The unerring source
A bit of good news for once – the US Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal by the Association of Christian Schools International against the University of California for refusing to grant college-prep credit for courses with religious viewpoints. UC says the schools use textbooks that replace science with the Bible.
So…there’s a problem with that? But science and religion are supposed to be in harmony, aren’t they? So why is it a problem if schools use textbooks that replace science with the Bible?
Oh don’t be silly, the religion&science people snap; you know perfectly well we don’t mean, when we say religion&science go together like ham&eggs, that the Bible should be used as a biology textbook. We mean the right kind of religion, not the wrong kind.
Yes, we snap back, but our claim is that that distinction is neither so clear nor so easy to maintain as you like to claim. Our claim is that the distinction that matters in this context is the one between science on the one hand and religion on the other, not the one between biblical religion on the one hand and liberal religion ‘n’ science on the other.
The association’s 800 high schools in California teach “standard course content” and “add a religious viewpoint in each subject … as an integral part of their reason for existence,” the group’s lawyers said in their Supreme Court appeal.
But a federal judge said experts testifying for the university refuted those claims in reviewing textbooks.
Biology texts, one professor concluded, teach students to reject any scientific evidence that contradicted the Bible. A history text declared the Bible to be the “unerring source for analysis” of past events, in the view of another expert…
See? That’s where the conflict is, and there is no reliable, consistent way to stipulate a brand of religion that never does that – that never rejects scientific evidence that contradicts a particular religious belief – in such a way that religion and science can be made to seem inherently and entirely not-in-conflict.
Yes, and this is what is so wrong with the idea that religion and science somehow use the same methodology, and therefore, if they are not mining the same seam, are at least following parallel seams. This is not the case. The parallel seam idea is basically what Arthur Peacocke claims in his “Templeton Book Prize” winning Theology for a Scientific Age. It is also (I believe) what we saw Thomas Dixon up to regarding Galileo’s way of understanding inferred entities vs. the Church’s way of understanding inferred entities. And I think something similar is going on in revisionist ideas of what happened in the Huxley-Wilberforce encounter in Oxford in 1860. But I think it is safe to say that science and religion are not friends. Notice that it is mainly the religious who are ardently seeking this relationship. You might say, in fact, that religion is rather obsessively stalking science, a bit like a star-struck fan stalking a celebrity.
I should have added: Kudos to the Supreme Court.
Mining metaphors perhaps running in our minds today.
I’m not the only one following the progress of the rescue, right? I know the media freak out about particular horrors and ignore common systemic ones, but this one is plenty systemic, and it’s miners, it’s workers, it’s Chileans – it’s nice for people like that to hog the spotlight for a day.
“…there is no reliable, consistent way to stipulate a brand of religion that never does that – that never rejects scientific evidence that contradicts a particular religious belief…”
And I say, even if there were a way to do that, it wouldn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. One could theoretically make a car that was in no way at all *bad* for the environment, but that wouldn’t make it reasonable to say, “cars aren’t bad for the environment.”
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa and Jim Nugent, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: The unerring source http://dlvr.it/6zfRN […]
After sheltering their children in evangelical schools for 13 years, why would they want to put them into to the care of a largely non-Christian (atheists, agnostics and other faiths) faculty at the University of California?
These parents have already thrown away large chunks of money paying tuition for a decidedly 2nd-rate private primary and secondary school education and they won’t throw more away on a religious college? We have a gazillion conservative Christian colleges and universities in southern California and I am sure most of them would be happy to take students who were indoctrinated in the evils of evolution and all things secular.
But Michael, if they send their precious babies to one of those conservative Christian colleges then the degrees they graduate with won’t be worth squat!
That’s the aspect of this case that I’ve always found the most fascinating/frustrating. These parents must know that degrees from ideologically-driven conservative Christian colleges (as opposed to more ecumenical religious universities like Notre Dame, which offer students a primarily secular education) are for the most part worthless scraps of paper in the competition for good jobs and/or slots in graduate/professional schools: Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been motivated enough to launch a lawsuit attempting to force higher-quality schools to accept their ill-prepared children. But shouldn’t awareness of the worthless character of degrees awarded by dogmatic Christian colleges have led them to ask themselves whether they should be sending their children to dogmatic Christian high schools in the first place? I’m not expecting miracles here: That is, I’m not expecting conservative Christian parents to accept wider society’s (correct) collective judgment that an education constrained within the bounds of dogmatic religious purity is, other things being equal, substantially and inherently inferior to a more secular education. But since parents clearly recognize that society does make such a judgment, and since they care enough about their children’s career prospects to fight all the way to the Supreme Court to force better schools to admit their precious darlings, then shouldn’t it have crossed their minds much earlier that it was strategically unwise to send their children to dogmatic Christian high schools if they wanted them to get in to better colleges?
But maybe that’s expecting too much critical thinking from people who take Biblical literalism seriously…
This has to be causing lots of angst; Temecula and Murrieta where the lawsuit originated are pretty well-off communities in southern California and very conservative. The love of one kind of materialism (I want toys) must be winning over the fear of another (science and loss of faith). Maybe after all those years of indoctrination, they feel comfortable about their children staying in the flock.
@Eric…
“You might say, in fact, that religion is rather obsessively stalking science, a bit like a star-struck fan stalking a celebrity.”
Argghh. You got to it first. I’ve been writing a blog post comparing religion to a stalker for a while. Mind you, I think it’s more the sexual predator than the star-struck fan.
Great minds? :P
This is an interesting and strong assertion, and I’m not certain whether or not I agree with it. To be clear, I do agree whole-heartedly with Kester Taylor at comment #4, that whether or not Ophelia’s statement here is true, it is irrelevant to the debate at hand — and his/her analogy with cars being bad for the environment is quite apt.
But is it possible to “stipulate a brand of religion” which would always accept scientific fact at face value? This is a difficult question. I suppose it is not religion unless it contains a component of faith, and faith by definition is always in conflict with science whenever they overlap… so could faith ever be corralled sufficiently so as to prevent it from ever overlapping?
I guess I’m leaning towards agreeing with you that the answer is no. Even if we thought we had achieved that, physics sometimes makes some surprising end runs around apparent philosophical certainty. (Just yesterday, I read how quantum physics has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that all electrons are identical and interchangeable, even though there are apparently sound philosophical arguments that state you could never know that for certain. The quantum world — i.e. the real world — works in such a way that the philosophical arguments, as airtight as they seem at the classical level, are exposed to have built in assumptions that turn out to be false.) So even if we had an apparently airtight philosophical argument that walled off a particular area of inquiry from science, and corralled our faith into that spot, it would be difficult to say with certainty that the philosophical argument would not someday be undermined by science.
I am beginning to suspect that even deism may prove to be untenable (not just silly and superfluous, mind you, but contradictory with science). Furthermore, while I used to think that the God of the Quantum Gaps, as hilariously pathetic a retreat as it is, was at least likely to stand the test of time in light of Bell’s Theorem. Given a deeper understanding of Bell’s Theorem that I achieved just yesterday, I am now thinking quite the opposite — that Bell’s Theorem has actually already obliterated the Quantum Gap.
So I guess I agree with your assertion after all.