Blowing Way Past the Point

Do I doubt that Salon's Cary Tennis is a friendly, helpful, courteous, kind, shirt-of-your-back sorta-kinda sonofagun? No. But I sometimes wonder why he's paid to give people advice. This letter in Salon struck me. It's from a guy who wants to know how to cope with his disgust at his friend's openness to teaching young earth creationism in a science class (at a Christian school, presumably). Here's a snip of Tennis's response:

As I walked around Stern Grove in San Francisco this morning, I thought of my own early exposure to the science of single-cell organisms, atomic theory and geology. I was given a solid foundation in how the earth was formed, how elements are structured and how life processes occur. What I cherish most about that early exposure to science is that it gave me a coherent story of creation. It started with simple things and proceeded in an orderly and gradual way toward the more complex, revealing, in the end, literally everything under the sun.

What I loved about science was the story it told. It provided a creation myth.

I do not mean to say that science rests on belief, that it is not factual. What I mean to say is that our attachment to science, and our deep need for what it gives us, can cause us to act unscientifically in its defense.

So what would a true scientist do when confronted with this situation? Let's say a true scientist is visiting us from another planet, trying to observe and record significant phenomena so he can better understand what is going on in the universe.

Would a true scientist experience revulsion and nausea at the scenes of our culture that you describe? Would a true scientist observe the teaching of mythology to children and label it child abuse? Would a true scientist refuse friendship with another person because that person engaged in the teaching of these strange and wondrous mythologies to children?

If a true scientist came upon a pre-modern culture living right in Manhattan, would he be revolted and nauseated? Would he claim that in transmitting its mythology to its children this pre-modern culture was committing child abuse?

Why is it that colorful beliefs and mythologies are fascinating in other cultures, but considered pernicious in our own?

To answer Tennis's question, yes I think a scientist from another planet, Mr. Spock, let us say, would be appalled if a science teacher used his class to teach mythology as if it were science. He would come away mystified about why a species that had spent centuries accumulating evidence and testing theories against it to determine how life developed on this planet, and how this planet developed in this universe would decide to toss all of that over the side and teach an ancient fable as if it were confirmed theory. He'd then recommend that we be kept out of the Galactic Federation until we matured as a society (or blew ourselves up, or proved an impediment to the construction of a hyperspace bypass).

I have no objection to teaching the Bible in a literature course, or a course on religion, or even (with some caveats) a course on history or western thought. Only recently, I had to crack open The Book of Revelations to give a student some context for understanding Yeats's "The Second Coming". I was careful to explain that I wasn't proselytizing--when my student asked me about my religion, I told him I was an atheist. I went on to explain that, whether he chose to believe in some, all, or none of the Bible's stories, a working knowledge of them is essential to understanding much of western literature.

But a science class is not the place for the Bible. The Bible has no science content. The Genesis story is a poem about the creation of the world. It's built on metaphor and fantasy, not data or observation. Teaching Genesis in a science class will leave students unable to understand what the scientific method is or how it works. The same goes for every other creation myth humanity has told itself. And it's not an issue of preferring more exotic cultures to North American fundamentalist ones, as Tennis charges. Mr. Spock and I would be just as appalled if someone proposed to teach the Bakuba creation myth, which holds that a god named Mbombo vomited up the universe during a series of bouts of indigestion, as if it were science. I dearly love Ovid's account of the formation of the world in The Metamorphoses, but if a rich eccentric seriously proposed digging for evidence of the Age of Gold and the Age of Brass, I'd back slowly away from him while suggesting he get the counseling he so desperately needs.

It's a dangerous thing to confuse myth and science, or myth and history. And we don't even have to look a humanity's major disasters (World Wars, inquisitions, genocides, witch burnings) to see that. The Bush administration is evidence enough of the perils of willful delusion. Encouraging children to substitute fables for realities is an insult both to fable and reality. It is a form of abuse, and while, if I were the letter writer, I'd try to couch my objections delicately, I'd certainly make it clear that teaching lies to schoolchildren could cost the teacher at least one friend.