Science Literacy II: making your vote count
Sam Brownback is one of the scientifically illiterate who, in a shameless pander during the South Carolina Republican Candidate Debate, shot his hand up to show that he stands shoulder to shoulder with the ignorant in denying evolution. (He is Senator from the now notorious Kansas, where the people assert they are less evolved than the rest of us.)
Now he’s trying to have it both ways in an editorial he wrote for the Times which borrows heavily from (and debases) Gould’s Non-Overlapping Magisteria.
Brownback hopes he can salvage the impression he created of a superstitious neanderthal (not that he believes in neanderthals) by treating science as a salad bar – and helping himself to a little of this, a little of that. But modern science is a complex construction, with all the parts working together. If you start discarding the parts of an airplane you don’t understand, it isn’t long before the thing won’t fly.
I’m not sure that these electrons can contain my full disdain for people like Brownback. Does he have the same suspicion of cell phones and television that he does of evolution? I doubt his imagination is any more capable of understanding electromagnetic radiation than it is of understanding biology. Let’s see what he says:
If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.
Ah yes: If you are asking me whether I believe in Edison’s Electric Light, well, that’s one thing. But electromagnetic waves carrying voices and images? That’s going a bit too far. Delivering messages by invisible waves is the role of the universe’s guiding intelligence.”
Besides which, microevolution plus a few million years becomes macroevolution and speciation. It’s all part of a whole. (“Well, look, you can talk me into morse code over wires, but images transmitted through the air?”)
Anyway, it’s hardly worth the time to demolish the whole defensive backpedal and rationalization. Particularly because it probably has nothing to do with what Brownback believes, but is about what Brownback thinks that the people who will vote in the primary want him to profess.
However, for those of you who don’t want to click through to the editorial itself (and really, why bother. It’s as bad as you think. But this isn’t about you, this is about me. I’m venting) here are a few choice bits.
The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths.
Here you can see the debasement of Gould’s idea in action. And you can see a muddled intelligence struggling to rationalize a move on national TV which is rightly seen as ignorant.
Here’s the contradiction between the two:
Science tries to discover the truths about the universe by relentless verification and falsification.
Faith gets the truths about the universe by revelation.
When two scientists disagree, they know how to find out who is right. What happens when a Muslim and a Christian disagree about the divinity of Christ?
Furthermore, Brownback here claims that “faith deals with spiritual truths.” Let’s pretend that Brownback is at once intelligent enough to know what this means, and honest enough to mean what it says.
How is speciation a spiritual truth? What is spiritual about that? Speciation is a truth about the nature of created order and how it operates. The kind of thing that Sam thinks the scientists know better than the theologists. And yet there he was, on national TV, raising his hand and the hopes of the theocrats.
Brownback evokes the tired old “it’s just a theory” by asserting that even the evolutionists don’t agree: “There is no one single theory of evolution, as proponents of punctuated equilibrium and classical Darwinism continue to feud today.” And yet, both those camps agree that speciation arose through evolution and not through special creation. Physicists argue about how to link quantum mechanics and relativity, but that dispute doesn’t help the cause of those still out flogging phlogiston.
The incoherence of Brownback’s editorial is astonishing, but my outrage is turning to other things – so I’ll just leave you with his conclusion, which I want you to compare with the lines, quoted above, about the domain of science and the lack of a contradiction between science and faith:
we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.
There it is again – the wedge between science and faith. Science says follow the facts, regardless of your convictions about what must be true. Faith says when the facts are at odds with revealed truth, so much the worse for the facts.