9-29-05, 9:10 am
Early in the 19th Century, Napoleon asked a prominent scientist about the existence of God. The scientist’s famous response was that that was not a question that we had to ask.He didn’t mean that it was a question that couldn’t be answered by science. He didn’t mean that religion, faith, etc., was bad, good, or indifferent. He meant that the questions that science asks and builds upon have nothing to do with religion.
He also 'believed ' that religion at the dawn of the nineteenth century could no longer prevent science from developing theoretical constructs, organizing controlled experiments and amassing empirical data through research to prove or disprove and advance or discard its theoretical constructs. Religion, even when it uses belief systems to encourage people to struggle to change society in a positive way can never do that. Institutional religion as a part of feudal power structures, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, fought against science often as ferociously as feudal lords fought against merchants and artisans of the emerging capitalist class. Feudal society was based on repetition and tribute, on conserving goods for the benefit of the rulers. Institutional religion, whose leaders were part of the ruling class in many places in a direct way, was organized around conserving, in the form of rituals, the faith and maintaining tribute to the leaders of the Church. When the Papacy, for example, fought 'temporal rulers,' the real fight was over wealth and power.
The principle of Separation of Church and State and/or subordination in matters of socio-economic policy of Church to state was an important feature of the rise of capitalism in Europe and globally. Capitalists used and continue to use legions of 'pork chop' preachers and priests, not to mention rabbis and mullahs with different dietary preferences, but they can no more take religion seriously than P.T Barnum could take the midgets, Siamese twins, and bearded ladies he paraded in his entertainment as business associates. Their system is based on a limitless expansion and exploitation of the productive forces, which in turn requires an expanding understanding of the material world and a population of workers and consumers that will respond to material carrots and sticks and have the education and skills to run the machinery efficiently.
I am not going to use this article to launch a polemic against religion and religious believers, anti-materialists in the philosophical sense, because that is not the relevant issue. Science and religion can co-exist as they long have, but not in a political supermarket as Coke and Pepsi co-exist.
Nor can education function as a series of commercials for different products if it is to be something more than a place to warehouse young people. When I took a woodworking shop class as a teenager because shop classes were required in my school, we weren’t taught that the bookends that I made existed only in my mind and could become anything or nothing depending on my consciousness. Actually, there were schools of philosophy that would make such a point, which might have been interesting in another setting but very counterproductive to my learning the skills of woodworking.
Marxism for example is a science of society not a 'religious faith,' as some of its secular enemies contend. While it does not advocate suppressing various theoretical constructs and world views, it seeks to test them, not to have them represented based on their commercial popularity. That which cannot be verified in material life is discarded as theory, although aspects of it may be upheld as contributing to social progress.
No one I know would advocate teaching Marx’s general theory in a course on Biology, although it, unlike 'Intelligent Design,' complements, from a social science perspective, Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Science cannot be dispensed with in any modern society. When the Soviet scientist Trofim Lysenko developed an environmental theory of acquired characteristics that rejected Mendelian genetics in the 1930s, he did so because of his administrative position and because the theory strengthened the aspirations of Soviet society to transcend rapidly all natural and social impediments to the construction of socialism and communism. The theory fit in with what Soviet Communists wanted to be, not reality. Besides the fact that some individuals who challenged Lysenko were the victims of terroristic purges (a significant fact that partisans of socialism should acknowledge if they are to separate socialism from the abuses that have been carried out in its name) these views undermined both science and the construction of socialism in the USSR until they were finally discarded.
Like Lysenko’s theories, which distorted the development of a scientific outlook in the USSR in the name of a pseudo-science that freed nature from genetic laws, 'Intelligent Design' is essentially a marketer’s strategy to distort science with a theologically influenced pseudo science, using sophistry, the ancient art of talking around something and inundating questions with high sounding but inaccurate or irrelevant information, to advance the interests of right-wing religionists. Anyone who believes that 'Intelligent Design' advocates are interested in anything beyond resisting the development of a scientific outlook in education can only do so on faith.
No one expects terroristic purges to be carried out against the enemies of mandated 'Intelligent Design' teaching, but there may be McCarthyite purges in right-wing dominated school districts, that is the firing of teachers who refuse to teach the subject just as the Dayton Tennessee School Board dismissed and the government prosecuted John T. Scopes in 1925 for teaching evolution.
The sophists who argue that Scopes is closer to the 'Intelligent Design' advocates today in that his was fighting to teach something ignore the fact that the 'theory' of Intelligent Design has no serious scientific standing and is put forward by groups either directly created by or allied to the religious-political right. Many of these people may sincerely want to see a scientific appreciation of a Supreme Being creating the universe and guiding it according to a grand moral ethical design, which wouldn’t be so bad if it were true, but in regard to science and the material universe, isn’t and can’t be.
The Bush administration has given support to 'Intelligent Design' advocates to squeeze more votes out of its religious right base at a time when polls show that the public is more sympathetic to 'Intelligent Design' as an abstraction than it is to the administration’s concrete policies. Since the administration doesn’t seem to care about science education, education in general beyond its empty 'no child left behind' commercial for itself, or any scientific policy that conflicts with its corporate agenda, it doesn’t think it has anything to lose by backing 'theory' that lead literate people in developed countries to heap scorn on the U.S. But there are reasons that we all should oppose the Dover school board and support the parents who are fighting for their children’s education beyond resistance to the Bush administration, which is a good general reason in itself.
First, there is education. A former student of mine from the Deep South in a discussion concerning modern politics mentioned sadly that in an area where his relatives live there are half a dozen churches and one school. In other cases, friends who live in Bible belt communities inform me that teachers are chosen because they are regarded as 'good Christians.' Intellectually, these public schools, while they may not have the discipline problems associated with urban slum schools, are dead ends in terms of the intellectual and skill development of their students and the bottom of the barrel nationally. A political culture that luxuriates in concepts like 'Intelligent Design' has little need to build new schools and upgrade existing ones. People who are taught such concepts will be clueless as they observe more and more professional jobs 'outsourced' to countries, including developing countries, where the labor may be cheaper but the science and the education is more modern.
Second, 'Intelligent Design' is of course about bringing religion into the public schools at the center of its curriculum. Introducing students to a wide variety of scientific and social scientific theories is of course a good thing for student’s intellectual development. Giving a pseudo-scientific theory great legitimacy and attempting to put it on an equal footing with science will, at best, waste resources and create confusion among students.
At worst, it will create a repressive political atmosphere in the schools for science teachers similar to the atmosphere that government scientists now face from the Bush administration. As such it will drive science teachers out of teaching and greatly undermine public education in the U.S., where test scores of elementary and secondary school students currently lag behind students in other countries in a number of areas concerning science education. And of course it will further erode the separation of church and state which is now and always has been a pillar of the constitutional Republic.
--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and maybe reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
