Bad evolution teachers

Some evolution teachers are worse than the creationists.

The debate continues over the Kansas Board of Education’s decision to introduce pro-intelligent-design language in evolution courses.

While I’m sorry for the students in Kansas who will have to put up with this nonsense, I don’t think it’s such a big deal. Intelligent Design (ID) is not science, as these students will find out soon enough. Science has a built-in mechanism for sorting out trash, and ID beliefs will be laughed out of existence sooner or later. I don’t see serious potential here for any harm to science, because the two things – evolution and ID – are so obviously different. One is science, the other is a fairy tale. It is like forcing teachers to add a line saying “Some people believe that the moon is made of green cheese” to all astronomy courses. Such a statement can’t corrupt astronomy. ID will harm only the few people who believe in it, and those of them who take up science as a career will grow out of it soon enough.

Contrast this with a report I read on science teachers who voluntarily make their evolution courses more palatable to the creationists. Here are some quotes:

"Why not be fair and teach all sides?" a few teachers asked. Others argued that intelligent design, which says the Earth is so complex that a higher power must have created it, is more than religion. The designer doesn't have to be God, they insisted - it might be an alien.

Science is concerned with objectivity, not fairness. How are these teachers qualified to teach science, if they do not understand something so basic?

"What I point out to them is that we're not trying to convert them in any way, but they should be able to understand the tenets of organic evolution," said Brian Vorwald, chairman of the grades 6-12 science department for the Sayville school district.

In class, he notes that there are other evolution theories, including discredited ones such as the flat Earth school of thinking, and the kids laugh when he tells them, "There's absolutely something you're being taught this year in science that will be disproven."

This guy wants to turn his class into a joke. He’s going to teach the kids evolution, but he doesn’t want them to take his class seriously because like the flat earth theories, the stuff he’s going to teach them will turn out to be a lie. Why bother to learn? Why bother to deal with uncertainties?

Over the years, science teacher John Cunningham has fashioned a weapon of sorts for students who fear he will force them to accept evolution, counter to the wishes of their parents or religious leaders.

"What you're supposed to do is to attack theories all the time," the Brooklyn teacher said he tells them. "If you believe any of your theories, you've turned science into a religion."

This is the worst of all. This man is destroying science more surely than a truckload of Kansas School Board members could ever hope to.

He wants science to be devoid of truths. This process started with empiricists like Karl Popper, who declared that nothing can ever be proved, you can only disprove things.

This is an absurd position to take and there is nothing scientific about it. If nothing can be proven, I cannot prove that I am sitting here writing this. I cannot prove that I exist. Why should I bother to do anything? Popper would probably say that I should bother because "I exist" is a pretty good theory, seeing it hasn't been falsified since I was born.

The problem with this approach is that it equates “truth” with “omniscience,” which is not a quality possible to humans. You can never be sure of anything because it’s always possible that your senses lie, because reality might be an elaborate hoax perpetrated on humanity by some superior intelligence. You would have to be God to know the truth. Heck, you can’t even disprove anything, because disproving it requires that you trust your mind’s ability to reason logically, and how can you do that? You can’t even prove that you exist or that you have a mind to reason with.

Fortunately, although many scientists pay lip service to Popper, they don’t take him very seriously when it comes to science. I have not come across any scientific papers with the footnote “conclusions predicated on the unproven theory that I exist and wrote this paper”. This kind of belief is taken for granted as a matter of course.

Humans are not omniscient, and demanding infallibility from them is insane. When you say “nothing can ever be proven to be true” you are in fact demanding superhuman knowledge from humans, which we do not have and never shall have, and then as a consequence taking away all certainty from us.

Certainty to a human being simply means "this is true to the best of my knowledge today". This is all that science, philosophy, or any branch of study that claims to investigate reality can come up with, and this is all they will EVER come up with. Expecting or wanting any level of certainty higher than this is foolish, because it is the desire for the superhuman and supernatural, which is not science’s concern.

Why is this important? Because truth is important to humans. Staying alive requires that we act (eat, drink, work, sleep, etc.). Actions require beliefs, not theories. You must believe that your body needs food and water to survive. You can play intellectual games if you wish and convince yourself that this is just a theory, but you had better act as if it were the truth. Every action we take implies the truth "I accept that I exist, and I interact with a world that also exists." Every second that we are alive and acting, we are assuming something or the other to be the truth. We simply cannot avoid this need for truth.

When a science teacher says “If you believe any of your theories, you've turned science into a religion” he is telling his students that science offers no truths, only perpetually contested theories. If that were so, science would be a game which had nothing useful to offer to the student or to the world. But the facts point otherwise.

The problem is that he is talking about scientific theories, but applying the biblical standard of truth to them. For him, "true" means: true regardless of my current knowledge, true regardless of human limitations of knowledge, true in a non-human sense, because humans will always have limited knowledge and never be omniscient. This kind of truth is not possible to humans, it can only be revealed by a superhuman being, and even then cannot be proven to be true. It must be accepted on faith.

A theory is simply an explanation that covers some facts. Facts are observations, or deductions made from observations. Facts, by themselves, are useless to us. In order to live, we have to generalize, or theorize. To illustrate:

1. It’s a fact that this big red truck ran over Mrs. X and killed her. I saw it happen.

2. It’s a fact that this blue car knocked down Mr. Y and broke his leg. I saw it happen.

3. These facts tell me it's not safe to stand in front of the red truck and the blue car. Unfortunately, there are another billion vehicles out there whose potential for causing injury I have not observed, and there do not know as fact. I must now theorize.

4. I theorize that all heavy moving objects are dangerous. I can’t actually prove this, except by theorizing a whole bunch of other stuff first about mass and momentum and force and the squishiness of humans, but I can easily disprove it if my experiment shows just one person emerging unscathed after being crushed by a truck.

However, whether I can prove it or not, it doesn’t take a scientist, far less a smart one, to figure out that this theory is true. Not many of us would be willing to test it by standing in front of moving trucks. We just know it’s true, and damn Popper and his uncertainty.

Not all theories are this simple and easy to test. But a theory is useful only if it’s true, and to the extent that science has been useful to humanity (think aeroplanes, computers, refrigerators), it is based on true theories. True theories are not rare in science; they are common as dirt. That is, if you do not demand superhuman standards of truth.

What does it mean when it's said that scientists continually question a theory or keep testing it? It simply means that "truth" for scientists is not biblical truth, to be accepted on faith. It means that a scientist will continue to test his theory against new data, new situations, to discover the limits of his theory. This is how theories are refined, and sometimes overturned. It simply means that any theory is valid within certain parameters, with certain assumptions, and scientists constantly try to discover what those boundaries are. For any theory, you can add "true, given these assumptions and under these conditions". That does not negate truth, it circumscribes it.

We need to stop being ashamed of claiming to know the truth. We mustn’t fall into the trap that this makes us no better than the Bible thumpers, who also claim to know the truth. We mustn’t fall into the trap that there is some “perfect” truth only knowable to an omniscient being, a la Popper. In order to do this, we must take back the word “truth” from those who have hijacked it – and re-establish what it really means: a conclusion reached logically from available pertinent facts, which is not contradicted by any other conclusion reached logically from available pertinent facts. This is simple and adequate. Let's not confuse the issue by saying stuff like "facts which are observable and not revealed" or "not reaaaally truuuly proven since I'm not God and I don't know everything". Science can define what it is without having to add that it's not religion and not the philosophy of some guy with too much time on his hands.