A Science Teacher Arguing Against Science
Dawkins’ documentary last night was damned entertaining, and occasionally painfully revealing. And the science teacher at the Islamic faith school who so totally dropped herself in it has responded:
Science is essentially mankind’s best effort at understanding the workings of the known universe, given our limited resources and intelligence. Learning about science is fun, fantastic and thought-provoking, especially discussions arising around ethical grey areas. However, it is important that children are made aware of the limitations of scientific endeavour lest they be corralled into a realm wherein nothing is worth knowing unless it has been determined by empirical scientific discovery.
If they were encouraged towards that worldview alone, I believe they would be receiving an education devoid of further enrichment from a faith-based narrative. I’m not in the business of wanting young people bereft of the entire canon of human belief systems. That religions have stood the test of time is testament to the human need for something other than that which we can prove or disprove.
As a teacher, I’d be doing my pupils a grave disservice if I insisted that the answers that science can give us should be the limit of our understanding of the world. Kids are bright and don’t need liberating from religion, especially if the alternative is limited to giving credence to atheistic secularism alone. Rather, equip them with all the alternatives and let them work it out for themselves.
I’m aghast at this. She’s debating her confrontation with Dawkins about evolution, which she as a science teacher disputed. I’ll accept (to a point) that history has shown at the very least a predilection for something other than what we can prove or disprove, but that has almost entirely been due to historical ignorance – we haven’t been able to figure out the answers about who we are and how we came to be. Now we can, and for her to say that metaphysics should or could in any way answer how humanity, the earth or the universe came to be is objectively wrong. By all means discuss the issues and run through the debates in a religious education class, but science alone does have the answers to these questions – to suggest there are religious/metaphysical/transcendental alternatives is in small or large measure an attempt to indoctrinate children (as Dawkins says) into believing ‘God’ has answers science doesn’t, thereby contributing to robbing them of the freedom to engage with the world critically.
I personally agree with Dawkins that children do need liberating from religion, at least from their parents’. But my bottom line from Erfana Bora’s argument is this: she is doing her pupils a horrible disservice by suggesting as a science teacher that science doesn’t provide all the answers to our understanding of the world – it does. If she disagrees with the theory of evolution, and suggests for a heartbeat that a religious text has any role in any way in explaining how life on earth has come to be, she shouldn’t be teaching science in a school funded by the British taxpayer. Very simple.
The Commons is Poorer Without Dr Evan Harris
Mark Henderson in the Times decries the loss of Dr Evan Harris from the House of Commons:
Yes, he is an atheist who believes that others’ religious beliefs should not constrain personal freedom. But many of his positions that some religious people dislike are well-supported by evidence: the scientific case for reducing the abortion time limit, for example, is flimsy, as the Commons Science and Technology Committee, on which Harris served, showed to good effect.
Harris’s support for evidence-based policy and free speech also extends to plenty of races in which religion has no dog. How can his support for well-regulated animal experimentation, for example, be characterised as solely motivated by drab, secular determinism? Or his advocacy for reform of the libel laws? Or his forensic scrutiny of the Government spending decisions that have decimated much of British physics?
It was science and evidence that defined Harris’s parliamentary career. This sometimes brought him into conflict with some (though not all) religious people, and it is impossible to deny that he takes a stronger line than many when it comes to religious interference with personal freedom. But it is very wrong to suggest he is a secular “one-trick pony” who sees everything through an anti-religious prism.
Parliament will be poorer for his departure. It needs MPs who share Harris’s respect for evidence.
I couldn’t agree more. Policy should always be determined by reason, by evidence, after rational debate and discourse. Evan Harris has been the parliamentary champion of these principles for years, and as I told him last night, has long been my political hero because of it. Sholto Byrnes in the New Statesman said:
If more MPs had been like him, it is highly unlikely that politicians would have come to have been held in such low regard. If more Liberal Democrats had been like him, I suspect they would be doing much better and might even have stood a genuine chance of replacing Labour as the main party of the left.
A consistently strong voice for the NHS and for science, he shared the title of “Secularist of the Year” with Lord Avebury in 2009 for their work in helping abolish the offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel. He has campaigned against faith schools and argued courageously in favour of abortion, euthanasia, immigration and gay rights.
Some readers — especially those who have described me as being “an apologist for religion” — may be surprised to see me praising him. On the contrary, although I may disagree with some of Evan’s stances, I think he has been one of the most principled MPs in parliament, sticking to his convictions and standing up for a true-liberal view of free speech and of the idea of liberty itself.
If you want to help re-elect him in the contest which is realistically no more than a year away, leave a message here, contact him via his website or tweet him on his twitter profile.
Creationist Kirk Cameron – Slapped Down!
If you haven’t already, watch (and love) the greatest slapdown of modern Christian fundamentalism I’ve yet seen:
“Your God-rights, Kirk, aren’t given by God but by other people. That’s why when you need to know what liberties you have, you don’t open the Bible, you open the Constitution!”
Cristina is referring to the video former teen heartthrob Kirk Cameron has made for evangelical Christian Ray Comfort, in support of his reissuing of Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ but with a ‘special’ insert (read: one which tries to subvert the theory of evolution). Now I’d love to have a good bitch about the intellectual failures of creationism in general, but Cristina does it far better than I ever could. Just enjoy and have a particularly great time laughing as Cameron rails about the overwhelming prevalence of professors self-identifying as atheists or agnostics amongst university biology and psychology academics. Reason and logic – terrible things, eh?
