Lessons about Gatekeeping

Gatekeepers Matrix

What lessons can we draw from our discussion of four alleged examples of pseudoscience, and over a dozen failed demarcation criteria? There are two sorts of lessons, negative and positive. I'll say first what we have and what we have not established about Scientific Creationism.

With Kitcher's help, it has been shown that evolutionary theory is a much better theory than Scientific Creationism; it has characteristics that any good explanation ought to have, and Scientific Creationism seems to have very little of any of those characteristics. Scientific Creationism is pretty clearly an awful theory, with little of the justifying evidence, predictive success, or explanatory power of evolutionary theory.

By itself, this does not show that evolutionary theory is true and Scientific Creationism false. Scientific Creationists sometimes write as if those views were the only two possible explanations of the relevant phenomena, but we should not join them in their mistake. Although it may be hard to think of a plausible explanation besides evolutionary theory, we haven't proved that evolutionary theory is correct just by showing that it is better.

Nor have we shown that evolutionary theory and religion are incompatible. In fact, we haven't said anything even to suggest that Christianity, in all its forms, is incompatible with evolutionary theory. All we have done is to show that some of the Biblical interpretations of some members of a minority religious group are deficient as scientific explanations of some biological phenomena. Scientific Creationism is just one of many ways of expressing a religious viewpoint and values – not the only way. Sympathy with such viewpoints and values should not mislead us into endorsing a view as if it were the only way. Rejecting Scientific Creationism does not mean that nothing that it says is right or worth preserving. It may be possible to preserve parts of the view without buying all of it. Nor does a sense of fairness require that any and every view should be taught in science courses.

Should Scientific Creationism be taught in public school science courses? We haven't settled that question either.

The First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution says in part, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ...." This has been interpreted as placing some restrictions on public school curricula. But we haven't studied the relevant court cases. The language itself rings a bit odd in late twentieth-century ears. The authors of the Constitution did not waste words, so they surely had very good reasons for writing the amendment exactly as they did. Why did they write of an "establishment"? The word's not purely decorative. And their use of "respecting" is somewhat unusual. We know what it is to respect a person (if that's anything like the intended usage), but what does it mean to respect an establishment? And then there the $64,000 question: What is a religion?

EEOC Backs 'Cold Fusion' Devotee By Curt Suplee Washington Post Wednesday, August 23, 2000 ; A23 Belief in radically unconventional scientific notions, such as "cold fusion" or cryptic messages from extraterrestrials, may merit the same workplace protections as freedom of religion, according to a ruling by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in a job-discrimination case. The July 7 EEOC decision came in response to a complaint by maverick Alexandria astronomer and erstwhile patent examiner Paul A. LaViolette, who was fired in April 1999 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. LaViolette, 52, claimed the action was taken because he believes in the validity of a highly controversial energy-generation idea called "cold fusion," along with other unorthodox matters, and protested the decision to the PTO. His Web site, www.etheric.com, details his "proof" of the existence of alien radio communication, his theory that the zodiac is a "time capsule message" warning of emanations from the galactic center and his views on the Sphinx, the Tarot and Atlantis, along with his considerable accomplishments in mainstream science. The PTO's parent agency, the Commerce Department, evaluated LaViolette's complaint, and on Sept. 13, 1999, dismissed his case. The agency concluded that even if he had suffered reprisal for his cold-fusion beliefs, those beliefs did not fall within the protective purview of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That statute prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. LaViolette then appealed the ruling to the EEOC, arguing that "discrimination against a person on account of his beliefs is the essence of discrimination on the basis of religion." "I don't want to explain everything" while the complaint is still under consideration, LaViolette said in an interview. "But there is a connection between my scientific beliefs and my very deep religious feelings." "A lot of people normally associate religious belief with doctrinaire belief, something unchanging. Mine are based on observation and subject to change based on new findings. My views do evolve, and that is still compatible with this being deeply religious or sacred," he said. Title VII defines religion to include "all aspects of religious observance and practice, as well as belief." The EEOC looked at the relevant criteria for protected religious beliefs as explicated by the Supreme Court and found two main considerations: "whether the belief professed by a complainant is sincerely held and whether it is, in his own scheme of things, religious." In addition, the commission's reviewers considered EEOC guidelines, which note that "the fact that no religious group espouses such beliefs . . . will not determine whether the belief is a religious belief of the employee." Faced with those flexible standards, the EEOC decided the Commerce Department had improperly dismissed LaViolette's complaint. However, "we did not make a determination as to whether those two criteria [for valid religious belief] are fulfilled" in LaViolette's case, said Carlton Hadden, director of the EEOC's Office of Federal Operations. "Nor did we determine whether the complainant's claims of religious violation are true." Basically, "we just sat down and said the agency had improperly dismissed that claim, and put it back in the ballpark of the Department of Commerce." Under EEOC rules, Commerce has 150 days after the decision to complete its investigation. If Commerce concludes, after gathering more information, that his claim is still invalid, then it can dismiss the complaint again. And if LaViolette is not satisfied, he can request a hearing before an EEOC administrative judge, who would rule on the complaint. A PTO spokeswoman said the agency would not comment on the pending matter. LaViolette is the director and president of the Starburst Foundation, a nonprofit that funds his research, and the author of four books, most recently "The Talk of the Galaxy: An ET Message for Us?" All are published by Starlane Publications, which he founded. He joined the PTO following an Internet appeal by patent examiner Thomas Valone, who in 1998 called for "all able-bodied free energy technologists" to "infiltrate" the agency, according to published reports. Valone's activities caught the attention of University of Maryland physics professor Robert Park, who directs the Washington office of the American Physical Society. Park, author of a new book, "Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud," is a severe critic of many "new energy" notions, and has publicized the Valone-LaViolette story extensively. LaViolette feels such actions have prejudiced the PTO. "I'm trying to bring to light this issue through my case. People should not be thrown out just because they have ideas that are not agreed to by Robert Park or the American Physical Society," LaViolette said. "The ideas that are going to change the world are those that we maybe don't have answers for right now."

© 2000 The Washington Post Company

Suppose, however, that we could figure out exactly what the authors meant. We'd still face another major question in constitutional law: Are we now bound by the originally intended meanings, or is the Constitution better thought of re-interpretable in changed social circumstances? Since we've not addressed any of these jurisprudential questions, we've not settled many issues relevant to deciding whether Scientific Creationism can legally be taught in public school science courses. (The U. S. Supreme Court has not entirely settled this either, in no small part because it can get things wrong and can change its institutional mind. There are some respected constitutional scholars who believe that although the Arkansas and Louisiana "Creation Science" laws were flawed, it is feasible to draft such laws that will pass muster.)

Constitutional and other legal questions aside, there are questions about educational psychology that need to be addressed. A main purpose of teaching theories in elementary and secondary schools is to instruct students about what in general makes for a good explanation. It might be that teaching Scientific Creationism would serve a useful purpose in science courses: it could provide an example of what never to do. Making an example of it in this way – a bad example – might help students to do better, and to appreciate the richness of evolutionary theory. Scientific Creationists would not view that as a victory, but this is not about pleasing them. On the other hand, teaching Scientific Creationism and evolutionary theory in tandem might overload students, resulting in a diminished appreciation of the latter theory's virtues, and that would be a disaster. My hunch is that which of these two possibilities obtains will depend on features of the teachers and the students in a particular class, and that it'd be a rather complicated matter to sort out the two sorts of situations. But I'd hate for the future of US science education to depend on my hunch. I'd much rather someone did the necessary empirical research so that we can improve our children's science education.

Lessons about Demarcating Science from Pseudoscience

It would have been very nice if we could have had a nice, clear, clean, simple criterion for separating the good stuff from the bad. We have looked at over a dozen such criteria, and they're all rotten, either because they misrepresent science or because they misrepresent the view being assessed, or both. Two things are clear from our examination of Scientific Creationism and other views: (i) the difference between science and pseudoscience is a difference in degree not a sharp difference in kind; and (ii) there is simply no substitute for careful and detailed scrutiny of a theory when its scientific status is in question; sometimes, we must even spend some of our scarce resources on experimental evaluation of the theory. Things are even more complicated when it's not a theory, but a branch of inquiry whose status is in question. Astrology, phrenology, Scientific Creationism, and Chinese acupuncture are theories; unlike them, parapsychology, UFOlogy, sexology, and Chaos theory are not theories, but branches of inquiry defined by the questions that they pose. To show that any of the latter are pseudoscientific, we would have to demonstrate that the questions themselves are not worth asking (or, perhaps, that they have no hope of being answered), and that's generally very difficult to do.

This does not mean that there are no standards in science, that there is no difference between truth and falsehood, between correct and incorrect, between good reasons and bad, etc. There are such standards, and many of them are quite familiar. It is a main job of courses in inductive logic and deductive logic to evaluate and systematize just such standards.

But – and this is the most important lesson of our investigation so far – science has no corner on the market in high standards. This is such an important, and often ignored, point that I want to restate it in a different way, to reinforce understanding.

There are two independent uses of the word "science" that often get confused in debates on  these matters: one is the "list" use: we give a list of areas that we think of as clear examples of science, e.g., physics, chemistry and biology, and the applied sciences based on them; the other is an "approval" use: "science" means whatever accords with the highest cognitive standards. It is important to keep in mind that these are two different uses. Failure to do so has two bad consequences: (a) we may think that what's on the list always meets those standards, and so be led to overvalue it; (b) we may think that only the things on the list meet those high standards. Both (a) and (b) are false, but (b) is the most pernicious. It leads some to think that if it's not physics, etc., then it's garbage. No wonder some religious groups feel threatened. But they should not buy into the errors of their opponents. There is no reason why literary analysis, history, philosophy, and religion – to give just a few examples – cannot be "scientific" in the approval sense.

Why is this error so common? While I have no deep explanation of this complex psychological and social phenomenon, I'll offer one observation. When we are anxious to draw sharp lines and to find clear differences between two things, we often exaggerate the differences, just to help us get started (and to hit opponents over the head). One way of exaggerating differences is to compare the worst examples of one kind of thing with the best examples of the other. In this case, depending on their initial biases, participants in the debate compare the best science to the worst religion, or the worst science to the best religion. If, for example, one compares the best science to the worst religion, one will be struck by the lack of systematic, empirical investigation in the latter. The picture is different if one compares the worst science to the best religion or the best religion to the best science. Even a stalwart atheist who is utterly devoid of religious sentiment must credit the highly systematic, exquisitely careful collection and evaluation of religious experience that is characteristic of religion at its best. And where else would one seek the essence (if any) of religion than in religion at its best? Whatever the cognitive or rhetorical utility of exaggeration, we cannot allow its distortions to deprive us of the truth.

Some of the most vocal opponents of Scientific Creationism are themselves clergy and other deeply religious people. They realize the latter point. They also fear that by setting Scientific Creationism up as a direct competitor to evolutionary theory, religion opens itself up to challenges that it should not have to face. Because, despite the recognition that there are cognitive standards in religion as well, many believe that religion and science are so different that there is really no possibility of any serious conflict between them. We'll need to take a close look at that widely held belief in the second part of the course, when we address the question, What is the difference between science and religion? For now, let us summarize what we have learned so far by quoting an old Shaker saying, "God dwells in the details."

Additional Sources

2000 David F. Austin

Go to next part on Science and Religion: Separation by Cognitive Standards