Humanism, atheism and other freedoms

I’m currently reading, and enjoying, Richard Dawkin’s new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: the evidence for evolution. Apparently, he was inspired to write it when he realised that, in spite of the fact that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, many people don’t know that.

The book lays out the evidence in an easy-to assimilate way. Dawkins has had to be careful: he has been maliciously misquoted in the past by having short statements repeated out of context by creationists. (Apparently their ‘Christian’ morals don’t extend to honesty. And intellectual rigour is antithetical to creationism.)

As well as elucidating the scientific evidence, Dawkins tackles some of the muddle-headed ideas often thrown up by those who can’t cope with, or are scared of, evolution. For example, he carefully repeats that mankind is not descended from chimps, or any other kind of ape in existence today. We simply have a common ancestor – as we do with every other living thing.

Some of the other accusations thrown at evolutionists are more bizarre – almost to the point of cretinism, in my opinion. “I’ll believe we’re descended from monkeys when a chimp gives birth to a human” is one. This is so phenomenally stupid it’s hard to know where to begin. Dawkins makes a good stab at it, though. He also deals with the alleged ‘missing link’ (it isn’t missing), the lack of weird hybrids like the crocoduck in the fossil record (evolution doesn’t work that way so they should be missing) and the accusation that fossils show no intermediate stages (flat wrong on two counts: 1. There are plenty of fossil sequences that show steps along the evolutionary path; 2. Virtually all fossils are intermediate stages).

Then there’s the rallying cry of anti-evolutionists everywhere (or ‘history deniers’ as Dawkins rightly calls them): “what about the gaps in the fossil record?”.

Why wouldn’t there be gaps? What else could you expect? Fossilisation is a random happenstance relying on special conditions. Only a portion of the world’s rocks are capable of fossilising animals and plants during the rock’s formation. Special conditions must apply – conditions that don’t occur everywhere (a forest, for example, is not a good environment for creating fossils). Then the plant or animal has to be in the right place at exactly the right moment. Then we have to find the fossil. Untold millions must have been destroyed in the intervening period, by natural and human activity. Many more will be in strata where they will never be found. The fossil collections we have represent just a small fraction of the fossils that have been formed over the millennia.

Let’s consider an analogy. How many humans have lived and died? How many millions have been carefully buried, with clothes and grave goods in specially prepared ground? And yet how few do archaeologists find?

We’re lucky to have any fossils. And yet, the tens of thousands – or it is millions? – that we’ve been fortunate to find still paint a detailed and consistent picture. And they all fit beautifully with the theory of evolution. Indeed, ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, with his brilliant insight into the most important evolutionary mechanism – natural selection – every important discovery and advance, such as DNA, has fitted perfectly into the overall evolutionary picture.

(I’ll be dealing in more detail with some of the anti-evolutionary ‘arguments’ in my occasional series, Lies Believers Tell.)

All the arguments against evolution stem from one source. Ignorance. The very basis of these arguments is false because they rely on assumptions that simply are not true.

Creationists are the worst offenders. (Let’s remember that many religious people have no problem with evolution.) They listen only to each other. They repeat the same baseless lies and distortions because they don’t want evolution to be true. They prefer their ignorance because, however disconnected it might be from reality, it allows them to indulge in their bronze-age fantasies.

And this, sadly, is why I think Dawkins’ book won’t reach the people who need it most. Where truth and faith collide, the faithful will stick their fingers in their ears, incant loudly and give themselves up to ignorance.

The Greatest Show on Earth is available from:
 Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

The creationists are at it again. Schools in the UK are receiving copies of a glossy new book, Explore Evolution, published by the hilariously mis-named Truth in Science.

What could be better? Surely a book on evolution is a good thing? Except that this book is one gigantic lie.

The book is subtitled The Arguments for and against Neo-Darwinism, but the contents are not nearly so balanced as that phrase suggests. Indeed, the material is carefully and deliberately twisted, distorted and unbalanced in order that readers – and these are schoolchildren, remember – will come to the conclusion that the Theory of Evolution is flawed and that other ideas are just as valid.

The book is, in short, a piece of creationist propaganda, heavily and dishonestly disguised as science.

Truth in Science is not a scientific organisation, it is an evangelical religious organisation. It just doesn’t have the guts to say so. (The British Humanist Association, at its Humanist Life blog, has an interesting breakdown of Truth in Science’s board members.) Instead, it flatters itself that it has a mission to educate, when in fact its mission is to lie to children.

Here’s how the organisation’s website describes what it’s up to:

At Truth in Science, we wish to highlight the scientific weaknesses of Neo-Darwinism and to encourage a more critical approach to the teaching of evolution in schools and universities.

We consider it is time for students to be exposed to the fact that there is a modern controversy over Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and that this has considerable social, spiritual, moral and ethical implications.

Creationists are always moaning, ‘Teach the controversy’ – but it’s actually the last thing they need.

First, there is no controversy. Even that much is a lie. Evolution is an established fact, and natural selection its most significant mechanism. Yes, there are debates and controversies within evolutionary science: that is the nature of science. Unlike religious faith, scientific knowledge continuously grows and adapts. It is a living thing, imperfect, incomplete but always getting better. Science is fundamentally honest in its willingness to admit its shortcomings and admit errors. Creationists and other religious extremists often take advantage of this openness, deliberately misrepresenting it as a weakness when it fact it’s a strength.

There is no controversy between evolution and … well, anything else, least of all religious fantasy. ‘Creation science’ is no such thing – it’s fundamentalist religious dogma and does not belong anywhere near a science class. ‘Intelligent design’ is just creation science re-badged when the latter was seen by sane, intelligent people to be fraudulent and intellectually bankrupt. If it is dealt with at all in schools (and I’ve yet to see a convincing reason why it should be) it belongs alongside other outdated mythologies, like the Flat Earth, dragons and witches – perhaps a footnote in a comparative religion class.

We know that the ‘teach the controversy’ ruse is an attempt to get creationism on the same platform as evolution – to pretend that they are somehow equivalent and equally respectable. Yet, the more that creationists (whether or not they admit to being such) make this call, the more they highlight the fact that creationism is not the equal of evolution. All they really succeed in doing is advertising the dreadful inadequacy of their ideas.

Perhaps this is why they are now resorting to such underhand tactics.

You’ll note that the mission statement quoted above does not mention religion directly, let alone creationism. Truth in Science [sic], like so other creationist organisations, has to resort to dishonesty in trying to sneak through its message – by inventing ’scientific weaknesses’ and pretending there is a ‘controversy’.

One assumes they know, at some level, that creationist ideas cannot stand by their own merits. They have none. They must disguise them as pseudo-science. They can’t ‘teach the controversy’ because that would mean presenting their case fully and honestly, which is doomed to failure. So they don’t want to teach the controversy – what they want to teach the UK’s children are lies and distortions.

And so a religious organisation attempts to push its ideas on children by not mentioning their religious origin. It’s rather like a drug dealer hanging around the school gates handing out bags of crack pretending they’re sweets.

Clearly, creationist organisations, such as Truth in Science [sic] do not have the courage of their convictions, nor do they have the decency to put their case honestly. Remind me again about ‘Christian’ morals…?

A storm has brewed up over the practice, by British faith schools, of hiring only those teachers who practice that faith. But once again, a deeper issue goes largely unchallenged.

Teacher unions have complained that the hiring policies at these schools is discriminatory. The schools and their supporters have responded that it is natural to want to have teachers who share the pupils’ faith. On TV this morning, I saw one religious journalist (didn’t catch her name) saying: “If you’re going to have faith schools, then they should teach the ethos of the faith and who best to do that than teachers who share that faith?” (the quote is from memory but is faithful to the meaning).

The argument over hiring practices is to do with the last part of that statement. The real issue lies in the first part.

Of the 21,000 schools in the UK, nearly a third – 6,850 – are faith schools. They are all government funded – that is, their money comes from our taxes. All but a small minority of these are Christian, either Roman Catholic or Church of England. Around 40 are Jewish and there are just a few for Sikhs, Muslims and Greek Orthodox.

Why do faith schools exist? It must be for the benefit of the parents, not the children.

A child’s mind is unformed, unfinished. The function of a school is to assist a child along the path of becoming a fully formed individual, and to do this through education, opening their minds to new ideas. As Richard Dawkins so memorably described in ‘The God Delusion’, a child is not a Christian or a Muslim or a Sikh. Those are complex belief systems with profound implications for one’s moral and philosophical outlook and adopting them requires – or, at least, should require – deep introspection and intellectual analysis. Children are not capable of this. Becoming a Christian, or whatever, is a process that should not take place, cannot honestly and convincingly take place, until adulthood.

Religious education is a process of shutting off other avenues of thought – rational avenues. If you want evidence of that, just look at a recent investigation by More4 News which found that creationism (a profoundly anti-educational mythology) is being taught by 14 out of 19 Jewish schools that responded, all 21 of evangelical schools following the Accelerated Christian Education syllabus, and half the Islamic schools contacted. Even five state schools confessed to teaching creationism. The investigation concluded that over 5,800 pupils were being taught this irrational and insupportable fairy tale – that they are, in other words, being taught lies.

But that’s the answer to our question. Faith schools exist to teach lies. They exist to indoctrinate the children into the ways of their parents. They exist to narrow children’s minds, not open them.

Some parents argue that they send their children to faith schools because the schools have good performance records. And this is true. But it is purely because the schools have callously exploited loopholes in the law that allow them to select only the brightest children – which would be illegal for state schools. (Presumably that leaves equally faithful, but less bright children to take their chances.)

Religion should be a private matter. If parents want their children to believe in the same myths they do, then that particular form of child abuse should be confined to the home. Ultimately, we can’t stop vulnerable children’s minds being twisted and narrowed in this way, but this abuse should not be supported by the state.

So solving the issue of discriminatory hiring practices is easy. Get rid of faith schools. There is no good reason to have them.

Richard Dawkins’ ‘The God Delusion’ is available from:
 Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

PZ Myers, scientist and author of the famous Pharyngula blog, was recently prevented from attending a screening of a documentary movie in which he appears. The movie is called Expelled. How ironic.

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The ‘intelligent design’ trial in Dover, Pennsylvania was a landmark case. It established that ID is just a dishonest re-badging of creationism and has no place in a science class. It was an important victory for rationalism, commonsense and science.The video above is the 2006 BBC Horizon programme on the case and the underlying issues.I would also strongly recommend ‘40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, Oxycontin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania’ by Matthew Chapman – a personal, often funny, scrupulously fair and sensitive account of the trial and the people involved.

via videosift.com