Can Creationists Compete?
A headline on Joe Romm’s fine climate-change blog, RealClimate, gives me pause: “Tennessee Enacts ‘Monkey Bill’ To Dumb Down Kids In Biology And Physics, Undermine Their Future.” The bill — now law — orders schools to help teachers present the “scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses” of “controversial” topics such as “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” Romm argues that Tennessee thus
encourages the disinforming of its kids in two of the most important areas they will need to thrive in the 21st century [evolution and climate change]—thrive economically in a world of global competitors who don’t teach anti-science disinformation to their kids . . .
Well, such bills do tend to “dumb down” science education. We mutilate science if we either fail to teach the biggest creationism-unfriendly scientific ideas like the age of the Universe and evolution, which unite all known scientific observations into one great, sense-making fabric, or else teach “skeptical thinking” on “controversial” subjects that aren’t, in fact, substantially controversial among scientists. I agree that... Read More
And the Life of the World to Come: Science vs. Resurrection
It’s been drawn to my attention that the blog Everyday Revolutionary recently posed a question: Two bastions of Christian dogma that I have great difficulty accepting are the concepts of resurrection and afterlife. Biology and physics (i.e. “the facts”) seem to be enough to discredit the ideas that earth will eventually be restored (since all things tend toward degradation) and that we (or at least, our spirits/souls) “go”... Read More
Evil Dreams and the Nature of Nature
To use “natural” as a synonym for “good” is almost a reflex for us. We are the godchildren of the Romantics and Transcendentalists, the cultural and religious heirs of the ancient Hebrews whose God made the world and judged it “good.” Nature is normative, sets us straight, shows us wisdom. “Come forth into the light of things, / Let Nature be your teacher,” urged Wordsworth in 1798, for One impulse from a vernal wood May teach... Read More
Is Evolution Evil?
Evolution has been accused of evil by friend, foe, and doubter. Many creationists think that “evolution,” the theory not the thing, is a font of evil. They charge that it teaches us that we are “nothing but animals,” and so leads inevitably to nihilism. The fruits of evolution in this sense, according to prominent creationist Ken Ham, are “lawlessness, immorality, impurity, abortion, racism, and a mocking of God” (The Lie: Evolution,... Read More
“We’re Smart Enough” . . . to Not Put Intelligent Design In the Classroom (I Hope)
A long-time education columnist with the Washington Post, Jay Mathews, has been pushing a strange but all-American thesis (e.g., in his Jan. 18, 2012 essay “We’re smart enough for Darwin debate”): we should inject Intelligent Design ideas into public-school science classrooms and let the kids figure out that it is not science, or at least bad science. Don’t we trust our kids, and their parents, to be “smart”? Isn’t it healthy... Read More
Mirror, Mirror: Religion Gets Explained, but Science . . .
Sometimes there seems a shortage of mirrors. Case in point, an article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society for 2010 devoted to the interesting question of whether religious cues make people more likely to inflict punishment in certain artificial settings. The piece includes this précis of the state of scientific speculation on the origin of religion: In terms of ultimate evolutionary explanation, our results are consistent with dual inheritance... Read More
Free Will Blues
Some neurologists are convinced that they are finally closing in on proof that human brains are deterministic chemical mechanisms, more complex than a ticking watch but no more “free.” Civic-minded writers worry how we will keep on talking ourselves into behaving morally and meting out legal penalties if once we become truly convinced that everything we think and do is a foredoomed self-rearranging of molecules ruled by basic physics. A large... Read More
Roughgarden, Further Thoughts
Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution and Christian Faith (2006) is a gentle, thoughtful, and—to me—unsatisfying book. For one thing, confirming my initial impressions from a few weeks ago, I am frequently unsettled by the sense that its voice has been crafted to allay or bypass the suspicions of readers who take the Bible as a more or less perfect guide to everything, including biology. Although disavowing literalism, Roughgarden seems to choose to... Read More
Welcome to the Multiverse
Physicist Alan Lightman has a fascinating piece on the “multiverse” in the latest issue of Harper’s (“The Accidental Universe,” Dec. 2011). Multiverse theories posit that what we have long thought of as the Universe, all the galaxies we can observe, is just one of many universes—perhaps an infinite or endlessly growing number of them, or perhaps a fixed but large number like 10500. (The number of atoms in the observable universe is only... Read More
At First Glance: “Evolution and Christian Faith” (2006) by Joan Roughgarden
I have just started Evolution and Christian Faith (2006) by Joan Roughgarden, who is both a convert to Christianity and an evolutionary biologist specializing in lizards. So far, her book strikes me as painstakingly polite and even-tempered: I don’t want to argue with other Christians. I want to share with them the fellowship and the love of Jesus. (p. 5) I myself love a good kick-and-bite argument, civilly conducted, but it takes all... Read More
