Will allowing free discussions of scientific theories hurt innovation?

Some people are complaining that allowing students and teachers to question and debate scientific theories will harm economic growth and raise unemployment.

Evolution News explains:

One common piece of rhetoric being lobbed against academic freedom legislation is the claim that the bills would kill jobs and have a negative overall economic effect. An anti-academic freedom op-ed in The Tennessean stated that Tennessee’s academic freedom bill would have “adverse economic consequences for the state” and asked “What high-tech employer will want to open up shop in a state that allows ideology and prejudice to trump science education?”

If you actually read that op-ed, you will find that the authors make the following arguments against academic freedom:

1. scientific theories favored by the secular left should not be subject to falsification by scientific evidence
2. the only reason why some people oppose secular left ideologies like naturalism (e.g. – in the origin of life) and socialism (e.g – man-made global warming) is because of religious beliefs
3. some religious clergy accept ideologies like naturalism and socialism, so therefore everyone should have no problem with naturalistic speculations about the origin of life and doomsday predictions about catastrophic global warming – since there is no scientific reason to oppose these theories
4. scientific theories should be accepted or denied based on the pontifications of organizations like the AAAS or teacher associations, not on the basis of repeatable experiments and measurements
5. lawyers should be able to settle disputes about science using their ability to file lawsuits against school boards
6. although the new law explicitly forbids bringing religion into the classroom, it would bring religion into the classroom
7. environmental regulations, chevy volts on fire, green energy solyndra grants, cap and trade, drilling moratoriums, drilling permit delays and carbon taxes don’t hurt the economy, but allowing students and teachers to ask questions about scientific theories would hurt the economy

Now look at that last argument (#7). Is there any evidence to show that allowing academic freedom and free discussions about scientific theories and scientific evidence would hurt the economy and raise unemployment?

More from Evolution News:

In late 2010, two-and-a-half years after it passed its Science Education Act, Louisiana won the “State of the Year Award” from Business Facilities magazine, in part because of its burgeoning high-tech industry. As the magazine noted:

“The diversity and growth potential of Louisiana’s top projects in both high-tech and traditional manufacturing, as well as healthy total investments, overall job creation and innovative incentives made Louisiana a clear winner of our annual State of the Year Award,” said Business Facilities Editor-in-Chief Jack Rogers.

[...]To determine the winner, Business Facilities reviews each state’s top five projects in terms of overall investment and job creation. The magazine also evaluates the state’s execution of its economic development strategy, and the diversity and growth potential of its target industries.

“We were particularly impressed with the diversity of Louisiana’s strategy for developing high-growth sectors, including digital media, alternative energy, advanced manufacturing, and modular nuclear power plant components,” Rogers said.

The Business Facilities editor noted that Louisiana “has emerged unbowed from a series of disasters that would have brought less-determined locations to their knees — including a major hurricane, an oil spill and the national economic downturn — and charted a course for the future that positions the state to be a national leader for years to come.”

So despite a massive recession, manmade and natural disasters, and — most terrifying of all — an academic freedom law, Louisiana’s economy appears to be doing better than most all other states that don’t have academic freedom laws. It appears that in the experimental laboratory of the real world, the Darwin lobby’s claim that academic freedom bills harm the economy is resoundingly disproved.

To me, it seems intuitively true that students will be more interested in any topic where there are two sides presented fairly. No one likes to be preached at – it’s boring. I realize that some people who are lazy-brained ideologues will try to bypass a fair investigation of scientific disputes and just jump right to agreeing with their government-paid educators, but that’s not a good way of becoming educated. A better way to be educated is to consider the evidence for and against propositions, and not jump to believe whatever the people in authority say that you should believe in order to be considered “smart”. It’s better to really be smart rather than just to be told that you are smart because you agree with everyone.

Filed under: News, AAAS, Academic Freedom, Atheism, Catholic Church, Classroom, Climate Change, Darwinism, Dogma, Economy, Education, Galileo, Global Warming, Industry, Leftism, Naturalism, Religion, Science, Secularism, Socialism, Student, Teach the Controversy, Teacher, Technology, Tennessee

How should intelligent design affect education policy?

The best people to read on that question are the people from the Discovery Institute. And you can find a nice summary of their approach on the Sententia blog.

Excerpt:

I decided to gather together an easy-to-follow outline of the evolution of (how apropos) science education policy and intelligent design with a particular focus on the role of the Discovery Institute.

The New Debate over Teaching Evolution

• It’s about science, NOT religion.
• It’s about teaching MORE about evolution, not less.
• The problem isn’t that we are teaching too much about evolution rather we are not teaching enough about evolution.
• It’s about freedom of speech and academic freedom.
• Discovery Institute has “transformed the debate [over evolution] into an issue of academic freedom rather than a confrontation between biology and religion.” New York Times, August 21, 2005

Discovery Institute’s “Teach the Controversy” Approach

• Teach the scientific evidence for and against Darwin’s theory, but don’t try to mandate the study of alternatives to Darwin like intelligent design.
• This tries to not politicize intelligent design.
• This was DI’s policy before Dover, and it remains the policy after Dover.

The rest of the article explains how this approach has been applied to the education system in different states, and how the Darwinian Empire is responding.

Filed under: Commentary, Academic Freedom, Both Sides, Center for Science and Culture, Darwin-Only, Debate, Discovery Institute, Education, Evidence, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Question, Student, Teach the Controversy, Teacher

Republican lawmaker introduces bill to protect questioners of Darwinism

From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Excerpt:

An Arlington lawmaker has filed a bill aimed at protecting Texas college professors and students from discrimination because they question evolution.

The measure from Republican state Rep. Bill Zedler would block higher education institutions from discriminating against or penalizing teachers or students based on their research into intelligent design or other theories that disagree with evolution.

Zedler said he filed the bill because of cases in which colleges had been hostile to those who believe that certain features of life-forms are so complex that they must have originated from a higher power.

“We can have the academic freedom to have all kinds of ideas and philosophies but, lo and behold, even mention intelligent design and there are people that want to run you out of town on a rail,” Zedler said.

Zedler said fear of workplace discrimination is preventing evolution critics in colleges from speaking their minds.

“I do believe there are people that want to say something but … they’re afraid to because there are people around the country that have been discriminated against,” Zedler said.

Secular leftists place a great premium on getting “consensus” for whatever ideas provide maximum autonomy from moral obligations, whether the ideas are true or not. They don’t care whether the consensus is true, just that everyone agrees on it and that it produces good feelings. They just don’t handle differing points of view well… it confuses them and makes them anxious and frustrated. They are uncomfortable with concepts like being judged, or being punished. The don’t want anyone to disagree with their religion of materialism, which allows them to pursue pleasure apart from any objective moral obligations. Since the religion of materialism, which is so popular on the left, does away with morality, we have to be very careful to enshrine into the law protections for those who would dissent from this denial of objective morality. Otherwise you end up with cases like the Guillermo Gonzalez case or the Richard Sternberg case. There are no limits to what a materialist will do in order to keep up the illusion that no one is there to hold them accountable. They’ll believe anything. They’ll do anything. There isn’t anything in their materialism to stop them from committing atrocities. That’s why we need laws to contain their abuse of power.

A quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr. illustrates the point:

“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”

Until the time where those on the secular left learn to accept dissent, and allow debate, without resorting to insults and personal attacks, laws that protect dissenters will be necessary.

Filed under: News, Academic Freedom, Critical Thinking, Darwinism, Dissent, Education, Evolution, Expelled, Fascism, Intolerance, Materialism, Naturalism, Secular Humanism, Secular Leftism, Secularism, Tolerance

How do secular leftist professors feel about Christian students?

From the Alliance Defense Fund.

Excerpt:

The late American philosopher Richard Rorty (d. 2007) in describing his assessment of the role of university professor wrote:  “When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures.  Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization.”  The re-education imperative is one that he, “like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.”  Rorty explains to the “fundamentalist” parents of his students:  “we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable.”  He helpfully explains that “I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.”

The sociologist Alvin Gouldner in his book The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class set forth a number of the historical developments that were decisive in the formation of the revolutionary intellectual class.  Among the factors is the process of secularization which de-sacralizes authority and enables challenges to theological traditions.  Another factor was the extension of non-church public schooling.  The colleges and universities in particular generate “dissent, deviance, and the cultivation of an authority-subverting culture of critical discourse.”  And the school teachers at all levels conceive and fulfill their tasks as representatives of (the abstract) society as a whole (whatever that is), thus distanced from and with no allegiance or obligation to the values of the parents of their students.  A related factor is the structure of the new educational system:  “increasingly insulated from the family system,” thereby situated to serve as “an important source of values among students divergent from those of their families.”  In both form and content (which are not so neatly divisible, by the way) the state educational enterprise has been leveraged to missionary ends, further undermining parental authority and replacing its formative function.

Law Professor Samuel Levinson has with welcome candor revealed that it is not due to his sympathy for certain religious students that he prefers that public grade schools grant limited exemptions to those students with conscientious objections to portions of the curriculum.  Rather, such measures are calculated to mollify those religious students, thereby keeping them in the secularizing environment of the government school where they are likely to have their views transformed.  With just enough solicitude for such students’ interests, they may be convinced to stay put, and thus be “lured away from the views—some of them only foolish, others, alas, quite pernicious—of their parents.”

To push these [Christian] students from the public schools . . . will assure that they will in fact be educated within institutions that are, from my perspective at least, far more limited, and indeed, “totalitarian” than anything likely to be found within a decent public school.  My desire to “lure” religious parents back to the public schools thus has at least a trace of the spider’s web about it.

And there’s more than a trace of irony in his assigning “totalitarian” levels as he plots means to manipulate the worldviews of children by coaxing them to remain in institutions designed for that very purpose.  Spider’s web, indeed.

I was just having a conversation with a couple of left-wing Christians on Facebook who were telling me how Christianity was compatible with left-wing politics. They have no idea what they are talking about – they just don’t know what they are up against. They are the ones who vote for more funding for public schools, thinking they are innocuous.

One of the reasons that kept me from marrying is that I didn’t meet anyone in university who took this threat as seriously as I do. If you believe that children should be influential for the Christ, then reading that excerpt should scare you. But if babies are just for baby pictures, then it’s not really a big deal. But it’s a big deal to me.

Filed under: News, Academic Freedom, ADF, Alliance Defense Fund, Censorship, Christianity, Discrimination, Education, Fascism, Government School, Parental Authority, Parents, Public School, School, Secular, Secularism, Teacher, Totalitarianism, Union

Should adherence to intelligent design be grounds for not hiring a professor?

From Michael Egnor at Evolution News.

Excerpt:

Commenting on proposed state laws to protect scientists from discrimination, University of Chicago biology professor Jerry Coyne sums up the Darwinist approach to academic freedom:

“… I abhor discrimination against hiring simply because of someone’s religion, but adherence to ID (which, after all, claims to be a nonreligious theory) should be absolute grounds for not hiring a science professor.” (emphasis mine)

Actually, Coyne has no problem with discrimination against a scientist because of religious belief. Coyne took strong exception to NIH director Francis Collins’ public discussion of his Christian beliefs:

Collins gets away with this kind of stuff [i.e. publicly stating that science is compatible with belief in God] only because, in America, Christianity is a socially sanctioned superstition. He’s the chief government scientist, but he won’t stop conflating science and faith. He had his chance, and he blew it. He should step down.

[...]Coyne has failed to provide a shred of evidence that adherence to ID is associated in any way with bad science. How many of the scientists who have signed the Discovery Institute’s “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism” — all of whom, according to Coyne, should be unemployable in science — practice bad science in any measurable way? Where is Coyne’s objective evidence that these scientists who support ID are substandard scientists, let alone so substandard that not a single one of them should be employed in science?

Yet Coyne insists that scientists — not just evolutionary biologists but any scientists — be banned from employment merely for affirming the evidence for design in nature.

Coyne provides no evidence that adherence to ID is associated with substandard science. He makes no argument at all for discriminating against scientists who recognize design in nature. He merely asserts that such scientists (mostly scientists who don’t share his atheist metaphysics) must not be allowed to work as scientists.

For Coyne, and for his atheist comrades who exert disproportionate influence in the scientific profession, actual evidence of scientific skill or accomplishment are of less importance in hiring a scientist than whether the scientist passes the materialist/atheist litmus test. An atheist who is an utterly undistinguished biologist can gain international renown as a defender of science, whereas a superbly accomplished astrophysicist is denied employment because he has expressed doubts about the adequacy of Darwinism to explain all aspects of living things and has expressed a willngness to take ID seriously.

Jerry Coyne’s inquisition is a small part of a fervent crusade on the part of (mostly atheist) scientists to eliminate scientists who acknowledge design in nature from the scientific profession. But most of this science is paid for by taxpayers, who ultimately decide whether or not such discrimination is acceptable in science.

Coyne’s explicit metaphysical litmus test is clear evidence that we need legislation to protect academic freedom for scientists.

This is another case where the close-minded inquisitors can be promoted higher in the academy based on their ideological purity, while the really brilliant scientists are burned at the stake as heretics.

Filed under: Commentary, Academic Freedom, Bias, Darwinism, Evolution, Fascism, Global Warming, Intelligent Design, Jerry Coyne, Naturalism, Religion, Science