In the American Prospect, Chris Mooney does some calm and penetrating analysis of what’s going on in Kansas. In his article Creating a Controversy, Chris points out that it’s not just evolutionary theory that’s under attack there, but the whole foundation of science as a reality-based enterprise, one whose purpose is the pursuit of objective truth.
Kansas’s previously proposed science standards had appropriately defined science as “the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us.” Anti-evolutionists want to change this language to the following: “Science is a systematic method of continuing investigation, that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building, to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.”
This may seem harmless at first glance. But the change carefully removes any reference to science’s search for natural explanations in favor of “more adequateâ€? explanations, creating a opening for creationists to insert the supernatural. Such a change reflects the fact that the new generation of anti-evolutionists has launched an attack on modern science itself, claiming that it amounts, essentially, to institutionalized atheism. Science, they say, has a prejudice against supernatural causation (by which they generally mean “the actions of Godâ€?). Instead, the new anti-evolutionists claim that if scientists would simply open their minds to the possible action of forces acting beyond the purview of natural laws, they would suddenly perceive the weaknesses of evolutionary theory.
This is terrifying stuff, which will inevitably lead to a cloud of stupidity pouring out of the heartland to darken the country’s communications channels and classrooms. Once they’ve driven the wedge into science through the crack they perceive in evolutionary theory, they will go after the Big Bang, e.g. the current consensus on cosmology. They will attach every branch of science that is not easily susceptible to laboratory experimentation, because they can use the same appeal to ignorance:
- It’s only a theory
- theory == guess
- guess == uncertainty
- God == certainty
And we need to be certain about this, because we certainly don’t want our children led into error.
God help us.
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