Science and the versus of religion: a conversation with my students - Special Issue: Science and Religion: Conflict or Conciliation?

The courts have ruled that creationism isn't science, so its proponents want to change science's standards to include the supernatural. Beware: they may have a receptive audience, even among college students.

In the perpetual skirmish between science and religion, biological evolution is a contentious battleground. Despite a series of legal victories for science, which many thought or hoped were the final nails in the coffin of creationism, hostilities still flare. Maybe it's millennialism. Perhaps it reflects unease with modern science and technology. Vigorous anti-science rhetoric coming from the humanities in the guise of postmodernism (see Gross and Levitt 1994; Sokal and Bricmont 1998), some of it anti-evolution in flavor, may be fueling the fire. Whatever the causes, attacks on evolution haven't ceased. Donald Aguillard, litigant in the landmark 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard Supreme Court decision on evolution, told the 1998 National Association of Biology Teachers convention in Reno that creationism is thriving in local school districts (see Aguillard 1999). Academia isn't immune either (Berlinski 1996) - here at the University of Georgia, a vocal minority of fundamentalist faculty proclaims the evils of evolution at every opportunity. In response to the controversy, America's premier scientific society recently published yet another forceful statement on the matter (National Academy of Sciences 1998).

Because teaching creationism in the public schools is an unconstitutional infringement on the separation of church and state according to the Supreme Court, opponents of evolution no longer approach the issue head-on. One of their tactics is to lower the status of evolution by labeling it "only a theory," a rhetorical trick going back to the 1925 Scopes trial (Larson 1998). Another ploy has been to resurrect the threadbare Argument from Design, which was effectively dismissed on philosophical grounds in the eighteenth century (Hume 1779). But, having lost the "what good is half an eye" battle to developmental biology, creationists have retreated to an equally bogus "intelligent design theory" (Bunk 1998) applied to biochemical pathways and cell structures, most notably in Darwin's Black Box (Behe 1996). Of course, for strategic reasons creationists avoid mentioning God as the designer.

After participating in and watching debates with creationists eager to argue about supposed gaps in the evidence for evolution and natural selection, I concluded that arguing about the data is pointless because creationists filter information through a predisposition that has nothing to do with science. It's a matter of what my friends in the humanities call "world view." Creationists will always see inconsistencies or unexplained phenomena in evolutionary biology that make supernatural intervention an unavoidable conclusion. Science is an easy target in that regard because everything it says is couched in probabilities - certainty isn't in our vocabulary. The public traditionally views science and medicine as authoritative, so uncertainty is easily misinterpreted and manipulated (Toumey 1996). According to increasingly popular mantra, that uncertainty, the fact that we still can't answer all the questions and explain everything about the natural world, by default leads to God (see Johnson 1998b).

The debate, if there is to be one, should instead center on the basic philosophies of science and religion that make them fundamentally different pursuits. In a recent article in Discover, physical anthropologist Matt Cartmill (1998), while lamenting the attacks on evolution by the religious right and now by a new opponent, the academic left, also goes on to chide scientists for ruling God out of the evolutionary equation. To do so is a personal, not a scientific, statement, he says. I think Cartmill is mistaken. Creationists want to redefine science in the public eye in order to accommodate their religious views. Since creationism has failed to gain credibility as science according to commonly accepted norms, proponents want to change the rules by altering the public's perception of the nature of science. By calling the scientific concept of purposeless evolution "an article of faith," and by insisting that Stephen Jay Gould's ideas are "a profession of his religious beliefs," Cartmill's position plays right into their hands.

An incident in my honors botany class helps focus the relationship between science and religion. A genetics faculty member delivered a lecture on God and genes. Because genes explain so much of what used to be God's turf, he argued, we should re-examine religion in that light (see Avise 1998). Knowing the lecture would be thought provoking, I asked my students to attend and write a brief essay voicing their opinions. Many students wrote that the speaker had wrongly excluded religion from the realm of science. I was so surprised that I spent the next class period revisiting the subject.

Religion in Science