A new alliance

A new alliance against science: The 'anything goes' academic left is coming to the support of the 'God did it' religious right Vancouver Sun Saturday, April 22, 2006

Byline: Peter McKnight
Column: Peter McKnight
Source: Vancouver Sun

The religious right has a new ally, and it's none other than its erstwhile arch-enemy -- the academic left.
The latest evidence of this unholy alliance comes from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which recently rejected a research proposal aimed at studying the impact of popularizing intelligent design, the theory that the complexity and supposed design in nature reveal that there must have been a designer.
The proposal, by McGill University's Brian Alters, was titled Detrimental Effects of Popularizing Anti-Evolution's "Intelligent Design Theory" on Canadian Students, Teachers, Parents, Administrators and Policymakers, and that title alone was enough give the SSHRC's review panel the willies.
In its terse rejection letter, the SSHRC said "the proposal did not adequately substantiate the premise that the popularizing of Intelligent Design Theory had detrimental effects" and there was inadequate "justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of Evolution, and not Intelligent Design Theory, was correct."
Now those reasons would be laughable if they weren't so pathetic. First, Alters's reference to the detrimental effects of popularizing intelligent design isn't a premise, but a hypothesis. This is what the study was designed to test, so it's a bit much to expect Alters to have the evidence in hand prior to conducting the study. Indeed, were he already in possession of the evidence, there'd be no need to conduct the research.
But as it turns out, the panel's second reason for rejecting funding provided exactly the evidence Alters was looking for. That a committee of "experts" could suggest that ID and evolution are equally plausible theories reveals just how great the detrimental effects of popularizing ID have been.
One has to wonder if members of the review panel have ever leafed through a biology journal, since if they had, they would have found that the theory of evolution has been tested and corroborated thousands of times. And ID? Not once -- there is not a single empirical test of ID published in a peer reviewed biology journal.
This isn't really surprising, since instead of conducting empirical research, ID theorists while away their days attacking Darwinism and composing lists of the few scientists (mostly non-biologists) who object to evolution, as though that's supposed to prove something.
Indeed, ID theorists never will test their theory since it's untestable.
The criterion of testability -- which distinguishes science from pseudoscience -- requires that a theory make predictions so that researchers can conduct studies to see whether those predictions come true. But ID, which amounts to saying "God did it," makes no predictions at all, and hence can't be tested and is pseudoscience.
Even worse, while scientific theories allow us to control nature, ID does nothing of the sort -- for example, saying "God did it" provides us with no help whatsoever in developing antibiotics to counter rapidly evolving bacteria.
You'd think it wouldn't be necessary to explain these things to a panel of experts, but the profoundly detrimental effects of popularizing ID have evidently made it necessary. And many scientific organizations, including the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Centre for Ecology and Evolution, the American Institute for Biological Sciences and the U.S. National Center for Science Education, have now taken it upon themselves to fill the enormous gaps in the experts' education.
The response of the SSHRC has been less than reassuring. While SSHRC executive vice-president Janet Halliwell issued a statement saying, "The theory of evolution is not in doubt. SSHRC recognizes the theory of evolution as one of the cornerstones of modern science," she also made comments that are a lot more worrying.
First, she attacked Alters for taking one line from the panel's rejection letter "out of context," which is nonsense. The entire letter is only five sentences long, and the sentence about ID and evolution, which I quoted above, is abundantly clear.
Second, Halliwell and other SSHRC members have made no statement about the pseudoscientific status of ID. On the contrary, they have, in fact, expressed a certain sympathy toward the theory.
So Halliwell stated that there are some phenomena that "may not be easily explained by current theories of evolution." To which I say, so what? That evolution cannot, at present, account for all phenomena is reason to conduct further scientific research, not reason to throw up our hands and introduce pseudoscience to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. By that logic, since we don't know everything about the cosmos, we ought to toss in a little astrology, or the Book of Genesis, into astronomy classes.
SSHRC review committee member and Memorial University sociologist Larry Felt echoed Halliwell's comments and then made some more telling ones of his own. Felt told the Ottawa Citizen that evolution and ID might "come together," and he explained that the review panel feared Alters's proposed study would "dump on the religious right." That was enough for the Citizen's editorial board, which wrote a breathtakingly ignorant editorial in support of the SSHRC.
Many better informed commentators are mystified by the seemingly contradictory opinions of the ideologues at the SSHRC -- who simultaneously accept evolution and express sympathy for a theory that directly contradicts it -- but I think Felt's comments reveal what's really going on here. The SSHRC, it seems, has adopted wholesale the postmodern epistemological relativism that has for years been promoted in many university humanities and social science faculties.
Central to the project of epistemological relativism is the notion that, contrary to popular belief, science doesn't occupy a privileged position, that it doesn't have any special claim to truth. Rather, science maintains its authority through power rather than truth -- through carefully controlling access to resources and bullying its opponents into submission.
Consequently, the postmodernists arrogate to themselves the responsibility to "deconstruct" this scientific monopoly, to show that other forms of "knowledge," whether they come from religious texts, conspiracy theorists or UFO cultists, are just as valid as scientific knowledge.
For the postmodernists, then, all truth is relative, and all attempts at finding it ought to be equally valued. This fits in nicely with the lefty postmodernists' warm-and-fuzzy egalitarianism.
It now appears that the SSHRC has swallowed this postmodernist dogma, what with Larry Felt's talk of evolution and ID "coming together." What's really fascinating, though, is that when the academic left was promulgating these asinine theories in the 1980s, it vigorously avoided the religious right, but not any more. Witness one Steve Fuller, an American at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom.
As Rutgers University mathematician Norman Levitt explains in a devastating demolition of Fuller's postmodernism, Fuller acted as an expert witness on behalf of the Dover, Penn., school board in the recent case of Kitzmiller v.
Dover, where parents sued the board for including ID in biology classes.
(Brian Alters was an expert witness for the parents.)
While Fuller describes himself as a leftist, he employed the postmodern relativist gobbledygook in an attempt to convince United States District Court Judge John Jones that the religious right was right -- that ID belongs in science classes. But Jones was having none of it: In deciding in favour of the parents, Jones, who is a conservative Republican appointed by George W. Bush, used words like "ludicrous" and "breathtaking inanity" to describe the school board's decision.
Dover voters weren't having any of it, either, as they dumped all eight members of the board who ran for reelection shortly after the case was decided.
Now, just as Fuller and his leftist colleagues have advanced toward the religious right, The New Republic's Noam Scheiber explained last year that the religious right has returned the favour by becoming the chief purveyor of the left's crass relativism.
This is more than a little ironic, since the religious right was once the main critic of leftist relativism, and ID godfather Phillip Johnson specifically promoted ID as an alternative to the relativism he wrongly believed stemmed from Darwinism.
Nevertheless, since science does not and cannot sanction ID, we now hear the right complaining that the scientific establishment has wielded its political power to shut ID theorists out of the discussion. And we hear that those of us who value science and object to intermixing science and pseudoscience are closed-minded. (I get accused of this whenever I write about ID.)
Even, or perhaps, especially, politicians have entered the fray. So George W. Bush advises that both evolution and ID should be taught in science classes. And Tennessee Sen. Bill Frist, who tirelessly parades around his MD degree and then routinely makes statements that betray a shocking ignorance of science, supports the teaching of ID in the interest of "pluralism." And worst of all, Arizona Sen. John McCain, who I long thought was the only hope to rescue the Republican party from the talons of the theocrats, says that all points of view should be represented. The postmodern left couldn't have said it any better.
Indeed, at the root of these complaints is the postmodern ideal -- the notion that the religious right's knowledge claims are as valid as the claims of science, that all truth, and all methods for arriving at truth, are equal.
By learning to speak the language of postmodernism, the religious right has therefore succeeded in gaining a foothold in the academy, and in influencing funding decisions in the social sciences and humanities. But it has paid a great price, a price that involves denying the existence of absolute truth.
"Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows," wrote William Shakespeare, and nowhere is the truth of that nugget more in evidence than in the unhappy marriage of the postmodern left and the premodern right, a marriage made not in heaven, but consummated by the parties' mutual commitment to the relativity of truth.
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