Most of our anti-Creationist battles are over efforts to infuse Christian religion into K-12 education. One common battlefield is the courtroom where our side has (so far, until/unless the benches get filled with more clones of Priscilla Owen) won. But another place where we can stop them is the college admission office.
Sara Robinson of the Orcinus blog (which everybody should read daily) revisits, in more detail than I ever saw on any science blogs at the time this first started, the legal battle between the University of California and the Calvary Chapel Christian School over what constitutes permissible educational standards:
The battle started back in late 2005, when UC reviewed Calvary's courses and decided that several of them -- including "Special Providence: Christianity and the American Republic and "Christianity's Influence on America," both history courses; "Christianity and Morality in American Literature," an English course; and a biology class -- did not meet their curriculum standards, and would not be counted toward the admission requirements when Calvary students apply to UC.
Sara goes on to say later on something that I expect our resident science philosophers, historians and ethicists to chime in on:
When it comes to the history and English courses, they're absolutely right. We all look at language and history through the filters of culture. The subjects lend themselves to multiple interpretations, depending on your perspective. Understanding this, and being exposed to the full range of perspectives in these fields -- including religious ones -- is an essential part of secondary and undergraduate education.
But nobody, save the Christian schools, teaches science or math that way. There is no African-American or Latino or feminist or Jewish or Russian science (Hitler and Stalin notwithstanding). There's just a method, and a group of techniques, and the skill-building and knowledge base required to use them well. Scientists do their best -- with varying degrees of success -- to uncover their cultural biases and move beyond them. The greatest ones regard bias as a dangerous source of error: it can blind you, and lead you to draw the wrong conclusions from the observed facts. For that reason, any textbook that starts off by telling you to believe a 2,000-year-old religious scripture over your own lying eyes is not teaching science. It's putting students on the path to a Christian version of Lysenkoism.
But the whole essay was prompted by Sara's initial sense of despair she felt before discovering this case:
I've been saying for a long while now that the power to end the Intelligent Design fiasco, firmly and finally and with but a single word, rests in the manicured hands of the chancellors of America's top universities. The message is short and simple: "Teach what you like, it's all fine with us. But if you put ID in your science courses, we will not accept those courses as adequate for admission to our campus."
Making this kind of public statement would be one small step for a university chancellor; and one giant leap for American science education. Somebody, somewhere, needs to set a firm standard. If our universities -- which bear responsibility for training our professional scientists, and maintain the labs and faculties responsible for much of our best research -- won't stand up and draw that line, then we really are well and truly lost.
Well said. Feel free to add comments either here or over on Orcinus .
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