Opposition to Naturalism
From Hobson's Choice
One view of the world is that it originated through divine providence. This concept applies not only to human beings, but also to other species of animals and to the earth itself. The Theory of Evolution, therefore, is actually part of a larger set of beliefs known as "naturalism," which contradict this. Naturalism argues instead that natural causes, many of which remain in operation today, caused the origin of not merely the human race, but all things in nature. Needless to say, naturalism has many divergent currents as scientists often disagree as to the character of those natural processes. However, scientists have a fairly reliable system of resolving such disagreements, known as the "scientific method."
A common corollary of this is that, while theists—people who believe in God—may or may not insist on a divine explanation of creation, atheists must necessarily embrace the naturalistic one. A common fallacy is that naturalism implies atheism. I would prefer not to spend time on this, since this is not a theological essay. However, I do want to make it clear that there exist orthodox Muslims, Christians, and others who believe in naturalistic explanations of the universe. In addition, there are some who believe that the universe bears some trace of divine intelligence, but are not doctrinaire about the matter. Unitarian sermons and hymns, for example, allude to this often. Moreover, I noticed in the closing chapters of Carl Sagan's Contact that he speculates that there is "meaning" to the universe. This suggests that Sagan wanted there to be intelligence in the design, without any actual intelligent agent.
So, hereafter I would like to use the term "naturalist" and "supernaturalist," without any religious suppositions.
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A Brief History of Anti-Naturalism
Since the publication of Darwin's The Origin of the Species (complete text online), there have been basically five major episodes of anti-evolution reaction. The first phase occurred in the 1860's as the book became widely known. There was already a large body of analysis of Lamarckian evolution, but it's interesting to notice that the Lamarckians like Herbert Spencer and Trofim Lysenko tended to identify with politically reactionary movements (Lysenko was involved in the shift of the USSR from the leftist internationalism of the 20's to the fascist nationalism of the late 1930's). This phase seems to have been little more than a final salvo by the established churches against a new scientific doctrine, and part of the process of dissemination.
The second phase occurred in the late 19th century, and involved numerous debates over the implications of evolution. The second phase was really a battle among elites; for example, were the implications of evolution favorable to the political right (e.g., Herbert Spencer or Joseph-Arthur, Comte de Gobineu) or left? At the time, Karl Marx was not terribly influential in any sense, and for the political left we would need to look at the Christian Socialist Movement and the German Center Party (which was pro-Catholic, and favored clerical control over education but also a big social welfare state).
In the 1920's, the decline of pietistic populism in the economic sphere was accompanied by the boom in the KKK (at first, publicizing itself as a conservative defender of nativist Christian morality against Bolshevism and libertinism). This climaxed in the Scopes Trial (Dayton, TN, 1925) but was accompanied by other laws trying to slam the door on any concept of a common ancestor of mankind. In 1926, Mississippi passed a law banning the teaching of evolution; so did Arkansas, in 1928 [*].
During the period 1929-1965, evolution appears to have diminished as a political issue.
In 1950, Pope Pius XII published Humani generis, and declared evolution to be a serious hypothesis that does not contradict essential Catholic teachings.
A fourth phase occurred in the late 1960's and continued to around 1981. It involved several court cases (Epperson v. Arkansas, 1968; see also About listing; and McLean v. Arkansas, 1981). During this period, while political conservatives and market fundamentalists enjoyed a stupendous recovery, the religious right was still in the political wilderness.
Louisiana's "Creationism Act" forbids the teaching of the theory of evolution in public elementary and secondary schools unless accompanied by instruction in the theory of "creation science." The Act does not require the teaching of either theory unless the other is taught. It defines the theories as "the scientific evidences for [creation or evolution] and inferences from those scientific evidences." Appellees, who include Louisiana parents, teachers, and religious leaders, challenged the Act's constitutionality in Federal District Court, seeking an injunction and declaratory relief. The District Court granted summary judgment to appellees, holding that the Act violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The Court of Appeals affirmed.This seems to have been a late component of the fourth phase, seeing as it occurred in Lousiana and was carried out as a desultory gesture. Scalia, astonishingly, dissented with the majority opinion on the grounds that the counsel for the appellee had defined the Louisiana Law as merely "teaching scientific facts that challenge evolution." Scalia made the astonishing claim that, since the intent of the law was unclear, it could not be alleged to suppress free speech.
It would appear that this fourth phase was kept alive by cranks with no proximate interest in the actual case, who did find it a handy nexus of (a) states rights, (b) white power, (c) state control over education, and (d) a crusade against bureaucrats per se.
The Fifth Phase seems to have come out of that movement. In the mid-1980's, the Christian Coalition was taken over by a business consultant named Ralph Reed, who apparently got religion as a career move. The CC, like other organizations, adopted the curiously neglected strategy of aligning itself with business interests. It seems that, in previous decades, there had been a slight disconnect; while religious communities everywhere favor business, they aren't necessarily pro-corporate. One reason is that corporations are heavily connected to lending institutions, and there's a conflict right there; another is that the most pious regions include rural areas like Kansas, and populist politicians from there faced a constituency that was pro-business, ultra-devout, but heavily victimized by big corporations (especially railroads).
The debate over evolution is partly over the domain of establishing the truth. The US courts have taken the position that the state-funded educational system is not obligated to protect free speech by teaching something that has no foundation in fact. A creationist biology teacher can be challenged for teaching false information, but not for refusing to teach undocumented speculation.
In Kansas, the new law removes evolution from the science curriculum but doesn't ban it. This seems to me like the object is to abolish state accreditation of schools.
My surmise is that the anti-evolution forces have always been there, and always been frustrated cranks longing for unlimited license to be taken seriously; but occasionally they get outside help from people like the Ahmansons because they're defending/attacking some urgent issue having to do with accreditation or scientific accountability.
An Explanatory Hypothesis
The basis for a popular opposition to the theory of evolution can be summarized thus:The problem of public opposition to evolution in education is not that religious fundamentalism is growing, but that hucksters can exploit public resentment of science. They can do that because science is sometimes a handmaid of imperialism.Just what could I have meant by that? Lest there is any doubt, the hucksters are discussed in detail by Chris Mooney in his outstanding The Republican War on Science (2005). "Intelligent design" is a costly scam that exploits the weak points of US policy at every corner; the payoff is ensuring that US taxpayers, or producers in the 3rd world, will pay the tab for the ecological disaster that our actual elites have wrought. But why does it work?
There are two plausible explanations. The first is that movement conservatives tend to identify with business managers and engineers. For an engineer, it's not surprising: engineers, as opposed to other types of scientists, may prefer to think of the world as a machine that serves its creator. The concept of the world as arising from a supremely wise engineer, who has little patience with frivolity, is attractive. It's optimized for worthy users. The act of engineering enhances, sometimes immensely, human agency over the natural world. This is another vocational value that an engineer shares with a theist. The power of a rational being to reason mastery over the natural world could easily lead one to think of civilization as being an epiphany of the divine. The line between theist and atheist could here become quite blurred.
In fact, this is not a thought experiment; it's a historical observation. The literature on industrial management and politics, especially of the 19th century, does tend to propose the industrial manager as a surrogate of God on earth, a manifestation of "natural laws." The notion that the engineer's grand project, of rendering the earth serviceable to mankind, could itself be a flawed ambition is akin to doubting the wisdom of divine providence. It's difficult to convey the strength and certitude of this sentiment among engineers; you have to observe them holding forth, laughing or seething at environmentalists.
Among blue collar workers or technicians, who tend to supply a large share of the creationists' enthusiasts, however, there is a different reason for mistrust of science: it usually confronts them in ways that jeopardize their civic position. In earlier phases of US history, philosophers like William Grant Sumner (following Herbert Spencer) argued that the theory of evolution was mirrored in the concept of a market economy. The early fundamentalist movement in Usonian Protestantism made much of this, erroneously: Sumner was isolated academically, while the American Apologists overwhelmingly eschewed him. He was a poster boy for the religious left of the day, which used him to tar neoclassical economics with "Social Darwinism." Examples of this old chestnut will tumble into your lap if you Google his name; but the association is deceptive. Every crank wanted to prove his pet scheme was divinely (or naturally) ordained.
In the 1980's the situation was changing significantly. Usonian workers found their jobs under pressure from foreign competition, capital substitution, and industrial consolidation. Another source came from renewed Taylorism, now purporting to be "anti-Taylorism": "Six Sigma," "Lean Production," and others. [1] Taylorism is a system of industrial management introduced in 1913 and propagated universally. It involves micromanagement of the industrial process to extract the maximum output from labor and capital. By the 1950's, a US expert named W. Edward Deming introduced Total Quality Management (TQM) to Japan; engineers and managers there embraced TQM as a new, Asian-style Taylorism, and devised several highly specialized, Japanese versions. In the 1980's, Taylorism's descendant, TQM, returned and was embraced by several firms. Other aspects include "Just in Time" (JIT) inventory management also applied a "beefed-up" Taylorism to industry.ref> The New Taylorism was part of a policy of pretending to consult with workers in order to eliminate any unscheduled pauses in their work; applied to services, such as health care management, the effect was to drastically increase stress levels suffered by medical personnel. Once again, "scientific management"was actually a method used by managers to sack workers, and flog the remaining ones mercilessly. The fact that the comprehensive allocations of the economy were not consumer-driven, and were wasteful, was a heretical concept.
Similar conditions obtained in European plants, but Europeans had more effective social institutions for worker solidarity. The role of unions and labor-parties was stronger, albeit declining. In the USA, religious institutions often were urged to pick up the slack ("faith-based" initiatives are actually not new; they are a perennial feature of state and local initiatives). The relationship between political officials and churches was as crass as could be; the churches were expected to allow the elected officials to balance budgets while cutting taxes, as if by magic. As this scheme gained in popularity, political activists at the local level tended to become addicted to it. Churches were unsuited for taking the place of unions, and focused instead on "personal" Taylorism: self-help gimcrackery, mixed with a pop perversion of Christian teachings.
Seen in this light, it is unsurprising that churches themselves evolved into organisms purveying a repulsive ideology,[2] managed by businessmen, and oriented towards coordinating the delivery of social services. The megachurches emerged as "normative" corporations, firms that are granted unusual license for a corporation (such as receiving massive amounts of volunteer work) in exchange for fulfilling a normative goal. The outlook of industrial management tends to favor the concept of a supremely wise manager-engineer, whose disregard for human needs is actually evidence of superior merit, clobbering the natural universe into artifice for human use. The fantasies people have of conversations with God reliably feature a deity mystified by fairly obvious human expectations and desires (example). Notice, in the example linked, how the author assumes God's personality consists of an inability to relate to humans; and that this inability is taken as evidence of God's extraordinary merit. God, it seems, is the ultimate manager: micromanaging, paradoxical, and incapable of accommodating the limitations of psychology and biology.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, the alternative movements tend to offer little hope. In an era where the worker is in constant fear of unemployment, the Usonian left has nothing to say. As the one hope of a rational, tangible path to a better world, we must say that the left has become itself a weird drawerful of pathologies. At best, it can defend its glorious dictionary definition; at worst, it is acknowledged for what it, in fact, is.
This may be a circumlocutory and depressing route to the heart of Usonian resentment of science, but the picture must be sketched: for huge numbers of Usonians, the controversy over the teaching of evolution is a peculiar one. The purveyors of intelligent design are, to lawyers and evolutionary biologists, just fancy-dress creationists. Their misappropriation of terms like "irreducible complexity" is as blatant a fraud as one could point to, and ought to be proverbial. But the Usonian worker comes under constant barrage of intrusive personal manipulation at her job. Corporate badgering of consumers is obsessive. Government regulation of personal behavior, especially that of parents, is also onerous. Now a category of scientists purports to come along and invade the last realm of personal sovereignty left, namely, the ability of humans to form opinions about their souls and their relation to the Almighty. And enthusiasts are eager to propagate precisely this fear.
Notes
- ↑ Simon Head, in The New Ruthless Economy (2003), introduces this term with all the baggage I intended.
- ↑ The repulsive ideology is "Christian" in name only. The crassness has reached the point where one is likely to find copies of Who Moved My Cheese (Spencer Johnson) in the Sunday school syllabus. Unsurprisingly, the executive moving the cheese is equated with God. Frank (One Market Under God, 2000, p.247) explains the book's insidiousness marvelously well.
External Links/Additional Resources
- "High School Students' Perceptions of Evolutionary Theory," C. Sheldon Woods & Lawrence C. Scharmann, Kansas State University (1999?). Excellent paper with nuanced, philosophically consistant pedagogical goals. Conclusion:
When dealing with a potentially volatile topic such as evolutionary theory, teachers should take great care not to alienate students... An alienated student will not learn. It is evident... that students already possess many different views of evolutionary theory that potentially impede rather than facilitate their acquisition of scientifically literate information. In addition to activities that increase logical reasoning skills..., students should be provided with inquiry-based activities ...that challenge their prior knowledge of evolutionary theory... Such activities coupled with accurate conceptual information on evolution...
I understand readers might take offense at the notion that teachers in possession of objective truth ought to avoid alienating students. However, an absolutist position is incompatible with a naturalist one.
- Matthew Nisbet, "The Multiple Meanings of Public Understanding: Why Definitions Matter to the Communication of Science" Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal CSICOP) (April 28, 2005)
- Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (2005); unsurprisingly, much of the book is devoted to "Creation Science" and "Intelligent Design." The book is so superbly written I almost regret the partisan title. While this is not a book explicitly about science, it is a very good introduction to misconceptions about science.
James R MacLean (10:46, 18 September 2007 (PDT))
