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Perspectives
Total Truth and the Ongoing Controversy Over the Teaching of Evolution
By Frank N. Laird
The 2005 legal decision in Dover, PA, and the elections for the Kansas State Board of Education, are only the most visible recent skirmishes in the controversy over teaching alternatives to evolution in public schools. Discussions of this controversy mix and sometimes confuse three distinct and separate, though related, processes: what teachers teach, what students learn, and what citizens believe. In a recent Pew poll (2005, pp. 1-2), 42% of Americans said they believed “that life on earth has existed in its present form since the beginning of time.” Proponents of teaching evolution often point to such data as evidence that evolution needs stronger support in the classroom to ward off anti-science trends in society. However, thinking that you can change what citizens believe by changing what teachers teach is too big a conceptual leap. While there is certainly a relationship between teaching, learning, and belief, it is by no means simple or linear. By separating those processes out we can better understand them. The study of what citizens believe is a huge social question. Scholars have compiled huge amounts of polling data on what citizens believe, though interpreting that data comes with problems, such as assuming that belief is measured by response to questions instead of processes that get citizens to reflect and deliberate on questions. But in any case we know more about what people believe that why they believe it. While formal high school education may have some influence, so will family background, religious affiliation, occupation, race, income, and a host of unquantifiable cultural beliefs and ways of sorting true from false claims, what Sheila Jasanoff has called civic epistemology (Jasanoff 2005). The second process, what students learn in biology class is a pedagogical question, one that those who study science teaching and learning are most qualified to answer. Anyone who teaches knows that there is not a simple relationship between what teachers teach and what students learn. Does discussing intelligent design (ID) lead to students learning less or more about evolution? This Perspective focuses on what teachers teach. This in fact is the nub of the evolution controversy and viewing it as an institutional question can help to clarify the issues surrounding it. Strengthening the institutions that govern what teachers teach is both politically more feasible and ethically more defensible than trying to change what citizens believe.
Why Evolution? Why do biology teachers still have to defend the teaching of evolution? Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Ever since, prominent scientists have written books explaining that there is no necessary conflict between evolution and religious belief, from Asa Gray, Darwiniana (1876) to Oliver Lodge, Evolution and Creation (1926) to Stephen Jay Gould, Rock of Ages (1999). Mainline Protestant denominations have long since made their peace with Darwin, as has most of the Roman Catholic Church. Prominent scientists and scientific organizations have published short, accessible books and articles explaining to lay audiences the strengths of evolution and the untenability of creationist claims. Generations of biologists have used evolution’s insights to create a remarkable corpus of scientific knowledge. How can it still be controversial to teach evolution in public schools? The answer comes from the rise, both in numbers and political influence, of evangelical churches at the expense of traditional Protestant denominations. But that answer just raises another question: why do evangelical Christians care so much about evolution? The answer to that second question goes beyond conflicts with a literal interpretation of Genesis, as important as that is. In evangelical eyes, evolution also casts doubt on their broader worldview and legitimates a materialist philosophy as a powerful influence over important governance institutions. Evolution explains one of the deepest mysteries of human existence in purely material terms. Evangelicals see it as the foundation of the materialist approach to science (sometimes called naturalism, the idea that the things we observe in the world can be explained in purely natural or material terms), and they fear such a materialist philosophy leaking into all human endeavors. They believe that a materialist approach is the wrong way to do science and, when spreading into law, morality, and other social institutions is the source of a wide variety of social problems. They are entirely serious when they blame almost all social ills, from crime to divorce and teen pregnancy, on evolution. Nancy Pearcey, a leading evangelical intellectual, has written extensively on the relationship between evangelical Christianity and science. Her book Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity (2004) deals with evolution as a central concern. Pearcey’s view of evolution derives from three basic premises: the philosophical nature of evangelical Christian belief, the challenge Darwinism poses to their belief, and the consequences of failing to meet that challenge. The nature of evangelical Christian belief is simple and comprehensive: “Christianity is not merely religious truth, it is total truth—truth about the whole of reality.” (17-18) Pearcey means this literally and seriously. Religion is not merely a private realm of belief. Evangelical Christian theology provides guidance that is both absolute and objectively true, she asserts, whether the topic is science or social issues. To her Christianity is a worldview, a framework that provides a coherent view of all of life, which includes empirical questions as well as moral ones. Evangelical Christian moral claims are, in this way of thinking, just as objectively true as the empirical claims and so deserving of special deference in public debate. In staking this claim for evangelical Christianity as a source of objective truth (which she states repeatedly) Pearcey insists that she is not rejecting science. In fact, she claims to be rescuing science from false beliefs. She depicts science as a process of drawing coherent and defensible inferences from empirical evidence, but with the wrinkle that a good scientist will infer divine intervention, in the form of intelligent design, if the evidence points in that direction, which she stoutly maintains that it does. Darwinian evolution, therefore, challenges more than a creation story. Darwin’s biggest transgression was challenging theistic explanations more broadly, claiming that all of the big questions that a worldview must answer (where did we come from? what is our fundamental nature?) can have purely naturalistic explanations, that human life and all that happens in it is the result of impersonal forces acting on matter. In a rhetorical maneuver that most biologists would find exasperating, she accuses the evolutionists of ignoring evidence against their theory and therefore concludes that what really drives secular biologists is not the evidence but instead their adherence to a philosophy of naturalism. She frames naturalist Darwinian evolution as a worldview instead of a science and, to her, the wrong one. Pearcey claims that naturalism has had two major effects on evangelical Christianity and the wider world. First, naturalism demotes religion from the truth about all reality to a lesser status of merely personal subjective beliefs. “If natural causes working on their own are capable of producing everything that exists, then the obvious implication is that there’s nothing left for a Creator to do. He’s out of a job. And if the existence of God no longer serves any explanatory or cognitive function, then the only function left is an emotional one: Belief in God is reduced to an escape hatch for people afraid to face modernity.” (pp. 153-4). Second, she attacks naturalism because she is convinced that it affects all modes of thinking, not just those about science, and therefore leads to a host of social ills. “If you start with impersonal forces operating by chance—in other words, naturalistic evolution—then over time (even if it takes several generations) you will end up with naturalism in moral, social, and political philosophy.” (p. 208). She claims that this process is already well along and responsible not only for such social problems as divorce and teen pregnancy but even more extreme social pathologies, such as infanticide. For evangelical intellectual elites, evolution is not some convenient or randomly chosen target for their attack; it is a central threat to their belief in a truth so total that it is the source of moral grounding for humanity. Thus, evangelical intellectual leaders such as Pearcey cannot be convinced by any of the various scientific defenses of evolution, however clearly conveyed. Remember,Pearcey claims that it is biologists who are ignoring the evidence, not the evangelicals.
Controlling Institutions The evolution versus ID debate is about more than just the science. Fundamentalist evangelicals have several reasons why they attack evolution, but they are able to do so because they are able to exert influence on institutions that govern education. Some of these institutions operate formally, with legal authority and tangible organizations, such as school boards. Other institutions are informal, such as the deference people usually give to experts in particular fields. Evangelicals have made the teaching of evolution controversial, not simply because they oppose it, but because they have sought broader influence over the formal and informal institutions that guide education. This conflict over the control of institutions is why simply debating the science, while important, is not enough. The institutions that control K-12 public education in the United States provide an arena conducive to this sort of control struggle. Public education’s formal institutional structure exhibits radical decentralization. Most of the important decisions about curriculum, staffing, funding, etc. are made by 50 state and approximately 17,000 local school boards. This long tradition of local governance of education shows great resilience, with some state authorities now battling the federal government over its assertion of authority through mandatory testing. The basis for local and state control is, of course, local and state funding, which accounts for the vast bulk of school district budgets. Local school boards in particular are susceptible to narrowly focused political pressures, including pressures from determined minorities within the school district. In most cases, citizens elect school board members. These elections often take place in mid-term (non-Presidential) or odd-numbered years. Voter turnout is highest in presidential elections, lower in mid-term elections, and lowest in odd-year elections, well below half of the potential electorate. Therefore, citizens who hold a minority view on some important issue can, if they are especially motivated, determine the composition of a school board in these low turnout elections. This structural feature of education governance shows what a severe setback the 2005 Dover school board and 2006 Kansas state board elections were for the ID advocates. Efforts to force the teaching of ID had aroused such intense opposition from pro-evolution advocates, including in the Republican party, that their structural advantage, low turnout for an elected board, vanished. However, Dover and Kansas are not the only local or state school boards debating the ID issue, and we can expect this structural advantage to aid ID advocates elsewhere. The Dover case also highlights a deep and powerful but still hotly contested informal institution, the deference school boards should give to subject-matter experts. Who gets to say what biology is? The commonsense answer to that question—biologists—demonstrates the power of the informal institution of deference to experts but also lacks institutional specificity. When we say “biologists” do we mean just the individuals who teach high school biology and have an undergraduate or perhaps a Masters degree in it? Or do we mean the particular biologists who happen to write textbooks? Or do we mean biologists self-selected and organized formally such as the National Association of Biology Teachers? Or do we mean biologists who are formally organized but much more elite-selected, such as those convened by the National Academy of Sciences? Advocates of evolution have the advantage that all nationally organized groups of biologists agree about the basic importance and tenets of evolution. Nonetheless, the institutional ambiguity of deference to experts aids those school boards who may wish to pursue a non-mainstream course, since they have no legal requirement to consult any of these particular people or formal organizations about curriculum and can instead turn to individuals who write biology textbooks more to their liking, a tactic that the pro-ID school board in Dover attempted. The biology teachers in the Dover district resisted that attempt and were aided by the informal institution of deference to expertise, i.e. their own expertise as biology teachers (Kitzmiler et al., 2005). But that deference was no guarantee that the teachers would succeed. As for the larger institutions of science itself, public deference to them has decreased dramatically in the last 50 years as measured by polling and electoral data, along with deference to all major political and social institutions (Laird, 1989). Local and state control of education is even more pronounced in deciding what parts of biology, or any other subject, are appropriate for K-12 education, and those judgments change over time. I went to school at a time when the biology of human sexuality was reasonably well understood, but I heard little about it anywhere in the curriculum. School authorities thought that it just was not appropriate for public schools to get deeply into such topics, a matter that is still hotly debated in some places. There are lots of things to teach in any subject area and a very limited time to teach them. Local and state educational authorities will influence what and how much of any topic gets included in the curriculum, and the informal institutional norm of deference to expertise may have little influence over such decisions. Therefore, debates over biology curriculum are not just arguments over who has the best science. They are also debates over the control of formal and informal institutions of governance. If the advocates of ID win those debates, it won’t matter much who has the best science.
Competition for Cultural Authority The conflicts over the informal institution of deference to experts reflects a larger competition over cultural authority. Scientific expertise garners some deference precisely because it has substantial cultural authority. No one in this debate wants to say they are against science. Young earth creationists call their field “creation science.” ID advocates insist they are all for science, just one that is freed from its naturalist or materialist dogma (Pearcey 2004). At least at the rhetorical level, everyone is greatly deferential to science expressed as an abstract ideal. That rhetorical deference undergirds substantive deference to subject-matter experts, which is a problem for ID advocates and one they seek to overcome by challenging that cultural authority. Pearcey writes (2004, 18-19) about the need for evangelical Christians to make more progress in changing the culture. She claims that evangelical Christians’ goals will continue to be frustrated unless they can make more progress in changing the broader culture, including changes in “their families, churches, schools, neighborhoods, workplaces, professional organizations, and civic institutions.” (19) The famous Wedge Document, a manifesto developed by the pro-ID advocates, reiterates that goal, seeking the cultural authority that would be signified by a few university biology departments becoming friendly to ID. What is at stake here is who has a cultural warrant to make authoritative claims about the natural world. The events in Kansas and Dover show that mainstream scientific institutions still have that cultural authority. The judge in the Dover case rejected claims to scientific legitimacy from the ID advocates, noting repeatedly, for example, that they did not have a body of work published in peer-reviewed journals. He also flatly rejected their efforts to redefine the nature of science by including divine intervention (Kitzmiller et al. 2005). By insisting that science had to be a purely material enterprise, Judge Jones rejected the larger goals ID advocates have in attacking evolution. He said that he had no opinion on the metaphysical merits of the beliefs that underlie ID, just that they did not constitute a science. The voters in Dover may not have studied the issue in the same depth as the judge, but they came to similar conclusions. It was local parents who sued the school board over the issue, as well as local voters who threw the ID advocates off the school board in the 2005 election. In Kansas, pro-evolution Republicans mounted their successful election bids by explicitly calling for science to be free from religious influences (Blumenthal 2006; Davey and Blumenthal 2006). These successes might suggest that the scientific community should just keep on doing what it has been doing, only maybe more so. Keep writing those books, articles, and op-ed pieces. Keep appearing on television and radio, and encourage shows like Nova to keep showing the scientific perspective. Any successful advertising campaign requires repetition. Scientists have been winning the competition for cultural authority, so they should keep doing what works. And so they should. But defenders of evolution should recognize that such work may not be enough. However significant the Kansas and Dover cases were, they are not the only place in which this battle is being waged. The issue will come up again and again because it is so important to evangelicals and because there are so many fronts—17,000 of them—on which to wage the battle. Related issues, such as the controversy over stem cell research, will not go away either. The scientific community and science policy analysts need to think more broadly about how they confront such issues. The evolution issue enjoys a sort of purity: at stake is the definition of biology, not any particular application of it. As such, it is an issue for which it is still relatively easy to get significant, though not universal, political support. But such deference to science is limited, especially when disruptive applications of science come onto the public agenda. There has long been an ambivalent, complicated, and sometimes highly conflicted relationship between scientific institutions, government institutions, and the public at large. There is no simple formula for resolving those conflicts, but science policy analysts and the scientific community need to confront them squarely. That effort includes analyses familiar to readers of this newsletter. We might ask ourselves: why aren’t evangelicals won over by the cultural authority of science? It is by now both a ritual and cliché for scientists to proclaim that a new field of science and technology is going to revolutionize all of society. That rhetoric, so appealing to scientists, may terrorize some citizens more than entice them. Is it any wonder that a large part of the population, facing so many sources of fear and insecurity in their lives, recoil from such a prospect and seek refuge in the solidity promised by absolute, eternal, and total truth? The point here is that science policy makers and scientists need to take seriously their rhetoric about producing science for the public good by analyzing in a serious way the diverse social outcomes of their efforts—including the destabilization of socially binding elements of culture. They thus need to broaden their concept of social outcomes beyond risk and financial return. Do some groups systematically win and others lose depending on what sorts of science society supports? Mightn’t some citizens reasonably care as much about the implications of scientific research for their identities and cultures as they do about the economic advantages that new R&D may bestow? A scientific community that takes these questions seriously has a better chance of having the moral foundation it needs to hold onto its cultural authority, be treated respectfully by governing institutions, and resist the claims of those who would govern by dogma.
Frank N. Laird is an Associate Professor with the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver specializing in science policy, energy policy, environmental policy, technology and politics.
The views expressed here are those of the author.
References Blumenthal, Ralph. “Evolution’s Backers in Kansas Start Counterattack,” New York Times (August 1, 2006).
Davey, Monica and Ralph Blumenthal. “ Evolution Fight Shifts Direction in Kansas Vote,” New York Times (August 3, 2006).
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1999. Rocks of ages : science and religion in the fullness of life. New York : Ballantine Books.
Gray, Asa. Darwiniana: Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism. Ed. and with an introduction by A. Hunter Dupree. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963 [1876].
Jasanoff, Sheila. Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Kitzmiller, Tammy et al. v. Dover Area School District et al., 400 F. Supp. 2d 707; 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 33647, December 20, 2005, (M.D. Pa).
Laird, Frank. “The Decline of Deference: The Political Context of Risk Communication,” Risk Analysis 9 (December 1989): 543-550.
Lodge, Oliver. Evolution and Creation. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1926.
Pearcey, Nancy R. 2004. Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity, foreword by Phillip E. Johnson. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books.
Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. 2005. “Public Divided on Origins of Life: Religion and Strength and Weakness for Both Parties,” August 30. Available from www.people-press.org.
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