 It's very, very nice to be back in Knoxville. Haven't been here in a while, so it was a real pleasure to be invited to return. Science, origins, and religion. Where we come from is a topic that's of interest to most people, and certainly cultures reflect this interest. There is the approximate question, where do my people come from? Which is a topic that takes us into family history, takes us into sometimes family legends, sometimes into mythology. Clans and tribes often ascribe their membership from figures in the deep past. And sometimes these people may have actually lived, although with unwritten languages, it's sometimes very hard to verify such claims. But those kinds of claims remain extremely important to clan or tribal members, which govern, and these claims govern rights to property, rituals, or who is eligible to marry whom. But what about the question of where do people come from? Where do human beings come from? Where do animals and plants, where does the earth, where do the stars come from? Cultures have come up with explanations for these questions as well. And they vary greatly both in detail and in source. Now in the United States, we tend to think of these kinds of origins questions to be the purview of religion, because the Middle Eastern monotheisms that are most common in our culture, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, all address the creation of the universe. And in truth, Christianity and Islam dominate world religions in terms of the number of adherents. But even if about half of the people on earth are Christian or Islamic, that leaves the other half. And there's plenty of variation and beliefs out there. It's important to note though that beyond religion, there are many sources of explanation of origins. Folklore, tradition, or even a steady state, it is this way and it always has been, have been found by ethnographers as the locus of origin stories. But what brings up the question of what do we mean by religion? And that brings up the further question of how do we know? So before I address the topic of origins or religion, we need to step back and ask some basic questions of epistemology. What are the ways of knowing? Now, when I'm talking about ways of knowing, when I say knowledge in this sense, it doesn't apply accurate knowledge, okay? Some knowledge people hold is erroneous, regardless of the source of this knowledge. Some knowledge is valid. Epistemology looks at the structure more than the content of knowledge. And I want to talk about three ways of knowing that are relevant to my topic tonight. Science, insight, or reference to personal states of being and authority. I'm gonna start with insight. Insight is defined as knowing through internal or personal states of being. It includes things like intuition, meditation. It may even include aesthetics. What is beauty, what is truth, et cetera. Now, there are many ways of generating these internal states. The Yanamamo Indians of the Brazilian rainforest take hallucinogenic snuff. They blow it into the nose through these tubes. Hurts like hell. This summons the gods of the forest who give them visions and explain about enemies or answer other questions that they might have. The vision quests of Native Americans are another very common form of knowledge through insight. There are more familiar examples in Western culture. Woodstock, for example. And there also are situations for all of us have just known the answer to something, whether we're right or wrong. We feel that we are correct and we can't attribute it to anything other than just a gut feeling. And you may be very certain of the truth or accuracy of this gut feeling, whether it turns out later or not you were correct or not. Yet, such experiences are not persuasive outside of the cultural context in which they occur. Christians who are slain in the spirit are not going to find believable the Yanamamo claim of being possessed by spirits of the forest. Neither will the Yanamamo accept the Christian view of being inhabited by God. And my gut feeling isn't necessarily your gut feeling. The subjectivity of personal states of being make this way of knowing unreliable and also limits its utility in persuading someone else of your experience. If you haven't had the feeling of being touched by God, claims of what it is like aren't likely to resonate. And there is no universal way of confirming such claims. Let's talk about authority next. Now, authority isn't necessarily negative. Parents and other adults tend to be our first authorities. Children learn to accept their proclamations. A large fat man comes down to chimney at Christmas time until he doesn't. But we accept that authority of our parents until we don't. On the other hand, there is adaptive value for young children to accept the authority of parents. Don't tease the saber tooth is very good advice when you're a little kid in the play scene. And the kids who followed the directions of their parents very likely survived longer and passed on their genes at a higher rate than those who didn't follow the advice of their parents and don't play in traffic is a very good bit of advice for today as well. We accept authority in a lot of things, I would suggest to you. I don't know much about particle physics. You could write it all on the nail of my little finger. And I will tend to accept Nobel laureate Steve Weinberg's proclamations when he talks about quarks. A little bit later on though, I'm gonna talk about, I believe there's a subtle difference in accepting this kind of authority. And I'll come back to Steve Weinberg specifically. Now, a particular kind of, very special kind of authority is something called revelation. And it's known to many religions. When knowledge comes from sources that are considered sacred. Now, the ancient Greeks accepted the authority of the Oracle of Delphi because they believe that the God Apollo revealed truth to her. Islamists believe the Quran was revealed to Muhammad. Jews and Christians believe the first books of the Bible were revealed to Moses. Catholics and Mormons believe the head of their churches, the Pope and the president respectively, receive revelations from God. Revelation requires belief in supernatural powers, whether Apollo, the ancient Norse God Thor, ancestor spirits, gods, or God. Truth is thought to be revealed from these sacred sources. The Bible is considered by many to be, at least in part, a book of revealed truth. Mystical personal states of being are often combined with revelation. Apollo's Oracle at Delphi would go into a drug induced trance to receive the revelations. So revelation has the same shortcomings as knowledge acquired from personal experience. It's culturally conditioned. And being based on subjective experience, it's impossible to verify to an outsider. Catholics don't believe the Mormon president receives revelations from God, and Mormons don't believe that God speaks to the Pope. And you have to look pretty hard to find somebody who prays to Thor these days, although that may be changing. Revelation is a way of knowing that, nonetheless, has great power with people. For example, the Krishna consciousness movement from the Bhaktivedanta Institute out in California believes that according to the Hindu evaders, the relationship of the sun and the earth and the moon are as follows. The sun is closer to the earth than is the moon. Now, most of us don't really think this is true. Most of us believe that the moon is actually closer to the earth than is the sun. But the Krishna consciousness people are very convinced that this is the proper relationship because that is what it says in the literal interpretation of the Vedas. So therefore, they believe the moon landing is a hoax. If you go to your website, you'll find in this passage, which I've blown up for you so you don't go blind, we have information from a very reliable source, the Sanskrit Vedic scriptures that the so-called astronauts never actually went to the moon. The manned moon landing actually is a colossal hoax. And in this passage, they say, why do you accept the popular version of the manned moon landing? Because you believe the authority of the scientist and the politicians who propagate that version. When we cite the Vedic scriptures, which state that the astronauts could not have gone to the moon, we're simply favoring another authority. In both cases, it's a matter of accepting an authority and believing what it says. So the Vedic scriptures are revealed truth and as such, trump all other knowledge. Their authority is absolute. There are people who feel the same way about the Bible and about the Koran. These documents are the absolute authority because they are revealed truth sources. Now, as with knowledge obtained from internal states, knowledge obtained by authority is not always easily transferred. Few people in this room, for example, accept the authority of the Vedic scriptures when it comes to the positions of components of the solar system. Yet, note the Krishnas believe that one authority is as good as another, of accepting an authority and believing what it says, they claim. So if you accept the moon landing on the basis of science, is it just a matter of ini-mini-mai-ni-mo, just accepting another authority? I suggest that when we do accept the authority of science, it's qualitatively different from accepting the revealed authority of the Vedas. I'm proposing that science is authoritative rather than authoritarian, and there's a distinction. I might choose to accept Stephen Weinberg's claims about quarks, but I don't have to accept his authority. Weinberg didn't come to his conclusion about quarks because of a dream he had or because someone revealed the nature of quarks to him. There's a nice little cartoon here, a non-sequitur, trust you read him, which suggests that extraterrestrials reveal the secret of the Higgs boson. Hey, Lars, can we talk to you about that God particle thingy? No one stopped calling it that. Oh, sorry, it's Higgs boson, don't they? Okay, so why is this a big deal? Because the power it can generate is too dangerous. And every time we've given you talking monkeys something good, you've made it into something destructive. This is gonna be another rant about the internet, right? It was supposed to make you smarter. And no, actually not the Higgs boson, but the Higgs boson, okay, but back to science now. Okay, the discovery, I know, that was really awful, wasn't it? But it was such a good pun, you know, I couldn't better. Okay, the discoveries of the Higgs boson and of Steve Weinberg with quarks followed a process which I could follow, although keep your expectations pretty minimal when it comes to the math. It would take me several years to learn the math, but I could do that, and so could you. We don't accept the authority of science, so to speak, in the same sense that we would accept the authority of revealed truth, the authority of an internal state of being or something like that. It's a process that anybody can follow to come up with the same conclusions. So let's talk a little bit about what science is, because it's rather different from the ways of knowing that we've been talking about so far. Science is a body of knowledge about the natural world, but more importantly, it's a way of knowing. I suggest to you that it's a limited way of knowing, which may come as a surprise coming from the scientists, because I think the way the public often hears about science is that they think that science is this hegemonic uberolus, science solves all your problems and so forth. Science is a limited way of knowing, and it's limited in two very important ways. Number one, it's limited to explaining the natural world. Number two, it's limited to only using natural processes in that explanation. We're not attempting to answer all questions that human beings seek to answer. We're just trying to figure out how the natural world works, the world of matter and energy, the material world, the natural world, if you will. Some may use science as a foundation for philosophy, I have, but it's clear that science itself doesn't compel any particular religious or philosophical belief, and I'll want to develop that idea a little bit more for you later on. The other limitation to science is that we can only use natural processes to explain the world, and there's a very good reason why we restrict ourselves to natural processes too. It has to do with testing. So what's the scientific method? Well, scientists and science educators often express frustration with lessons on the scientific method, as though it's some sort of a recipe. Ask a question, formulate a hypothesis, perform the experiment, no. This is seventh grade science. It's generally true, but much too simple. Science is much more like a web of factors or a web of processes than a linear procedure. Notice that in the middle of this process of science, shall we say, is testing, and that's really an important thing to remember about science. It has to do with testing your explanations, which is what makes it different from reveal truth and what makes it different from intuition. This is from the very wonderful University of California Museum of Paleontology understanding science site, if you're looking for it. Now notice I'm talking here about testing rather than experiment, and experiment is obviously a kind of test, certainly. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with experimentation, but I tend not to use that language because the connotation of experiment is something you do in a laboratory, right? And it's clear that experiments and testing is also done in the field. It's not just a laboratory kind of experience. Experiments are test of hypotheses. They aren't done in any one locus. They can be done in many settings, and because there are many ways of testing. The essence of testing and explanation is to control or hold constant certain variables. And you can do this directly in that kind of laboratory experiment where you're sitting at a bench someplace. You can often do it directly in a field kind of setting, but more often the really interesting kind of science that is being done these days, you're doing indirect kinds of tests where if I change this variable and I get this kind of a result, then I will conclude that. It's this combination of observation and inference. But in general, the sine qua non as it were of testing is that you're holding constant certain variables. You can do this through directly, you can do it observationally, you can do it statistically, you can do it in a computer simulation. There's lots of research designs that you can use to test ideas. Unfortunately, most Americans really don't understand that science is about testing. The National Science and Engineering Indicators Survey is published each two years by the National Research Council. And you all know about these surveys, even if you don't know where they come from, because periodically, every two years, the newspapers will publish the results of this showing that only 50% of Americans know that the planets go around the sun and take a year, that the earth goes around the sun and takes a year to do it. That one, that's these guys. They also ask questions of American citizens about their understanding of how science works. Science is a way of knowing. And they'll ask people in their own words to explain what science is. And most people really don't have a very clear idea at all. Most of them have to do with, explain, most of their answers have to do with, well, we accumulate a lot of information, and like as if the explanations will sort of magically emerge from that with no further effort. Only a very small percentage of Americans, only about a third of Americans, really understand that science is about testing explanations against the natural world. And coming up with a conclusion that then continues the exploration of the phenomenon. So they decided to give the citizens in our country a practical example and see if they could recognize science when they saw it. The difference between recall and recognition and testing, you all have been experiencing that. So an example of testing they used was, let's say hypothetically you have a blood pressure medicine and you wanna know if it works. You wanna know if it's efficacious. How are you gonna do it? Are you gonna give the drug to a thousand people and then measure how many have decreased blood pressure? Or are you gonna give the drug to 500 people with high blood pressure? Don't give the drug to another 500 people with high blood pressure and then see what happens. Okay, boys and girls, it's quiz time. How many of you say that the best way of testing the blood pressure medicine is the first one? Anybody wanna raise your hand? Okay, how many of you think it's the second one? How many of you aren't voting? Okay, congratulations, you did better than 46% of your fellow citizens. Only less than half of your fellow citizens, each of which has one vote. We won't get into that. Less than half of your fellow citizens really understand the essence of a scientific explanation which is holding constant variables and testing your explanation against the natural world. And yet figuring how to test a claim is one of the most challenging intellectual experiences one can have. Ask the science faculty here who find this an extremely exciting way of living a life. It's really the essence of critical thinking. Okay, here's a claim. These people belong to a dowsing society in England. They claim they can find water using a folk stick. The claim is that a mystical force operates through the stick and draws the stick down. How many of you have ever heard of dowsing? Everybody's heard of dowsing, okay. So the claim is, it's actually a two-part claim. The first part is that they can find water or valuable, some people claim they can dows for gold or minerals. There have been psychic detectives who claim that they can dows to find missing children or the body of some slain individual or whatever. So there's a lot of claims that are made about dowsing. Lost my mouse here, here we go. So, the first thing, how would you test this claim of dowsing? Well, obviously the first thing that you want to test is can they actually find water? How many of you think these people will find water? Oh, come on, if ever. How can you miss not finding water? There's no way these people are not gonna, oh yeah, my dowsing is working just fine here today. Okay, so if they find water, there may be an explanation other than a mystical force, right, so, but the first thing you want to do is test whether or not you can find water and then asking is there another explanation? Is really the essence of thinking like a scientist. Okay, if you go to the Australian skeptic site, it's a wonderful site. They've done a lot of tests on dowsers and they're really quite wonderful because they're a wonderful example of a controlled experiment. Here's an example of a test that they did with some of the Australian dowsing claims where they basically put jugs of water inside opaque bags and they scattered them around and of course, first of all, you test out. You open up a bag, you show that it has water in it and the dowser says, yep, I can find the water and you open up another bag without a bottle of water and the dowser says, nope, doesn't work. So the dowsers know that their equipment is working. Then you close everything up and then you put out the bags. You blind the experiment in that the dowsers don't know, I mean, once the experiment starts. The dowsers don't know which of these bags have water and which are empty. Actually, some of the bags are filled with sand because you don't want an inadvertent clue. If it's full of water, it's gonna be heavy and it's gonna be pressing down on the grass and the soil. So you have to think about things like this. So they've got bags of sand, bags of water. The dowsers are supposed to be able to find the bags of water. The dowsers don't know which bags have water. More importantly or as importantly, the people with the clipboards walking along with the dowsers saying, you say bag 26, okay, dowser number four says bag 26. The people doing the recording, the scientists, if you will, also don't know which bags have water. It's called double blinding. It's the sort of thing that is done in good medical research. If you look at complementary and alternative medicine, rarely done, poorly done. Double blinding is sort of the sine qua non of good scientific research. The person collecting the data can't know what the right answer is. The person taking the test, so to speak, can't know what the right answer is. And if you go and take a look at the Australian website on this thing, it's really kind of fun because what happens is the dowsers do no better than expected by chance. So the first part of that question, the first part of the claim, I can find water. You don't even have to ask the second part, is there a mystical force? Because they can't find water under controlled conditions. Now Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis, which is a very well-known creation science website, is very fond of asking the question, were you there? And he tries to get children to go to their high school science classes. And if the teacher starts talking about the age of the earth is 4.2 billion years, the age of the universe is 14.8 billion, whatever. The students are supposed to stand up and say, were you there? Now the whole point of that exercise from Ken Ham's standpoint really reflects, well, he's trying to get the kids to challenge the idea that the earth is ancient, that evolution is happening and so forth. But when you think about that little exercise, what he's really reflecting is a very poor understanding of how science works. Because what he's saying there with us, were you there campaign, is that unless you have direct observation, you can't make any scientific inferences. And in fact, it's also making the stronger claim that only direct observation, rather than inferential reasoning, is acceptable. And I'd like to present to you the hypothesis, actually it's not a hypothesis, it's pretty well demonstrated. That in fact, direct observation, isn't all it's cracked up to be. 334 to start with you. Well, the proof of it, bludgeoning to death, with a blunt estimate. I would need you here to tell me your whereabouts, and precisely the time that the start of this exercise. I would buffer in your course, it shows to those there, so. I would, why do you like to do this? And why is that? Customers, arrest. Let me just smile. Hoot, hoot, hoot, hoot, hoot, hoot, hoot, hoot, and madam, if any of the countries will tell you whether it's not possible to do this, it's been made, it's after it. It's just a matter of observation. And look, it's hard though, if you were to use it. Clearly, somebody in this room, learn adult smile, who, at the 53, 34 this afternoon, bludgeoning to death, with a blunt estimate. I would need you here to tell me your whereabouts, and precisely the time that the start of this exercise. I would buffer in your course, it shows to those there, in my view that there's a lot in there. Customers, arrest. Let me just smile. You know, it's easy, it's easy to love the British. This has to be one of the best public service announcements I've ever seen. But the reason why I show it, it has a lot of charm. But also, direct observation, isn't the sine qua non of science, okay? Direct observation, just the way, there's a lot of psychological research showing that we miss stuff. And we're focusing on one thing, we're not seeing other things. I knew a researcher who studied buffalo. And he was telling me how he was out observing buffalo and had observed buffalo for many, many weeks out in the field, and came back and talked to another buffalo specialist who said, oh, did you notice any side threats? This is side threat, what's a side threat? You know, when the big buffalo males just sort of stand sideways to the other buffaloes and they don't do anything, they just sort of, they're just kind of like leaning toward like, get out of here, buddy. No, so he went out to the field again and he saw them all over the place. Okay, now you've all been cued, okay? You all are gonna be really good observers now. You're not gonna make that same mistake, are you? Let's see if we can test your observational abilities. Oops, we'll test your observational abilities, particularly if I can get this thing to work. The monkey business solution. Count how many times the player's wearing what? Past the ball. The correct answer is 15 passes. If you spot a gorilla, for people who haven't seen or heard about it, if you've liked this before, about half of this is a gorilla. If you knew about the gorilla, you probably saw it. But did you notice the crimson changing color or the player on the black clip was in the game? Let's rewind and watch it again. There comes the gorilla and there goes the player and the curtain is changing from red to gold. Looking for a gorilla, you often miss other times. And that's the monkey business one. Learn more about this solution and the original gorilla experiment at theinvisiblecorrilla.com. Hey, enough said. That's a very fun thing to show because enough people know about the invisible gorilla by now that you're confessed. You are sitting there feeling very smug. Here comes the gorilla. I saw the gorilla, huh? How many of you noticed the curtain changing color? Come on. Not very many. Anyways, so direct observation is not necessarily the best way to do science. A lot of times, inferential explanations actually inferential explanations based upon good observations, of course. But a lot of times you can do better than with direct observation. Anyway, moving right along. All right. Now, I've talked about three ways of knowing. What about religion? Well, in my definition, religion isn't an epistemology. It is not a way of knowing. It's much broader than that. It may be a way of life. It may be an ideology that permeates an individual's consciousness and everyday activities and gives life meaning and may structure every relationship an individual has with the animate or inanimate universe. And Muslims often speak this way. It can be extraordinarily important, but it isn't in itself a way of knowing, like the other ways of knowing that I've been talking about. Actually, religion draws from all ways of knowing. It draws from authority, especially the authority of revelation. It draws from personal states of being or insight. And also, many religions are informed by science. So let's talk a little bit about religion. Anthropologists look at religion differently than most other Americans. When most Americans think of religion, they think of Christianity and usually just their own version of Christianity. More educated people might reflect upon the three great Middle Eastern model theisms, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Still, more sophisticated individuals might think of religion as Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Taoism, and so forth. But anthropologists understand religion as a phenomenon that occurs in world religions and among people who no longer exist, nobody prays to Zeus these days, and among a very large number of small groups of people who have distinct religions about which we know very little. Native Americans can be roughly divided into five different culture areas where cultural traditions are similar but not identical. Religious beliefs within a culture area also are similar but not identical. The Pueblo Indians of the Southwest, for example, exhibit many different tribes and also tribal religions. Hopi and Zuni religion belief differ in significant ways, but they're rather different from their neighbors, the Navajo, which are comparatively recent migrants to the area and which come from a completely different culture area. Although Christianity and Islam have made major inroads into Africa, there's still a great deal of the continent where tribal religions occur, sometimes incorporating elements of Christianity. In West Africa, for example, there's been a syncretism of beliefs about Catholic saints and other Christian elements and tribal spirits. Trickster spirits are conflated with Satan, for example. In Melanesia, where over 700 languages are spoken, the variety of religions is probably comparable to that of the variety of language. So religion to us anthropologists is likely much broader than it is to most Americans. Let me try to define religion and I'll confess that this is not an easy thing to do. I believe that religion is a set of rules and beliefs that if people have about a non-material universe and its inhabitants. These may include gods, ancestors, powerful spirits and other supernatural forces. And usually religion includes ideas about an afterlife, but not always. Religion often, but not always, includes rules about how people should treat one another. Ethics and morals, for example. Religion often, but not always, includes explanations of the natural world. Religious beliefs almost always include a sense of the spiritual, which is a term that's very difficult to define, but includes emotions such as awe or wonder, reverence, faith, other emotions. These feelings can also be invoked outside of religion. I feel awe every time I go down Grand Canyon on NCSE's Raftrip, and some people have feelings that can only be described as reverent about their sports teams. Contrasting, and I'm sorry about Missouri. Contrasting with religion is a philosophical position called materialism. Whereas religion, as I define it, requires a supernatural component, and materialism either denies the supernatural or considers it irrelevant. When Richard Dawkins says, quote, the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference is expressing the philosophy of materialism, sometimes called naturalism. Not an especially new view, by the way, certainly Richard didn't invent it. It can be traced in Western culture at least as far back as the Greek philosophers. I suspect, actually, if we were able to go back to the Pleistocene, we'd find some folks sitting around the campfire thinking, you know, all this stuff about the God guiding us to the hunt with a little fat Venus figure, I don't think so. But they generally kept quiet about it because they could end up on an anthill or whatever the Pleistocene equivalent of that was. And, you know, certainly there are plenty of places today where being a non-believer can get you killed. Personally, as a non-believer, I'm rather glad I'm living in the United States in the 21st century. I will have a much longer lifespan that way. So materialism is a non-supernatural philosophy. Is it the same as science? No. Science is methodologically naturalistic, not philosophically naturalistic. When we say that science uses methodological naturalism, that's the reference that I made earlier when I said science is restricted to explaining things through natural causes. And the reason why science is restricted to natural causes is because those are the only kinds we can test. If there is a God, if there is a God who intervenes in the world, how could we possibly hold constant the acts of an omnipotent force? We can't. So because we have no way of holding constant God's actions, we have to just leave God out of a scientific explanation because science is all about testing things. Therefore, because of the limitations of science, we can only explain using natural causes. If you wish to use God as an explanation of a natural phenomenon, you know, God makes the rainfall, or God makes the planet go around the sun or whatever, fine, but you can't call it science because science can only explain through natural causes. That is a restriction of science. As my friend, Bill Thwaites, a biochemist once said, we have no theometer. If we ever get a theometer, then maybe we can consider God's efforts and hold constant God, but we can't. So we just have to bumble along as best we can. And you know, we've done remarkably well by restricting ourselves to natural causes. Let me illustrate this in another way. Certainly, it's reasonable that if you are a philosophical materialist, you're also a methodological materialist because philosophical materialists don't believe in the supernatural. Of course, they explain the natural world through natural causes. Those are the only ones they believe operate in the universe. So as the diagrams show, all P's are M's. What that means is that there are many methodological materialists who are not philosophical materialists. These are the approximately one third of scientists who believe in God or a higher power. There's a lot of confusion about science, materialism, and religion. So I'd like to examine their similarities and differences a bit more. Let's talk about religion on those characteristics that I outlined that characterize these philosophies. Does religion use empirical and logical evidence? Yes. Does religion use revelation? Yes. Does religion use mystical personal states of being? Yes. What about science? Science uses logic, certainly. Science does not use revelation nor does science use mystical or personal states of being. Let's continue. What about materialism in this column? Yes, materialism uses logic. No, materialism does not use revelation. And no, materialism probably doesn't use mystical or personal states of knowing, but it's hard to say because certainly materialists may make decisions based on intuition or whatever. Let's take some other qualities. Yes, religion accepts the idea that supernatural powers intervene. They believe in a non-material world. They believe in spiritual beliefs. Science, we have to assume when we do science that supernatural powers don't intervene. Otherwise, we really couldn't do science. If God is messing around with your test tube, then you're not gonna get the right results. So you just have to sort of assume that God isn't trying to screw up your experiment. Which is not the same thing as saying that scientists don't believe in God. When you're doing science, you have to set the supernatural aside because as I was saying, the only kinds of tests you can make are those on natural processes, not supernatural processes. When it comes to belief in the non-material world, science has no opinion on that. It's irrelevant. Science is restricted to the natural world. So this is a neutral kind of phenomenon. Scientists may have an opinion on this, but science as a methodology doesn't. Spiritual beings, similarly, science doesn't have an opinion on this issue. Scientists may, but scientists don't. How about materialists? Materialism, of course, being a philosophy. They don't believe that supernatural powers intervene. They don't believe in a non-material world. They don't believe in spiritual beings. Let's take a look at some other characters. Belief in an afterlife? Yes, most religions do believe in this. Concern with ethics, morals, and religion? Yes, most religions do. By the way, not all ethical systems are religiously based. The ones we're most familiar with are, but many peoples around the world, many tribal peoples, base their ethical beliefs on tradition. Or this is the way we do it, not so much on supernatural and primatur. A sense of the awe, mystery, sacred? Yes, of course. In science, well, an afterlife, science per se has no opinion, because once you're talking about an afterlife, living after death, you're out of the realm of matter and energy. Concern with ethics, morals, no. Science as a methodology doesn't concern itself whether it's ethical for coyotes to kill sheep. Scientists can, as individual, be very concerned with morals and ethics, many of us are. But when we're doing science, the idea of morals and ethics doesn't really come into it. Now, the applications to which we might place science, those are definitely issues in which ethical and moral considerations need to apply. But is it ethical for molecules to permeate this membrane? No, it's irrelevant. It doesn't really make any sense. Sense of awe or the sacred? Again, science as a methodology doesn't have an opinion on that. How about if we drop in materialist philosophy? Belief in an afterlife? No, because materialists don't believe in the supernatural. As a philosophy, materialism is concerned with ethics, evil, morals, so forth and so on. And many materialists do feel a sense of awe or a sense of mystery, but it comes from nature rather than from supernatural causes. Now, that's a lot of stuff to process, so let me just try to combine this in a comparison. I think the end result of this is going to be that we're gonna see more similarities between materialism and religion than between science, the methodology, the way of knowing and the other two. If we look at the similarities, the yeses and the noes, okay? Between science and religion, there's one similarity. Come on, little circle, you can come up. And this is logic. Both science and religion do use logic in terms of coming up with conclusions. And both science and materialism also use logic, so we'll score a yes in each of those boxes there. Now, religion, when we're comparing religion and materialism, there comes a little circle there, we have three similarities. Both religion and materialism are concerned with logic, with ethics, with the idea of law, that's a similarity, which you might expect because religion and philosophy would be concerned about some of the same issues. Let's talk about the dissimilarities, let's talk about the noes, the ends there. We look at the dissimilarities between science and religion. The differences here is that science is not concerned with revelation, it is not concerned with mystical phenomena, but really the biggest differences here are between materialism and religion. They are the most dissimilar. And again, here the qualities are supernatural intervention, the existence of a non-material reality, the existence of spiritual beings, the existence of an afterlife. Materialism and religion, being ideologies, are more similar and more different from one another than either is to science, which is ideologically neutral in the sense that I'm using it here. So the disagreement between science and religion that some people hold is really misplaced. The difference really should be between religion and materialism. Let me try to say this in another way. Visualize a garden. We have flowers in the garden. These flowers are in competition with each other. They're in competition for water, for sunlight, for nutrients and so forth and so on. Let's say that instead of this being an actual botanical garden, this is an ideological garden. We have theistic plants, so to speak, a theistic flowers, and they're in competition with each other. Catholics with Protestants and Christians with Muslims and animists with the monotheisms and so forth and so on. There also are non-theistic views, like humanism, other types of materialism, ethical culture and so forth. And these are in competition with the theistic views. Now, religions, philosophical ideas like religions or non-theistic philosophical ideas are in competition with one another. Both theistic religions and non-theistic philosophies claim to be inspired by science, which is methodologically naturalistic, not philosophically naturalistic. Science, per se, is in the philosophy of life. Think of it as the plants being in competition with one another. The plants are not in competition with the soil. Religious views are not at war with the soil of science. Non-theistic views obviously embrace science to a greater degree, but religions are in competition with other religious views and non-theistic views, not with the soil which can nurture either. A corollary of that is that neither religion nor atheism own science, as is sometimes claimed. You sometimes hear from the more enthusiastic atheists that science belongs to them. You hear from people like the young earth creationists, science belongs to them. I would propose to you that neither of them, neither of these religious views has a lock on science if you really understand science properly. But wait, there's more. Science may be the soil, as it were, that may nourish religious views or non-religious views, but just as soil is underlain by bedrock, which nourishes the soil in various ways, so critical thinking underlies science. And obviously, critical thinking is very important to science. But critical thinking also underlies other intellectual pursuits, is relevant to many intellectual endeavors in addition to science. Art, literature, history, theology, really, all of these influence our ideologies, whether theistic or non-theistic, and all of them respond to critical thinking. All of them are dependent upon critical thinking. Human intellectual endeavors require the process of critical thinking, which involves, as it does in science, amassing information, evaluating that information, weighing it against one another in the case of science, weighing it against the natural world, and then coming up with some sort of a reasoned conclusion that is based upon that evaluation. That is really what critical thinking is all about. It happens in science, it happens in history, it happens in all human intellectual endeavors. Now the take-home is that none of these, pardon me, the take-home is that none of the ideologies own science and science does not own critical thinking. Critical thinking is really the bedrock for human intellectual endeavors. Science is a bedrock that is a soil as it were that can nurture all philosophies. Okay, I'm supposed to talk about origins and the hour's getting shorter, so let me move on. Where do we put origins in all of this? Well, I've always felt that the term origins was better used in religion than in science because origins has the connotation of something that has a single beginning, which many origin stories incorporate, the special creation in Genesis, for example. Yet in science it's very difficult to talk about origins since living things are a continuum, time is a continuum, the universe is a continuum back to the Big Bang. If we're gonna talk about origins, once we get, you know, the only thing that's really origins is the Big Bang. Everything else is a continuum from that point. Matter and energy and the interaction produce the stardust, produce the elements within the stars, the elements within the stars produce the organic molecules that eventually produce life on earth. So let's talk about evolution for a moment, evolution being the scientific way of looking at origins or at least an attempt to answer the question, where did we come from? First of all, what is evolution? I would propose to you that evolution is a general principle that cuts across all sciences. The big idea of evolution is that there has been cumulative change in the universe. The past is different from the present. Were we able to go back to the past, we would find a different universe than we find today. This contrast with, for example, Christian, Jewish, Islamic special creation in which God created the universe in essentially its present form and there's been only tiny, tiny changes since that time. The continuity of time and the cumulative changes through time, such as in this diagram, is what the big idea of evolution is all about. And therefore, astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology are all evolutionary sciences. There has been cumulative change in all of these phenomena. Now that doesn't mean that the mechanisms of astronomy and the mechanisms of biology are the same. They certainly are not. But there has been cumulative change in the cosmos, cumulative change in the planets and our planet. And with biological evolution, we're talking about the added inference that living things have common answers, that there has been this descent with modification of living things. And anthropology cultures cumulatively change through time. And so anthropology is also an evolutionary science. When we talk about biological evolution, there are three big ideas, the pattern and process of evolution and the big idea of evolution. The big idea being, of course, descent with modification, common ancestry. And this is represented in The Tree of Life as Darwin's sketch did. When we talk about the mechanisms or factors that bring about evolution, obviously natural selection is the most important, but there are many other factors that bring about evolution. We don't have time to talk about them, obviously. When we talk about the pattern of evolution, we talk about who is ancestral to whom, so to speak. What is the Tree of Life? How is it branched through time? What are the lineages that compose the Tree of Life? Pattern and process and big idea are three independent phenomena. The data and observations and inferences that Darwin used to come up with the idea of descent with modification are very different from the data and inferences that people who study natural selection or other mechanisms, for example, use to explain how evolution takes place. And those two sets of data and inference are very different from how paleontologists and paleoanthropologists or reconstructing evolutionary phylogeny go about their work. So these are actually three independent kinds of sets of ideas, which is another kind of interesting thing. Scientists are virtually unanimous that living things have common ancestors. Where research is going on and where scientists disagree is over the details of pattern and process, which, of course, is normal science. Creationists, by the way, accept natural selection and the other evolutionary mechanisms, but they reject the big idea of common ancestry and they reject the idea that there is a pattern of evolution. Now, understood in this way of the big idea of descent with modification or the even bigger way of cumulative change through the universe, evolution is an aspect of the natural world and thus suitable for science to explain. The history of the universe is the function of matter, energy, and time. It's thus a function of science. And interestingly enough, standard Christian theology views it as such. Famous geneticist Theodosius Dabzonski once back in the 1970s wrote an article titled, Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution. If you start reading where that arrow was, you'll see the quotation. This is a picture that I took of a five foot in diameter tile, a really big tile, in the floor of a new science building in a large Midwestern university. Now, each of the science faculty, the chemists, the physicists, the biologists, the geologists were all allowed to design a tile in the floor of this big new fancy science building at the university to sort of try to express what they wanted to communicate to potential students, to everybody in the world, so to speak. The biology department thought that evolution was the most important concept to communicate to the public about their field. So they chose Dabzonski's quote as the centerpiece of their tile. Anybody know where this is? It's Notre Dame. In fact, Catholic theology has been quite clear on the acceptance of evolution for decades. I often joke, and it's not really a joke, that more evolution is taught in Catholic parochial schools than in public schools. In fact, the very well-known Catholic theologian, John Hot, has been quoted as saying nothing in theology makes sense except in the light of evolution. NCSE's book Voices for Evolution contains a section devoted to statements by religious organizations making it clear that their theology accepts that God created, but that evolution was the means by which God created, a Christian view called theistic evolution. Now, clearly, there are Christian views that are not compatible with evolution. No question about it. Those who believe the Bible is literally true and especially that Christian salvation depends upon the book of Genesis, such as the Answers in Genesis poster here. Evolution is not gonna be able to be accommodated within their faith, but evolution is not inherently anti-religious because empirically, many Christians have made peace with evolution and in fact find that it enhances their faith. So considering all of this, what should we teach in schools? There's no question there are people who object to the teaching of evolution and there continues to be a struggle to get evolution taught in public schools. If you come to my talk tomorrow morning, I will be speaking more about that. Yet, evolution is a critically important scientific concept for students to understand. It's an aspect of the natural world so it's a suitable subject for science class. It should be taught as it is understood by scientists without qualifications, without, since I'm speaking in Tennessee, the strength and weaknesses of evolution. The meaning of evolution, on the other hand, is a matter for a student's religious or philosophical view. Because schools should be religiously neutral, teachers should neither promote nor denigrate religion. Schools must be religiously neutral. This is a cartoon from Answers in Genesis and the Grinch there is saying, listen kid, there's no real Adam and Eve, no forbidden fruit, no curse because of Adam's sin, which means there was no need for a savior to come to earth to save us from our sin. It is the fear of lots of conservative Christians that in addition to learning, science students are being taught to reject their faith when they learn evolution. In my experience, this kind of thing is vanishingly small at the kindergarten through 12th grade level. It's an unrealized fear since teachers, like the vast majority of Americans, are themselves religious. Now, students are much more commonly being deprived of learning evolution because of anticipated pushback from parents, administrators, or students. The Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg has written, I personally feel the teaching of modern science is corrosive of religious belief and I'm all for that. And this, of course, is the great fear of conservative Christians. This is the message that they're getting from the high school teacher. But I want you to listen to what Steve then went on to say yet further. But I don't think that that attitude of mine should control the high school curriculum. My own personal motivation is irrelevant. Science should be taught not in order to support religion and not in order to destroy religion. Science should be taught simply ignoring religion. Now, students have a right to interpret the meaning of evolution for themselves according to their own theistic or non-theistic ideologies, but schools must teach good science. And that means teaching evolution. And teaching the nature of science, which has not been nearly often enough or well enough, nor clearly enough. And if you teach the nature of science as being methodologically, rather than philosophically materialistic, you leave the door open to a conservative Christian student to learn the science, to appreciate the science, to be thrilled by the scientists as science as we all are. Without feeling that somehow the door has been slammed upon the student's ability to continue as he believed it. All right, we have more information on this and many other topics at NCSE's website, which is ncse.com, and I'd encourage you to check it. If you want a free electronic newsletter, you can go over to that news alerts button, follow the link, and you can sign up for the free newsletter. If you go to the news page, you will be taken here where you will, this is term paper material, ladies and gentlemen. You can pull down and find your state and other states, what's going on in the creationism and evolution controversy. You can sort for, especially if the thing is looking here, you can sort by year, and you can find a great deal of information about this topic. Also, I'll call your attention to our new climate change area on our website. We've included climate change as another topic. Like the frying pan wasn't hot enough, we decided to add climate change to evolution, not because we were bored, but because teachers are having trouble teaching that as well, and we would certainly welcome you becoming a member. We have a web's Facebook page, evolution.ncse. We have a YouTube's page. There's Steve Gould holding the world's best biological bumper sticker. Honk if you understand punctuated equilibria. Not many honks, but they are really first rate when you get them. And if I may ask, if you wish to become my Facebook friend, please do it at eugenie.scot, because that's actually where I update. There's a lot of other Eugenie Scott Facebook pages out there, but this is the only one I actually update. This has been great fun being able to be part of this anthropology class at the University of Kentucky. Thank you. The rest of you, I do know better. We were talking about Kentucky early. I used to teach it. Not only did I get my PhD at Missouri, and we won't talk about that this week, but I also worked for several years at Big Blue. So I'm surprised you welcomed me at all, but you have been very welcoming and very cordial, and I appreciate being here at the University of Tennessee, and I do know better. Thanks so much for inviting me. I was saying that it was one of the, theology was one of the intellectual endeavors, shall we say, that depended upon critical thinking. Religion is very, yeah, that was part of a different diagram. Religion encompasses such a huge range of ways of knowing that I didn't set it aside as a separate way of knowing it because it incorporates revelation, authority, some incorporate science as well, mysticism, and everything else. Theology as a discipline requires critical thinking. Yes, sir. The question was, how are we doing? What is the state of the teaching of evolution in secondary science? There have been an uptick of problems involved, fights over state science education standards, fights over district policies and so forth, largely as a function, quite frankly, of no child left behind, because no child left behind promoted the state science standards movement, which is very important and a very good thing. But since most of the state science education standards included the teaching of evolution because they were written by scientists and master teachers, so it's normal science. This meant that since students are gonna be tested on them, they gotta be taught. So in many parts of the country, evolution was taught for the first time once science education standards were adopted in that state that required the teaching of evolution. So this created an uproar and people who don't want their kids to learn evolution immediately attacked the science standards the next time they came up for review and this keeps us very busy. And then there's Texas. But no, it's unfortunately the nature of science education in the United States, as opposed to many other developed countries. We have a very decentralized education system. We really love our local control. There's a lot of good things about local control of education. Curriculum isn't one of them, but there's a lot of good things about local control of education. But what this means is that education is run by these elected school boards and the emphasis is on elected, which means that education is very much more politicized in the United States than it is in any place else that you can think of. When you've got politics involved, you've got elected officials looking over their shoulder to see who's voting. The noisiest members of the community often get their way, despite what might be good educational policy. So we've had lots and lots of fights over the last 20 years over the English language curriculum. We've had, oh, you think the evolution wars are fun. You should see the health education wars and sex end. Those, I'm glad I'm not in that one. I don't think I have the stomach for it. But the politicization of the process has resulted in a very erratic curriculum from state to state and sometimes even within the same state. Now, in the works is the development of the next generation science standards, NGSS. If you Google NGSS education, the National Academy of Sciences website will come up and you'll get the whole skinny on that. The National Academy of Sciences in conjunction with the National Science Teachers Association and the Geology teachers and the Biology teachers came up with a consensus document that was a blueprint or a framework for the next generation science standards which are intended to be national standards that would be adopted by the states. This framework was given to a nonprofit organization called Achieve which is in the process right now of writing the standards. There have been, well, the first draft is out, the second draft is about to be released for public commentary. There are 26 states so far that are partnering with the Academy and with Achieve to come up with a consensus document. The assumption is that these 26 states, and Tennessee is one, will then adopt these national science standards which will give us some continuity from state to state which would be so helpful because right now education is such a patchwork, not just science education but education in general. Now there have been English language arts and mathematics standards essentially developed on the national level which have been adopted by 48 states so there's gonna be some sort of continuity developed in those disciplines. Hopefully the same thing will happen with science education. And that will be a very good thing because for one thing it will make more consistency within the textbook publishing market and they won't be writing just for Texas anymore and there'll be a number of very good things. If you move from one state to another, you're gonna get roughly the same science education which is a real good thing because right now you could completely miss big chunks of science if you just moved at the wrong time because of the patchwork nature of our science education. Yes, sir. I wanna make it very, very clear. Yes, please do. You can study. Absolutely. Yeah, that's an excellent comment. You can study human behaviors, ethical and moral behaviors being one of them. You can study the predecessors of those behaviors and non-human primates and other animals. I mean, it's a fascinating field of study. I was just trying to distinguish between science as a methodology and what you do with religious concerns or philosophical concerns. And I think it is the case that philosophies, humanistic philosophies or rather non-theistic philosophies as well as religious theistic philosophies are very concerned about ethics and about the shoulds. Science is not concerned about the shoulds but I'm glad that you mentioned that because I think many people don't realize that there is a very fascinating study of the origins of these kinds of behaviors without the shoulds attached. Yes. If it's matter and energy or it's interaction, it's fair game for science. Love works. There are a lot of things that are the result of matter and energy. Emotions, that's sort of critical thinking, maybe a clearer way of looking at it is to think about if we're gonna understand human beings and all of their richness, we have to use those critical thinking processes. Science happens to be an extremely clear and crisp example of that. But it's critical thinking underlies science but it also underlies these other disciplines and it may be that some of the things that we could come up with would be more appropriate for theology, say, than for science. But still, if it's gonna be good theology, it better use critical thinking. Yes. Doesn't your forehead get really flat from doing this? Psycop, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal is a righteous group. Psycop.org, check out their website. If you're interested in testing claims of the paranormal, this is a very good place to start because this, and maybe stop, but read widely. These are scientists and they are looking at these kinds of claims. Now, what is very interesting is that people who are proponents of these various pseudoscience ideas, being able to walk through walls or ghosts, dowsing, you know, mystical forces, bigfoot, although that's, I really want that one to be, I'm a physical anthropologist. Don't you, Andy, don't you want that there to be a bigfoot? All physical anthropologists really want there to be a bigfoot, okay. But cryptozoology, we'll call it, okay. The idea that dinosaurs exist in the forests of Africa, all right, that's one of the more out there cryptozoological claims. The proponents of these ideas are all very anxious to use science to validate their views. And it's because science is such a powerful cultural component. I mean, science is really important in our culture. And we rightly, you know, rightly give it a lot of credibility. So they're out, you know, these ghostbusters type movies, they just drive me nuts. Oh, the movie is fun, but these TV shows are. They're out there with magnetism detectors. Well, why would ghosts have magnetism? I mean, yeah, they're picking up 60-cycle hums. You know, I mean, they're not picking up anything that's real. What you'll notice if you watch those shows, and this would be a great exercise for high school class, watch the show critically and see whether they're really actually testing scientifically these phenomena. Are they holding constant any variables? Are they really, you know, really testing whether there are real phenomena there? I mentioned before in passing, but I think it's a good thing to remember. One of the bedrock values of science is asking, is there another explanation? Because it's so easy to stick with the first one you come up with that sounds good. But if you're really thinking scientifically, you have to ask, is there a better explanation? This one works pretty well, but you know, come to think of it, if I really hold these variables constant or if I really kind of run this again, oh no, it didn't work after all, did it? I must be this, is there a better explanation? And you don't find any of that going on. The dowsing example I gave you, there's lots and lots of stuff about dowsing in the paranormal literature, because people really believe it. Old Uncle Fred was able to find water, every year we'd send him out there to find the where we should drill the new well. By golly, every time we'd drill the well, we found it. One of the phenomena that you run into when you're looking at these paranormal claims is you count the hits and you forget the misses. You're remembering when Uncle Fred found water. You're forgetting all the times that he blew it. And or Uncle Fred hit, it's like that picture of the British Dowsers, there was water all over the place. Well in a way, you kinda can't go wrong in many parts of the country in finding water, because there's a lot of, the water table is generally, it's an agricultural area, the water table is gonna be close enough to the surface that you're gonna find water pretty much wherever you go. And there are subconscious things that a person who's lived in that part of the country for a long time is gonna pick up. What are the landforms? And when two hills comes together, are you more likely or less likely to find water? I mean, there's all kinds of stuff that people may be queuing into subconsciously, but they really think it's the mystical power of the dowsing rod. So that's why you want to try to test these kinds of things under controlled conditions. And when you do that, they never perform any better than chance. Same thing with psychic detectives, only it's worse because that's just cold reading. Google cold reading, it's really interesting. It's a great parlor game, you can get very good at it. Yes, sir. I would disagree with you because when you say creationism is testable, what you're saying is the fact claims are testable. And you're right. If a creationist says that Grand Canyon, the sediments of Grand Canyon were laid down at a single event, that is a fact claim, we can test that. We can do science on that. They turn out to be wrong. But the fundamental principle of creationism is that God supernaturally, specially created everything in its present form. That goes even beyond a fact claim. What's interesting about creation science is that these guys actually do more actual science than the intelligent design guys do. And I'm not saying they're not doing science. I'm saying that when they do science, the fact claims they come up with are wrong. I don't think you can simplify too much, quite honestly, when you're dealing with the public. Seriously. Because the idea of, look at that example from the science and engineering indicators. Less than half of Americans realize the best way to test that blood pressure medicine. I mean, that's the sort of thing that should make everybody's jaw drop. And that is, we need to explain as simply as possible. Now I'm more than delighted to hear a quality of science that is more agreed upon than testing. I didn't say falsifiability notice. I wasn't saying that. I'm making it really, really simple. I'm open to a similarly, I chose testability because it seems to me that that is the one thing that as much as philosophers of science like to argue about demarcation. Pretty much if you really pinned their shoulders down to the mat, they'd say, yeah, it's about testing. But we may have to disagree on that. But if you can come up with another criterion like that, I want to hear from you. Well, you remember, I don't know if you recall. You haven't memorized my slides, what is it? But I did show a slide that I took from the UCMP understanding science site, which showed this very complex drawing. Testing was in the middle. But you take a look at the other little bubbles around there. And what I love about that diagram is that there's no way to get into it. I mean, it really is a feedback system and it actually does represent pretty well what scientists actually do as opposed to what philosophers, philosophers of science would like us to do or what we should do. In terms of this sort of reiterative process of backing and filling, but in a one-hour lecture talking about a lot of other things, I did focus upon testing. Yes, you know, I would be reluctant to make any sort of sweeping statements because I only know two things. I only know the evolution issue and I'm getting to know the climate change issue. We just added climate change this last spring, so I'm still kind of wet behind the ears about it. There's a whole lot more money in climate. I mean, the anti-global warming people have just Google gods of money. Now, the creationists, there's so many young earth creationist groups. There's the Discovery Institute, the Intelligent Design Group, and there's a bunch of smaller ID groups out there. They all have more money than we do. So join NCSC, it's a worthy non-profit for you to give your support to. Here's the member, right here. They all have more money than we have, but the total amount of money is not huge in the evolution and creationism issue, but it is just totally dwarfed by the budget of one of these astroturf organizations that are promoting a global warming denial. Right, let my people go. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you.