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Books: Johnson: The Right Questions InterVarsity Press October 01, 2002 Source: http://www.gospelcom.net/ivpress/title/exc/2294-1.pdf Biology and Liberal Freedom THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT AND THE MEANING OF LIFE The Santorum Amendment On June 13, 2001, U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (Rep., PA) proposed a two-sentence amendment to the White House-sponsored education bill that was under consideration in Congress. The Santorum Amendment said simply that “it is the sense of the Senate that (1) good science education should prepare students to distinguish the data or testable theories of science from philosophical or religious claims that are made in the name of science; and (2) where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy and should prepare the students to be informed participants in public discussions regarding the subject.” Senator Santorum explained that as a mere “sense of the Senate” resolution, the amendment included no provisions for implementation or enforcement and hence would not require or fund educators to do anything in particular. It merely acknowledged the existence of disagreements and controversies over scientific theories, especially biological evolution, and supported the conclusion that science education would be more effective if it prepared students to understand these controversies. Senator Santorum then yielded the floor to Senator Edward Kennedy, who was taking the leading role on the bill for the Democrats. Senator Kennedy enthusiastically agreed with Senator Santorum, urging all senators to vote for the amendment because “we want children to be able to talk about different concepts and do it intelligently with the best information that is before them.” After additional supporting statements from other senators, the amendment passed by a huge bipartisan majority of 91-8. One might have expected mainstream organizations of scientists and science educators to take the same view that Senator Kennedy had expressed and to welcome the amendment as an invitation to educate the public to understand science as the scientists do. Although I drafted the amendment for Senator Santorum, it did not give any recognition to dissenters from Darwinian orthodoxy such as myself, so the existing science educators would have had a free hand to present the subject as they thought best. Instead these organizations vehemently opposed the amendment and exerted all their influence in an attempt to persuade the legislators to drop it from the final version of the bill. They almost succeeded: the House of Representatives passed the education bill without a parallel “sense of the House” resolution, but the amendment attracted support from both House and Senate members of the Conference Committee, which had the task of reconciling the House and Senate bills. The science educators’ principal, explicit objection to the Santorum Amendment was that it singled out biological evolution as a subject of controversy. They insisted that there was no scientific controversy over evolution but merely a religiously or politically based resistance to scientific knowledge, which should not be dignified by allowing it to be expressed in science classes. Their logic seems to have been that the many persons with impressive scientific credentials who have expressed skepticism toward the theory of evolution must not really be scientists, since they have expressed skepticism toward the theory of evolution. More important, the Darwinist educators cannot afford to acknowledge to either their students or the public that there is a distinction between the data or testable theories of science, on the one hand, and philosophical or religious claims that are made in the name of science, on the other. All Darwinist propaganda depends on blurring that distinction so that a credulous public is taught to accept philosophical naturalism/materialism as inherent in the definition of “science.” On that premise scientific knowledge is deemed the least implausible naturalistic mechanism for creating complex life and therefore true. Sometimes Darwinists say that their naturalism is merely methodological and makes no claims about reality, but of course the method is thought to be sound because it is deemed to reflect reality. Public opinion polls consistently show that a very substantial proportion of the American public is skeptical of the theory of evolution—at least when it is offered as a complete explanation for the history of life—a skepticism that scientific organizations deplore. How is public skepticism over evolution ever to be addressed unless educators recognize its existence and use their best efforts to educate the public in the errors in the public’s way of thinking? Education in other subjects aims at helping students to understand the subject as completely as possible. However, education in biological evolution (Darwinism) must aim at keeping the students and the general public confused so they will continue to accept philosophy as science and not perceive that the scientific evidence is not consistent with the scientistic philosophy (naturalism) that the ruling metaphysicians of science want them to believe. Darwinism and clear thinking are at odds with each other. In the end the amendment survived virtually unchanged in the report of the Conference Committee, which was approved by both houses of Congress with the final version of the education bill, signed by President Bush in January 2002. The Conference Committee report is not itself an operative provision of the statute, but it is the primary source of legislative history to which a judge or administrator would turn to interpret the meaning of key terms that are operative in the statute, like science and education. What I had hoped to accomplish with the language of the amendment was primarily to make it very difficult for public school authorities to justify firing or disciplining a teacher who informs students of the weaknesses of the Darwinian theory, rather than teaching it in the authoritarian and dogmatic manner that Darwinians have been able to enforce up until now. Beyond that, how much effect the amendment may have depends on what the public makes of it. If people at the grassroots level are active in raising objections to Darwinian dogmatism, the amendment will protect their legal position. If the people allow themselves to be cowed by the authority of the current rulers of “science,” then Darwinian dogmatism will go on much as it did before the amendment was passed. To understand why educators find biological evolution so diffi- cult an issue to handle, it will be helpful to consider the differing interpretations in the media of the first results of the massive Human Genome Project, probably the most ambitious biological research effort in history. Unless people keep their common sense firmly under wraps, most instinctively recognize that a supernatural intelligence must be at work in the wonders of biology. It takes years of indoctrination to learn to ignore the evidence of intelligent design that is so apparent before our very eyes. The Human Genome Project and What It Means to Be Human On June 26, 2000, President Clinton announced that the scientific effort to sequence the human genome had met with its first substantial success. Scientists warned that it might be a long time before tangible benefits like cures for diseases resulted, but the accomplishment nonetheless generated a mixture of elation and suspicion. Elimination of genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis obviously would be desirable if it could be achieved, but the program of the more ambitious genetic wizards goes well beyond curing or preventing specific diseases. They yearn to produce better people by redesigning the human genome, which they take to be a cobbled- together product of unguided natural evolutionary processes consisting largely of “junk DNA” along with a smaller number of genes that code for proteins. Whatever technologies the scientists invent will inevitably be for sale in the amoral international marketplace, where enforcement of any ethical restraints may be extremely difficult. For example, parents who can afford to pay may one day be able to purchase genetic makeovers that could enable them to have “designer children” who are healthier and smarter than those of their less affluent neighbors, thus perpetuating a genetic caste system. The promised biotech wonders may be a long time in coming, but in the very near future, information from genetic testing may be used to make some persons unemployable or ineligible for insurance coverage. President Clinton tried to provide some reassurance against these widely recognized dangers, vowing that “as we consider how to use new discoveries, we must also not retreat from our oldest and most cherished human values.” Specifically, the President said, “All of us are created equal, entitled to equal treatment under the law.” Created? The claim that all humans are created equal is a creationist notion that implies other species are inferior, presumably because only humans bear the image of the Creator. president Clinton did not mention the possibility, now widely advocated or even taken for granted in elite scientific and philosophical circles, that what biologists are telling us about life and evolution has made our oldest and most cherished values obsolete. For example, many scientists and philosophers now say that to award a special status to human beings (that is, to “us”) is an anthropocentric sin called speciesism, akin to racism and sexism. The core message of evolutionary biology is that humans are not created at all, much less created in the image of God, but are merely a random product of evolution like every other species. In that case, to declare humans to have some unique status above that of other species may be as arbitrary as to declare one race of human beings superior to the others. This challenge to human pretensions to superiority comes from biological evolutionary theory, but its philosophical implications are causing immense difficulty for biologists by inspiring the growth of an animal rights movement that does not accept the legitimacy of animal experimentation. The issue of animal testing first arose with respect to those animals that are most similar to man, such as chimpanzees, but the logic has been extended even to laboratory rats and beyond. In consequence laboratories that use animals for experiments have had to become fortresses, and the scientists fear for their very lives. None of this is surprising if you take seriously the premise that experimentation on animals is morally equivalent to performing the same experiments on human beings. Insofar as the genome project leads to further findings of similarities between men and animals, it may have the ironic effect of encouraging further acts of terrorism against biologists. However that story may develop, the formal celebration of the initial success of the genetic sequencing provided evidence that creationist premises remain influential even in the vehemently materialist culture of biology. President Clinton exulted that “today, we are learning the language in which God created life; we are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, the wonder of God’s most divine and sacred gift.” Dr. Francis S. Collins, the scientific director of the government’s Human Genome Project, used similar words, saying, “It is humbling for me and awe-inspiring to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.” Taken at face value, these statements seem to say that genome research actually supports the view that a supernatural mind designed the instructions that guide the immensely complex biochemical processes of life. To put the same point negatively, Clinton and Collins seemed to be repudiating the central claim of evolutionary naturalism, which is that exclusively natural causes like chance and physical law produced all the features of life, including whatever “instructions” are contained in DNA. Whatever Clinton and Collins may think about the matter, however, the vast majority of biologists, especially prestigious biologists, emphatically deny that God had anything to do with evolution, and contemptuously dismiss what they call “intelligent design creationism” as inherently unacceptable to science, regardless of the evidence. For example, Dr. David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate and president of the California Institute of Technology, wrote in the New York Times that the genome project had revealed that “our genes look very much like those of fruit flies, worms and even plants.” Baltimore argued that this finding implies that “we are all descended from the same humble beginnings,” which he thought “should be, but won’t be, the end of creationism” (David Baltimore, “50,000 Genes, and We Know Them All [Almost],” New York Times, June 25, 2000). Because current scientific doctrine holds that the genes contain a sort of recipe for creating a human, Dr. Baltimore’s logic seems to imply that discovery of those genetic similarities should put an end both to the idea that humans (or other organisms) were created and to the idea that Homo sapiens is sufficiently different from other organisms to merit any unique status. So much for the traditional, theology-based view that humans are all created equal to each other and superior to everything else. Another genome scientist wrote to the New York Times that President Clinton’s references to a language in which God created life “could not be further from the truth,” and that these words would only “give more ammunition to creationists to further their destructive social and political agenda” (“Eureka! A Key to the Code of Life,” New York Times, June 28, 2000). The scientist did not say what that destructive agenda is, but by raising this objection he implied the possibility that biologists may reject the concept of design in biology because they dislike the possible religious, political or moral implications rather than because their data compel that conclusion. In that case, the rest of us may wonder where biologists got the idea that they should have authority over religion, politics and morality, and whether they may turn out to be the ones who are furthering a destructive social and political agenda. Some scientists seemed much more receptive to the idea that the evidence from the genome project points to an intelligent designer. Gene Myers, a computer scientist who was instrumental in assembling the genome map for Celera Corporation, told a science reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, “What really astounds me is the architecture of life. The system is extremely complex. It’s like it was designed. . . . There’s a huge intelligence there. I don’t see that as being unscientific. Others may, but not me” (Tom Abate, “Human Genome Map Has Scientists Talking About the Divine: Surprisingly Low Number of Genes Raises Big Questions,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 19, 2001). Abate was also astonished to discover that the geneticists were estimating that the total content of the human genome amounts to only about thirty thousand genes, approximately the same as the mouse genome. Larger estimates have since appeared, but the underlying problem remains: it is an interesting fact that our genes look very much like those of fruit flies, worms and even plants, but this fact does nothing to explain why humans are so different from fruit flies, worms and plants. If identifiable genetic differences do not account for our uniquely human characteristics, then perhaps the true lesson of the Human Genome Project is that genes are not nearly as important as we have been led to believe. This possibility must be very disquieting to investors who anticipate huge profits from the exploitation of technologies for manipulating all the uniquely human genes that haven’t been found. Knowledge and Belief One might expect that there would be a healthy debate in intellectual circles over whether the appearance of design in biology is real or illusory, and how the evidence of biology may bear on the proposition that humans are created equal to each other and superior to all other forms of life. The reason that debate does not occur is that the intellectual culture of our time enforces a distinction between belief and knowledge, and between faith and reason, which makes it virtually impossible to ask the right questions. The difference between belief and knowledge is easy to state but often subtle in application. Knowledge is objective and valid for everyone; belief is subjective and valid only for the believer. One rough way of expressing the distinction is that knowledge may be taught in the public schools and universities or used as a foundation for law making, whereas beliefs are confined to private life— unless they are beliefs that have the approval of the cognitive elite, which claims the power to draw the boundary between belief and knowledge. The paradigmatic illustration of the distinction is the assumed contrast between scientific knowledge and religious belief, supplemented by the parallel contrast between scientific reason and religious faith, which rationalists assume to mean belief without reasons. The fundamental rule of cognitive modernism is that every rational person accepts scientific knowledge because it is by definition based on reason and evidence, even if the evidence can’t be produced and the reasons seem unreasonable to many, whereas religious belief is at most optional because it is conclusively presumed to be based merely on subjective preference or indoctrination. Persons who internalize these distinctions automatically classify references to God as nonrational and hence not to be taken seriously as truth claims, although they may have to be treated tactfully for political reasons. Following the same logic, guidelines for teaching science in the public schools routinely specify that science is committed to explaining all phenomena in terms of natural causes only. In strict logic this leaves open the possibility that some phenomena (such as the DNA instruction book) really are the products of supernatural causes and hence cannot be fully explained by a science precommitted to naturalism. In practice modernist intellectuals are extremely reluctant to concede such a possibility because to the naturalistic mindset that conclusion implies “giving up on science” and embracing ignorance. Because philosophical naturalism is thus incorporated in the very definition of science, most biologists think it is as much a scientific fact that the genome is the product of natural causes alone as it is that DNA is composed of organic chemicals. Hence science cannot recognize an instruction book in the genome other than in a metaphorical sense, because an unevolved intelligence capable of writing instructions would be supernatural. As one naive biology professor explained in a letter to Nature, the world’s most prominent scientific journal, “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic” (Scott C. Todd, “A View from Kansas on That Evolution Debate,” Nature, September 30, 1999, p. 423). More politically sophisticated biologists do not express themselves so candidly because they know what the hated creationists would make of the admission that biologists sometimes disregard the data if it points in a direction they consider unacceptable on philosophic grounds. More commonly, scientific naturalists simply invoke the cultural power of “science” to confirm the claim that the evidence supports their philosophical position, even when the evidence consists of nothing more than similarities between various kinds of organisms. One could employ the same logic to prove that the nine symphonies of Beethoven had no composer since they all employ similar musical elements. Individual scientists who do believe in a supernatural reality had better be careful to keep their religion safely insulated from their scientific responsibilities. The professional ethos on this subject was nicely encapsulated in a Scientific American magazine profile of Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the Human Genome Project who shared the stage with President Clinton. Collins is an evangelical Christian who publicly identifies himself as such, and this is a curiosity indeed for a scientist at such a prestigious level. In what the editors probably intended as a display of tolerance, they lauded Collins because he “strives to keep his Christianity from interfering with his science and politics.” Of course, the same editors would never write a similar sentence about an atheist, such as that “Richard Lewontin strives to keep his atheism, his Jewishness and his Marxism from interfering with his science and politics.” Lewontin, a Harvard genetics professor who occupies a place near the top of the scientific pyramid, wears his atheism, his ethnicity and his politics on his sleeve. A member of a disfavored group had better not think he can get away with the same thing. It may seem that Collins did let his Christianity interfere with his science when he referred to that “instruction book previously known only to God,” but the circumstances were exceptional. On ceremonial occasions directors of expensive scientific programs are allowed wide latitude to say whatever is necessary to please the taxpayers who have to pay the bill. If Collins were to deliver a lecture on God’s instruction book at a scientific meeting, arguing that the information content of the genome points to an author, the reaction would be ferocious. The Right Questions About Science, God and Morality Is it wrong to mix science and religion, or is such mixing inescapable? In 1981 the U.S. National Academy of Sciences resolved that “religion and science are separate and mutually exclusive realms of human thought whose presentation in the same context leads to misunderstanding of both scientific theory and religious belief.” As with the supposed “scientific finding” that humans have no unique moral or spiritual status, the scientists intended the resolution to be nothing more than a weapon for use against creationists. They apparently gave no thought to the larger implications—whether it is even possible to avoid religious implications altogether when explaining the origins of human life. In fact prestigious scientists continually publish books that so thoroughly mix the two subjects that the word god or gods even appears in the title, a practice that is well known to boost sales and consequent royalties. For example, see The Genetic Gods: Evolution and Belief in Human Affairs by Dr. John C. Advise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). Dr. Advise, a scientific materialist who thinks his philosophy is required by “science,” writes in the preface, “I hope to diminish the hostility between these differing epistemological approaches (theology and evolutionary biology), [and I also] hope to resolve a central issue in my own life: how to reconcile the intellectual demands and pleasures of critical scientific thought with the sense of purpose and fulfillment that a rich spiritual life can provide.” When a materialist proposes a reconciliation of science with religion, the terms of the peace proposal usually amount to a demand for unconditional surrender. The theologians must accept the genetic gods in place of the old God, whose mention is banned not only from science but also from ethical discourse, including the ethics of employing genetic technology. According to Advise: The many ethical challenges prompted by the new genetic technologies are both complex and profound. In response, not only scientists, theologians, and lawmakers, but everyone must gather at the discussion table to consider rational, humanitarian courses of action. In such deliberations, perhaps the only mode of argument to be firmly censored—the only ‘wrong’ approach—is that in which the moral authority of a god is asserted. As judged by the diversity of opinions held by responsible individuals on ethical matters pertaining to the human condition, any supernatural deity either has been strangely silent on such issues or else has conveyed vastly different messages to different listeners. If God is dead, is everything permitted, or does moral judgment continue as before but on a secular basis? The early modernist rationalists assumed that the death of God was merely the death of superstition. On that premise modernist man, guided by science, could preserve the best of the old morality (or President Clinton’s “oldest and most cherished human values”) in a revised moral code founded on the solid rock of enlightened secular reason. More recently many have come to doubt that human reason can supply the missing transcendent standard by which differing human moral beliefs can be evaluated. From a scientific standpoint, morality—like religion—is a matter of subjective belief rather than objective knowledge. That makes it effectively a matter of personal preference. This does not mean that moral codes will cease to exist (even a gang of robbers or terrorists has one), but it does mean that those codes will be grounded on the preferences of local power holders rather than on universal principles of reason and knowledge. What is right or wrong depends on the preference of whoever has the power to impose his will. Perhaps no one should have that power, and every individual should have an absolute right to choice. That is the alternative that three centrist justices of the U.S. Supreme Court seemed to embrace in 1992 when they reaffirmed the existence of a constitutional right to abortion. In what lawyers call the “mystery passage,” the justices wrote, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State” (Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 [1992], 851 [opinion by Justices O’Connor, Kennedy and Souter]). However, no American law, including laws restricting abortion, seeks to compel “beliefs about these matters.” The only question presented by abortion prohibitions is whether a person is entitled to act on his or her beliefs when the action involves a taking of innocent human life. An affirmative answer to that question would seem to justify assassination and even mass murder. Of course, the justices did not mean to endorse such a broad proposition, so they immediately qualified the general language by saying that the right to act on such ultimate beliefs applies only to a woman who is deciding whether or not to bear a child or terminate the pregnancy. In such a case, “the destiny of the woman must be shaped to a large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society.” Thus a court influenced or intimidated by feminist ideology granted—only to one kind of person in one kind of situation —a right to act on her beliefs even at the cost of human life. Readers will readily imagine, however, that many others will think this restriction arbitrary and will wish to extend the same logic to claim a broader privilege for themselves. Is God safely buried, or should we anticipate a resurrection? The question is not whether some form of “religious belief” will continue, because it surely will, but whether God will always be excluded from the cognitive realm of knowledge and thus remain confined in the never-never land of subjective belief where Zeus, Thor and Santa Claus are to be found. If God is nothing more than a concept in the human mind and has no power to act or speak for himself, then it may seem that man created God and has the power to dispense with his own creation. The right question then is not so much whether God exists as whether the Word of God exists and whether that Word has done something that truth-seekers cannot afford to ignore. These issues are discussed in my previous book The Wedge of Truth (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2000), especially chapter seven. I expect there will be a great deal more discussion along these lines as truth-seekers take advantage of the liberal principles of the Santorum Amendment once they fully grasp the religious and philosophical dimensions of the nihilistic philosophy that has seized control of our culture in the name of science. |
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