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Evolution and a better understanding of science

Tue Feb 28 05:43:00 2017

Category : Blog

Author : Mike

A friend recently asked me for my opinion on an article from PoliticsUSA about teaching of evolution in schools. First up, it was my opinion that the article excellently illustrated a number of the key points which make the discussion of science, religion, and evolution so difficult. It was also my opinion that the article favoured simplistic polemic over nuanced consideration of an interesting, if complex, subject. But, for all that, it is worth a blog post to look at some of those key points it illustrates so well.

 

The Agreement

In understanding a dispute, it is often tempting to start by looking at where the two parties disagree. In a lot of discussions about the alleged conflicts between science and religion however, you must start by looking at where the two parties agree. For the article at hand, the magic occurs in a single paragraph near the beginning. The author sets the stage for the discussion by clarifying some key terms:

"Now, it is beyond refute that only the stupidest human beings in the 21st Century cannot fathom that there is a marked difference between religion and science; it’s just the way it is and the way it has always been. However, for the clearly stupid it may be worth reminding them that religion is 'the belief and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal god or gods.' Conversely, science is 'a systematic enterprise built on and organized by knowledge based on facts learned through experimentation and observations'."

The author goes on to report (and object) that

"The fundamentalist Christians write to Pence saying, 'It is obvious to us that Evolutionism-Darwinism is an anti-Christian atheistic dogma masquerading as science. There is no doubt that evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion'."

While fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist atheists (and I mean neither of those terms pejoratively) seem to disagree on a good many things, many people (on all sides of the discussion) agree with the basic ideas laid out here concerning the differences between science and religion. Once they have agreed on that, everything that follows (including their understanding of a letter to Mike Pence) will necessarily be a mess. I will take the paragraph sentence by sentence, because it is important.

 

Only the stupidest human beings in the 21st Century cannot fathom that there is a marked difference between religion and science.

This sentence is problematic. I know some very smart people – both religious and irreligious – who spend a lot of their time trying to pin the difference down. While most of them agree that there is a difference, few of them agree on what the difference is, or on what it should be. Admittedly one could conclude from this that I hang out with really dumb people without realising it. But I hope that the difficulties in making a simple distinction will become clear in the rest of this post.

 

It’s just the way it is and the way it has always been.

This sentence is also problematic. It has not always been thus. Pretty much any time and place where a culture has developed science, it has also linked it closely, even inextricably, with religion. Should you have time on your hands, you can find examples from a Western context in Science and Religion, and examples in an Asian context in Qigong Fever.

 

Religion is ‘the belief and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal god or gods’.

I am happy for someone to use this as a working definition of religion, provided they accept with it that Confucianism and various sorts of Buddhism and Hinduism are not religions (because they have no god); many forms of Shamanism are not religions (because spirits are sub-human, not super-human); Deism is not a religion (because god is not personal); and some forms of Jainism are also not religions (because they have gods but don’t worship them). But hey, if people are happy with the consequences of that definition, I can roll with it.

 

Science is ‘a systematic enterprise built on and organized by knowledge based on facts learned through experimentation and observations'.

Before giving the nod to this definition, I would want to know (as an experimentalist) what the author means by “systematic” and “based on.” My theorist friends would also want to know why they are excluded from science completely. Still, such quibbles aside, this definition of science runs in to similar problems to the above definition of religion: you can use it as a definition if you like, but you will have to exclude from “science” more things than you might intuitively want to. It is exactly on this point that most of the discussion about teaching evolution in schools hinges. And this is where it gets interesting.

Before we get in to that, let me summarise the story so far: the stage has been set, and it has – by most measure – been set wrong. Any discussion based on the above assumptions is going to be painful and unfruitful. Here we go.

 

The Disagreement

The author of the PoliticsUSA article objects that "The fundamentalist Christians write to Pence saying, 'It is obvious to us that Evolutionism-Darwinism is an anti-Christian atheistic dogma masquerading as science. There is no doubt that evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion'."

Clearly, this looks like a point of disagreement between fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist atheists. But it is worth noting that fundamentalist Christians take their position here exactly because they agree with the stated claim of the fundamentalist atheists that “Science is ‘a systematic enterprise built on and organized by knowledge based on facts learned through experimentation and observations'.” And evolution does not do that.

          Darwin came up with a theory that unified many of the disparate ideas floating around at the time, and plugged in bits of data to show the theory made sense. Some of the data, of course, didn’t fit. Karl Popper says that if a falsifying instance is found then the theory must be rejected. In fact, what happened was that falsifying instances were generally ignored, or put on the shelf of mysteries. (Darwin himself highlighted a few animals for which he couldn’t see how they would fit the theory, and suggested they might be falsifying instances.) When there were too many problems to ignore, the entire project was repackaged as “neo-Darwinism.” And we still have “open questions” which, depending on your bias, are dubbed “avenues for research” or “clear instances where the theory fails.” Top of the list: how did life first appear? This is a question that Darwin didn’t even bother with: that is why he wrote “The Origin of the Species” not “The Origin of Life.”

 

The Options

There are three ways to deal with the “open question” concerning the origin of life. For what it is worth, these three options generalise to a good many other open questions in evolution, and indeed to science as a whole.

 

Option #1

  • Science is based on experimentation and observations.
  • We have no experiment or observation for the origin of life by evolutionary processes.
  • Therefore theories about the origin of life by evolutionary processes are not scientific.

This is a perfectly valid argument (i.e. it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false). It is exactly the arguments that the fundamentalist Christians are making. In fact, although the PoliticsUSA article under discussion thoroughly disparages fundamentalist Christians, said Christians are simply consistently applying the article’s own logic. Hat off to them for their rigour.

 

Option #2

  • Science is based on experimentation and observations.
  • The origin of life by evolutionary processes is scientific.
  • Therefore we must find experiments or observations for the origin of life by evolutionary processes.

The fundamentalist Christians say that this is bad science because the scientists are now not trying to falsify the theory (as Popper says they should) but rather trying to prove it.
          Worse, the claim, “the origin of life by evolutionary processes is scientific,” is now an assumption, not a conclusion. In the words of the letter to Mike Pence, it has become “an ideology, a secular religion.
          The scientists, of course, can sleep at night because Thomas Kuhn says they have just formed a paradigm, which is a necessary part of pursuing mature science.
          The poor author of the PoliticsUSA post, however, has a problem: while invoking Thomas Kuhn lets him claim that evolution is science, is does not refute the fundamentalist Christians’ claim that evolution is “an ideology, a secular religion”. But if he has shown evolution to be a science and a religion, he is skewered on his own claim that “the stupidest human beings in the 21st Century cannot fathom that there is a marked difference between religion and science.” An uncomfortable position indeed.

 

Option #3

  • The origin of life by evolutionary processes is scientific.
  • We have no experiment or observation for the origin of life by evolutionary processes.
  • Therefore science is not based on experimentation and observations.

My theorist friends can breathe a sigh of relief that they can still be real scientists.
          Sure, science takes observational evidence seriously. Having done so, it may then ignore it. (For example, if my old voltmeter reading drops to zero for an instant, it is more likely that it has a lose connection than that I am observing fundamentally new physics. Ignoring some of my meter readings does not make me a bad physicist; it means I have made a judgement call about which puzzles I want to solve and which ones I don’t.) Similarly, if observational evidence does not exist or is hard to get in some particular area, scientists are totally happy to build a theory to bridge the gap and move on. (Every rat I ever dissected had a brain. If I take a lab rat at random I can assume it has a brain without having to cut its head open to experimentally observe that fact.)
          If they take this option, our friend at PoliticsUSA can still draw a distinction between science and religion, but cannot do it by claiming that science is based on evidence, for any but the weakest understanding of what can be meant by “based on.”

 

The Conclusion

The fundamentalist Christians (for this one specific example) can walk away knowing that they have been rigorously consistent in their reasoning. However, their adherence to what they have been taught science should be will mean that they reject as unscientific most of the things that modern science is and does.

The fundamentalist atheists (for this one specific example) have been sloppily inconsistent in their reasoning. However, their failure to understand what they have been taught about science has let them embrace scientific rigour, which turns out to be a lot less rigorous than they were taught it should be.

Monty Python could not have written it better.

 

For my own part, I shall be glad of the interaction between science and religion. It allows us, if not forces us, to step away from the comfortable caricatures that we paint for our subjects and see them with fresh eyes. We can then return, hopefully having gained a better understanding of what science is, what it can do, and why other perfectly rational people can seem to take such an apparently different view of things.