The Charles Darwin news keeps on coming this week.
Yesterday we reported on the fracas at Britain’s Royal Society, where Nobel laureates threw a fit after the society’s education director, Michael Reiss, appeared to endorse science teachers discussing creationism. Reiss tried to say that he was misquoted, but it was too little, too late: Today he formally resigned.
If Reiss is honest that he was misrepresented, and he really meant that science teachers should be able to discuss (but not endorse) creationism with students who bring it up, then his departure is unfortunate. First, it’s more fodder for those peddling the nonsense that science is just like a religion because it persecutes dissenters. And second, Reiss is right: Teachers need to be able to talk to creationist students. Dismissing them as dumb or informed is no way to get students interested in science.
The other Darwin development across the pond was the statement by Anglican minister Malcolm Brown that the Church of England was wrong about Darwin and evolution all along, and owed him an apology. At a conference today, the Vatican announced that you shouldn’t expect anything similar from the pope. The Roman Catholic Church has accepted evolution as a valid scientific approach, they said in a statement. And because the church neither condemned Darwin nor banned his book, they say, they have nothing to apologize for.
Given that the old naturalist died in 1882, he’s probably not too worried about it.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
September 16th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Dear Andrew:
For physicists who aren’t angry at worship, science is a bit like religion: cosmolology and particle physics are a search for basic truths underlying the universe (sometimes known as God).
It is with the New Atheists where the analogy is relevant. There, dissenters who don’t believe properly - i.e., they don’t accept the New Atheist gospel - get condemned from the high pulpit. Believers in religion are, the New Atheist priests intone, ignoramuses who can’t reason and shouldn’t be allowed to teach their own children. This kind of vitriol leads to very real persecutions sooner or later.
Steve F.
September 16th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Greetings,
Here’s a new take on all of this that will amaze, it’s called “The Creationist Chimera of Accidental Evolution Lives on as The Centerpiece of Intelligent Design”:
http://phoebekate.com/2008/09/14/randomness-creationism-and-intelligent-design
September 16th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Steve,
Science is not a religion by any stretch of the imagination. Science does look for basic truths, but they are not looking for a consciousness. Instead, science by definition asks the question “what if.” Not “what if” in the philosophical sense, but “What if I do this, then what?” and “Will I always get that answer?”
Even on the cutting edge of string theory and particle physics, the question is still “what if,” scientists can’t make up experiments that use the whole universe, so they they just make it smaller or more theoretical. String theory is an example of the latter, we can’t manipulate the fabric of the universe, so the “what if” is all in formulae “what if there are 9 dimensions or 10.” In time, we will be able to experimentally prove the answer we get.
The LHC is another good example: science can’t recreate the big bang, so the project is scaled down to see if the answers that the formulae gave for the “what if” are the same as the experiment.
> It is with the New Atheists where the analogy is relevant.
There is no “New Atheist” in the way you describe it. there is no gospel and there are no priests. There are not even facsimiles of the same. The so called new atheists are just normal people who have had it with people pushing religion at them, so they fight back.
Some atheists would rather just nod their head and pretend to listen when someone spouts off about why their religion is correct, but others won’t allow a double standard because there is one.