Response to Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker Article “Is Science Kind of a Scam?”

I think that saying that science is a scam (or another kind of ‘faith’) is intellectually dishonest. Adam Gopnik, in his New Yorker article “Is Science Kind of a Scam?,” makes a number of logical fallacies and erroneous claims about science. These are common misconceptions about science so I think it’s worthwhile and beneficial to discuss a few of them in rebuttal to his widely circulated article. I might add that many scientists do not spend enough time to refute ‘anti-science.’ Unfortunately this is at the expense of a scientifically illiterate population that can be duped by authors such as Gopnik.

It’s possible that there are many people who believe the things that they hear out of conformity (or “out-of-faith”) but these are not ‘good scientists’ or critical thinkers. Good scientists are true 'scientific skeptics' who want to see the empirical evidence. There is a hierarchy of knowledge from which one can gain insight and wisdom. To say that there is no way of knowing is to claim that all truth is relative (truth relativism), and that deters us from searching to find the truth. One cannot possibly research everything that there is study, so one defers to the experts who sift through the data for us, and then tell us their findings. One could degrade this process by calling it a kind of “faith,” like Gopnik does, but that seems to be drastically missing the point. To some degree we take one’s word for what we read in 'Nature' magazine or 'Scientific American,' because the authors and editors have the credentials and qualifications backed by research institutions. These journals are peer-reviewed and go through a rigorous process of fact-checking and correction before publication. They are careful not to publish false or misleading information. It’s not having ‘faith’, but rather trust and confidence in a method of acquiring knowledge and epistemology (how we know what we know) that works.

What makes science great is that anyone can help with the process, as long as one is courageous enough to test the limits of one’s own understanding. That is the beauty of the 21st century: science has become democratized. One does not need to be an evolutionary biologist in order to grasp the fundamentals of evolution. One does not need to be an astrophysicist to share in the wonders of the cosmos. One does not need to be a physicist to become curious about the nature of atoms and subatomic particles. Granted, it’s not easy to understand some of these concepts- that goes with the territory- but it can be done.

Of course there are limits to our knowledge. After all, we are only human. Also, there are human biases which often enter into science and there are often implicit biases in specific fields. It's unfortunate when people interpret one specific bias (or simply a “quack”) as a reason to write-off the entire scientific method and scientific achievements of humanity as a “scam." Yes, scientists are human and humans are fallible, but the scientific method takes this into account. It has error-correcting measures that make sure that one’s findings conform to reality and not conform to the preconceived ideas of what the experimenter wanted to discover. That’s why a good experiment is replicable. Scientists encourage others to repeat the experiment/observations to test their results. If one wishes to challenge/disprove a "scientific theory” (a scientific fact) then one must devise an experiment and testable theory which is more universally valid and fits the data better than the previous theory. Much of science relies on Karl Popper’s notion of ‘falsifiability’- that a good theory must have a way of proving it wrong. If one finds new data that does not conform to the theoretical framework then we must re-work the theory. Proving that a theory is false (or has “holes” in it) is a way of furthering our knowledge because every test result that supports the theory makes it stronger, and every result that falsifies a theory teaches us a lesson.

When one discovers a more accurate theory which overturns the old, this creates what Thomas Kuhn called a “paradigm shift.” Facts change as scientists find better models that approach a closer approximation of the truth of reality. This process is called learning- and it is necessary that scientists are allowed to learn and adapt with new data findings. It’s possible that there will be a "new Einstein”- a grand unified theory (GUT)- that will replace the current “paradigm” of the theory of gravity, but a lot of theoretical physicists like Lawrence Krauss & Neil Degrasse Tyson say that it’s unlikely in their lifetimes (StarTalk Radio).

I think that it’s intellectually dishonest for Adam Gopnik to imply that the 20th century paradigm shift in science (namely quantum physics in the 1910-20s) raises questions on scientific knowledge today. I think that this is a typical ‘red herring.’ The differences between Niels Bohr & Albert Einstein’s views seem to me like fundamental disagreements on the most valuable aspects/implications of the paradoxical equations regarding quantum mechanics. When Einstein referred to “spooky interactions” it involved the “quantum entanglement” of atomic particles in the Double-Slit experiment. Everyone was puzzled by how a particle can act both as a wave and a particle, existing in a "quantum state,” where according to the Heisenberg principle, the results of the experiment (the observed) become inextricable from the observer. Bohr & Einstein admittedly did not comprehend the vast implications of their own equations. For example, Einstein wrote a paper (On the Quantum Theory of Radiation) describing the fundamentals of LASERs decades before anyone found a practical use for it. A brilliant theory can be way ahead of its time and it’s true that it took a long time for theoretical physicists in the first half of the 20th century to adjust to the newer paradigm of Einstein's relativity. This should not be a point of criticism but rather a triumph of science. Science does not proceed by what one thinks is true. It proceeds by what experimental data shows us to appear to be true, even if the results are bizarre and puzzling as is the case with quantum physics. Shared understanding comes about through rational debate and collaboration.

Gopnik’s question, “Why, then, did Einstein’s question get excluded for so long from reputable theoretical physics?” is therefore not a very practical question and rather a moot rhetorical point. The answer is that no one (or very few) in the 1920’s understood what was going on in terms of “non-locality” with the Double Slit experiment. The Einsteinian paradigm was brand-new and physicists were still conditioned to the “machine-like” view of the world from Newtonian mechanics. Plus I would argue with Gopnik’s claim that there was not “decisive debate” because (in my understanding) the paradox was later clarified by the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky paper in 1935 and the collapse of the wave function was later explained by David Bohm (Bohmian mechanics). “Quantum entanglement” can still be explained by Einstein’s theory of special relativity. It seems to me that Bohr and Einstein simply disagreed on why or how the particles act with “indeterminacy” (i.e. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which shows that either a particles’ speed or locality can be measured accurately, but not both at the same time). Their misgivings about the consequences of the experiment is not a mark of sciences’ failings, as Gopnik implies, but rather a testament to these two scientists’ rigor, fortitude, and intellectual curiosity. I think Gopnik is right about the fact that the public could benefit from stories about these men’s lives but not for the reason which he proposes. We could show that science & physics equally involves brilliant creativity as much as the greatest art & music.

It should not be surprising that the nature of the universe eludes our understanding at the atomic level. The universe did not evolve to make sense to humans. Likewise, humans did not evolve to make sense of the atomic world. This example of Einstein’s equations reveals another characteristic of physics: that when we find answers to hard questions, it often raises more questions. This is a unique feature of scientific knowledge, that the answers lead to more questions which broadens our horizon on what can be known. This hypothetically unending set of questioning is often mischaracterized by dogmatists as a shortcoming of science- an example of its inability to find definitive answers about the universe. This is simply not true. It frankly shows the power of science in its ability to ask questions which we would not have previously thought to ask about the universe.

The author also appears to be intellectually dishonest to bring up Galileo & Copernicus without really discussing Newton’s laws of motion, or even mentioning Kepler who accurately discerned the laws of planetary elliptical orbits. The author cites a moon crater drawn by Galileo presumably as an example of ‘bad science,’ not mentioning that Galileo was the first to ever use a telescope to view celestial objects in the night sky. To me it shows a lack of knowledge in the history of science (anachronistic thinking) to not acknowledge how in the 15th-18th centuries science was still co-opted by the Catholic Church, and not to mention how Galileo was punished by the Inquisition for not accepting authority and forced under threat to change his public views.

Then Gopnik cherry-picks a theoretical physicist (Lisa Randall) who wrote a book hypothesizing that ‘dark matter’ is a plausible explanation for why large comets occasionally get flung out of the far reaches of the solar system towards the gravitational pull of the Sun. He ridicules this idea but I don’t see this hypothesis as a harmful one. Carl Sagan, in his book ‘Comets,' proposed that comets are simply jostled out of the Oort Cloud as our solar system revolves around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. And Sagan proved to be right about a lot of the things that he predicted, like the presence of organic compounds on Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons. Sometimes the seemingly “wacky” and “out-there” ideas have relevance in science because it implores other scientists to test the hypothesis and prove it wrong. That does not mean that we take these notions for granted, or outright ridicule them. We test the hypothesis for what it’s worth. We sometimes discover truths by testing radical theories and we often make new discoveries when we choose to look in a new place in a new way. One can discover truths by finding out what’s not true. This is an example of the ‘natural selection’ of ideas in science. If a hypotheses is proven incorrect, one can adapt the model to better fit reality and re-test it. This is not a flaw of science- in fact it shows the flexibility & strength of science to change in the light of new evidence to work towards solving new & complex problems. The ‘trial and error’ method is sometimes cited as proof that scientists don’t know what they’re doing, but ‘trial and error’ is a way of arriving at knowledge when faced with a complex problem with numerous data points. The important lesson here is that it often takes a lot of error before one reaches an informative conclusion. It’s the nature of human inquiry into how the physical world works. Luckily the scientific method has an in-built error-correcting mechanism for determining what works and what doesn’t work.

To me, the line between science and magic is not so “fuzzy” or complicated. It’s simply the line between what is known, unknown and unknowable. The “lunar tides are occult” when they seem like mysterious unknowable forces; “the next day they are science” when they become describable as an interaction between the gravity of massive objects in space. What Gopnik seems to be struggling to point to is the fact that many times in the history of science, the biggest mental ‘revolutions’ occur when people come up with a novel concept which radically overturns the previous paradigm. For Copernicus it was observing that the Earth revolves around the Sun rather than the geocentric model. For Newton it was observing the existence of a force of attraction between massive objects, called gravity, which is proportional to the inverse square law. For Einstein it was that space-and-time are inseparable dimensions in one space-time continuum, and that gravity is due to a curvature in space-and-time. This ought not to be surprising that a radical new scientific idea is contrary and counterintuitive to what came before it. What makes it seem “magical” to the average person is that these discoveries were not made in nature but they were intuited from the mind with the use of mathematics. This is not ‘magic’ but perhaps just the work of brilliant minds that are able to unshackle themselves from the ordinary mainstream ideas of their time and use the new tools and instruments available to them. Scientists might seem like ‘magicians’ to those who do not understand science but this does not make it ‘magic.’ Although I would argue that learning about the wonders of nature can be a magical and often spiritual awe-inspiring experience. 

Gopnik makes it seem like science is part of conspiratorial cover up. “Why,” Adam wonders, “weren’t we told about the puzzle until after it was solved?” The answer: because unlike religion, science doesn’t claim to know the answers before it does the experiment and gets the results. As an example, Einstein’s theory of relativity predicted gravitational waves as a consequence of his equations, one hundred years before they were discovered. Unless you previously understood the theoretical consequences of Einstein’s equations, this would seem like “magic” (although it’s fundamental physics using the tool of mathematics). It might seem like Einstein just made up gravitational waves out of thin air, but no. In fact, it took civilization nearly one hundred years to build an apparatus large and precise enough (the LIGO detector) to measure these gravitational waves. But in science, it isn’t until we actually get a measurement that scientists are able to confirm that something like gravitational waves exist. Adam Gopnik seems to be laboring under a common misconception about science and the history of science. One could easily look back and say, as Gopnik does, that it looks “retrospectively engineered.” We might ask post-hoc: why didn’t anyone make a big deal about gravitational waves before they were discovered? Well, duh. Physicists were making a big deal about it and searching for the answers- but no one else noticed. No one in the general public seemed to care (or needed to) because there was no evidence for it yet. Scientists must wait for the concrete evidence before claiming a new discovery, no matter how convincing the clues are. Gopnik asks “What makes science different from faith?” The answer is evidence.

It’s good in a way that people like Gopnik are skeptical about science but I question what their ulterior motives for doing so are. I wish they would use this same inquiry to ask questions about the universe and ask how we discover these truths. If one does not know enough about how science proceeds, one might be tempted to agree with Gopnik that “science is a scam.” In my view, this is a dangerous canard. It is not the right kind of skepticism- the kind which requires reasoning and logic to further our understanding. Questioning things is good, but sometimes asking misguided questions can lead us to a troublesome place where there are no good answers. Sometimes questions lead us to answers which do not make us happy because they challenge our preconceived notions and do not conform to what we want to think is true about the universe.

On Bret Weinstein & The 'Day of Absence' Debacle

The attempts at Evergreen State college (in Washington State) to falsely accuse professor Bret Weinstein of ‘racism’ and, in a confrontational way, demanding that he quit is absolutely absurd. The context, as always, is important: in an e-mail, Weinstein challenged a recommendation by a campus group that people who are “pro-minority” should absent from going to classes that day: a policy which Weinstein rightly saw as discriminatory. It was the reversal of a thirty plus year tradition where once a year people of color would absent from going to classes at Evergreen in solidarity in order to show how important that community is to the campus population, based on the Douglas Turner Ward play ‘Day of Absence.’

Bret Weinstein got in hot water for rightly calling out the new version of "day of absence” for being discriminatory against non-black people (which in turn of events became demonstrably true). But of course, the one thing that’s intolerable to the “social justice warrior” activists who protested him is calling them out on their “bigotry of low expectations." So instinctively, they’ve flipped the script on Weinstein, calling him a ‘racist’ and forcing him to resign through acts of intimidation and physical threats to his person and family. It is apparent that these Evergreen state student protesters are confused. Their views on free speech (that your "free speech doesn't matter anymore" when you start inciting violence) is ironic, because the student protesters can’t look in the mirror and realize that they are the ones suppressing the free speech of professor Weinstein and that they are the ones inciting violence. Many of the college students appear to be jumping on the bandwagon of "social justice” without squarely looking at the facts of the situation and without really thinking about what terms like ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’ mean (or "social equality" for that matter). Ideally in a free and open democratic society, we all want equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. But they don’t get it. Free speech is threatened on campus by this regressive ideology.

Verbal dissent and non-violent protest is allowed for. We have the right to protest and the freedom of assembly. But when one person or a group of people are disrupting the classrooms and the school environment where students are trying to learn and get an education (that they’re paying for) then that can’t be allowed. The student protesters actions are just ridiculous and counter-productive to the causes which they purport to be fighting for. For example, the student protesters refused to have a dialectic with Bret Weinstein, instead shouting him down and chanting slogans at him. Also, how they took the president of the college, George Sumner Bridges, hostage in his office (even not letting him use the bathroom without their supervision). As absurd as it is what Bridges has done (or rather not done), I can see why the president of the school has given in to the students’ demands. The fact is that he shares their same ideology and admittedly has guilt that he’s in a position of power. He doesn’t want there to be any suppression of dissent, but in so doing he has missed the opportunity to support the free speech of the school’s professors and the suppression that they’re facing from radical protestors.

The “social justice warriors” want to “weed out people like Bret” because it’s easier to kick out the professor that doesn’t agree with their views than actually contend with his rational arguments and sane position. This strategy of “weeding out” the people that disagree with you (especially by labelling them a ‘racist’) is not going to work, people! History is not just a “power play," as much as the lense of “oppression”- a dynamic between oppressor and oppressed- is a simple and convenient way of seeing the world. Some ideologies are self-destructive and the regressive “far-left” has sadly become one of them. Let me add that all extremes on the political spectrum are bad because both far-left and far-right extremes “horseshoe" into the realm of authoritarianism. To be clear, I am not in support of far-right groups who think we need to quell the protests with more police presence. That can not be the answer either.

Many of us have succumbed to this mob mentality which is causing people to go on a witch-hunt for anybody who appears to question their belief system. Unfortunately, many young people are succumbing to 'group-think' and accepting a militant ideology. When I was at a college campus, I had some experience with what I saw then simply as a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism & 'confirmation bias.' To me then, it was just an abstract academic viewpoint but it was not yet fully operationalized. Fortunately there were enough teachers & faculty at my college who understood the importance of freedom of speech, freedom of the press & freedom of religion (the First Amendment, Enlightenment principles and 'classical liberalism') that my concerns were mild. But now on various college campuses across America it seems to have become a visible danger to critical thinking and free speech.

During my academic career I read a lot of “social constructionism” and many of the thinkers whose ideas make up the core of the post-modernist philosophy, like Michel Foucault. Understandably I did not make any sense of Foucault's books. It was gobbledygook. I thought it was a function of not having enough knowledge to understand the complicated systems of “oppression" and “intersectionality” (highly popular terms in the “social justice warrior” community because anyone can claim that they are oppressed [even the wealthiest and most “privileged” among us] and anyone can claim that their subjective experience is proof of systemic social problems). Now I’ve come to realize that I’m not alone in thinking that this is a bunch of highly stylized nonsense. It’s a belief system based on emotions and not on facts and evidence. 

But nowhere in that post-modernist philosophy did I get the sense that these philosophers advocated for violence as a "means to an end” to fight against perceived oppression, or that the “ends justify the means.” Where did this idea come from? This seems to have stemmed from an anti-capitalist anarchist mentality which has also given rise to groups like the anti-fascists. What happened to the cherished ideas of civil disobedience and non-violent protest? People fought hard (and died) for these principles during the civil rights era in the 50s and 60s. Now it seems like people have forgotten our history- where we came from- and where we’re going. We’re at the point now where any perceived act of “oppression” is labeled a “micro-aggression” and this trivializes the real prejudice and discrimination which exists in the world.

The First Amendment is not in place to give a “carte blanche” to everyone to say whatever they might want (like hate speech, incitement to violence, death threats, etc.). The principle of free speech is there to protect people who have unfavorable views. Unfortunately, Bret Weinstein’s anti-racism has been misconstrued by students on the liberal campus of Evergreen State College as being antithetical to their “social justice” ethos. The irony kills me. This is an example of how the far-left has become like an ouroboros, eating its own tail and cannibalizing its own members. They have become so “triggered” that they are unknowingly demonizing self-proclaimed 'progressives' that ought to be on the same side as they are- on the side of fighting against true discrimination.

I implore everyone to read a history book (instead of reading one’s Facebook and Twitter). History does not repeat itself, but we’re bound to make the same mistakes over and over again if we don’t learn from them quickly. I am in full support of Bret Weinstein. If we continue to demonize our brightest and most courageous intellectuals in this country, we will eventually pay the price.

On Google's Firing of James Damore

The firing of engineer James Damore from Google is an example of how one can be punished for simply trying to understand the world around us. It’s an example of how authoritarianism does not like it when its cherished beliefs are challenged. Oddly enough, what offended most people about the Google memo was that Damore introduced the term 'neuroticism,' which is one of the measurable personality traits on the 'Big Five Personality Model' in psychology, and he gave supporting evidence for how women score higher than men on this psychometric scale in personality tests. Many interpreted this as an "insult" to women but its merely scientific data. It sounds like a pejorative if you don't know what it means. In multiple podcast interviews (like the Rubin Report and the Joe Rogan Experience) Damore said that, in retrospect, he regrets using the word 'neuroticism' but I think that this is silly and wrong to back down from knowing something when faced with undue criticism. We cannot be forced to self-censor ourselves simply because some people are ignorant and uneducated about psychology and the historical definitions and terms used in scientific literature. Anyone at Google could have easily searched the definition of 'neuroticism' and the historical use of the term but instead people decided to take offense as part of this new 'outrage-and-victimhood culture.'

In many ways, it’s not surprising that James Damore got fired from Google because a lot of the "social justice left” is very open about their policy which is: 'Shut them down. If they don’t agree with you, get rid of them. If they don’t go away easily, threaten & tar them with accusations of “racism” and “sexism.” Shout them down.' The irony is that in a quest for “diversity,” Google has set up policies which explicitly discriminate against people on the basis of race & gender. They claim to be all about inclusion when in secret they are enacting policies which are non-inclusive. As they say, "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions." Not only will individuals suffer as a consequence of this, but the society as a whole will suffer from censorship and the shutting-out of ideas. We want “equality of opportunity,” not “equality of outcomes.”

We witnessed this tactic with the example of Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College in Washington (see stevenrepka.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-attempts-at-evergreen-state-college.html). The tactic is to stifle the debate, suppress the dialogue and prevent a real discussion or dialectic from occurring. The “social justice warrior’s" way of ‘winning’ the argument is to make sure that the opposition is not heard, and often making false accusations and claims about the person (i.e. ad hominem attacks). Many have surmised that this tactic is used because they have no supporting evidence for their claims. Their argument is based solely on emotions, feelings, and irrationality. Like Christopher Hitchens said, if you have a better argument, one must have the courage to have an open and public debate about it. Let the audience decide who wins the argument. This is called civil debate. The level of suppression of free speech on liberal college campuses across America in the 21st century is astounding to me. Did we not learn from our history? The point of 'freedom of speech' (and the First Amendment) is not for speech which conforms to our pre-existing beliefs but rather to protect people who may have unwelcoming perspectives or non-conformist views. 

There’s a strain of anti-intellectualism which seems to have become more predominant in the past decade in America with the advent of the internet (I personally did not realize how controversial the findings of psychology and psychometrics were in many academic circles until I went to a liberal arts college and discovered many of their ideas in the social sciences). We have entered into the “twilight zone” where subjective meaning outweighs objective truth. This is very dangerous and this development ought to be considered an affront to logic and reason. Good science questions everything. In science, a good theory must be testable and falsifiable. The scientific method works so well because it has built-in measures to prevent cognitive biases from influencing the results.

To Google: this is what happens when radical social constructionist ideology overshadows reality. This is what happens when people are lead by dogma instead of empirical evidence, knowable facts and objective truths. This is what happens when people ignore scientific consensus in favor of their personal biases. Biological sex differences exist; that is evolution, that is science. The exceptions do not disprove the rule. [Can we move on to bigger things and more important discussions now?]

Religion Does Not Belong in the Science Classroom

Halfway through the semester of my freshman high school biology class (in a New York State public school) when we got to the chapter in the textbook about Darwin’s theory of evolution, our teacher sat down on the front of her desk & explained to us calmly that we had to skip the chapter on evolution because one student’s parents did not approve & it did not match their household’s religious teachings. I was quite upset because I had been looking forward to the teacher’s discussion about evolution, especially since I wanted to talk about dinosaurs & fossils which had fascinated me ever since childhood. 

I understand now that our biology teacher and the science department did this because of fear of litigation. If the parents sued the school district then presumably the high school could potentially lose its funding. It’s a shame because I know that most of the students would have loved a discussion on prehistoric animals and I felt like we were unfairly punished by an imposing religion. Somehow the curriculum was affected by a religion that was not even the choice of any of the other thirty students in the classroom (or their parents for that matter). Kids are put into school to learn, not to regress to their parents’ ideologies and religious dogmas. What perturbs and saddens me the most is the way that our lovely teacher had to break the news to the classroom, that we couldn’t learn about evolution because someone’s parent objected to the known facts.

I consider this to be a foolish mistake on the part of the New York State educational system, to let science get taken over by religious superstition in the science classroom. The science curriculum ought to stay as it is whether objectionable or not to parents. The scientific consensus of reality does not change because one likes it or not. Even as a freshman in high school I thought we had grown up enough as a society not to let tribal religion enter into our science classroom and overturn the work of thousands of scientists simply because it challenges someone's religious convictions. I think that this is emblematic of a bigger problem which failing American school systems face. I feel like our education and the students’ learning experience in that biology class was unjustly deprived because of one parent’s beliefs that the Book of Genesis is literal truth - and the false implication that the empirical fact-based reasoning of Darwin’s theory (fact) of evolution would somehow impart knowledge that would damage their child.

The opposite is obviously true. The ‘theory of evolution’ (“fact of evolution”) has mountains of evidence for its support (and it would require extraordinary evidence to become discredited (i.e. fossil rabbits in the Precambrian strata of rocks). On the other hand, the Book of Genesis (and the Bible largely) is an 'allegorical cosmogony' (a term from Lloyd M. Graham) filled with fairy-tale nonsense copied from earlier Bronze Age myths. A literal interpretation of Genesis presumes that there is no prehistory, that God created everything in seven days ~5000 years ago for which there is no evidential support. As Carl Sagan said, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." This is the kind of junk that one hears proffered from creationists like Australian Ken Ham and the "Focus on the Family's Truth Project." It’s ridiculous claims like this that make me sick knowing that this BS (belief system) is being taught to children. As Richard Dawkins states in his book “The God Delusion,” to deny a child scientific knowledge and indoctrinate him/her with these erroneous beliefs is akin to “child abuse.”

Scientists do not run into churches shouting and waving the ‘Origin of Species’. Why do religious people go into science classrooms waving the Bible? Threatening that knowledge defames their beliefs? And claiming that we need “equal time” for infactual unsubstantiated claims? By and large, most American citizens understand that we have freedom of religion which means that one is allowed to have whatever stupid belief they want behind closed doors. But this is only “freedom,” by definition, if religion does not impose itself on the beliefs of others- especially not imposing itself on the understanding of science in a public school. We all have the First Amendment right to freedom of religion, but this also entails the right to freedom from religion (in a secular setting i.e. public education). It’s not that our biology teacher had to teach us the Book of Genesis instead of the chapter on biological evolution but the act of preventing us from learning about evolution is a real-life example of how religion often co-opts science for its own nefarious purposes. Whenever religion overcomes science in the public sphere (schools, courts, government), we lose value as a society.

Why don’t we leave the scientists to do science and leave the religious to do their religion? I think it’s OK for religious people to “believe” and go to their places of worship, but it's not OK impose their beliefs on people's education. Don’t impose one’s falsities on a group of growing developing individuals in a public school with a well-qualified teacher simply because someone told you that one’s ‘holy book’ has divine authority. One ought to teach Genesis in Sunday school but not in a public school science classroom. Certainly I think it is worth studying ancient peoples and their creation myths in the context of history and comparative religion. They reveal to us how the ancient intuitional mind functioned (and how they interpreted experiences under the influence of psychedelic drugs). But this does not give much meaning for us in observable reality. The theory (fact) of evolution is the study of “objective reality” whereas ancient religion, for the most part, is the handed-down accounts of peoples’ “inner experiences.”

Religious people feel they are being “attacked by science” because science overthrows their entire worldview and up-ends their whole system of lies. No wonder they feel threatened because these ancient texts no longer hold up to any modern rational scrutiny. Religion also claims to be an authority on morality which it simply is not. A person does not become a “good” ethical moral person simply because they fear punishment from a capricious surveilling celestial dictator entity that watches every minute to see if you’ve been “good” or “bad.” Plus, the scientific studies of psychology in the 21st century have revealed much more about ethics/morality than religion ever has. Religion has only granted us with one universal (not culture specific) worthwhile commandment which is ‘the Golden Rule.’ But I argue that humanity does not need religion to figure that out for ourselves. Religion wants a monopoly on this domain of knowledge and morality because it protects them from any skeptical inquiry. And of course they target the youth because it's understood that children are the most impressionable and vulnerable to become inculcated by religious teachings. Science is not “attacking” religion. In fact (if you were reading carefully) it’s apparent that it’s quite the opposite, that religion is waging an assault against science for dismantling its paradigm and weakening its control over civilization (and it has been since before the times of Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei, etc.).

Religion does not belong in the science classroom. That’s not how science (or the scientific method) works. It relies on questioning, verifiability, testability and falsifiability. Religion works in exactly the opposite way - believing things essentially on “faith” and taking the truth-value of its books’ claims based on the notion that it’s the “Word of God.” It is important to inform children about the benefits and usefulness of science and teach them the tools of questioning, experiment and discovery - the scientific method, the best tool we have of understanding the universe and how it works. It is not good enough to teach people what to know, we must teach growing adults how to know. Without a scientifically literate population, America will not succeed in the future. We have already been surpassed by dozens of developed nations in terms of science, math and technological innovations because we have not yet removed the shackles of ancient religion. Without giving our children the adequate knowledge of our modern scientific achievements we are neglecting them the full intellectual life which everyone deserves.

Twelve years later I’m still appalled at the fact that our 9th grade biology teacher in a New York State school could not teach a chapter in the course textbook which focused on evolution and dinosaurs because one of the student’s parents did not wish it to be taught since it contradicted with their faith. Presumably it was more practical for our teacher & the administrators to skip the lessons on evolutionary theory rather than risk the student’s parents suing the school district. Thus the entire class of students missed out on a valuable lesson in empirical evidence-based evolution because of one family’s absurd religious teachings (a.k.a. the creation myth of Genesis). For me, this was one of the first signs that the American public education system has problems. 

This is a personal anecdote but I know for certain that it cannot be an isolated case. This is an example of how creationism not only affects the people who wrongly believe it, but also that religions’ nonsense claims that its beliefs must have protection does more harm to others than good. In a democracy everyone ought to have access to information and truth, especially in our institutions of learning. Science taught in public schools ought not to be censored by religion simply because it offends the sensibilities of fundamentalists. Churches (and places of worship) are allowed the freedom of religion in America. Science classrooms ought to be granted freedom from religion.