A recent survey by the National
Science Foundation found only 25 percent of adults could answer basic
scientific questions. Only half of those surveyed knew the Earth orbits
the sun annually.
While these results are discouraging,
what is even more disheartening is that precisely at a time when American’s
knowledge of science is lacking, the academic left is joining the right
in an all-out assault on science, further impoverishing our educational
system.
The right has always had a
tenuous relationship with science, specifically because science removed
God from His place as prime mover of nature and replaced Him with explanations
deducible by human beings.
The attempt to restore God
to His pre-Enlightenment place has been taken to its ultimate conclusion
by lawyer Phillip Johnson. Johnson attacks what he calls the principles
of “naturalism” in his book Darwin on Trial, a book
which has proven quite popular with contemporary creationists.
The results of Johnson’s rejection
of “naturalism” are fairly simple. Once upon a time, people
believed the sun rose and set because God made it do so. Along came the
scientific revolution and the cycle of the sun was explained instead by
entirely physical phenomena such as the rotation of the Earth around its
axis.
Johnson wants to put God back
into the equation and argues that by sticking to non-supernatural explanations
for all observed phenomena, scientists are ignoring God’s role in the
universe.
Of course accepting this idea
would mean the end of science as it is currently constituted, resulting
in no way to preclude the possibility of God’s intervention anywhere in
the natural world.
Do cars really start because
of the natural principles behind internal combustion engines, or do they
start because God intervenes at each stage to make cars start? In Johnson’s
world, deciding that question would be next to impossible.
In his desire to demolish
evolution, Johnson ends up demolishing all science.
What is saddening is that feminists
and postmodernists have joined this silliness with their own attack on
scientific truth.
Both postmodernists and some
feminists start from the position that to some extent the way knowledge
is categorized is socially constructed. Many postmodernists and feminists
insist on taking this claim a step further, arguing all knowledge is socially
constructed and therefore suspect.
Science thus becomes yet another
branch of knowledge to be thrown out as oppressive. Since nothing in science
is really true, it can be replaced by anything postmodernists or feminists
decide to construct in its place.
Physicist Alan Sokal demonstrated
the intellectual emptiness of this position when he submitted a parody
of a postmodernist analysis of science to Social Text, a leading
postmodernist journal, and the editors published the article.
Sokal’s paper was little more
than a string of out-of-context quotes connected by the jargon-heavy prose
popular with postmodernists.
Social Text’s editors
now claim they knew the article wasn’t very good, but decided to publish
it anyway.
The only difference between
Sokal’s article and what generally passes for postmodernist or feminist
critique of science is that Sokal freely admitted his article was a hoax
that wasn’t logically defensible.
The postmodernists and feminists
simply haven’t yet realized the nature of their endeavors in bringing
to bear this radical criticism of sciences.