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The dangers of creationism
#1
The dangers of creationism
I recently studied in french class a text about creationism, an excerpt from the introduction to "Lucy and the obscurantism" by Pascal Picq ( a french paleoanthropologist). I found it very interesting, so I'd like to show it here if you're also interested. Since I haven't found any link on the internet I'll write the original text (roughly translated by myself, I also explained a few things), I apology if it's a bit long, here it is :




Without secularism, this book wouldn't exist! This first sentence announces a pamphlet, especially when it's written by an agnostic paleoanthropologist; I would be expected to hold high the arguments of the Enlightment's philosophers against religions and obscurantism. This is not the biased view I chose for this essay, even if our time is experiencing a return of religious conservatisms, of different forms of quest of meaning and of the reactions against evolutionism according to Darwin and his heirs.

The law of 1905 (the french law of separation between church and state) sanctions a century of political and ideological struggle. During the same period, the sciences grow stronger, their teachings are developed and theirs applications spread: the idea of progress is accepted by most people.

During the following century, the school of the french republic didn't manage to get free from the fundamental oppositions between the values of secularism and the values of religion; like a new religion, the school remained marked by a "combat secularism" associated with the scientific positivism. [...] (the author concludes in the skipped part that we should rethink the french secularism because nowadays it wrongly appears to some people as holding an absolut truth).

For all that, this secularism is attacked today on the most essentials grounds: the place of the Human in nature. We're experiencing a powerful rising of ways of thinking which, to better impose certain religious dogmas, are attacking the core of the knowledges that we patiently accumulated about nature, evolution, our origins, our status in the Universe.

The principle of this 'backlash', of this offensive against the modernity: not setting anymore religion against science, as two different registers, but denying to certain knowledges, to certain theories their scientific quality. It is about showing them as "interpretations" among others. The religious fundamentalism, absolutely not islamist here, perfectly plays with the ambient relativism and certain "postmodernists" fashions. From then on, if such or such scientific theory is only the reflection of the ideology, the interests, the prejudices, the position of their defenders, then, from this point of view, all the theories are equal; none is really "scientific", none can aspire to an universal validity beyond the peculiarities of their defenders. This is what the upholders of creationism have understood. The whole project of the biology (to understand every living things as a set of derivations, of combinations from simple components without using principles which transcend matter) is an aberration to the creationnists. Then they, on the one hand, have to try to persuade everyone that this projects and its theories are about ("connote of") a simple ideology, about a simple belief. But, on the other hand, they have understood the prestige that science has nowadays : from here to imagining a "creationnist science" there is not much, and they are actually doing it by founding museums which are supposed to bring the "factual" evidences of the divine creation or by doing research on the mount Ararat to find the remains of Noah's arch.

[...] (The author says that there is a real danger for the teaching of sciences and biology today). The risk that a grave confusion between the register of beliefs, ideals and the scientific register gets into the minds of our children is high, leading to an "all are equal" which could look tolerant and sympathetic but is in fact disastrous. Is the secularist period, which lead to the rising ("blooming") of the sciences, about to end ?

In any case, this danger mustn't be answered by a violent speech against religion and reminding the importance of secularism. That danger demands us to remind people why the theory of evolution is scientific and what it implies, why the creationnists and the upholders of ID can't stand what evolutionism taught us. It is very important to show how their arguments, often old, are deceptive. The debate between creation and evolution is not new, but the contemporary context gave him vigour. We must not fall into the trap of demonization and anathemas: let's try instead to understand, to demonstrate the dishonests arguments and the false debates. In fact, we could say that the only war between Darwin and the Bible is in the mind of the creationnists.

[...]

But the danger is not only in the reaction of fundamentalists against what we now know about the human being. It is also in the nature around us, in the planet we live in. How could we have a clear awareness of the risks that imply the significant recession of the biodiversity and the climate changes if we don't understand the mechanisms of evolution ? On this particular point, the convinced rationalists of the infinite progress of the Humans, "masters and owners of the nature" as Descartes said, join the believers who doesn't really care about the fate of other species or about the climate changes down there. All of them teach us one behavior: the fatalism. This is precisely what is out-dated nowadays towards certain global problems. If the knowledge of the evolution of the Human makes us modest (no, the nature has not been organized for our own sake), it also teaches us to be watchful. That's why, here again, the teaching of evolution seems crucial to me.
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