Teaching Students About God and Science

By Karl Giberson, Ph.D

Physicist Eric Hedin is headlining the Culture Wars right now because of his class at Ball State University on the "Boundaries of Science." Critics and supporters are deeply polarized about the propriety of this class, which the syllabus says "will examine the nature of the physical and the living world with the goal of increasing our appreciation of the scope, wonder, and complexity of physical reality."

Critics charge Hedin with promoting religion, noting that his syllabus is clear that he believes science provides pointers to God and that biological evolution is inadequate. His most strident critic, University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne, hyperbolically describes Hedin as the "the Ball State University professor who proselytizes about Jesus in his science class."

Hedin's most enthusiastic supporters are the Intelligent Design proponents at the Discovery Institute. Lawyer Casey Luskin, who debated the case with an atheist on Michael Medved's radio show, considers Hedin a heroic champion of academic freedom. Luskin is promoting a petition in support of Hedin, asking people to sign onto the following declaration:

We, the undersigned, urge the administration of Ball State University to support Prof. Eric Hedin's academic freedom to discuss intelligent design and related issues in the classroom. We call on you to reject demands by the Freedom from Religion Foundation to censor or punish Dr. Hedin for exercising his right to free speech.

(Note that the petition is for Hedin to "discuss," rather than "promote" intelligent design.)

David Klinghoffer, another intelligent design enthusiast, describes the complaints about Hedin's course as deriving from "scientific materialism and rigid, intolerant, prosecutorial Darwinism."

The Hedin uproar interests me because I teach similar courses -- at Stonehill College in Easton, Mass. -- that explore the boundaries of science, the nature of scientific truth and the religious implications of science. I just turned in final grades for two of them that were well-received by my largely Catholic students: Science & Belief and Does Science Disprove God? Most of the topics in Hedin's course are also in mine, and he even lists one of my books in his course bibliography. My classes, like Hedin's, are general education science electives and most of my students come from outside the natural sciences.

Teaching courses on controversial subjects when you have a public -- or even private -- position on the controversy is a balancing act. Teachers, especially professors, are authority figures with powers of persuasion that should not be used to move students to positions that do not represent the mainstream thinking on the topic. Students should not leave a class -- science or otherwise -- with the idea, for example, that there are serious questions in the scientific community about the validity of evolution. But there is nothing wrong with exploring minority, outsider and even eccentric ideas of thoughtful scholars, especially when those scholars wield considerable cultural influence, or are tackling big mysteries, like free will, consciousness or the existence of God.

I once taught an honors seminar on the work of Phillip Johnson, by far the most important figure in the Intelligent Design movement. I even hosted Johnson on campus so the students could hear his arguments untainted by my low opinion of them. In my science-and-religion classes at Stonehill, I assign equal reading from theists and atheists and spend roughly half the time discussing the ideas of the atheists. My goal -- and I think I succeed -- is to help students think through important issues that may inform their own spiritual journeys, regardless of the direction they are traveling. And as we know, college students do a lot of traveling.

How a class accomplishes the goals of the syllabus depends on how classroom discussions are handled. For Hedin's overall classes at Ball State, which are mostly traditional astronomy and physics classes, we know that the students rank him very high on "rate my professor," although one -- just one -- widely quoted student did complain that "the class had an extremely Christian bias and (Hedin) does not believe in evolution."

No evidence whatsoever supports Jerry Coyne's claim that Hedin is "proseletyzing for Jesus" in his Boundaries of Science class. Coyne is notorious for pretending not to understand the difference between a philosophically motivated theism and Christian fundamentalism and has waded into this controversy with his usual blinkered culture war mentality.

On the other hand, I can hardly agree with the intelligent design folk at the Discovery Institute that this is an academic freedom case. Academic freedom is a noble, if ambiguous, concept that can be invoked in support of many things but one of those is not the freedom to tell students things that are not true. If, as the syllabus suggests, Hedin's students are learning that the ideas of the intelligent design movement are the cutting edge of science and heralding a major revolution, there are grounds for concern. If the students leave Hedin's class believing that the scientific community is wrestling with the proposals that have come out of the intelligent design movement, then they have been misled and poorly served. Most practicing scientists understand that their disciplines have unanswered questions and "boundaries" of some sort. But virtually none of them are looking to an external "designer" to answer these questions.

Hedin's assigned readings and bibliography are somewhat unbalanced, although one of the two required texts is a solid popularization of conventional big bang cosmology, unadorned by theological speculation. However, were students to infer that the extensive bibliography list covers the bases for the discussion of the "Boundaries of Science" they would be mistaken. Of the roughly 20 books listed, half advocate basic intelligent design with the remainder divided evenly between books by Christians sympathetic to raising constructive questions about God in the context of science -- like Keith Ward and myself -- or non-theists with minority viewpoints that resonate in some way with traditional theism -- like Roger Penrose and Paul Davies. Noticeably absent are genuinely critical books of the sort written by Vic Stenger, Steven Weinberg and even Jerry Coyne that address the same issues but offer informed atheistic responses.

But is any of this a big deal? Should Ball State University terminate a young assistant professor teaching a general education course, which most faculty avoid like the plague, outside his field because, on first offering, it was ideologically slanted? I wonder how those us living in the ivory towers of academia would fare if our most challenging interdisciplinary syllabi constructed early in our careers became topics of national conversation?

Eric Hedin is an assistant science professor, popular with most of his students. He needs to get promoted to associate and then full professor. If he works hard, he will get tenured along the way. And my guess is that his interdisciplinary explorations, like those of many thinkers inclined to consider the larger context of their fields, will become more sophisticated as time passes. If not, his colleagues won't vote him tenure. In the meantime, Ball State doesn't need external culture warriors telling them how to run their university.

Evolution's Refusal to Die

By Karl Giberson, PhD

The most interesting strategy employed by anti-evolutionists over the last century and a half has been to report that "Darwinism is Dead" or "Evolution has Collapsed." The exercise is all but meaningless in terms of scientific discussion but it's a marvelous culture war strategy, requiring almost no effort to get a few people claiming, in all seriousness, "They say evolution is dying. Most scientists don't believe it any more." And as long as the claim is made to laypeople who have no idea what the actual scientific community thinks, the strategy is sure to have some influence.

The anti-evolutionary Discovery Institute has just published a report titled "How a Scientific Field Can Collapse: The Case of Psychiatry." Taking aim at everything from its "eccentric pioneers" (Freud and Jung) to its "peer reviewed" -- but often changing -- guidebook, the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," the article reports on recent and credible concerns about psychiatry published by scientists in respectable publications likeNew Scientist.

The real quarry of the article, however, is not psychiatry, but evolution. The article lists many of the problems of psychiatry -- long history of failure, ignoring critics, reliance on a book, etc., etc. -- and then claims that similar maladies afflict evolution -- failing to explain the Cambrian Explosion, exalting Darwin and the Origin of Species, refusing to hear or publish scientific critiques of Darwinism, etc., etc. Psychiatry is collapsing, and evolution is just like psychiatry, so it should be collapsing also.

But we have heard all of this before. In 1968 Henry Morris, who did more to galvanize anti-evolution than anyone, published "The Twilight of Evolution," inaugurating a non-stop chorus of claims that Darwin's theory was all but dead. At around the same time the Harvard educated lawyer Norman Macbeth published "Darwin Retried," claiming evolution had collapsed. Writing in the American Biology Teacher in 1976, Macbeth announced that evolution had "utterly failed." Another lawyer, Philip Johnson, made identical claims in "Darwin on Trial," published in 1991, described on its website as a "standard in American protest literature." "Darwin on Trial" launched the Intelligent Design movement.

The list of books claiming that evolution has come down with a serious illness is long. On my bookcase alone, we have "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," "The Collapse of Evolution," and my favorite, "Evolution Shot Full of Holes."

Immediately after the Origin of Species was published in 1859, Darwin's rival Richard Owen said the book and its speculative theory would be forgotten in 10 years. Eberhard Dennet published "At the Deathbed of Darwinism" in 1904. George MacCready Price, who influenced William Jennings Bryan, claimed in 1924 that Darwinism was now a "doctrine ... merely of historical interest." And then, of course, we have the "Lady Hope" myth that Darwin himself announced his theory to be dead, as he lay on his own deathbed.

In the century and a half since Darwin's theory of evolution was first pronounced dead, it has grown steadily stronger. It is not in "crisis." It is not "collapsing." It is not "shot full of holes." Darwin's theory has grown steadily stronger to the point where virtually all evolutionary biologists -- not a one of whom wrote any of the books listed above -- would be mystified by the claim that evolution was dying, or even feeling poorly. Evolution is no more ill than heliocentricity, atomic theory or quantum mechanics is ill.

Ironically, the reason for the robust health of evolution can be found in the very article attacking evolution I quoted above from the Discovery Institute: Science -- and this includes evolution -- is a self-correcting enterprise. I know little of psychiatry, but I am not shocked to discover that critical voices have emerged and are being heard. This is the norm for science. Seemingly secure science is often modified -- think Newtonian physics -- and entire fields even disappear, like phrenology (studying personality via bumps on the skull). Anyone who understands the scientific community knows it to be full of renegade individualists only too eager to overturn the status quo. This aggressive self-examination is the reason why we now understand the world so well -- why we know the behavior of nature in such excruciating detail that we can build a phone capable of extracting a tiny bit of information from a database on the other side of the planet.

The historical lesson is clear, even if the anti-evolutionists can't see it: Science is open to correction. In the event that evolution does become a "theory in crisis," we will read about that in Scientific American, Nature and Science, not the blogs of the anti-Darwinian culture warriors.

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Why Americans Love Creationism

By Karl Giberson, PhD

I was sobered while watching a recent conversation on HuffPost Live about America's troubled conversation over origins. Nominally about recent attempts in Louisiana to get creationism into the public schools, the wide-ranging conversation shines a remarkable light on the country's century-long battle over creation vs. evolution.

All of the strategies developed by the anti-evolutionary leadership to rally support for their cause are on display. Significantly, however, the individuals in the conversation are not the leaders of the movement promoting their standard arguments, but ordinary conservative Christian leaders who have absorbed the anti-evolutionary message. Their confident claims and responses to challenges testify to the rhetorical power of this message. They are true believers.

The great power of the anti-evolutionary message embraced by so many Americans comes from the following, all of which are on display in the conversation:

1. Appealing to America's democratic impulse: At a time when we constantly hear that lawmakers should heed the voice of the "90 percent of Americans who want more gun control," on what basis do lawmakers ignore the "vast majority of Americans who reject evolution?" Does this constituency have no right to be heard? Must their children be forced to learn ideas in the public schools at odds with their family's values and rejected by most of the voters?
2. Demanding fairness and tolerance: Isn't America all about being fair? And what could be fairer than giving voice to other viewpoints with widespread support? At a time when most Americans are demanding gay marriage in the name of fairness, why are we being so unfair to the creationists, excluding their ideas about origins?
3. Promoting freedom for our students: Must education be coercive on the topic of origins? Why can't teachers present "both sides" and let our "bright high school students" make up their own minds? Will this not encourage critical thinking in our science classes? What is this need to restrict science teaching to just one viewpoint when there are others in play?
4. Appealing to authority: A popular anti-evolutionary website contains the signatures of hundreds of credentialed academics who "Dissent from Darwin." This is a lot of intellectual firepower. Surely such a large crowd of anti-evolutionary scholars can't all be wrong.
5. Deflecting criticism: Much has been made of the failure of the creationists to publish in scientific journals. But their ideas are blocked from those journals by editorial and peer referees whose allegiance is to the scientific status quo. New paradigms, like Intelligent Design, are rejected out of hand.
6. Currying sympathy: Anti-evolutionists in secular universities or other scientific institutions are forced to hide their views from their colleagues. I was once in a gathering that including several such individuals and they insisted that nobody take any pictures, lest they be identified. If they "come out" they run the risk of losing their jobs, run off by intolerant peers who object to their ideas without considering them. Ben Stein exposed this abuse of Intelligent Design scholars in the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

This rhetorical strategy contains great synergistic power; polls show that Americans are not coming around to accept evolution, even as its scientific credibility has grown to point of certainty. The conservative Christians in the video above have heard and embraced all of these arguments. In their view, they have a strong case and every right to press it.

Dismantling these arguments takes more time than assembling them. And the process often sounds like little more than special pleading and self-serving prejudice. Science, of course, is not a democratic process -- and it shouldn't be -- but explaining why is a bit tricky to an audience that values democracy so highly. High school students are not capable of adjudicating the validity of anti-evolutionary arguments -- they have enough challenges simply learning the material and taking time to put fringe ideas in their heads is not reasonable. Restricting education to well-established knowledge is certainly not intolerance, but you can't tell that to someone who rejects well-established knowledge.

The "Dissent from Darwin" list disintegrates when you look at it closely: The signers are largely non-biologists or even non-scientists. Many are retired academics, trained long ago before evolution became so established. Virtually none are experts in the sense of being evolutionary biologists active in the field. Ben Stein's movie is riddled with falsehoods that have been exposed. (No creationists have even submitted papers to scientific journals, much less had them rejected. The few cases of people losing their jobs turn out to far more complicated than simply anti-creationist prejudice.) And on it goes.

Science education in America is in trouble.