The science classroom is a place in which many people attempt to maintain a strict separation of church and science. However, we should be equally vigilant in ensuring that it is also a place in which there is strict enforcement of the separation of atheism and science.
There are many scientists who cannot seem to divorce their atheistic worldview activism from their understanding and teaching of science. This is particularly so in the softer sciences, some of which are saturated with personal interpretation of evidence (see the very many examples in Scientific Cenobites). Thus, many atheistic worldview activists use science as a facade, as a backdoor way by which to smuggle atheism into the classroom. Generally speaking, atheism tends to use, abuse and misuse science in making fallacious claims that science leads to absolute materialism (see my essay Omni-Science).
In this essay I will present some examples of worldview activism in the guise of science: one is a blatant attempt to draw a logical conclusion to atheism from Darwinian evolution and the other a very poor argument against design and for retrofitting. These examples will not come from individuals merely expressing opinions, not from generic books popularizing science but from textbooks, with the exception of a reference to Charles Darwin’s writings. Neither am I considering instances when pure atheistic propaganda was foisted upon unsuspecting elementary public school children in the form of, for example, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series.
The first example comes from Joseph Levine and Kenneth Miller, Biology: Discovering Life (2nd edition, Heath & Co., 1994, p. 161). This is the same Kenneth Miller, by the way, who in 1994, apparently, could not find any information about embryology that was more recent than Ernst Haeckel’s 1866 drawings. Could 128 years worth of scientific progress really go unnoticed?
Levine and Miller wrote:
Darwin knew that accepting his theory required believing in philosophical materialism, the conviction that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomenon are its by-products. In Darwin’s world we are not helpless prisoners of a static world order, but, rather, masters of our own fate. And from a strictly scientific point of view rejecting biological evolution.
Clearly the implications are that if you accepting his theory then you must, logically, become an strong atheist. How could any intelligent person not do so considering that rejecting it is no different from rejecting other well evidenced natural phenomenon.
Important to keep in mind that Darwinism was and still is a mixture of observation and speculation (or observation and interpretation, personal worldview opinions, etc.). For instance the last paragraph of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, makes the following reference in “Recapitulation and Conclusion”:
…an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner.
This is an observation that any naturalist, biologist, scientist or common observer can make. He continues by stating that these,
have all been produced by laws acting around us.
Again, fairly obvious to the observer, although hinting at a worldview philosophy.
Finally he states,
There is grandeur in this view of life.
This is no longer science but a personal opinion regarding emotions and aesthetics. Indeed, aesthetics play a big part in science.
It is another matter altogether that he continues by stating:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Moreover, if it is true that spiritual phenomena are by-products of materialism it follows that materialism produces false beliefs and thus we cannot know if materialism itself is true.
The next textbook to which I refer is Neil Campbell and Jane Reece, Biology (6th edition, San Francisco, CA: Perarson Education, Inc., 2002, pp. 438-439):
Surely, the best way to construct the infrastructure of a bats wing is not also the best way to build a whales flipper. Such anatomical peculiarities make no sense if the structures are uniquely engineered and unrelated. A more likely explanation is that all mammals [descend] from a common ancestor.The historical constraints of this retrofitting are evident in anatomical imperfections. For example, the human knee joint and spine were derived from ancestral structures that supported four-legged mammals.
Almost none of us will reach old age without experiencing knee or back problems. If these structures had first taken form specifically to support our bipedal posture, we would expect them to be less subject to injury.
This argument, and its tone, are not worthy of a textbook that sells for hundreds of dollars nor of the class in which it is taught that costs thousands of dollars spent by someone who wants to learn biology and not have an atheistic worldview snuck in through the backdoor.
There are a few points to make in this regard:
Notice the pushy tone implied in the terms surely, and the affirmative terms make no sense and more likely. Keep in mind, this is not an anonymous posting on the internet, this is you and your (or you parents) hard earned money sitting before a brilliant professor with a captive audience. Instantly, you understand that to disagree would be foolhardy and nonsensical, it would be to negate the more likely explanation and would surely threaten your grade.
References to the concepts of creation or design are implied in the terms construct, build and engineered. The reason that this is so clearly a very poor argument is that according to it I should file a lawsuit against the company that claims to have designed/engineered my car since they obviously did not design/engineer my car.
Why do I think that they did not do so? Because the fact is that even the best designed/engineered car will suffer from accidents as well as wear and tear. Since my car not only requires regular maintenance but is becoming un-drivable it must not have been designed/engineered but evolved from a three, two or one wheeled vehicle which in turn evolved from smooth rounded river rocks.
Incidentally, note that Campbell and Reece define “evolution” in their glossary as, “All the changes that have transformed life on Earth from its earliest beginnings to the diversity that characterizes it today.” Indeed, who would disagree with that?
The next example comes from the textbook Evolutionary Biology by Douglas Futuyma,
By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.
This is philosophy or theology at most, and bad philosophy or theology at that and certain has no place in a textbook on biology.
These are a mere tiny example of atheism being smuggled into textbooks and classrooms are supposed to offer education in science, in biology and not in the history of ideas, philosophy, theology and certainly not militant atheistic activism.
We seem to have well mimicked something noted in the editorial section of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (Can Med Assoc J., 1961 May 27; 84(21): 1205–1206):
Dr. Wulf Grobin…has lately drawn to our attention a particularly intriguing article published in a recent issue of Socetskoe Zdravookhranenie, a Soviet journal of public health, under the rather startling title, “Scientific Atheistic Propaganda in Medical Schools”. Two years ago, according to T. Ya. Tkachev, the author of this report (Sovet. Zdravookhr., 1: 46, 1961), the Ministry of Higher Education of the U .S.S.R. recommended that a course on the basis of scientific atheism be instituted in Soviet medical schools. It was proposed that this course should consist of a total of 24 hours’ instruction covering the following subjects: Marxist Atheism as the Highest Form of Atheism…The Form and Methods of Scientific-Atheistic Education…
the Soviet intelligentsia is exhorted to work toward the “atheistic education” of the laboring masses, as one of its “highest duties”. The author describes at length the methods employed in his medical school to indoctrinate students with the concepts of atheism. Every medical discipline from anatomy to psychiatry…
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