt the creationists a crushing blow, and state boards of education are beginning to adopt "science frameworks." These policy statements are designed to encourage textbook publishers to proclaim boldly the fact of evolution-and therefore the naturalistic philosophy that underlies the fact-instead of minimizing the subject to avoid controversy. Efforts are also under way to bring under control any individual teachers who express creationist sentiments in the classroom, especially if they make use of unapproved materials. As ideological authority collapses in other parts of the world, the Darwinists are successfully swimming against the current.
There will be harder times ahead, however. The Darwinist strategy depends upon a certain blurring of the issues, and in particular upon maintaining the fiction that what is being promoted is an inoffensive "fact of evolution," which is opposed only by a discredited minority of religious fanatics. As the Darwinists move out to convert the nation's school children to a naturalistic outlook, it may become more and more difficult to conceal the religious implications of their system. Plenty of people within the Darwinist camp know what is being concealed, and cannot be relied upon to maintain a discreet silence. William Provine, for example, has been on a crusade to persuade the public that it has to discard either Darwinism or God, and not only God but also such non-materialistic concepts as free will and objective standards of morality. Provine offers this choice in the serene confidence that the biologists have enough evidence to persuade the public to choose Darwinism, and to accept its philosophical consequences.
The establishment of naturalism in the schools is supposedly essential to the improvement of science education, which is in such a dismal state in America that national leaders are truly worried. It is not likely, however, that science education can be improved in the long run by identifying science with a worldview abhorred by a large section of the population, and then hoping that the public never finds out what is being implied. The project requires that the scientific establishment commit itself to a strategy of indoctrination, in which the teachers first tell students what they are supposed to believe and then inform them about any difficulties only later, when it is deemed safe to do so. The weakness that requires such dogmatism is evident in Philip Kitcher's explanation of why it is "insidious" to propose that the creationists be allowed to present their negative case in the classroom:
There will be ...much dredging up of misguided objections to evolutionary theory. The objections are spurious-but how is the teacher to reveal their errors to students who are at the beginning of their science studies? ...What Creationists really propose is a situation in which people without scientific training-fourteen-year-old students, for example-are asked to decide a complex issue on partial evidence.
A few centuries ago, the defenders of orthodoxy used the same logic to explain why the common people needed to be protected from exposure to the spurious heresies of Galileo. In fairness, the creationists Kitcher had in mind are biblical fundamentalists who want to attack orthodox scientific doctrine on a broad front I do not myself think that such advocacy groups should be given a platform in the classroom. In my experience, however, Darwinists apply the same contemptuous dismissal to any suggestion, however well-informed and modestly stated, that in constructing their huge theoretical edifice upon a blind commitment to naturalism, they may have been building upon the sand. As long as the media and the courts are quiescent, they may retain the power to marginalize dissent and establish their philosophy as orthodoxy. What they do not have the power to do is to make it true.
(Johnson P.E. "Evolution as Dogma: The Establishment of Naturalism," Foundation for Thought and Ethics: Richardson, Texas, 1990, pp1-17) |
