Creationism and the Science Curriculum

With a number of misnamed “academic freedom” bills proposed in various places, and passed recently in Louisiana, it might be a good time to consider some issues other than religion that are related to the science curriculum.

I have argued repeatedly that these bills are religiously motivated, and that the idea is to create as much of a loophole as one possibly can in order to let creationism sneak into the classroom. I think this would be enough reason to vehemently oppose such bills.

But not all bad science is religiously motivated. Some of it is motivated by the simple human desire to bypass reality. Many examples of such attitudes exist in alternative medicine. It’s not impossible that a good idea might turn up in such venues, but the very attitude and process is such that bad ideas will tend to predominate.

We sometimes decry the scientific attitude as closed minded. But I like a certain amount of “closed mindedness” in science. I return to my frequent illustration of the airplane. I only want to fly in an airplane designed by someone whose mind was closed to anything that couldn’t prove itself as part of a successful aircraft design. I simplify this to: Don’t trust any epistemology that you wouldn’t want your aircraft designer to use.

Having said that, religious motivations illustrate the problem very effectively, not because they are religious, but because they are motivations other than aiming for the best approximation of the truth that is possible. When someone is motivated by something other than accuracy and effectiveness, whether that motivation is religion, laziness, money, or anything else that distracts, that person will produce some bad science.

If there is bad science and good science, which should be taught in the high school classroom? We debate academic freedom and freedom of speech, but we really don’t want that type of freedom in most areas of the high school curriculum. Why? Well, we want our children to get a good, high quality education. Christian conservatives become justly annoyed when “feel good” programs get in the way of solid academics in public schools. Yet when it comes to creationism they’re willing to play with the same type of ideas, weakening the curriculum in order to provide a place for ideas that haven’t passed must in their field. Those who wish to defend science need to watch out for both.

I read an excellent illustration of how this works following a link from Dispatches from the Culture Wars to this article by Howard J. Van Till. Now Van Till is professor emeritus of Physics and Astronomy at Calvin College. He goes over a series of young earth creationist arguments regarding the “shrinking sun.”

It all starts with an abstract by two scientists who were basically trying to get others working on the data. Amongst the things that follow are:

• Creationists taking the preliminary data and running with it, making unwarranted extrapolations from it
• Creationists continuing to cite the data even after it has been called into question by further research. A minimum that a scientist would normally do in such a case would be to cite the research that has called the results into question and explain why he still accepts that data.
• Creationists continuing to cite one another and the original study years afterward
• Creationists predictably failing to go to the trouble of doing research for themselves
• Creationist magazines, both popular and supposedly professional going ahead and publishing all this

Now in all of this, these creationists are not citing religious grounds. They don’t say, “the earth must be about 6,000 years old according to the Bible so we believe this.” What they do is take a single study and use it for all it’s worth, and then considerably more. They do bad science.

Now should such flawed work be used in the high school curriculum merely because it doesn’t cite anything religious? Even if it were not religiously motivated–which it clearly is–it should be rejected simply because it is sloppy. We’re working on improving education, we shouldn’t waste the students’ time on trash. The time available to give students a sound scientific education is short enough.

Academic freedom is a good idea in its place. In higher education, one gets to the point where students are supposed to be working through various ideas. There, the range of ideas of controlled to some extent by the fact that professors, students, and publications must pass review processes appropriate to their roles. In high school the students, and often the teachers, are not prepared to deal with the sheer mass of misinformation that is available in any field.

Academic freedom bills for high schools are a bad idea. They work directly against the need to provide a sound, basic curriculum to students that will prepare them for careers, further education or life.