A Victory for Science (Part 1)

While the recent Texas evolution fight made a loser out of both Creationists and Evolutionists, thankfully science came out the winner.

Recently, the state of Texas underwent a periodic review of it's biology curriculum textbook. At primary issue was a debate over how evolution should be taught. The results were mixed. For the first part of this three-part blog, I'm going to look at one of the losers to this battle of wits: evolutionists.

For pro-evolution people (specifically, those who care enough to actually have a vehement opinion on the matter), the result was shocking. To this group, this is nothing short of the state of Texas saying that hard, irrefutable, scientifically-driven, absolute facts of the universe are equal in legitimacy to witchcraft and voodoo. To many in this camp, it is a fundamental debasement of science.

In order to hold this view, you need to have a worldview that tells you that "if the method is good, then the conclusions are good". If you have the proper methodology (say, the scientific method), then the data that you gain from the process is true, and any conclusions that corroborate with are fact. End of story. This is called positivism.

The problem, of course, is that positivists take a warped, inaccurate and, most importantly, limited view of science. Positivism ignores the fact that science has made countless blunders and wildly inaccurate statements over it's long history. Furthermore, it ignores the fact that the data being collected, no matter the methodology, is taken through the lens of human institutions. Which experiments are run in which manner on which hypotheses, and, most importantly, how to subjectively interpret the data into scientific facts is based on human institutions that deal with things like power, money, pride, and all of the other millions of things that make humans subjective. To say that objective truth can be determinately ascertained is flat out silly.

But it's actually more than that. If you take a certain set of data, and, necessarily, introduce human subjectivity to create an ideology, you are doing nothing different than religions do. What you have, in both cases, is not some absolute truth (no matter how much religious figures or positivists would say otherwise), but a primarily faith-based worldview, comprised of a handful of data points and a lot of wishful thinking. In the end, when a positivist looks at evolution: a concept that almost totally defies the ability for the scientific method to even function (ie. science can not prove any given historical event happened), then what the positivist has in evolution is a worldview with a smattering of data and a lot of faith.

As such, what we're seeing here is really people's faith being challenged. As such, it is unsurprising that some evolutionists (like the one linked to above) believe that evolution should not only be taught as absolute truth, but that science classes should prevent students from using critical thinking to examine it. It should be believed, no questions asked.

This is not science. This is religion. It doesn't matter if the particularities of the belief system are different.

But alas, some jerks who have a different religious ideology for how the universe was created and why humans exist have forced the state of Texas to teach children to use objective, skeptical, critical thinking skills on determining the viability of "facts" that are drawn from certain data sets. Unfortunately for evolutionists, they are being beaten by what science actually stands for. Odd that it took another religious group to do what those who have draped themselves in the mantle of science should have been doing this whole time.