I have recounted these parts of my own professional history so that
you will know that I have long been interested in teaching about
religion, and so that you will understand why I am concerned about
the book Taking Religion Seriously Across the Curriculum.
Issued in 1998 by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Development (Alexandria, Virginia), Taking Religion Seriously
is an attempt by Warren A. Nord and Charles C. Haynes to tell us how
religion must be presented in our public schools, and how the most
popular religious beliefs and doctrines must be endorsed and
promoted at public expense.
Nord is the director of the Program in Humanities and Human Values
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Haynes is a
scholar at the First Amendment Center, a unit of the Freedom Forum
(Arlington, Virginia). Both men have written before about how
public schools should handle matters of religion, and some parts of
Taking Religion Seriously seem to be softened and popularized
restatements of passages from Nord's book Religion and American
Education: Rethinking a National Dilemma (1995).
Inside the book, the alleged consensus gains a formal-looking title
with some capital letters: It becomes the "New Consensus," and it
figures prominently in Nord and Haynes's efforts to justify their
program.
These efforts begin on pages 9 and 10. In a section headlined "The
New Consensus," the authors claim that "a fairly broad consensus
about the role of religion in public schools" has emerged "at the
national level among the leadership of many religious and
educational organizations," and that this New Consensus rests on
three major principles:
On pages 36 and 37 the authors offer another section labeled "The
New Consensus." Here they allege that the New Consensus exists in
multiple versions, although they choose to quote only one version at
length. It is a declaration -- entitled "Religion in the Public
School Curriculum: Questions and Answers" -- that appeared in 1988:
Study about religion is also important if students are to value
religious liberty, the first freedom guaranteed in the Bill of
Rights. Moreover, knowledge of the roles of religion in the past
and present promotes crosscultural understanding essential to
democracy and world peace.
That 1988 text, Nord and Haynes say, was endorsed by a number of
organizations, including the American Jewish Congress, the Islamic
Society of North America, the National Association of Evangelicals,
the National Council of Churches, the American Association of School
Administrators, the National School Boards Association, and the
American Federation of Teachers.
If the declaration that Nord and Haynes have cited is supposed to
represent the New Consensus, then I reject Nord and Haynes's claim
that the so-called consensus is "fairly broad." I notice that the
religious organizations which have endorsed the declaration
represent only the three Abrahamic religions -- Judaism,
Christianity and Islam. I observe that the declaration has not been
endorsed by any scientific organization, even though some of the
deepest disputes about how America's public schools should deal with
religion are disputes over science curricula. I conclude that the
"New Consensus," far from being broad, is narrow and thin.
However, I find little reason to disagree with the statements put
forth in the declaration, because they are statements of the
obvious. Yes, religion should be discussed and illuminated, not
obscured or trivialized, when it bears on important events and
themes in history, geography, literature, music, art and other
subjects. Yes, such illumination is indispensable in any serious
program of instruction. And yes, students must see that religion
remains a potent force in contemporary life and in world affairs.
In particular, students must know that there still are societies in
which most facets of life are viewed through religious lenses, and
students must recognize that religion still is used to lend
justification and impetus to political demands and political
actions.
Nord and Haynes, however, have not composed their book merely to
make claims about a New Consensus and to quote declarations. They
purport to examine the underlying principles of the New Consensus
and to "draw out," from those principles, some "implications for the
curriculum." The implications, they say, are "sometimes
surprising."
I agree. It is truly surprising to see these authors "draw out" the
implication that history teachers must present religious myths
alongside historical scholarship and must depict these as
equivalent paths to knowledge about the past! It is indeed
surprising to watch the authors "draw out" the implication that
science teachers in public schools must negate their own teaching of
science by telling students that prescientific world-views, magical
beliefs and miraculous happenings deserve serious consideration as
explanations of nature!
I must wonder whether the organizations which endorsed the 1988
declaration knew that it carried such "implications."
Nord and Haynes's feats of drawing-out appear even more surprising
when I recall the promotional blurb on the back of the book. The
blurb asserts that Nord and Haynes are charting some sort of "middle
course." In truth, these authors want us to follow a course that
would lead to a drastic restructuring of American public education,
with particularly pernicious consequences for the teaching of
science. If Nord and Haynes were to get their way, our public
schools wouldn't be able to offer any science instruction worthy of
the name.
The introduction merits close attention because here, at the very
start of their book, Nord and Haynes give themselves away. In a
three-page section called "What Is Religion?" they skim across some
contradictory definitions, and then they write:
We will not attempt any further effort at defining religion here
-- other than to suggest three generalizations about these major
world religions that will be relevant to our discussion.
1. Each of them discerns a richer reality than does modern
science. Ultimate Reality (be it God or Brahman or Nirvana or the
Tao) can't be grasped in scientific categories, expressed in
scientific language, or analyzed in scientific laboratories.
2. From within each tradition, religion can't be
compartmentalized; it isn't simply a matter of what one affirms
or does on Friday evening or Sunday morning. The implications of
God's existence extend to all life -- to how we act the rest of the
week, and to how we make sense of the world.
3. And, of course, religion is important. Religion deals,
as Tillich argued, with matters of ultimate concern. People are not
free to ignore God. Religion is a matter of concern not just to
scholars and antiquarians.
So these authors of a book about "taking religion seriously" say
that "religious claims" span a "spectrum of possibilities," but
then they immediately dump most of the possibilities by announcing
that "religion" means only the "major" religious systems -- the ones
which are most popular. Next they pit the "major" religions
against a world-view circumscribed by natural science, and then they
quickly narrow the "major" religions down to the Abrahamic
religions. Notice how Brahman, Nirvana and the Tao appear in the
first of the authors' generalizations but then vanish. In the
second and third generalizations, only the Abrahamic "God" survives.
The authors' introduction faithfully foretells what we will see in
the rest of the book. In the rest of the book, Nord and Haynes
align themselves with Christianity, with the supremacy of the
Christians' Holy Bible among sacred books, and with using the Bible
in classrooms. They devote an entire chapter to "The Bible and
World Religions" (as I noted above), and elsewhere they provide
sections on "The Bible as Literature" and "Moral Education and the
Bible" -- but they don't offer any comparable material about other
scriptures or myth-books. The index in Taking Religion
Seriously has fifteen entries pertaining to the Bible but only
one entry pertaining to the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, and it
doesn't mention the Koran anywhere! Nor does it mention
The Book of Mormon -- even though Mormonism is an endemic
American religion with millions of adherents, and even though we
know more about the origins of Mormonism and of Mormon scripture
than we ever shall know about the origins of Christianity and of
Christian scripture.
According to my reading, the Nord-and-Haynes scheme for turning
public schools into centers for the propagation of Christianity
revolves around two overlapping principles:
Please don't imagine that you will be able to pick up a copy of
Taking Religion Seriously and find two paragraphs in which
those two principles are stated clearly and explicitly. Very few
things in Taking Religion Seriously are stated clearly and
explicitly, and the book is hard to read because it is packed with
slippery phrasing, weasel-wording, equivocation, and internal
contradictions. To figure out what Nord and Haynes are really
proposing, I have had to work hard. I have had to piece together a
lot of incomplete statements, hints, and circumlocutions from
various pages of their tract, along with dogmatic assertions that
appear without explanation or context. To infer the first of Nord
and Haynes's two principles, for example, I have had to assemble
fragments like this line from page 18:
Why not? Nord and Haynes don't support their assertion, and they
don't provide any context. They don't tell that they are simply
restating an assertion that fundamentalists have been using, for
many years, to promote the injection of creationism and
"creation-science" into science curricula.
The same assertion reappears later, in a somewhat different form,
when the authors write:
Why? Nord and Haynes don't say. Why, for example, must a public
school "take seriously" the advocates of views that were
discredited long ago or that never made any sense to begin with?
Nord and Haynes don't say. And they never resolve the contradiction
between their assertion that "everyone" must be taken seriously and
their claim that only the most popular "major" religions deserve
notice.
Nord and Haynes are advocating that public education must be recast
as a huge argumentum ad populum -- a huge appeal to the mob.
Schools would continually endorse the fallacious notion that an idea
must have merit if it is accepted by a lot of people, and courses
would be larded with popular beliefs and delusions simply because
those beliefs and delusions were popular.
Nord and Haynes are aware that some people will denounce the idea
that a public-school curriculum should be shaped by popularity
polls. Members of "minority traditions," the authors say, will
object that
The authors sanctimoniously label this a "justifiable concern," but
they don't take it seriously. They seem to view it as an
unfortunate but acceptable side-effect of their program -- a
side-effect that members of "minority traditions" will just have to
endure. "In any case," they ask rhetorically, "what is the
alternative?" They evidently expect us to agree that there is no
alternative and that we must not fret when teachers "end up
advocating Christianity, even if subtly or indirectly."
Nord and Haynes thus scuttle the third principle of their so-called
New Consensus -- the principle that "public schools must teach about
religion objectively or neutrally" without trying to indoctrinate
students into any particular tradition. Injecting a Christian
world-view into course after course, year after year -- from the
elementary grades through high school -- would constitute a
protracted program of psychological manipulation, and there would be
nothing subtle or indirect about it. Students would be subjected to
a classic indoctrination technique that is particularly effective on
young people.
Nord and Haynes's overt rejection of the New Consensus -- the
consensus that they invoked and pretended to embrace in some earlier
sections of their book -- exemplifies the internal contradictions
that run through Taking Religion Seriously from beginning to
end. Here is another example: The authors say that "It is not
proper for public schools to take sides on religiously contested
questions" (page 8) -- but later they declare that teachers must
not convey to students the idea that "all religious
traditions are equally true or equally false." How would a teacher
avoid taking sides while, at the same time, telling students that
one religion is more true or more false than another? Nord and
Haynes don't say.
Where overt self-contradiction won't do the trick, the authors
resort to deep weaseling. For instance:
What style of Christianity are the public schools supposed to
promote? Nord and Haynes evade this question, and they obfuscate
the theological diversity and doctrinal conflicts that exist among
Christians. In particular, they refuse to examine the great
spectrum of Christian opinion about whether, and to what extent, the
Bible may have any merit as an account of actual events. Instead,
and in contravention of what we observe in real life, they
simplistically divide Christianity into two forms called
"conservative religion" and "liberal religion." (Nord and Haynes
regularly say "religion" when, quite clearly, they are referring to
Christianity.) As far as I can tell, "conservative religion" means
a miracle-laden variety of Christianity based on literal readings of
scripture, while "liberal religion" means a more relaxed kind of
Christianity that involves less supernaturalism (although it does
retain belief in a few miracles). Both kinds are teleological, but
liberal religion -- which allows the Abrahamic god to work through
nature -- is generally compatible with natural science.
In advancing their plan, Nord and Haynes do not shrink from
employing misrepresentations and word-tricks. On page 137, for
instance, they list some "positions" that "individuals" allegedly
take with respect to the relationship between science and religion,
and they give these descriptions of the first two positions: "1.
Conflict: Religion Trumps Science. Science and religion
sometimes make conflicting claims about reality; when there is
conflict, only religion provides reliable knowledge. 2.
Conflict: Science Trumps Religion. Science and religion
sometimes make conflicting claims about reality, but only science
provides reliable knowledge."
Those descriptions, which promote Nord and Haynes's notion that
science and religion constitute equivalent and interchangeable
alternatives, are simplistic and deceptive. Science offers a
coherent world-view which transcends all cultural boundaries, but
religion does not. For people who subscribe to the scientific
world-view, science trumps all religious perceptions of the universe
-- but the reverse isn't true. Do you know any Christian who says
that Hindu legends or Navajo creation stories trump all scientific
findings?
Here are some more samples of Nord and Haynes's work, with my
comments:
That is false. Supernaturalism cannot be studied scientifically --
and if claims cannot be tested in "quite the same way as scientific
claims," they cannot be integrated into science. (The throwaway
reference to "quantum mechanics, cosmology, chaos theory, and
ecology" is meaningless, but it seems familiar because
propagandists routinely toss around arcane scientific terms that
neither they nor their audiences understand. One doesn't find this
sort of thing in books of serious scholarship.)
Teaching students to view nature in exclusively secular terms is
exactly what a science teacher is supposed to do and must do.
A science teacher is paid to teach science, and science is a
strictly rational, non-magical way of perceiving the universe. If a
teacher were to start promoting magic and supernaturalism in a
science classroom, he would not be teaching science anymore. If a
teacher were to start purveying phrenology or palmistry or
numerology or creation myths in a science classroom, he would be
perpetrating a fraud and he would be leading his students to an
utterly false perception of what science is and how scientists work.
Notice that Nord and Haynes garnish their complaint with the word
"uncritically," but they don't tell us what they mean by this. Do
they mean that a science teacher teaches "uncritically" if he
sticks to presenting natural causes for natural phenomena? If so,
then Nord and Haynes are again dealing in verbal flummery.
Teaching science properly, in a way that continually excludes
supernaturalism and rejects mushy thinking, requires care and
sophistication. So does the task of showing students how to
distinguish scientific interpretations of the natural world from
interpretations based on superstitions, on folktales, or on magical
revelations. These tasks cannot be accomplished "uncritically"!
(Do Nord and Haynes also consider it "troublesome" that math
teachers are "uncritically" impelling students to conceive of
geometry in the "exclusively secular terms" used by mathematicians?
Would Nord and Haynes prefer a magical form of high-school geometry
in which, for example, pi would be exactly equal to 3?
That's the value assigned to pi in the Hebrew Bible's First
Book of Kings. Aren't our math teachers "ignoring religion" when
they tell students that pi equals 3.14159 . . . ?)
Or maybe Nord and Haynes have something else in mind when they use
the word "uncritically." Are they saying that science itself
operates "uncritically"? If so, I answer that all science revolves
around critical thinking, and that science demands far more
intellectual rigor than anything which Nord and Haynes are
promoting. Science is concerned only with describing and explaining
the natural world, through the use of observations and reason, and
the canons of scientific analysis require scientists to consider all
the observations that bear on a given question -- not just the
observations that support some particular answer. (Among
scientists, the practice of selecting evidence to generate a
preconceived conclusion is scorned as "data-dredging" or
"cherry-picking.") Science often invokes specialized vocabularies, partly
to avoid the use of common words that, in everyday speech, are vague
or equivocal or laden with emotional connotations. And science is
self-correcting: Scientific findings are forever subject to being
altered, refined or discarded when new evidence comes to light.
Given all of this, do Nord and Haynes really expect us to believe
that science operates "uncritically"?
No scientific constructs are regarded as "controversial issues" by
all religionists. Educated Hindus and Buddhists, for example, have
no trouble with evolutionary biology. Conversely, countless
scientific topics can be made to appear "controversial" if they are
viewed through the eyes of certain religious groups. When a biology
teacher gives a lesson about blood, will he have to "provide some
context" for understanding the biblical tabus that involve blood?
Will he have to elucidate "what is at issue" in the blood tabus of
Jehovah's Witnesses? Why? Or why not?
To summarize: Taking Religion Seriously Across the Curriculum
is rich in weaseling, obfuscation, equivocation, and internal
contradictions. If one musters the patience to sort through these,
one finds that Nord and Haynes have a scheme by which most of our
public schools would become centers for promoting Christianity.
Public education would become a huge argumentum ad populum,
religious myths would be disguised as history, and science
education would be effectively abolished. In my judgment, Nord and
Haynes's book can correctly be described as stealth evangelism.
When the word history entered our language, some 600 years
ago, it meant a narrative -- any narrative. It was applied to any
account of events, whether the events were real or imaginary. With
the passing of time, however, that original way of using
history faded, and history acquired a narrower
meaning: It came to denote a narrative that was professedly a true
account of real happenings (as distinct from a narrative that was
acknowledged to be fictitious).
Later, history gained a second major meaning: It became the
English name for a traditional intellectual enterprise that
encompassed information about the past, popular beliefs and hearsay
about the past, reverence for the past, and the use of stories about
the past to promote social, religious or political undertakings. In
time, that traditional enterprise evolved into something new. It
retained the name history, but it evolved into an academic
discipline based on research, documentation and analysis. It became
the academic discipline that bears the name
history today -- the discipline devoted to reconstructing the
past through the use of evidence and reason, and to explaining the
past in terms of causes and effects.
Warren A. Nord and Charles C. Haynes view this newfangled brand of
history as an abomination. They despise its reliance upon evidence
and reason, and they seek to expel it from public schools. They
want the schools to shun the analytical history developed by modern
historians and to purvey instead -- as "history" -- a kind of
rubbish that will accommodate and promote popular religious beliefs.
They hold that classroom teachers must present popular religious
myths as if these were reports of real persons and events, must
endorse popular superstitions derived from religious tales, and must
avoid presenting "history" in any way that might invite inquiry,
analysis or reasoned judgments.
You can learn about Nord and Haynes's plans for history education, and
about other things that they have cooked up, by reading their book
Taking Religion Seriously Across the Curriculum. I must warn
you, though, that reading it is no easy task. If Nord and Haynes had
written a straightforward statement of their proposals, they could have
issued that statement as a 40-page pamphlet. Instead they have produced
Taking Religion Seriously, a 221-page book in which their
essential points are deeply hidden behind rhetorical baffles, decoys and
smoke-screens. To infer what Nord and Haynes really want, a reader must
continually dig his way through double-talk, fog-chatter, contradictions
and misleading pieties. For me, this has been a frustrating, tiring
experience -- the more so because I eventually had to make a chart to
keep track of Nord and Haynes's self-contradictions. (I used red ink to
make a note of each passage in which Nord and Haynes have invoked the
First Amendment, and I used violet ink to record each passage in which
they have put forth a notion or scheme that contravenes one of their own
claims about First Amendment law. I used blue ink to record each
passage in which they have promoted creationism [see note 1, below], and
I used violet ink to record each passage in which they have sought to
distance themselves from creationism. And so forth.)
I said earlier that these authors want to expel history from our public
schools, that they want to replace history with a kind of rubbish which
will accommodate and promote popular religious beliefs, and that they
want to compel teachers to endorse popular superstitions derived from
religious tales. Those statements about Nord and Haynes's goals reflect
inferences that I made while I struggled through chapter 4 of Taking
Religion Seriously -- the chapter called "History" -- and sought to
discern what lay behind all the decoys and the shrouds of verbal
camouflage that I found there. I shall make more statements about Nord
and Haynes's goals, and these too will reflect inferences that I made as
I strove to penetrate the authors' obscurantism. Nord and Haynes
themselves have seldom described any of their goals in any
comprehensible way, so I continually have had to form my own deductions
about their objectives and about the program that they are trying to
promote.
Nord and Haynes want to turn America's public schools into agencies for
propagating and promoting the religion of "the Bible." Sometimes it is
difficult to tell what they mean when they refer to "the Bible," but
they seem generally to mean the Christian Bible -- i.e., the Hebrew
Bible and the Christian New Testament, taken together.
In Taking Religion Seriously, Nord and Haynes try to provide
rationalizations for converting the public schools into
religious-indoctrination shops, and they try to convince their readers that this
conversion can be accomplished in spite of the Establishment Clause of
the First Amendment -- the clause that forbids the erection of any
official religion by any unit of government or any public agency. What
the schools should do, Nord and Haynes suggest, is to set up programs of
education "about religion" and to rig these programs in favor of
whatever religions are deemed to be the "major" ones or the most
"influential" ones. Then the schools can do what Nord and Haynes
themselves do in their book: Cast Christianity as the only religion that
is sufficiently "major" and sufficiently "influential" to merit
sustained consideration, and cast the Christian Bible as the only
religious scripture that merits any serious study. Nord and Haynes evidently
imagine that this ruse will fool any court in the land.
It's amusing, in a way, to watch Nord and Haynes perform their
major-religions number and to notice they never present any criteria for
deciding just which religions have enough voltage to qualify as
"major." On page 4 they say that "when we talk about religion in the
chapters that follow, we mean the traditional major world religions --
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, for
example." A list of examples, however, explains nothing. Who said
those were the "traditional major world religions"? On what grounds?
And why should one care about this "traditional" taxonomy? [note 2]
It is hard to see why, in the context of American
education, one should give attention to Taoism but should entirely
ignore -- as Nord and Haynes do -- various world religions that are far
more conspicuous and more significant in America than Taoism has
ever been. In almost any American telephone book, the advertising
section carries more ads for chiropractors than for savants of the Tao,
but there is no entry for chiropractic in the index of Nord and
Haynes's book [note 3]. Nor is there any entry for Mormonism
[note 4] or for Scientology [note 5 and note 6].
As it turns out, Nord and Haynes do not have much use for Taoism
either. After declaring on page 4 that Taoism is one of the major
religions, they mention it once more (on page 50), and then they dump
it. So much for their major-religions sham.
Here is something else that I noticed when I looked through the index:
There is no entry for myth or mythology or comparative
mythology. If students are to appreciate religion, they must gain
some understanding of why religious myths are created, of why myths are
valuable, and of what can happen when myths break down and lose their
credibility. Students must also understand that mythic events, gods and
heroes often reflect local environments and economies, and students must
grasp that certain important ideas have recurred again and again (in
more or less recognizable forms) in myths revered by different peoples
from different times and places. Nord and Haynes, however, are
oblivious to all these matters, and they want the schools to teach
"about religion" without providing instruction in mythology. So much for
the pretense that Taking Religion Seriously is a serious book.
Despite its length, Taking Religion Seriously offers little that
can be regarded as novel. The view that American public schools must
serve as centers of religious indoctrination certainly isn't new, nor is
the view that our schools must specifically endorse and promote
religious beliefs that have been derived from "the Bible." These
notions have been advanced many times before, by fundamentalists, in
manifestoes and political campaigns. During the 1970s and the early
1980s, for example, fundamentalists tried to force public schools to
tell students that biblical myths, dressed up as "creation-science,"
furnished rational explanations of nature. More recently,
fundamentalists in a number of jurisdictions have sought to force public
schools to promote religious prescriptions that the fundamentalists call
"the Ten Commandments" [note 7].
The only discernible innovation in Taking Religion Seriously is
Nord and Haynes's effort to fuse the customary anti-intellectualism of
the religious right with the "postmodern" anti-intellectualism of the
academic left [note 8]. As we shall see, Nord and Haynes advance the
postmodern notion that any invocation of knowledge or experience or judgment is an
exercise in prejudice!
Taking Religion Seriously comprises an introduction, a chapter
about civic and legal matters, a chapter about the authors' vision of
public education, seven chapters containing the authors' designs for
introducing religion into the public-school curriculum, and a
four-page recapitulation titled "Conclusions."
In their introduction, on page 8, Nord and Haynes refer to "the
religious liberty clauses of the First Amendment to the Constitution,"
and then they write:
What does that mean? When Nord and Haynes say that "It is not proper
for public schools to take sides on religiously contested questions,"
they seem to be stating a grand principle -- yet they don't explain what
they mean by "religiously contested questions," and they don't provide
any examples. I suppose they have in mind such questions as How many
ribs does a man have? or Was Jesus of Nazareth killed by
crucifixion? or How many legs does an insect have? or Why
are ancient plesiosaurs still living in the deep oceans? Let me
elaborate:
The claim that insects are four-footed animals is quite obviously a
mistake, but fundamentalists who adhere strictly to the doctrine of
biblical inerrancy can't concede this, no matter how trivial the
mistake may seem. Nor can they acknowledge any of the other errors
that the Christian Bible displays, nor can they admit that there are
obvious, fatal contradictions among the four canonical gospels. The
doctrine of biblical inerrancy states that the Christian Bible bears no
mistakes, is accurate in every respect, and must be read literally --
and many fundamentalists cling tightly to those views. As Raymond A.
Eve and Francis B. Harrold explain in their sociological study of
creationism: "For biblical literalists, no error in any area of
the Bible can be accepted lest the Bible become suspect in all other
areas" [note 11].
The cases that I have imagined are not ones that immediately leap to
mind when we think of religious controversies. The cases that I have
imagined are extreme, bizarre and even ridiculous -- and that's why I
have proffered them. If we are to grasp the full import of Nord and
Haynes's dictum that "It is not proper for public schools to take sides
on religiously contested questions," we must recognize that people who
follow eccentric forms of religion can find religious issues almost
anywhere. If we are to envision what would happen in schools that
adopted Nord and Haynes's dictum, we must recognize that people who
follow eccentric forms of religion can generate "religiously contested
questions" in almost any context. With those points in mind, let us
turn from Nord and Haynes's introduction to their first chapter.
Chapter 1 of Taking Religion Seriously is titled "The Civic and
Constitutional Frameworks." Nord and Haynes show us their civic
framework first, introducing it with this pious piffle: "[W]e believe
that justice requires that the curriculum of public schools be neutral
in a pluralistic democracy. When the public disagrees deeply, public
schools should not promote, much less institutionalize, one view and
remain silent about the others."
That's another item that looks like a grand principle -- until we
notice the word "deeply." What does "deeply" signify here? Why should
"justice" operate only when a disagreement is deep? Why is it
permissible for a public school to boost one view ("and remain silent
about the others") if public disagreement over those views doesn't pass
a depth test? And how should that test be carried out? Do Nord and
Haynes possess some formula for determining how deep a disagreement is,
or for discovering whether a disagreement is deep enough to affect a
public-school curriculum? Perhaps, but they never tell what that
formula may be. Instead, they rush ahead to write:
The analogy involving political parties is fog-chatter. Though it
would apply to a discussion of an upcoming election, it is plainly
irrelevant to discussions of faits accomplis or of matters that
already have been settled. Is your "sense of justice" violated if a
biology teacher fails to discuss the view that fossils aren't vestiges
of organisms but rather are objects which were secreted by rocks when
the rocks experienced a cosmic "molding force"? [note 13]
Is your "sense of justice" violated if a teacher of 20th-century history doesn't
take seriously the cranks who deny that the Nazis killed millions of
people in extermination camps? Is your "sense of justice" violated if a
chemistry teacher declines to dignify the notion that the formation of
an organic molecule requires the action of a preternatural "life force"?
Is your "sense of justice" violated if a geography teacher doesn't
discuss the claim that a land-bridge enabled kangaroos to hop to
Australia after they hopped out of Noah's ark?
Though Nord and Haynes have repeated their stuff about disagreeing
"deeply," they still haven't explained it. They still haven't said,
nor will they ever say, why "justice" is required only when a
disagreement is deep. They still haven't answered, nor will they ever
answer, any of the other questions suggested by their prating about
"justice." We'll see similar performances as we read farther in
Taking Religion Seriously, for Nord and Haynes routinely refuse
to acknowledge obvious questions engendered by their own statements.
Indeed, the practice of ignoring obvious questions, as if those questions
did not even exist, figures prominently in many of Nord and Haynes's
attempts to misdirect and bamboozle their readers.
Nord and Haynes's invocations of "justice" and of "pluralistic
democracy" ring false but familiar. Fundamentalists used the same
tactics, years ago, during their "creation-science" campaigns: They
appealed to fairness and democracy and egalitarianism, and they
insisted that a public school should subordinate scientific scholarship
to the fancies and imaginings of the local population. Consider, for
example, this passage from Dorothy Nelkin's book Science Textbook
Controversies and the Politics of Equal Time [note 14].
Nelkin recounts what happened in California in 1972, after the California State
Board of Education accorded to creationists some concessions which the
creationists regarded as inadequate:
Yes, they did -- but ideas about nature do not gain scientific
respectability by winning "public support," and scientific knowledge is
not dependent upon surveys or elections [note 15]. Creationists have
always been free to bring forth evidence that might bolster their claims
and might make those claims seem persuasive, but they have no such
evidence -- so they produce public-opinion polls and other political
claptrap instead. Sometimes they even produce claptrap like Taking
Religion Seriously Across the Curriculum.
Having exhibited their feeble civic framework, rigged around the claim
that "justice" and "democracy" require public schools to dignify any
notion about anything, Nord and Haynes now invite us to view their
constitutional framework. This one is stronger than the civic
framework, because this one is built around decisions issued by the
Supreme Court of the United States. Nord and Haynes say, correctly,
that public schools may require students to "learn about religion" and
that "including the academic study of religion [in a public-school
curriculum] does not violate the Establishment clause." Then they tell
us this:
Now, that is important stuff -- especially the principle that the
Establishment Clause "prohibits the government not only from preferring
one religion over another but also from preferring religion over
nonreligion." We later shall see that the unconstitutional practice of
"preferring religion over nonreligion" is an essential part of Nord and
Haynes's scheme for destroying science education.
Chapter 2 of Nord and Haynes's book is titled "The Educational
Framework." The authors begin by telling us that this framework
reflects a "New Consensus" about how religion should be presented in
public schools -- but it turns out that this alleged consensus is
embraced only by some "major religious and educational organizations."
No civil-liberties organizations or historical societies or scientific
societies need apply. Some consensus!
A few pages later, in a section titled "Worldviews," Nord and Haynes
unveil their attitudes toward natural science: They regard science with
disgust and hostility, and they resent the intellectual revolution that
science has wrought. They begin their "Worldviews" section by writing:
"God"? We can already perceive that Nord and Haynes think about
religion in terms of God-with-a-capital-G -- i.e., the
miracle-working God of "the Bible" -- and that they have little interest in
religions that don't offer such a figure.
It seems odd that these two fanciers of biblical miracles don't seem to
know much about them. Where did they get the idea that miracles "are by
definition singular events"? I have checked the entries for
miracle in several unabridged dictionaries, and I have read
articles about miracles in three encyclopedias
[note 16], but I have not
found any suggestion that a miracle must be a unique event or that the
biblical God can't perform a given miracle more than once. Moreover,
I can point to a miracle which the deity in question has
performed on hundreds of occasions in the past, and which he still
repeats regularly: During rituals conducted annually at Naples, a
vial containing some dried, solidified blood of the martyr St.
Januarius is displayed to the faithful -- and almost always, the
biblical God causes the dried blood to become a liquid. Then, after
a priest has announced "Il miracolo é fatto [The miracle
is done]," and after some of the faithful have been allowed to kiss
the vessel in which the vial is housed, the blood becomes solid
again. This recurrent Neapolitan spectacle is surely impressive,
but it isn't unique. Similar miracles, each involving the dried blood
of a saint, recur every year at other
places in southern Italy, where blood-magic is a regional specialty.
If Nord and Haynes really are unaware of these marvels, let them
consult the article "'Miraculous' Phenomena" in The Encyclopedia
of the Paranormal, issued in 1996 by Prometheus Books (Amherst,
New York).
As for the claim that scientists can't ask the biblical God to
replicate a miracle for the sake of a controlled experiment: Why
can't scientists do that, and why shouldn't God comply? Have Nord and
Haynes forgotten that God likes to show off? Then they must read the
Book of Exodus and see how God delays the liberation of the Israelites
while he devises opportunities to display his supernatural powers
[note 17].
Have Nord and Haynes forgotten that God already has exhibited his
willingness to deliver miracles on request? Then they should consult
the Book of Judges and see how Gideon not only solicits miracles,
successfully, but does this in a rather scientific way. First he
requests and obtains a miracle in which God causes dew to condense on a
fleece but not on the adjacent ground. Then Gideon verifies his
procedure, so to say, by requesting and getting a second miracle that is
the reciprocal of the first: This time, God causes dew to form on the
ground but not on the fleece [note 18].
That's enough merriment. Now let's get serious and consider Nord and
Haynes's claim that "the modern scientific conceptual net -- or
scientific method -- allows scientists to catch only replicable events;
the results of any experiment that cannot be replicated are not allowed
to stand."
Nord and Haynes are seeking to exploit three popular beliefs about
science -- the notion that scientific knowledge comes exclusively from
laboratory work, the notion that all scientific investigations revolve
around a cookbook formula for conducting controlled experiments, and the
notion that scientists call this procedure "the scientific method." All
three beliefs are absurd. None of them has any foundation in fact, and
there are many scientific disciplines -- such as astronomy, meteorology,
paleontology, oceanography and biogeography -- in which controlled
experiments are seldom, if ever, performed.
The reason why those absurd notions about science enjoy great
popularity is that they are promoted continually by creationists and by
schoolbook-writers:
Nord and Haynes continue by serving up a red herring:
So what? That theologians and scientists make use of different
"conceptual nets" isn't remarkable at all, since scientists and
theologians have different purposes and goals. Religion and natural
science aren't equivalent endeavors, science isn't a defective
imitation of theology, and scientists aren't cut-rate theologians who
use faulty "conceptual nets" because they can't devise better ones.
Nord and Haynes, however, want their readers to imagine that religion
and natural science are equivalent endeavors -- i.e., that
science and religion are inimical but equivalent approaches to
accomplishing the same things. They have introduced that notion here,
and they will promote it repeatedly, because it will be useful to them
during their attack on science education.
One fundamental reason why religion and natural science are not
equivalent, or even comparable, becomes quite clear if we consider the
scope of each. Religion -- by which I mean Nord and Haynes's style of
religion, taken from "the Bible" -- has no limits. Its products include
(among other things) doctrines about nature, doctrines about
supernatural forces and characters, doctrines about relations between
supernatural characters and humans, and doctrines (allegedly derived
from supernatural sources) about how humans should lead their lives.
Science, however, deals only with nature and seeks only to describe and
explain the universe that we can apprehend with our senses. Science
doesn't try to do anything else, or claim to do anything else, and it
certainly doesn't purport to divine how we should conduct our lives: At
most, science tells us what results we can expect if we decide to manipulate
some natural system in some specified way.
As if to reinforce the misconception that religion and science are
equivalent in scope and purpose, Nord and Haynes go on to depict
religion and science as the sources of alternative "worldviews":
Let me reject the authors' nebulous and misleading stuff about
"worldviews," and let me restate their question in a way that makes
some sense: Why should we assume that natural science, by itself and
without any help from religion, is adequate for explaining the natural
world?
The answer is: Because that assumption is supported by the entire
record of human experience, and it gains more support every day.
Science, by itself, has enabled us to acquire verifiable knowledge of
nature, to build a unified picture of nature, to make reliable
predictions about nature, and to use such predictions in developing
effective technology. Religion, on the other hand, has failed to
generate any coherent conception of the natural world, and the
technology that religion offers -- i.e., magic -- has been a monumental
flop. Over the centuries, men have made innumerable attempts to call
forth, by magic, supernatural forces that would override the laws of
nature, but all those efforts have failed. Over the centuries, men have
tried to manipulate nature by reciting magical incantations, worshiping
magical objects, building magical structures, performing magical dances,
drawing magical symbols and swallowing magical potions, but they haven't
achieved anything. They haven't been able to demonstrate that
supernatural forces can be invoked to alter nature, and they haven't
even been able to demonstrate that supernatural forces exist.
The record of human experience, then, testifies compellingly to the
adequacy of science, and to the irrelevance of religion and
supernaturalism, in dealing with the natural world. But not to worry --
Nord and Haynes have a solution to this difficulty:
Did you get that? We must flatly ignore experience and accumulated
knowledge, and we must shun the temptation to make such judgments as
experience and knowledge may engender, because anyone who makes
judgments is guilty of "being prejudiced"!
Nord and Haynes's attempt to equate judgment with prejudice will warm
the hearts of postmodern ignoramuses everywhere, but it is unadulterated
codswallop. Consider again the record of human experience: It
shows that we have discarded countless religious claims not
because we have prejudged them but because we have done the opposite --
we have taken the claims seriously, we have studied and investigated
them, and we have found them to be false or absurd. We have taken
seriously the religious claim that Earth is only 6,000 years old
[note 19],
and we have discarded it because it failed to explain what we saw
when we looked at Earth herself. We have taken seriously the claims put
forth by various faith healers, we have studied the faith healers
themselves while they practiced their craft, and we have found that the
claims were empty and the healers were merely showmen. We have taken
seriously the claims made by the exhibitors of various religious
statues that allegedly dripped blood or tears, we have studied the
statues and the substances that they allegedly secreted, and we have
found that the exhibitors' claims were fraudulent. We have taken
seriously the religious claim that "it came to pass in those days, that
there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should
be taxed" [note 20] --
and after studying it in the light of history, we
have discarded it as a fiction. We have taken seriously the claim that
the famous image of the Virgin of Guadalupe was formed supernaturally,
we have studied the image itself, and we have found it to be an ordinary
painting [note 21]. And so on, and so on, and so on.
Cranks, con men and true believers may persist in promoting religious
claims that have been studied and discredited, but persistence can't
make the claims respectable. Cranks, con men and true believers may
charge that we are "being prejudiced" when we ignore claims that have
been found to be worthless, but we needn't let such rhetoric intimidate
us. Nord and Haynes may bray that, for the sake of "fairness" we must
abandon rationality and must pretend to see intellectual merit in any
claim that is promoted under a banner of religion, but we can laugh at
Nord and Haynes's insults. I wonder: Does their "fairness" nonsense
echo the New Consensus that they mentioned at the start of the chapter?
Maybe, but that nonsense certainly isn't new. It embodies an attitude
that H.L. Mencken observed some 75 years ago and that he noted in
"Aftermath" [note 22], one of his articles about the Scopes trial:
Having informed us that public schools must take everyone seriously, and
that "we" too must take everyone seriously and must include everyone in
"the discussion," Nord and Haynes now change their minds:
Ah, yes -- those "major religious traditions." You will recall that
Nord and Haynes began to prate about "major" religions back on page 4,
but they refused to say how or why, or in what context, a religion might
qualify as "major." Well, they still haven't elucidated those matters,
and they now have made things even murkier by suggesting that a "major"
religion is one that has a lot of "influence." What sort of "influence"
do they have in mind? Do they mean political influence? Do they mean
commercial or economic influence? Do they mean the influence that is
manifested when true believers kill infidels in religious wars or
religious assassinations? Maybe they mean some combination of all those
forms of influence -- but if that is the case, we'll need some standards
or some conversion factors that will enable us to make comparisons.
How many deaths in a religious war are equivalent to, say, a million
dollars in gross revenues? Nord and Haynes don't suggest any answers.
On pages 48 and 49 the authors make their first reference to
"creation-science":
Here Nord and Haynes are attempting to distance themselves from
creationism by whacking "creation-science," but this is just a
rhetorical diversion. "Creation-science" has already been so
thoroughly whacked, by scientists and by the federal courts, that it is
moribund and is no longer of much use to the creationists in their
efforts to undermine science education. Today the creationists' most
virulent campaigns are based not on "creation-science" but on a
pseudoscientific absurdity called "intelligent design."
As it happens, the creationists' "intelligent design" hokum has been
whacked and rejected by natural scientists, just as "creation-science"
was, but Nord and Haynes don't mention this. I'll return to
"intelligent design" later, when I describe Nord and Haynes's efforts to
whitewash and promote it.
One more item in chapter 2 demands our attention. On page 49 Nord and
Haynes declare: "We do not propose the quixotic position that science
courses cease to be science courses." In fact, however, that is what
Nord and Haynes do propose -- not
here in chapter 2 but in chapter 7. Let us skip to that chapter right
now.
Chapter 7, "The Sciences," is devoted to Nord and Haynes's plan for
getting rid of science education. The chapter is relentlessly obscure,
and it is heavily laden with unexplained statements, supernaturalistic
fantasies and misleading half-truths. After reading it several times
and trying to figure out what Nord and Haynes really are proposing, I
have deduced that their plan has four major features:
This last feature of Nord and Haynes's plan seems to render the entire
plan unconstitutional. By Nord and Haynes's own account (in chapter 1
of Taking Religion Seriously), the Supreme Court has affirmed
that the Establishment Clause prohibits agencies of government "from
preferring religion over nonreligion" -- yet these authors want public
schools to do exactly that during the operation of fake science
courses.
Now let me describe how their chapter about "The Sciences" is
constructed.
Nord and Haynes begin by repeating the fishing-net analogy that they
introduced in chapter 2, and then they iterate their resentment of the
scientific revolution. First they remind us of how good everything was
before science came along:
(That, I must concede, is poignant prose. As I was reading it, I could
almost smell the aroma of a witch roasting on a pyre -- and I could
almost hear the sacred chants of the responsible agents who knew that
the cosmic playwright had ordained them to find and kill witches.)
Next, our two connoisseurs of goodness lament that the old biblical
view of nature and "reality" has been blasted by science. Science,
they say, assumes that "God is irrelevant to understanding nature."
Science, they say, assumes that there isn't any need to enlist
miracles, divine purposes, religious experience or religious scripture
in explaining how nature works -- and "science has become the arbiter of
intellectual respectability."
Are we supposed to see this as a problem? Why? Can Nord and Haynes
demonstrate that there is a need to enlist miracles or other
religious inventions in explaining how nature works? If they can
demonstrate such a reason, why don't they do so? Can they point to any
case in which a religious invention produced a scientifically useful
explanation of some aspect of nature? -- some aspect of nature that
couldn't be explained by evidence and reason alone? If they know of
such a case, why don't they cite it?
Nord and Haynes now start a new section of text titled "The
Relationship of Science and Religion." They make some misleading
assertions regarding "different positions on the relationship of science and
religion," then they promote again the notion that science and religion
are equivalent endeavors, and then (on page 139) they announce:
Is that true? Maybe it is. Some 52% of our countrymen believe in
astrology [note 24], so maybe it's true that a third of them believe in
the inerrancy of a book which says that insects have four feet. Some
42% of our fellow citizens believe that living persons can communicate
with dead ones [note 24], and 33% believe that the mythical continent of
Atlantis actually existed [note 24], so perhaps it's true that a third
of them believe that the canonical gospels are all perfectly accurate,
even when those gospels contradict each other. However, I can't
understand why Nord and Haynes have drawn attention to the embarrassing
persistence of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, because they don't
say any more about it. They mutter that "very few" scientists take the
position that religion trumps science -- but then, just when we expect
them to tell about those aberrant scientists, they dash away and
introduce a new topic. They allege that in recent decades, there has
been "a shift" toward an "integrationist position" which favors a fusion
of science and religion, and then they assert that
Predictably, Nord and Haynes refuse to explain any of those statements.
They don't explain or illustrate how theological claims can be
"testable" (even by theological standards), they don't explain how the
"integration" of science with theology would work, and they don't cite
any article that might elucidate such things.
In truth, their whole passage about "integration" is airy-fairy
nonsense that can serve only to bewilder and mislead the ignorant:
Theology deals entirely with supernaturalism, but natural science
doesn't deal with supernaturalism at all -- and the notion of fusing
the two is absurd. So is the notion of integrating scientific findings
with supernaturalistic claims that can't be tested "in quite the same
way as scientific claims." If claims can't be tested scientifically, by
recourse to evidence and reason alone, then science has nothing to say
about them.
Of course, when religionists stray beyond supernaturalism and
promulgate claims about the world that we can apprehend with our
senses, those claims can be tested by recourse to evidence and
reason alone. Such testing has gone on for centuries, and it continues
still. Bible-thumpers claim that a rotten carcass is a relic of a
plesiosaur, but scientists show that it isn't. A faith healer says that
he has reversed the course of this or that disease, but scientists show
that his claim is bogus. A miracle-monger produces a blood-dripping
statue of Jesus, but scientists show that the miraculous blood formerly
belonged to a chicken or a rabbit or a cat. And so on, and so on, and
so on. In such cases, religion and science already enjoy a sort of
"integration," but Nord and Haynes say nothing about this.
Now Nord and Haynes turn their attention to schoolbooks. They say that
they have "reviewed" five high-school biology books, four high-school
earth-science books and three high-school physics books, looking for
material about the relationship of science and religion, and they claim
that they made these observations: Ten of the books had no such material
at all; the 1996 version of Heath's Biological Science: A Molecular
Approach [note 25] had some unsatisfactory stuff that filled three
pages; and the 1992 version of Addison-Wesley's Conceptual
Physics [note 26] had two paragraphs that "[did] little to
discourage shallow thinking." Curiously, our two deep thinkers make no
comment about another textbook that they allegedly "reviewed" -- the
1994 version of Glencoe's Biology: Living Systems -- even though
it is a sort of religious tract and is riddled with religious notions
derived from natural theology [note 27 and note 28]. Have Nord and
Haynes failed to notice this? Or have they just decided that they
shouldn't mention it?
Nord and Haynes conclude their passage about textbooks by telling us
that
What do Nord and Haynes mean when they declare that science education
proceeds "uncritically"? I don't know. Do Nord and Haynes know? If
so, why don't they tell us what "uncritically" is supposed to convey?
And why do they object to students' learning that religion and science
are independent endeavors? Haven't Nord and Haynes themselves advanced
that very point? Haven't they themselves said that science excludes
religious inventions? Haven't they themselves told us that science
finds no need to enlist miracles, divine purposes, religious experience
or religious scripture in explaining how nature works? Yes, that is
what they have told us. So why are they now pretending otherwise? We
must also wonder why Nord and Haynes object to students' learning that
"science always trumps religion"? Can Nord and Haynes point to any
counterexample? Can they point to any case in which religion has
trumped science as a way of explicating the natural world? If they
know of such a case, why don't they describe it to us?
Alas, we shall never know. Instead of explaining themselves, they drop
the subject and turn to new things.
Nord and Haynes now bring forth three sections of text that are
titled "Evolution and Biology," "The Big Bang and Cosmology," and
"Nature and Ecology." Though these sections occupy nearly eleven
pages, their purpose is never stated explicitly. They seem to be
summaries of religious doctrines that will be presented to students
in Nord and Haynes's fake science courses.
"Evolution and Biology"
Reading the "Evolution and Biology" section, we find some material
that evidently will be featured in the Nord-and-Haynes biology
curriculum:
At last, Nord and Haynes have given us an idea of what they mean by
"integration." They mean nothing but naked religious preaching -- in
this case, the preaching of doctrines that they ascribe to a Roman
Catholic publication and to the current Pope. I cannot resist
imagining how the teacher in a Nord-and-Haynes biology course might
convey the Pope's affirmations to students:
SALLY, A STUDENT: Is that really true?
MR. SMITH: Aren't you forgetting something? In biology, we
SALLY: How does the Pope know the first people's names?
MR. SMITH: Their names are in the Bible.
CARL, A STUDENT: Does the Pope know the names of other things
MR. SMITH: I don't know whether he does or not.
BARBARA, A STUDENT: Does the Pope know the names of the major
MR. SMITH: I guess he does. I really couldn't say.
ANNE, A STUDENT: When I was in Florida I saw a religious comic
MR. SMITH: How many times do I have to remind you people?
ANNE: But if the Pope is the Antichrist, maybe what he says
MR. SMITH: Maybe, but I really couldn't say. The important thing
now
STEVEN, A STUDENT: Remember when you told us that Noah's ark
MR. SMITH: Gee, I don't know. Maybe there were whales on the
STEVEN: Was the Flood made of salt water or fresh water?
MR. SMITH: Fresh water. God made it rain for forty days and
STEVEN: Okay, but check this out. I watched a nature
program
MR. SMITH: Well, maybe they were special whales -- or maybe
STEVEN: Okay, but then what happened to all the fish that
MR. SMITH: Yes, I suppose he was -- but whether fish live in
BARBARA: Birds don't have souls, right?
Later in their "Evolution and Biology" section Nord and Haynes return to
the five biology textbooks that they allegedly "reviewed," and they tell
us that
Oh, what a familiar routine! Creationist charlatans have been using it
for decades in their performances before ignorant, gullible audiences:
They casually refer to "scientific arguments against evolution," but
they don't say what those arguments may be. In this way, they trick
their listeners into making two false inferences -- that "scientific
arguments against evolution" exist, and that the arguments are so well
known that there is no need to state them.
Look here: Organic evolution is the grand organizing principle that
informs and unites all of modern biology. If Nord and Haynes know of
any "scientific arguments against evolution," why don't they present
those arguments to us? For that matter, why don't they present their
revolutionary insights to the world's biologists, who surely would
respond by showering Nord and Haynes with praise and honors -- if the
arguments were valid. Why have Nord and Haynes devoted their time to
writing a sleazy screed if they could have revolutionized all of modern
biology at a single stroke?
"The Big Bang and Cosmology"
In the section titled "The Big Bang and Cosmology," we find some stuff
that apparently will be taught in a typical Nord-and-Haynes physics
course. Here is a sample:
Our two shammers have confused the words infinitesimal and
infinite [note 29],
have misspelled infinitesimal, and
have flashed a highfalutin term (Anthropic Principle) that
they don't understand. Nord and Haynes obviously imagine that there
is a single thing called the Anthropic Principle, but they are
mistaken.
There are at least four Anthropic Principles, all of which are
propositions about the presence of intelligent observers in the universe
-- and at least two of those propositions, called the Weak Anthropic
Principle and the Strong Anthropic Principle, were well known at the
time when Nord and Haynes concocted Taking Religion Seriously.
The Weak Anthropic Principle states that because we are here, observing
the universe, we can deduce (first) that the universe has properties
conducive to the evolution of observers, and (second) that the universe
is old enough for such evolution to have occurred. The Strong Anthropic
Principle, which is a teleological speculation, states that if a
universe is to exist at all, it must have properties which will
foster the eventual generation of intelligent observers. (We can
imagine a universe that could not give rise to life or intelligence --
but according to the Strong Anthropic Principle, such a universe
could not actually come into being.)
Neither the Weak Anthropic Principle nor the Strong Anthropic Principle
constitutes "cosmological evidence that the universe was fine-tuned to
produce life."
Nord and Haynes next enumerate some of the cosmological phenomena or
"coincidences" that seem to have made life possible in our universe,
and then they say:
You can see where they are going. They reach their destination on page
147, where they write:
Rubbish! The big bang may be "consonant" with a creation myth in the
Bible, but it is equally consonant with the Hindu myth in which the
universe springs from "golden seed" spilled by the god Prajpati, or with
the central-African myth in which the Sun and the Moon and the stars are
vomited up by the god Mobombo, or with any other creation story in which
the universe is suddenly brought into being through the actions of some
supernatural character or characters. Nord and Haynes's suggestion that
the big bang has some particular relevance to the biblical "God" -- that
the big bang specifically supports "the role of God in creating the
universe" -- is worthless, false and misleading.
"Nature and Ecology" In their
section headlined "Nature and Ecology," our authors return to presenting
material that presumably will be included in their fake biology
curriculum. This section is a romp along the frontiers where biblical
religion meets environmentalism, radical feminism and animism.
Nord and Haynes call attention to "our environmental crisis," and they
acknowledge the often-heard charge that certain items in the Bible have
supported the view that nature is simply something for humans to
exploit:
But "over the past several decades," Nord and Haynes say, the
practitioners of an art called "eco-theology" have discovered that the
Bible also supports kinder, gentler views:
None of that strikes me as remarkable, for it seems merely to
illustrate a point that already is well established: Somewhere in the
Bible there is a passage that provides support for almost any moral
proposition that one may articulate, and somewhere else in the Bible
there is a passage that contradicts the same proposition.
Nord and Haynes, though, evidently see the eco-theologians' material as
important stuff that students in a fake biology course will have to
learn. Then, apparently, the students will ponder such propositions as
transubstantiation and the Trinity, which are to be presented in this
context:
Presumably, any student who declines to accept the Christian doctrine of
the Trinity, or who doubts that God is present in the wine and bread,
will be rewarded with an F. And presumably, any parent who walks into
the principal's office with a copy of the First Amendment will get the
boot.
Reading on, we discover that the eco-theologians include some
specialists called the "ecofeminist theologians." Here is what
students will learn about these worthies:
That's hip, to be sure, but I don't know where the ecofeminists
acquired the notion that the biblical God "is disembodied mind."
Yahweh's properties were established and fixed by the ancient Hebrews,
and the ancient Hebrews conceived of Yahweh as an anthropomorphic,
masculine character whose anatomy included a face, a back and at least
one hand (Exodus 33:22-23). In any case, Nord and Haynes fail to
demonstrate how our comprehension of "Nature and Ecology" will be
advanced by efforts to turn Yahweh into a hermaphroditic ether.
After they dispose of "Nature and Ecology" Nord and Haynes offer a
three-paragraph section called "Other Issues." In the paragraph
labeled "Health and healing," they bray about "holistic
medicine," but they refuse to tell what that phrase signifies [note 30].
Then they say that "there are now some efforts under way to test
scientifically the efficacy of prayer and other spiritual practices in
healing" -- but they refuse to say how or where those "efforts" are
being conducted, or by whom. Then they announce: "What does seem clear
is that traditional scientific accounts of health and healing can no
longer be assumed to be adequate."
Why does that "seem clear"? Because some nameless wraiths are
allegedly testing prayer "scientifically"? Shouldn't we wait to learn
about their procedures and the results of their "efforts" before we
conclude that "scientific accounts of health and healing can no longer
be assumed to be adequate"? And by the way: If it is already clear that
"scientific accounts" can't be assumed to be adequate, then why are
those wraiths testing prayer "scientifically"? Don't they know that their
undertakings are doomed to inadequacy?
Nord and Haynes's rubbish about health is another exercise in
charlatanry. This time they have used a trick that is commonly seen in
television advertisements for patent medicines and bogus
weight-control schemes: A huckster claims that his product is being tested
"scientifically" or "by scientists" (perhaps at a "leading" but
nameless university), and he relies upon his gullible audience to infer
that this nebulous association between the product and "scientists"
means that the product must be legitimate.
Nord and Haynes have made some small mistakes here. The first book,
Darwin's Black Box, was issued in 1996 (not 1997), and the title
of the second book is Of Pandas and People (not Pandas and
People).
Nord and Haynes have also undertaken some big deceptions. They haven't
disclosed that Darwin's Black Box and Of Pandas and People
are pseudoscientific screeds promoted by creationists, and they haven't
cited any of the publications in which Darwin's Black Box and
Of Pandas and People have been exposed and demolished.
"Intelligent design" (or ID, for short) is the political successor to "creation-science." Among
today's creationists, ID has replaced "creation-science" as the hoax of choice for bamboozling
ignorant politicians and bureaucrats and educators. If we compare ID with "creation-science," we
discover some central similarities and some radical differences -- and to appreciate those
similarities and differences we must recall some history.
"Creation-science" was an elaborate body of hokum by which fundamentalists purported to show
"scientifically" that the stories in the Book of Genesis were accounts of real events, that Earth and
Earth's organisms had been fashioned directly by Yahweh (only a few thousand years ago), that
the concept of organic evolution was false, and that humans were not connected genealogically to
any other species. Much of "creation-science" consisted of lies, and many of the lies were so
crude and transparent that they seemed risible to people who understood science -- but
"creation-science" hadn't been contrived to impress people who understood science. It was intended to
impress members of state legislatures, state education agencies, and local school boards. It was
intended to persuade them that they should exclude modern astronomy, geology, paleontology
and biology from science curricula, or (as an alternative) that they should inject biblical myths into
science curricula as explanations of astronomical, geological, paleontological and biological
observations.
In their writings and their public appearances, the "creation-scientists" demonstrated that biblical
narratives explained a great array of natural phenomena; they also demonstrated that the
prevailing scientific explanations for those phenomena were wrong. They were able to perform
these mighty feats, easily, because they didn't have to deal with real phenomena or with real
science. Their chosen audiences were predictably ignorant of nature and science alike, so the
"creation-scientists" could simply make things up -- which is what they did. They showed, for
example, that the great Flood described in Genesis accounted for the stratigraphic distribution of
fossils and thus explained the fossil record -- not the real fossil record but a fake fossil record that
they themselves had invented. They showed that organic evolution couldn't occur because it was
precluded by a law of thermodynamics -- not a real law of thermodynamics but a law that they
themselves had cooked up. To bolster their claim that Earth was only a few thousand years old,
they showed that the established scientific techniques for measuring the ages of ancient rocks
were incompatible with some rules of nuclear physics -- not the nuclear physics that scientists
studied but a kind of nuclear physics that was known only to creationists. And so on, ad
nauseam [note 31].
In the 1970s and the early 1980s, the purveyors of "creation-science" achieved numerous political
victories. They succeeded in stifling the teaching of science in many local schools; they induced
many school districts to stick biblical creation myths into science classes; they persuaded crooked
schoolbook-publishers to print "science" books larded with creationistic double-talk; and in
Arkansas and Louisiana they secured the enactment of state laws which fostered the teaching of
"creation-science" in public schools.
Eventually, however, their fortunes deteriorated. Scientific organizations, individual scientists,
and competent educators exposed "creation-science" for the trash that it was, civil-liberties
organizations undertook lawsuits to reverse some of the creationists' most conspicuous political
successes, and the "creation-science" hoax started to fall apart. The Arkansas "creation-science"
law and the Louisiana "creation-science" law were declared unconstitutional by federal judges
who found that the concept of creation was supernaturalistic and religious, not scientific [note 32]
-- and by 1987, when the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed the voiding of the
Louisiana statute, shrewd creationists were busily overhauling and sanitizing their enterprise and
their vocabulary. They stopped their overt promotion of biblical miracle-stories as explanations of
nature, they dumped the term creation-science, and they even dumped the word
creation. Instead of saying that organisms had been fashioned by Yahweh, they now
claimed that organisms were products of "intelligent design," conceived by a nameless "intelligent
agent" -- and instead of saying that organisms had been divinely created, they said that organisms
had "appeared abruptly" or had "suddenly appeared."
The first major exhibition of the creationists' new lexicon of double-talk was Of Pandas and
People. That book had been developed by a fundamentalist organization called the
Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE), but it was printed and sold by Haughton Publishing
Company, an outfit whose principal business seemed to be the printing of agricultural labels and
catalogues. In 1989, Haughton began promoting Pandas as "a supplemental high school
text."
Pandas was rather narrow in scope. The FTE writers [note 33] dwelt on biology, the
science that creationists hate most intensely, and they purported to examine "two different
concepts of the origins of living things." One of these concepts, they said, was held by
"evolutionists," the other by "proponents of intelligent design."
Pandas was meant to convince dupes that the "evolutionists" were wrong and that the
"proponents of intelligent design" had the right explanation for the existence and diversity of
living things.
Though the writers referred to Yahweh by such code-names as "intelligent agent" and "intelligent
cause" and "primeval intellect," the material in Pandas was readily recognizable. It was a
collection of old "creation-science" stuff, replete with the usual devices -- false claims, false
analogies, false dichotomies, and ringing refutations of scientific constructs that were unknown to
science. (I especially liked the passage, on page 144, in which the writers cited eight organisms --
a plant, a pig, a duck, a turtle, a bullfrog, a carp, a moth and a yeast -- and announced that "None
of [these] species is ancestral to any other." Right, but no scientist had ever claimed otherwise.
No biologist had ever claimed that a duck was the ancestor of a pig, or that a pig was the ancestor
of a yeast, or that a yeast was the ancestor of a duck.)
Those displays of deceit were complemented by many items that seemed to bespeak plain,
ordinary ignorance -- for instance, the FTE writers imagined that the terms species and
variety were synonyms, that pterosaurs were "flying dinosaurs," that all marsupials had
pouches, and that there were honeycreepers "on the North American mainland" [note 34]. Then,
to top things off, the writers offered claims that had no meaning whatever -- claims that were
merely displays of pseudoscientific gibberish, devised to dazzle the dunces. (Example: "Evolution
requires the expansion of the gene pool, the addition of new genetic information, whereas
speciation represents the loss of genetic information." Go ahead and laugh.)
When they were not lying or slaying straw men or inventing "flying dinosaurs" or dispensing
gibberish, the writers of Pandas told of marvelous organic adaptations, and they produced
almost-English passages like these:
"In our experience"? The FTE writers didn't say where they had gained their experience in
meeting "the design requirements of multifunctional adaptational packages" (whatever that was
supposed to mean), and they entirely ignored a question that is well known to anyone who has
had real experience in studying the living world. The question is: Why are organisms so clunky?
Living things certainly exhibit countless adaptations that are marvelous, even stupendous, to
behold -- but living things also exhibit countless structural, physiological, developmental and
behavioral features that are clumsy, maladaptive, wasteful, or plainly useless. Think of the
cave-dwelling fishes that bear puny, useless eyes, incapable of responding to light. Think of the
island-dwelling insects that sport wretched little wings, incapable of lifting the insects into the air. Think of the ground-nesting marine birds that pack themselves so tightly into their rookeries that they
trample their own eggs and young. Consider how a halibut acquires its lopsided anatomy, with
both of its eyes on the same side of its head: First the halibut develops a head that is quite
symmetrical, with an eye on each side, but then it resorbs and rebuilds some of its bones in a way
that allows one eye to migrate through its skull. Recall that a baleen whale builds and then
resorbs a useless set of teeth. Recall that a woman produces and stores hundreds of thousands of
oocytes, though only a few hundred will ever become eggs and enter her fallopian tubes. Recall
that a man develops nipples! Recall that the channel which carries air to your lungs intersects the
channel which carries food to your stomach -- an arrangement so awkward that it literally can
make you choke.
Why? Why do organisms so often seem absurd, and why do they do things that, by rational
technological standards, seem foolish and wasteful?
Biologists offer cogent answers: Nature isn't rational, organisms aren't technological devices, and
organisms needn't be ideal or even efficient. They merely need to be workable -- workable
enough to survive and leave some descendants. They make do with mediocre mechanisms that
they have inherited from their ancestors, and they still carry the relics of structures, systems,
developmental programs, and behavioral scripts that once enabled their ancestors to achieve
workability.
The writers of Pandas offered no answer at all. They didn't even try. They prattled (as
creationists always had prattled) about the wonderful traits that some living things display, but
they ignored (as creationists always had ignored) the innumerable features that make living things
look like bungled contraptions. The FTE writers declined to tell why their "consummate
engineer" had done so much third-rate work, or why their "intelligent designer" had designed so
many kludges, or why their "intelligent agent" had not invented a more intelligent way to get both
of a halibut's eyes onto the same side of its head. They even declined to reveal why the "primeval
intellect" had decided that frigate-birds, which never swim, should have webbed feet.
The old "creation-scientists" had had a ready answer to that question: Yahweh was both a
designer and a manufacturer -- a figure who not only designed organisms but also used his
supernatural powers to bring them into being and to send them scurrying, loping, flying or
swimming into the Garden of Eden. The writers of Pandas, on the other hand, gave no
answer whatever. They refused to consider the question of how designs had become living
organisms, and the reason for their refusal was obvious: Any answer that the writers might have
given would have been supernaturalistic and would have shown that ID was just fundamentalist
woo-woo in disguise.
Pandas was a sitting duck (or pig or yeast) for reviewers who knew something about
science, and several such reviewers soon shot it to bits. For example: The paleontologist Kevin
Padian, of the University of California at Berkeley, called Pandas a "wholesale distortion
of modern biology," and he demonstrated that the FTE writers had mauled and misrepresented
such topics as the Cambrian explosion, the history of birds, and the concept of homology. The
treatment of homology in Pandas was "shameful," Padian said, and he described one of
the FTE writers' tricks:
Padian ended his review by remarking that it was hard to say what was worst in Pandas --
its religious sub-text, its intolerance for honest science, or the FTE writers' incompetence [note 35].
So much for Pandas -- the hoax that Nord and Haynes now are recommending as a book
"designed to inform students about intelligent design theory." Pandas wasn't meant to
inform anyone about anything, and it surely didn't present any "theory." A scientific theory is a
structure of ideas, supported by preponderant evidence, that explains a body of observations and
thus explains some aspect of nature. The ID rubbish in Pandas was evidence-free, and it
explained exactly nothing [note 36 and note 37].
The other ID book promoted by Nord and Haynes, Michael Behe's
Darwin's Black Box, was another travesty and shared some
essential features with Pandas. Like Pandas, it was
full of disinformation about biological topics. Like
Pandas, it was rigged to look like a scientific book. Like
Pandas, it was a book of pseudoscience, aimed at naive
readers. And like Pandas, it explained nothing.
Even so, Darwin's Black Box differed markedly from
Pandas because Behe didn't vilify and flatly reject the
concept of organic evolution. He accepted it, and he accepted some
central principles of evolutionary biology, e.g., the inference that
living things have been shaped by natural selection, and the
inference that modern species, now quite distinct, are descendants
of a common ancestor. But, Behe wrote, the principles of
evolutionary biology couldn't account for certain phenomena that
have been observed in the living world: Certain biochemical systems
-- such as those involved in the movement of a bacterium's flagellum
or in the clotting of a vertebrate's blood -- couldn't have arisen
by evolution, Behe said, because they were "irreducibly complex."
Behe employed the phrase "irreducibly complex" to describe a system
which couldn't function at all, and couldn't produce any effect,
unless all of its components were present and properly integrated.
Such a system couldn't have evolved in discrete stages by the
successive addition of new components, Behe asserted, because the
preliminary stages would have been useless: The preliminary stages
wouldn't have been able to function, wouldn't have had any adaptive
value, and wouldn't have been preserved and propagated by natural
selection. If a system was "irreducibly complex," Behe said, it
must have originated all at once, with all its components in
place and ready to perform -- and this implied that the system must
have been designed.
Like the writers of Pandas, Behe was unwilling to identify
any putative designer -- but creationists immediately discerned
that Behe's "irreducibly complex" systems had been designed by old
Yahweh, and they soon began to use Darwin's Black Box in
their attacks on science education. They saw Behe's book as a new
"scientific" endorsement of biblical myths, as a new "scientific"
demonstration that evolutionary biology was fallacious at best, and
as a new "scientific" justification for injecting miracles and woo-woo
into public-school science classes.
Scientists, on the other hand, recognized that Darwin's Black
Box was a hoax, and commentators who understood biology soon
began to demolish Behe's pseudoscience. Knowledgeable refutations
of Behe's claims and pretenses appeared in print or on the Web
during the second half of 1996 and throughout 1997, and Behe's book
lay in shreds by the time when Nord and Haynes undertook to glorify
it.
Many more responses to Darwin's Black Box have been issued
since then, and we now have a weighty body of literature devoted to
showing that Behe's ID stuff is just another effort to gull the
ignorant and to make magic seem plausible. For a survey of that
literature, go to http://dlindsay.best.vwh.net/creation/behe.html --
a Web site maintained by Donald Lindsay. Please be sure to read
Lindsay's section headlined "Rebuttal: [Behe's] Ignorance of His Own
Subject Area," and please use the links Lindsay offers in that
section and in his "Further Reading" list. You should also give
attention to the sections titled "Rebuttal of Example: Cilia and
Flagella" and "Rebuttal of Example: Clotting." You will learn
that, contrary to Behe's claims, neither a bacterial flagellum nor a
vertebrate's blood-clotting system is "irreducibly complex."
So much for Darwin's Black Box, and so much for the woo-woo that Nord
and Haynes have described as a "sophisticated argument for
intelligent design." Behe's argument was about as sophisticated as
a pratfall.
This concludes my analysis of Nord and Haynes's chapter 7 and their
scheme for destroying science education. I regard their chapter as
a heavy dose of malevolent hokum, and I wonder how the
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development -- the outfit
that has published Taking Religion Seriously -- decided that
Nord and Haynes's hokum deserved to be printed. Did anyone at the
ASCD look at what Nord and Haynes had written? Did anyone at the
ASCD actually read Nord and Haynes's typescript? Why didn't anyone
at the ASCD arrange for that typescript to be reviewed by persons
who knew something about science? And why didn't anyone at the ASCD
arrange for that typescript to be examined by persons who knew
something about religion?
The ASCD, on its Web site, describes itself as an organization
"committed to the mission of forging covenants in teaching and
learning for the success of all learners." In the case at hand,
the ASCD has forged a covenant with a pair of common tricksters,
and the ASCD has shamed itself. I'll describe some
more of Nord and Haynes's tricks as I consider their chapter about
history education.
STILLWATER, OK -- The world's theological community is in an
Chapter 4 of Taking Religion Seriously is titled "History,"
and it purports to deal with history education in the middle-school
and high-school grades. In many ways, it resembles Nord and
Haynes's chapter about science education: In chapter 4, as in
chapter 7, Nord and Haynes advocate fake instruction and the
bamboozling of students, and they again load their prose with
double-talk, unexplained words and phrases, and unsupported
assertions. Among the words that they conspicuously refuse to explain is
history -- and as we shall see, a substantial portion of
their chapter involves an attempt to render that word meaningless.
The chapter seems to have three major parts.
The first part begins with the assertion that "Few educators
dispute the importance of study about religion in history." But how
did Nord and Haynes determine this? Did they conduct a poll? If
so, what questions did they pose? To whom? And how did they
explain or exemplify, to prospective respondents, the meaning of the
phrase "study about religion"? Our two evangelists provide no
information about these matters, so their pseudostatistical claim
about educators' attitudes is worthless.
Nord and Haynes now direct their attention to textbooks, and they
declare, correctly, that textbooks govern most teachers' decisions
about what to teach in history courses. Then they say that the
handling of religion in textbooks is "woefully inadequate," and
they offer some comments about textbooks that they allegedly have
inspected:
United States history texts are no better. They mention religion
occasionally, especially in relation to political and social
developments. . . . In accounts of American history after the Civil
War, religion disappears almost entirely. If we exclude their
treatment of the Holocaust, each of four texts we examined devotes
more space to railroads than to religion for the entire post-Civil
War history of the United States. Again, the texts discuss no
religious interpretations of history, and with the exception of
short accounts of what was at issue in the Scopes trial, the texts
include no discussion of theology after the Civil
War.
Nord and Haynes don't tell what they mean by "the major theological
developments in the last two centuries," nor do they tell why they
imagine that some sort of "theology" was at issue in the Scopes
trial -- but never mind. They have bigger fish to fry.
I must now attempt to describe the second major part of Nord and
Haynes's "History" chapter. Let me begin by asking you to recall
the opening passage of this review, in which I told a little about
the English word history. Some 600 years ago, I wrote,
history was a broad term that simply meant a narrative.
Later, however, the meaning of history was narrowed
considerably, and history came to denote a narrative that was
professedly a true account of real events. Still later,
history acquired a second major meaning as the name of an
intellectual enterprise, and that enterprise eventually evolved into
a scholarly discipline devoted to reconstructing the past through
the use of evidence and reason.
Today history can mean a narrative of real events, or it can
mean the events themselves, or it can mean the scholarly discipline
to which I've just referred. But no matter which meaning applies in
a given case, the word history -- today -- always implies
attention to evidence and reason. If someone writes an account of
events and then presents his account as a work of history, he
implicitly claims that it is supported by demonstrable facts and
rational analysis. If a lecturer enumerates a series of events and
says that those events constitute history, he implicitly claims to
possess evidence that the events really occurred, and he implicitly
asserts that his enumeration is free of anachronisms, internal
contradictions, and other violations of logic. If a person claims
to be a practitioner of history, he implicitly claims that his
narratives of the past are based on research, documentation,
analysis, and the separation of facts from speculations, rumors,
myths, falsehoods and distortions.
All of this is straightforward, and it may even seem mundane.
Nowadays we take it for granted that history must be a rational,
analytical endeavor, and we find it difficult to imagine that anyone
could hope to reconstruct and understand the past without gathering
evidence, tracing primary sources, appraising the authenticity and
reliability of records and other documents, attempting to resolve
contradictions, discarding claims that cannot be corroborated,
discarding claims that clearly are groundless, and assessing
explanatory ideas.
So far, so good. But things don't end there. While most of us
comprehend and endorse the principle that history must be founded on
evidence and reason, Bible-fanciers like Nord and Haynes reject that
principle. They reject it because they want Bible stories to be
categorized as "history" and taught as "history" in public schools,
even if those stories can't withstand rational examination, and
they want public-school teachers to present the Bible as a "history"
book.
Accordingly, Nord and Haynes want public schools to revive and adopt
the 14th-century meaning of history -- or so I infer from
reading what Nord and Haynes fellows have written. I infer that
they want the schools to declare that history merely means a
narrative -- any narrative at all -- so that any story in the Bible
will qualify for the label "history" and will qualify for inclusion
in history courses. I can't be sure that this is their goal,
because their writing is so obscure, evasive and equivocal, but I
can say this with certainty: They want to wrap the concept of
history in clouds of confusion, and they have mounted an effort to
mangle the word history, to muddle its meanings, and to leave
it with no meaning at all. I assume that this is their first step
in a program to re-establish the meaning that history carried
600 years ago.
Nord and Haynes's effort to make history meaningless rules
the "History" chapter's second part, which opens with a section
titled "Religious Interpretations of History." Our two
obscurantists remark that there is more than one way to
conceptualize history, and then they write:
Like what? Do you know of any "claims for religious meaning in
history that a secular approach cannot convey"? I don't. Today's
historians, practicing their "secular discipline," can and do
demonstrate how views of the past have figured in religious
movements, in the evolution of religious doctrines and claims, and
in the forming of new religions. Today's historians, practicing
their "secular discipline," can and do analyze how religious beliefs
about the past have affected individuals, have animated entire
societies, and have figured in historical phenomena of many kinds --
territorial disputes, migrations, wars, genocides, political
alliances, artistic practices, and so forth. Nord and Haynes want
us to believe that "a secular approach" is tantamount to ignoring
religion and ignoring the power of religion in human affairs, but
what Nord and Haynes want us to believe is false.
Next, our two tricksters warn us that "The educational implications
of ignoring religious views of history are considerable." Then,
after cudgeling their brains, they discover a way to show us what
they mean: "We may illustrate our point by looking briefly at the
Bible, a religious account of history of central importance to
millions of people throughout the world."
What a surprise! With all of the world's religious writings to
choose from, they have chosen the Bible!
Nord and Haynes casually describe the Bible as "a religious account
of history," but they don't say what that phrase means. Is a
"religious" account of history different from some other account of
history? Why? And what does "history" mean here? It certainly
can't mean a scholarly reconstruction of the past, based upon
evidence and reason, because neither the Hebrew Bible nor the
Christian Bible provides any such thing.
Now Nord and Haynes write:
Again, what does "history" mean? And what does "historical" mean?
If (as Nord and Haynes have declared) the Bible is an account of
history, then its contents must be historical -- yet Nord and Haynes
now say that "what we take to be historical in the Bible will depend
on how we interpret it." Is that so? If it is, then there is no
foundation for their categorical claim that "We can, of course,
learn a great deal about history from the Bible." Suppose we
interpret the Bible to be an aggregation of legends, unencumbered by
any mandatory or reliably detectable connections to the real world.
Can we then expect to "learn a great deal about history" from its
verses? Of course not -- not if "history" carries its modern
meaning and denotes a body of supportable inferences about real
persons, real events, real causes and real effects.
If "history" carries its modern meaning, then Nord and Haynes's
categorical claim not only is false but is the very opposite of the
truth. We don't learn about history from the Bible -- we learn
about the Bible from history. To the extent that we have
identified Bible tales which may have some basis in fact (as
distinct from the tales which are wholly fanciful), we have done
this by using the methods of modern historians. To the extent that
we have learned how and where the Bible's tales originated, and when
they were written down, we have learned these things by invoking
evidence and reason. See "It's About Time" on page 3 of this issue.
If "history" doesn't carry its modern meaning, then Nord and
Haynes's categorical claim doesn't even qualify as a falsehood. It
is merely drivel.
For their next trick, Nord and Haynes ask their readers to compare
two snippets of material derived from myths in the Book of Exodus.
Here is the first snippet, which Nord and Haynes attribute to a
nameless "high school world history book":
And here is the second, which Nord and Haynes attribute to The
New English Bible:
Nord and Haynes don't explain what those two items, or the
comparing of those two items, may have to do with learning history.
I can only guess that, for some reason, they want their readers to
notice that the passage from the mysterious high-school book doesn't
mention the biblical God while the passage from The New English
Bible does. What strikes me as much more significant is Nord
and Haynes's confidence in their readers' ignorance. They clearly
assume that their readers will be too backward to know that the
story of the Israelites' flight from Egypt isn't supported by
evidence and isn't "history" in any modern sense of that word. And
likewise, they assume that their readers won't recognize that the
nameless high-school book, because it presents mythical fancies as
matters of fact, belongs in the trash-can.
To generate more confusion, and to advance the process of making
the word history meaningless, our authors now declare:
"Sacred history"? What is that? Is "sacred history" the same as
"a religious account of history," or is it something different? Is
it real history? If it is real history, why does it have an odd
name? Nord and Haynes don't explain, so I shall give the essential
explanation here. The phrase "sacred history" is a euphemism -- a
foggy name for a religious myth or a religious myth-book. Sacred
history is history in the same way that "creation-science" is
science, or carnal knowledge is knowledge, or French letters are
letters [note 39].
Lest any of their readers remain unbefuddled, our two fakers now
say that "Many religious conservatives believe that the Bible can
be read literally as history -- and, no doubt many of the
historical claims made in the Bible are accepted by secular
scholars." Though their statement howls for support, Nord and
Haynes refuse to provide even one example of the "many" biblical
claims that are "accepted by secular scholars." Instead, they dash
ahead and write this:
That sounds familiar because it is just a variation on the duet
that Nord and Haynes sang in chapter 2, where they warbled that
scientists couldn't catch miracles because scientists' "conceptual
nets" were faulty. Now they are claiming that historians can't
discern miracles because historians, like scientists, use defective
methods.
Do our two woo-woo artists make any attempt to substantiate that
claim? Do they cite any miracles which really have occurred but
which have remained unnoticed by the practitioners of "the methods
of historical scholarship"? No, they do not. Nor do they provide
any examples of "the actions of God in history." Nor do they say
what they mean by "history."
Nord and Haynes keep the baffle-gab coming, with hardly any
respite. Look at this:
Whoa! Before we consider whether "teachers who teach the Bible as
history" must be sensitive, we require answers to two pivotal
questions: Why would teachers undertake to "teach the Bible as
history" in the first place, and why would teachers ever imagine
that such teaching would be acceptable? Nord and Haynes, however,
are pretending that those questions don't exist. When they glibly
refer to "teachers who teach the Bible as history," they are
enlisting the fallacious form of argument called petitio
principii. They are pretending that they already have
established that the Bible is history (and that teaching the Bible
as history is therefore justifiable and acceptable).
In truth, Nord and Haynes have not established that the
Bible is history, in any modern sense. They have not even come
close. They have merely established that they are writing for
readers who are dumb enough to be fooled by unexplained claims,
slick evasions, and fog-talk -- like the use of "sacred history" as
a euphemistic name for myths. Sacred history is history in the same
way that Cape Cod turkey is turkey, prairie oysters are oysters, or
hempen neckties are neckties.
Look again at Nord and Haynes's dictum that teachers "need to be
sensitive to the differences between conventional secular history,
and the varieties of sacred history." What does that mean? Do
biblical myths occur in discrete "varieties"? If so, what are the
names or properties of those "varieties"? Nord and Haynes don't
tell. They are simply trying to create more confusion.
Now comes the finale, or at least the finale to the second part of
the chapter. All the stunts that we've seen heretofore -- Nord and
Haynes's abuse of the word history, their contradictory
statements, their murky claims -- have been the preliminaries to
this concluding number:
Two assertions about what students shouldn't be taught --
that is Nord and Haynes's big finish. It is disappointing, but it
is consistent with their tactic of refusing to answer questions
engendered by their own claims. It is also consistent with their
desire to create as much confusion as they can. Look again at those
last two sentences. The statement that public-school students
"cannot be uncritically taught to accept the Bible as literally
true, as history" seems to imply that Nord and Haynes are taking
account of the First Amendment. But in their next sentence, they
say that public-school students should not be taught "to accept as
historical only what secular historians find true in the Bible," and
I can only interpret this to mean that students should be
taught to accept biblical claims which historians don't
regard as true. I interpret it to mean that Nord and Haynes want
our teachers and schools to engage in fraud and to spurn the First
Amendment outright. Let me explain:
When a public school offers a course in any intellectual
discipline, the students who enroll in that course expect their
teacher to present up-to-date subject matter and to convey a true
picture of the discipline's scope, premises and processes. These
are reasonable expectations, and they are shared by the students'
parents and by the taxpayers who support the school. If your
daughter enrolls in a course called "Astronomy," you infer and
expect that she will learn the empirical astronomy of the present
century, not the metaphysical astronomy that Aristotle presented in
the 4th century BC. If your son enrolls in a health-education
course, you expect that he will study modern concepts of human
anatomy and physiology and pathology. You don't expect that he
will study the pathogenic influences of planetary conjunctions and
unlucky numbers, or that he will learn to answer questions like
"From what part proceeded the water which flowed from the side of
the dead Christ when pierced by the spear?" [note 40]
Now consider, specifically, a course in history. When a public
school offers a course in history, the students and parents and
taxpayers reasonably expect -- and the school implicitly warrants --
that the teacher who gives the course will present up-to-date
historical information, will present interpretations and syntheses
that reflect today's historical scholarship, and will convey a valid
picture of the premises and processes which underlie the work of
today's historians. To fulfill those expectations, the teacher must
present history in secular terms, and only in secular terms, because
history today is a wholly secular discipline: Today's historians
seek to reconstruct and explain the past without invoking
metaphysics and without ascribing historical events to the whims of
gods, devils or sorcerers. If the teacher were to tell students
otherwise, the teacher would be lying. If the teacher were to
present supernaturalistic Bible stories as "history," the teacher
and the school would be engaging in fraud. Nord and Haynes, I must
infer, are advocating this sort of fraud when they say that
students shouldn't be taught "to accept as historical only what
secular historians find true in the Bible."
Such deceitful teaching could not help students to learn history,
nor could it advance any other educational process. Its only
purpose would be a religious purpose, and its only effect would be
religious indoctrination -- and for these reasons, it would
contravene the First Amendment.
Nord and Haynes now offer an entr'acte, "The Puritan View of
History," in which they again say something about schoolbooks.
They set forth a valid observation, but they don't provide the
context that would make it meaningful. Here is their observation:
Nord and Haynes might well have added that American-history texts
treat other religious groups in the same sterile way: The textbooks
say something about this or that group, but they don't describe the
group's theological tenets, essential beliefs, or religious goals.
Consider, for example, how these textbooks dispose of the Shakers:
They say something pleasant about Shaker furniture, but they never
explicate the Shakers' millenarian beliefs. And look at how these
books treat the Mormons: They present the Mormons as a religious
group founded by Joseph Smith, but they don't describe Smith's
career as a fancier of mysticism and magic, they don't describe the
myths that Smith put forth in The Book of Mormon, they don't
explain the genealogical or mythological connections between
Mormonism and Christianity, and they don't say anything about Mormon
theology. If you read McDougal Littell's America's Past and
Promise, for instance, you will find that Smith's new religion
had only two distinctive features -- polygamy and economic
communalism. If you read Glencoe's History of a Free Nation,
you will learn the same thing. And if you read Glencoe's The
American Journey, you will find that "the Mormons' religion"
(though it somehow aroused hostility in "unsympathetic neighbors")
had no features at all.
My point is that the sterile, inane accounts of the Puritans in
American-history books are merely particular manifestations of a
general condition: The writers of American-history textbooks want
nothing to do with religious beliefs or with the theological
aspects of religious movements, and they continually exclude such
matters from their books. It's no accident that American-history
books do not elucidate the Puritans' desire to establish Christ's
true church in preparation for the Second Coming, nor is it an
accident that the books don't recount Joseph Smith's tale about
travelers who sail in magical boats that have perforated bottoms
and are illuminated by glowing stones [note 41]. These omissions
(and many others like them) are obviously deliberate, for they
conform to an obvious, rigid pattern. Haven't Nord and Haynes
detected this? Haven't they tried to uncover the reasons for it?
Haven't they tried to find out whether and how it may be related to
rules promulgated by state education agencies? Apparently not.
The third part of chapter 4 is called "Religion in History," and it
is utterly giddy. Our two spiritual advisors return to considering
textbooks of world history, and they say:
Nord and Haynes next assert that religion must be discussed from
the inside. They put up a new headline -- "Getting Inside
Religion" -- and then they write: ". . . it is not enough for
textbooks and teachers to briefly summarize major beliefs and
practices. Students need to explore the religious experiences and
convictions at the heart of the major world religions." Then they
elaborate by devoting a two-paragraph passage to -- of all things --
Islam and the Koran! This seems to be the only place in Taking
Religion Seriously where the Koran is even mentioned [note 42].
Nord and Haynes evidently hope that a two-paragraph trifle will
convince us that they care about some religion other than
Christianity, but their effort is lame and fatuous. They give no
indication that they themselves have ever looked at the Koran, and
they write stuff like this:
"Absolute transcendence and oneness"? What are those? (Do they
have anything to do with inscribing messages on the tails of
fishes?) Nord and Haynes don't explain what "absolute
transcendence and oneness" may be, nor do they suggest how
textbooks and teachers may convey those features of Allah to
students, nor do they say what "immediate revelation" may mean.
(Is there some other sort of revelation?) I suspect that Nord and
Haynes have simply parroted some phrases that they found in a
handout issued by a Muslim pressure group.
Although they allegedly have read some world-history textbooks and
have declared that the books "do provide brief accounts of the
basic teachings and practices of the major religions," Nord and
Haynes say exactly nothing about how such books present Islam. Yet
the "history" of Islam that appears in most schoolbooks is
pernicious claptrap produced by Muslim propagandists -- and any
informed reader will recognize immediately that it has been
contrived not to inform students but to dupe them and indoctrinate
them. In typical cases, Muslim myths are promoted as accounts of
real events, Muslim superstitions are presented as matters of fact,
the origin and content of the Koran are cloaked in lies, and Islam
is falsely depicted as a friendly religion that is similar to, and
compatible with, Judaism and Christianity [note 43] and [note 44].
Haven't Nord and Haynes seen this? Haven't these experts in
First Amendment matters noticed that in one world-history book
after another, Muslim preaching is peddled as history and Muslim
woo-woo is promoted as factual information? If they have noticed
it, why haven't they said anything about it?
Now we get some comic relief. Nord and Haynes provide it,
unintentionally, as they launch a section titled
"Multiculturalism." Here is what they say in the section's opening
paragraph:
These two fakers have learned a buzz-word, multiculturalism,
and they have stuck it into their book -- but they have neglected to
find out what multiculturalism means in the context of
American education, and they have guessed that it has something to
do with "cultures." It doesn't. In the jargon of our educational
establishment, the term multiculturalism denotes a body of
far-left ideology that revolves around racism,
anti-intellectualism, Victimism and the invention of fake "history" in
which certain Victim groups are sanitized and glorified beyond
recognition. If Nord and Haynes ever conceive a desire to learn
what multiculturalism means to American educators (and also
to American schoolbook-publishers), they will profit from reading
these articles that have appeared in The Textbook Letter: "A
Book of Far-Left Propaganda That Fosters Anti-Intellectualism" in
TTL for January-February 1997; "McDougal Littell's Baadassss
Song" in TTL for September-October 1997; "More Fake 'History'
from Glencoe" in TTL for July-August 1998; "An Insightful
Examination of Perverted Schoolbooks" and "Losing Our Science" in
TTL for March-April 1999; and "Meet Deaf Kitty" in TTL
for July-August 1999.
Under a new headline, "Coverage," Nord and Haynes entreat
schoolbook companies and teachers to pay more attention to
religion, even if this will require an overhauling of "the
curriculum." They declare that "different choices may need to be
made," and then they write:
I haven't been able to see those "particularly egregious" cases
because Nord and Haynes haven't identified the books in question,
but I've checked the treatment of Jesus in four world-history
textbooks that were being sold to high schools at the time when
Taking Religion Seriously was written. In each of the four,
Jesus commands much more space than Eleanor of Aquitaine does -- and
in each of them, the material about Jesus is pseudohistorical
rubbish that serves only to promote fundamentalist doctrines. See
the article "Fostering Fundamentalism," accompanying this review.
How about Nord and Haynes's objection to history textbooks which
don't acknowledge "that Christians see Jesus as God incarnate"?
Nord and Haynes again have refused to cite any titles, but I have
found some recent high-school books that say nothing whatever about
the doctrine of Jesus's divinity [note 45]. This omission is quite
unacceptable: If students are to acquire any valid appreciation of
Christianity, they surely need to know that, today, nearly all
Christians believe that Jesus was divine and was a manifestation of
the god of the Hebrews. In a history textbook, however, a mere
exposition of what nearly all Christians believe today would be
inadequate and highly misleading, and would itself be unacceptable.
If students are to gain a valid historical appreciation of
Christianity, they need to know why today's Christians regard
Jesus as divine. The students must learn how the doctrine of
Jesus's divinity originated and evolved, and why it eventually
became a widespread dogma [note 46]. Yet Nord and Haynes -- who
supposedly want textbooks to get "inside" religion -- ignore these
matters completely.
I have described here only four of the nine chapters that Taking
Religion Seriously contains. Some of the other chapters are as
vicious as these four, some are not. I have chosen to write about
the chapters that, in my judgment, most vividly illustrate Nord and
Haynes's tactics, their loathing of rationality, and their contempt
for their audience.
Sophisticated readers, I'm sure, will quickly recognize Taking
Religion Seriously for what it is, and will dismiss it
accordingly. The audience that Nord and Haynes have in mind,
however, is not composed of sophisticated readers. Manifestly,
Taking Religion Seriously is aimed at naive teachers,
administrators and school-board officials who don't know much about
intellectual endeavors, who can't distinguish an argument from a
political slogan, who can't detect (or won't even try to detect)
bogus claims, and who will believe almost anything.
I thank The Textbook League's manager of research, Earl Hautala, for
his help in gathering information that I have used in this review.
"The prophet and profits of Scientology" in Forbes, 27
October 1986;
John Atack's book A Piece of Blue Sky, issued in 1990 by the
Carol Publishing Group;
"The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power" in Time, 6 May 1991;
"An Ultra-Aggressive Use of Investigators and the Courts" in The
New York Times, 9 March 1997;
"The Shadowy Story Behind Scientology's Tax-Exempt Status" in
The New York Times, 9 March 1997;
"Educators Should Be Wary Of Scientology Claims" (letter to the
editor) in Education Week, 8 October 1997;
"Death of a Scientologist Heightens Suspicions in a Florida Town"
in The New York Times, 1 December 1997;
"Boston Man Wages Costly Fight With Scientology" in The New York
Times, 21 December 1997;
"Church of Scientology Reached Agreement with I.R.S." in The New
York Times, 31 December 1997;
"Inside the Church of Scientology" in the Boston Sunday
Herald for 1 March 1998. [return to
text]
Brant Abrahamson, of Brookfield, Illinois, has retired after
teaching history and social studies for 32 years at the
Riverside-Brookfield High School. Since 1986 he has been the president of The
Teachers' Press, which develops and distributes instructional
materials for use in social-studies courses. The newest publication
from The Teachers' Press is Calendars and Thinking Logically.
It describes the origins of our modern calendar, and it seeks to
dispel numerological superstitions linked to the year 2000.
William J. Bennetta is a professional editor, a fellow of the
California Academy of Sciences, the president of The Textbook
League, and the editor of The Textbook Letter. He writes
often about the propagation of quackery, false "science" and false
"history" in schoolbooks.
"Once you get past the divine right of kings, I'm not much into
theology."
"I think you should be more explicit here in step two."
Analyzing crank literature aimed at educators
Taking Religion Seriously Across the Curriculum
1998. 221 pages. ISBN: 0-87120-318-9.
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development,
1703 North Beauregard Street, Alexandria, Virginia 22311.
During my years as a high-school teacher, I constructed a sequence
of four world-history courses that spanned eight semesters. In
those courses I sought to give straightforward treatment to the
influence of religion upon social structures and on historical
events -- especially when I dealt with societies (such as those of
medieval Europe or of 20th-century Nepal, Thailand, or Saudi
Arabia) in which religion has colored most aspects of life. With
that work as a foundation, I have since developed a high-school
curriculum unit called Thinking About Religion from a Global
Perspective, which is used in various school districts. The
unit is distributed by The Teachers' Press, an organization that I
founded in 1986.
Warren A. Nord and Charles C. Haynes have developed a scheme for
overhauling American education: Our public schools must renounce
rationality, must promote and endorse popular religious beliefs,
must present religious myths as "history," and must make the world
safe for superstition by abolishing instruction in natural science.
The Nord-and-Haynes scheme is set forth in Taking Religion
Seriously Across the Curriculum -- a malevolent and dishonest
book that may seem to be respectable, at first glance, because it
has been published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Development. The ASCD has shamed itself.
Stealth Evangelism
Brant Abrahamson
A sales-promotion blurb printed on the back cover of Taking
Religion Seriously declares:
In Taking Religion Seriously Across the Curriculum, Warren
A. Nord and Charles C. Haynes chart a middle course in our culture
wars over religion and public education -- one that builds on a
developing consensus among educational and religious leaders.
First, as the Supreme Court has made clear, the study of religion
in public schools is constitutional. Second, the study of religion
is tremendously important if students are to be educated about our
history and culture. Third, public schools must teach about
religion objectively or neutrally; their purpose must be to educate
students about a variety of religious traditions, not to
indoctrinate them into any particular tradition.
Because religion plays significant roles in history and society,
study about religion is essential to understanding both the nation
and the world. Omission of facts about religion can give students
the false impression that the religious life of humankind is
insignificant or unimportant. Failure to understand even the basic
symbols, practices, and concepts of the various religions makes much
of history, literature, art, and contemporary life
unintelligible.
Giving Themselves Away
It isn't always clear when religious claims are being made, and
we must keep in mind the richness and relevance of a spectrum of
possibilities. Ordinarily, however, when we talk about religion in
the chapters that follow, we mean the traditional major world
religions -- Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and
Taoism, for example.
When the public disagrees deeply, public schools should not
promote, much less institutionalize, one view and remain silent
about others.
If public schools are to be built on common civic ground, they
must be neutral when we disagree; they must take everyone
seriously.
it is dangerous to include religion in the curriculum because
teachers, no matter how well intentioned, will inevitably display
their ignorance and prejudices. In a predominantly Christian
culture, alternatives to Christianity won't receive knowledgeable or
fair treatment, and teachers will end up advocating Christianity,
even if subtly or indirectly. [page 55]
Abolishing Science Education
In chapter 7, the longest chapter in the book, Nord and Haynes
unveil their plan for remaking science education. The plan seems to
revolve around requiring science teachers in public schools to
present both "conservative religion" and "liberal religion" as
alternatives to science, depicting both as if they were equivalent
to scientific constructs as explanations of nature. In other words,
science teachers would have to deceive students, would have to
teach things that aren't science, and would have to endorse things
that have no standing in science. Meaningful education in science
would be abolished.
A Pair of Common Tricksters
William J. Bennetta
The canonical Gospels exist as sequences of narrative and
dramatic scenes. This is not surprising: how else would
one tell the "story" of Jesus? What is surprising is the great
differences among the stories, even though they share, for
the most part, similar sources. For example: According to
Matthew and Mark, the dying words of Jesus were, "My God,
my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" According to Luke,
Jesus' dying words were, "Father, into your hands I commit my
spirit." But according to John, they were, "It is accomplished."
To put it another way, we cannot know what the dying words
of Jesus were, or even whether he uttered any; it is not that we
have too little information, but that we have too much. Each
narrative implicitly argues that the others are fictional.
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when
they do it from religious conviction.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging
the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people
peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a
redress of grievances.
For more than 50 years, ever since it first applied the First
Amendment to the states, the Supreme Court has held that government, and
therefore public schools, must be neutral in matters of religion
-- neutral among religions, and neutral between religion and
nonreligion. It is not proper for public schools to take sides on
religiously contested questions.
Yet these may ye eat of every flying creeping thing that goeth upon
all
four, which have legs above their feet, to leap withal upon the earth;
Even these of them may ye eat; the locust after his kind, and the
bald
locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the
grasshopper
after his kind.
But all other flying, creeping things, which have four feet, shall be an
abomination unto you.The application and content of First Amendment principles are
not determined by public opinion polls or by a majority vote. . . .
No group, no matter how large or small, may use the organs of
government, of which the public schools are the most conspicuous
and influential, to foist its religious beliefs on others.
when he decided the
case of McLean v. Arkansas Board of
Education and ruled
that the Arkansas "creation-science"
law of 1981 was
unconstitutional[B]ecause we disagree deeply about which political party has the
better policies, it would violate our sense of justice for public
schools to take sides, teaching only the policies and values of one
party, leaving the other out of the discussion. We also disagree
deeply, often on religious grounds, about how to make sense of our lives
and the world; hence public schools should not promote, much less
institutionalize, any particular way of making sense of the world be
it religious or secular. If public schools are to be built on common
civic ground, they must be neutral when we disagree; they must take
everyone seriously. [page 19]
[The creationists] began to gather survey material to prove the
extent of public support for their views. The Seventh Day Adventist
Church of Crescent City, California, polled 1,500 adults, about 57
percent of whom attended church. [The Adventists] claimed that 91
percent of church attenders and 85 percent of [those who didn't attend]
favored teaching creation in the public schools. Fifty-four percent of
church attenders and 65 percent of nonattenders also favored the
teaching of evolution. [The Adventists] respectfully submitted their
findings in support of "equal time" to the board of education as a form
of "public service" in order to help the board "represent our
community."
In a series of decisions in the 1960s striking down state-sponsored
religious exercises in public schools, the [Supreme Court] reaffirmed
that "no establishment" prohibits the government not only from
preferring one religion over another but also from preferring religion
over nonreligion. Writing for the majority in Abington v. Schempp,
Justice Tom Clark argued that required religious exercises in public
schools are a "breach of neutrality" barred by the First Amendment. He
was careful, however, to make clear that government neutrality cannot
result in hostility to religion. That is, government cannot prefer
nonreligion over religion either.
The next to be placed among the regiment of fools are such as
make a trade of telling or enquiring after incredible stories of
miracles and prodigies . . . .
The astronomer Arthur Eddington once told a parable about a fisherman
who used a net with a three-inch mesh. After a lifetime of fishing he
concluded there were no fish shorter than three inches. Eddington's
moral is that just as one's fishing net determines what one catches, so
it is with conceptual nets: what we find in the ocean of reality depends
on the conceptual net we bring to our investigation.
For example, the modern scientific conceptual net -- or scientific
method -- allows scientists to catch only replicable events; the results
of any experiment that cannot be replicated are not allowed to stand.
This means that miracles, which are by definition singular events, can't
be caught; scientists cannot ask God to replicate the miracle for the
sake of a controlled experiment. [page 40]
Theologians, by contrast [with scientists], have constructed
different kinds of conceptual nets for catching dimensions of reality
that, they claim, escape scientific nets. People within all religious
traditions believe moral and religious experiences provide knowledge of
a transcendent dimension of reality -- of God. [page 40]
[U]ntil the year 1500 any attempt to get power from nature had
inherent in it the idea that you could only do this if you forced
nature to provide it against her will. Nature had to be subjugated,
and magic was a form of words, actions, and pictures which forced
nature to do something which she wouldn't of herself do.
For most of history, the governing worldviews of civilization have
been religious; but over the course of the last several centuries in the
West, modern science has come to provide the dominant worldview of our
civilization and, as a result, shape our educational system. In the
process, what counts as reasonable (and what counts as a matter of
faith) has changed. True, if we assume the adequacy of the
modern scientific worldview, religion is likely to appear as a matter of
faith or even superstition. But why should we assume it?
... neutrality requires both fairness and refraining from judgment.
When we disagree on religious grounds, we can achieve neutrality only by
including everyone in the discussion. On this reading, "objectivity"
means being fair rather than being prejudiced -- rather than
prejudging conclusions by not taking everyone seriously. [page
47]
The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly
misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from
governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets
himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and emits such
bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so,
then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most
intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. . . .
What should be a civilized man's attitude toward such superstitions? It
seems to me that the only attitude possible to him is one of contempt.
If he admits that they have any intellectual dignity whatever, he admits
that he himself has none. If he pretends to a respect for those who
believe in them, he pretends falsely, and sinks almost to their level. .
. .But, of course, not all religions can be included in the discussion;
after all the school day consists of limited hours, and texts have only
so many pages. We obviously cannot use the truth of a religion as our
criterion for whether to include it, for we cannot assume judgments
about truth if we are to be neutral. A more plausible, and less
controversial, criterion is influence; indeed, in virtually all courses
it is the influential ideas and ideals, theories and movements, that
are considered. Almost inevitably the major religious traditions
will make the greatest claim for inclusion because of their
influence. [page 48]
In the early 1980s, . . . several states passed "balanced treatment"
laws requiring that "creation-science" be taught whenever evolution is
taught. It is important for students to learn that there are diverse
ways of thinking about the origins of life and humankind -- religious as
well as scientific. It is also important for students to learn
that the vast majority of biologists and paleontologists reject
creation-science as unscientific.
Teachers should let kids think world is flat, lobbyist says
PHOENIX, Ariz. (AP) -- Gov. Evan Mecham's educational
lobbyist told lawmakers Wednesday that teachers should not try
to dissuade students who want to believe that the world is flat.
Former state Rep. Jim Cooper testified before the House
Education Committee on a bill that would require schools that
each evolution to present it as a theory, not as a fact.
Cooper said teachers should not disagree with students who
want to believe in the biblical theory [sic] instead of evolution
as an explanation for the origin of humans.
Rep. Peter Goudinoff asked Cooper what should happen if a
student told his geography teacher that his parents said the
world was flat.
"If that student wants to say the world is flat, the teacher doesn't
have the right to try to prove otherwise," Cooper answered. "The
schools don't have any business telling people what to believe."
All cultures other than modern Western culture have conceived of
reality as having a spiritual dimension that could be known through
religious experience. In the Western religions, God was understood to
be the creator of the world, and believers could understand nature only
by seeing it as God's handiwork, designed to fulfill God's purposes.
Because nature was the creation of God, it was good; indeed it was
infused by the spirit of God. Reality was understood to have the
structure of a cosmic drama, and as actors in that drama, persons were
responsible agents. [page 135]
Roughly a third of Americans believe that the Bible is inerrant and
would presumably adopt the view (if asked) that religion trumps
science.
At the same time, many theologians have argued that (liberal)
theology can be "rational" or "objective" in some sense; theological
claims can be testable -- though not in quite the same way as scientific
claims. That is, theology and science are not nearly so different as
has often been believed, and integration has become a possibility.
. . . the nature of [the relationship between science and religion]
is deeply controversial, but that would seem to be a reason for
discussing rather than ignoring it. Indeed, by ignoring the
controversy, and by ignoring religion, science education implicitly
takes sides, teaching students uncritically to believe either
that science always trumps religion or that they are independent
endeavors. [page 141]
Do whatever steps you want if
You have cleared them with the Pontiff.
There are a variety of ways of integrating religion and evolution.
Catholicism, for example, accepts evolution but claims that, as the
Catechism of the Church puts it, "the universe was created 'in a
state of journeying' toward an ultimate perfection yet to be attained,
to which God has destined it. We call 'divine providence' the
dispositions by which God guides his creation toward this perfection" .
. . . Evolution is purposeful, though God has chosen to work
through the "secondary" causes of nature. Moreover, God is a personal
God who, on occasion, intervenes in the affairs of this world by way of
miracles. And, as Pope John Paul II recently affirmed, God directly
intervened in evolution to create a break between animals and humankind:
Adam and Eve were real people; God created them and their descendants --
unlike animals -- with immortal souls.
MR. SMITH, THE TEACHER: Listen up, class. The quiz on Friday
will be about the major groups of mammals. Learn the names of all
the
groups that we covered, and learn their important features,
and remember
what the Pope says: God directly intervened in
evolution to create a
break between animals and humankind.
The first man and woman were named
Adam and Eve, and God
gave them immortal souls -- unlike animals.
never
take sides and we never say that anything is true or false.
too, like the first clams or the first worms or the first frogs?
groups of mammals?
book, and it said that the Pope is the Antichrist. Is that right?
In
science, we never take sides and we never say that
anything
is right or wrong.
about
animals is wrong and he is trying to trick us.
is to make sure you're ready for the quiz about mammals -- and
please don't forget that whales breathe air, like all the other mammals.
had
all the kinds of animals that breathe air? Does that mean
that the ark
had whales too?
ark, or maybe the whales just swam around in the Flood until it
was
over, the way the fishes did.
forty nights, and the rainwater covered the whole Earth.
on television, and it said that whales have to live in salt
water
or else their skin gets diseased and they die. So how could
they
live in the Flood?
the
Flood was actually salt water. God could have made salty
rain if he
wanted to, I guess.
need
fresh water? When my brother used to work at the aquarium
store, he put
some really expensive goldfish in a saltwater tank by
mistake, and they
all died. The owner was really mad.
fresh water or salt water doesn't have anything to do with
biology. Now
settle down, please. In the rest of the period,
I want to start
teaching you the names of some birds.
No text mentions any scientific arguments against evolution or
discusses the possibility of design in nature. [page 144]
Over the past decade some scientists, philosophers, and theologians
have argued that there is cosmological evidence that the universe
was fine-tuned to produce life, for the odds against life in the
wake of a big bang are almost infintesimal [sic] . . . . (Such
claims often go under the label the "Anthropic Principle.") [page
145]
What is the most reasonable explanation for such coincidences?
Arguably, that the universe was designed to support life.
. . . for an increasing number of theologians and scientists, the big
bang does have theological relevance. If the big bang does
not confirm creation ex nihilo, it is at least
consonant with it, and the evidence from cosmology of a "fine-tuned"
universe may be evidence for a creator God. Needless to say, the God of
the big bang is not obviously the personal God of much traditional
religion. What is important for those who take the integrationist
position is the apparent convergence of science and (liberal) theology,
each providing evidence [sic] for the role of God in creating the
universe.
By emphasizing a single, transcendent creator-God [separate from
nature], the Bible began to secularize nature. . . . People often
argue that the Bible is anthropocentric in the sense that God gave
humankind dominion over nature (Genesis 1:26-29, Genesis 9:1-3,
Psalms 8:5-8): the plants and animals are to serve our purposes.
[page 148]
. . . after the flood, God covenanted not just with Noah and his
human family, but with every living thing never to destroy the world
again (Genesis 9:8-17); God declared that the Sabbath is for animals (as
well as for people) to rest, and even the land shall rest by lying
fallow every seventh year (Exodus 23:10-12, Leviticus 25:1-5); the
Psalms celebrate the beauty and goodness of nature (e.g., Psalm 104);
and in the New Testament, Jesus affirmed God's care for the sparrows and
the lilies of the field (Matthew 6:26-29). Of course, in the first
chapter of Genesis, God declares creation to be good before the
creation of Adam and Eve; nature is good in and of itself, not simply in
serving human purposes.
Some Christian theologians have recently resurrected an
incarnational or sacramental theology in which the idea of God as
trinity bridges the gulf between the transcendent Creator and nature.
Christ was the incarnation of God in human flesh. Moreover, through
Christ as "Logos" all things were created (John 1), and through Christ
all things in heaven and on earth are redeemed (Colossians 1:15-20)
that, in the end, "God may be all in all" (I Corinthians 15:25). As God
is present in the wine and bread, so God is present in the working of
the world: nature isn't inert but is animated by the spirit of God.
[page 149]
Ecofeminist theologians have argued that the transcendent creator-God
of the Bible, who is disembodied mind and who speaks with power and
authority, is conceived in narrowly masculine terms, and they would
replace this male God with an immanent God who speaks to us from within
and, and in Rosemary Radford Ruether's words "beckons us into
communion" with all of nature. [page 150]
Our two hucksters conclude chapter 7 of Taking Religion Seriously
by offering a list of "Suggested Readings and Resources." I'm familiar
with several of the items that they recommend, including the two books
that they describe thus:
The great mysticete whales use baleen plates as sieves to
catch huge quantities of small organisms. They neither need
nor have teeth. As foetuses, however, they develop a full
set of teeth. . . . If foetal baleen whale teeth were designed
by an omnipotent Creator, just what was He thinking of?
They never erupt through the gums and they are completely
resorbed before birth. They certainly are never used for
chewing. The creationists owe it to the rest of the world
to tell us just what it is that these teeth do, so that we might
appreciate the intelligence and purposefulness of this design.
the Hand of Evolution
in the Things It Has Wrought"
in Evolutionists
Confront Creationists (1984)In Darwin's Black Box (1997), the biochemist Michael Behe
provides a sophisticated argument for intelligent design in dealing with
evolution. Pandas and People (1989) is a short, low-key, but
controversial textbook supplement designed to inform students about
intelligent design theory as an alternative to conventional
evolutionary theory. [page 162]
Now, what do they mean when they announce that Darwin's Black Box and Of
Pandas and People deal with "intelligent design" or "intelligent design theory"? What is
"intelligent design"?
[P]roponents of intelligent design maintain that only a consummate engineer could anticipate
so effectively to meet the total engineering requirements of an organism like the giraffe. . . .
[Certain plants] are so sophisticated in their design that the same set of traits is used to
accomplish two completely different purposes. The existence of such a sophisticated adaptational
package is taken as evidence by the proponents of intelligent design of their theory. In our
experience only an intelligent designer has the ability to coordinate the design requirements of
multifunctional adaptational packages. [page 71]
There was something else that the FTE bunch didn't explain: How had the designs conceived by
the "intelligent designer" been turned into organisms? How had the imaginings of the "primeval
intellect" been turned into material creatures? How had the plans developed by the "consummate
engineer" been turned into finished goods? In short, how had organisms come into existence?
[The writers] pretend that the Tasmanian wolf, a marsupial, would be [classified] with the
placental wolf if evolutionists weren't so hung up on the single character of their reproductive
mode . . . . This is a complete falsehood, as anyone with access to the evidence knows. It is not a
matter of a single reproductive character, but dozens of characters in the skull, teeth, post-cranial
bones (including the marsupial pelvic bones), soft anatomy, and biochemistry, to say nothing of
their respective fossil records, that separate the two mammals.
Slight Inconsistency
Found In Bible
uproar
following Monday's discovery of a slight inconsistency in
the Bible.
"I was reading Jeremiah 17:4, in which God says, 'Ye
have kindled a
fire in mine anger, which shall burn forever,' " said
Pastor
Theodore Strait of First Lutheran Church in Stillwater.
"And I
immediately recalled Jeremiah 3:12, which says, 'For I
am merciful,
saith the Lord, and I will not keep anger forever.'
I thought, how
can this possibly be? The Bible, contradicting
itself?" Biblical
scholars are scrambling to explain the strange
paradox, believed to
be the first time a passage in the Bible has
been found to contain
flaws in logic.
World history texts do provide brief accounts of the
basic teachings and practices of the major religions as they appear
in history, but, in our view, the texts do not give enough space to
the topics to enable students to make sense of these traditions. In
the texts we examined, religion virtually disappears after 1750.
The authors say nothing about the various religious ways of
interpreting history and give no attention to the major theological
developments in the last two centuries.
Literalism [in reading the
Hebrew Bible] involves a fundamental
misconception of the mental
processes of biblical man and
ignorance of his modes of self-expression.
It thus misrepresents the
purport of the narrative,
obscures the meaningful and enduring in
it and destroys its
relevancy.
The Heritage of Biblical
Israel (1970)True, history has become a secular discipline and
most contemporary historians use secular categories to construct
their narratives. But surely a liberally educated person ought to
know that there are claims for religious meaning in history that a
secular approach cannot convey. [page 80]
We can, of course, learn a great deal about history
from the Bible, but what we take to be historical in the Bible will
depend on how we interpret it, and the criteria we use to assess the
validity of historical claims -- both of which are matters of much
controversy. [page 81]
Because the Egyptians feared the Hebrews, they made
them slaves. The Hebrew leader Moses led the Hebrews from Egypt to
Palestine.
When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not guide
them by the road towards the Philistines. . . . God made them
go round by way of the wilderness towards the Red Sea. . . .
And all the time the Lord went before them, by day a pillar of cloud
to guide them on their journey, by night a pillar of fire.
[ellipses inserted by Nord and Haynes] [note 38]
The Bible provides what is often called sacred
history. It makes sense of history in terms of God's purposes
and actions. [page 81]
But using the methods of secular historical
scholarship scholars are unable to discern miracles, divine
causality, or religious meaning in history. At best, secular
history must remain silent about the actions of God in
history.
petitio principii . . . a
logical fallacy in which a premise is
assumed to be true without
warrant or in which what is to
be proved is implicitly taken for
granted.
Sorting out what is historical is complicated
and controversial, and teachers who teach the Bible as history need
to be sensitive to the differences between conventional secular
history, and the varieties of sacred history.
Our position is that if students are to be educated
about the Bible, and if it is to be studied neutrally, they
must learn something about the contending ways of assessing the
Bible as history. They cannot be uncritically taught to accept the
Bible as literally true, as history. Nor should they be
uncritically taught to accept as historical only what secular
historians find true in the Bible.
Puritans generally get more space in U.S. history
textbooks than any other religious group. Unfortunately, most of
these accounts of Puritans are superficial, largely negative, and,
in many cases, simply wrong. . . . Few texts attempt to
explain theological issues important to Puritans, and none deal
[sic] fully with the Puritans' conception of history. By
most accounts, therefore, Puritans are important for how they
influenced (mostly negatively) early colonial history, but what
they actually believed and how they viewed the world are largely
irrelevant. [page 83]
Mention may be made of a
Chaetodont or Butterfly-fish
(Holocanthus semicirculatus),
in which the dark ground
colour of the head and body is broken
up by a series
of narrow curved white stripes, the caudal fin being
ornamented with markings of a similar nature (Fig. 83C).
In a
specimen which made its appearance in the fish-market
at Zanzibar
these markings on the fin bore a remarkable
resemblance to old
Arabic characters (Fig. 84), reading
on one side of the tail
"Laillaha Illaha" (There is no God
but Allah) and on the other side
"Shani-Allah" (A warning
sent from Allah). This caused considerable
excitement, and
the fish, which was originally sold for a penny,
eventually
fetched five thousand rupees!
Beyond attention to religious ways of interpreting
history, what should the teaching of history include about
religion? The answer is not merely to mention religion more often --
a common tactic in the textbook world. Coverage, though
significant, is not sufficient. How religion is discussed
is as important as the number of pages devoted to it. [page
85]
In the study of Islam, to take one significant
example, students need to know something about key theological
conceptions such as the meaning of the word Islam, the
strong emphasis on the absolute transcendence and oneness of Allah,
and the way in which the Qur'an is understood as immediate
revelation. [page 85]
Our suggestion that the study of history include
efforts to "get inside" religious perspectives parallels the call
for a more multicultural curriculum. Many advocates of
multicultural education advance arguments similar to ours about the
need for an empathetic understanding of the many cultures and
ethnic groups that have shaped both world and U.S. history. And,
much like our position, their stance pleads for a curriculum that
is both fair and reflective of a truly liberal education. [page
86]
Christianity was born out of
a meditation on disillusion.
In the first centuries B.C. and A.D.,
the whole Jewish race
was excited about the end of the world. The
Dead Sea scrolls
tell us all about this. . . . Christianity was
born out of this.
And then every thousand years the Christians
think the world
is going to end again. In the year 1000 there were
people in
France who gave their property to the church, to gain
merit
just before the end of the world. Some of their descendants
are
still in the courts, I understand, trying to get the land
back.
Transformations of Myth
Through Time (1990)To cite a particularly egregious example, when one
text gives Jesus less than half the space devoted to Eleanor of
Aquitaine or, in another, to Joseph Stalin, then someone is making
poor educational decisions about what is important for students to
learn. In the space Jesus is given, most texts say something
about love and forgiveness, but little or nothing about the fact
that Christians see Jesus as God incarnate. There is little
discussion of the nature of sin and salvation, . . .
.
Notes
"L. Ron Hubbard Dies of Stroke; Founder of Church of
Scientology" (obituary notice) in The New York Times, 29
January 1986;
Credits for cartoons
Cartoon by Charles
Barsotti. Copyright: The New Yorker Collection,
1998, from cartoonbank.com.
All rights reserved.
Cartoon drawn and
copyrighted (1977) by Sidney Harris. Reprinted in
The Textbook Letter
with permission from Sidney Harris.
has been reprinted as an excerpt, under the title "The 'Intelligent
Design' Hoax,"
at http://www.textbookleague.org/id-hx-1.htm
on this Web site.
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