Readers of this blog will recognize my habit of juxtaposing seemingly unconnected news items, an exercise which helps disclose hidden connections between aspects of reality. On March 12, 2016, the New York Times carried a story about the election of an extremely conservative candidate to the Texas Board of Education. On March 15, 2016 Astronomy Now, a British publication, reported the award of a prestigious Humboldt Prize to a scientist who had participated in the discovery of waves resulting from the collision of two black holes.
Mary Lou Bruner, a retired kindergarten teacher from Mineola in East Texas, has been elected to the state Board of Education. Her election has caused some controversy because of her (to put it mildly) ultra-conservative views. In Facebook postings collected by the Texas Freedom Network, an advocacy group, Ms. Bruner opined that Barack Obama (whom she calls Ahab the Arab) was a male prostitute and drug addict in his youth, that Islam should be banned in this country, that the United Nations has a plan to depopulate the world. She is also described as Christian (which in these parts means Evangelical Protestant) and anti-evolution. Manny Fernandez, the Times reporter, was hanging around in a local eatery called Kitchens Hardware and Deli, a combination hardware store and diner. There were some outspoken supporters of Ms. Bruner. It is not difficult to speculate why the NYT should find this story worth publishing. In the best tradition of H.L. Mencken reporting on the 1925 “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, the story is to show again that anything south of the Mason-Dixon Line and west of the Appalachians is barbarian territory. I don’t share this view (actually there are things about Texas that I rather like), but I found the story intriguing all the same.
The Texas Board of Education controls primary and secondary education, including curriculum and textbook selection. Since Texas has a very large number of schools, its state Board has an enormous effect on the publishing industry: It is too expensive to print separate textbooks for Texas and for the rest of the country. This gives the Texas Board great power over the content of the books that pupils must buy in New Jersey or New Mexico, and thereby over the curricula that are inflicted on them. For a while it was biology teachers that had the most to worry about. A Protestant fundamentalist caucus in the Board tried hard to give so-called “creation science” equal space in textbooks with standard biology. The former was claimed to be simply an alternative body of hypotheses, not an unconstitutional teaching of Christian religion. Needless to say, there was a lot of litigation over this. Court decision after court decision ruled that “creation science” (aka “creationism”) was not science but an elaboration of religious doctrine. A centerpiece of this ideology was a rejection of evolution (1925 all over again), but beyond this, an insistence that the account of creation in the Book of Genesis is literally correct. It follows not only that the human race was created separately from the animal kingdom, but that the world is only 6,000-10,000 years old; this part of the proposed alternative narrative went under the admittedly poetic name “young earth theory”. Under pressure of the litigation, and also because even people with a high school education found “creation science” hard to swallow (are all these dinosaur skeletons put there by God as a practical joke?), the Board gave up pushing creation science. The next attempt to excommunicate Darwin was so-called “Intelligent Design”, a much more sophisticated approach. This one did not challenge evolution or the modern cosmogony. Rather, it made the argument that the order of the universe points to an intelligent mind behind it. This of course is what any Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) monotheist would say. I think that one can make a powerful philosophical argument here. The mistake made by the fundamentalists was to insist that ID was yet another scientific theory. The courts struggled a bit, but then again concluded that ID was yet another religious doctrine falsely claiming to be science. More recently the Texas Board of Education, more precisely its Christian fundamentalist caucus, has concentrated on giving headaches to teachers of American history and social studies. The project now has been to give space to more conservative narratives of the American reality (for example, teaching about both sides in the Civil War, Jefferson Davis as well as Abraham Lincoln).
This is not the only time that an American religious movement has wrapped itself in the banner of “science.” There was Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), founder of Christian Science, the cupola of whose Mother Church of Christ, Scientist, still graces the Boston skyline. L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) founded the Church of Scientology, which practices a therapy of “auditing” to remedy damage incurred in past reincarnations. As far as I know, the First Amendment rights of these two organizations are legally recognized. I think that the wish of religious movements to be recognized as “scientific” is not difficult to explain: Science has attained enormous prestige in the modern world, not because its cognitive claims are universally understood (the scientific knowledge of most people is very limited), but because the technology created on the basis of science can be used without being understood. On the whole, this technology has greatly benefited human life on earth. One can drive an automobile without understanding why the internal combustion engine works—and most people enjoy the availability of this means of transport as a benefit. (Alfred Schutz has coined the apt concept of “recipe knowledge” for this ability.) Of course having tax exemption as a religious organization is also a benefit not to be sneezed at.
The second news story I placed at the beginning of this post was a late consequence of an event that occurred some months ago. In September 2015 a large international team of scientists succeeded for the first time ever at recording the “sound” of two black holes colliding a billion light years away. At the center of the team are three American scientists: Kip Thorne from Caltech, Rainer Weiss from MIT, and Ronald Drever, originally from Caltech and now retired. The event has been hailed as having stupendous implications for our understanding of the way in which the universe works. The feat was produced at LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, a project linking two observatories in Louisiana and Washington State. The technology is awesome—and awesomely expensive. The National Science Foundation spent more than a billion dollars over forty years to develop the apparatus for what was called a Quixotic experiment; until its actual realization, no one involved was sure that it would succeed. A black hole is produced by a large star exploding into a supernova and then collapsing in on itself. What is left behind is a region of space from which nothing, including light, can escape. The dimensions are inconceivable, certainly unimaginable. The collision of two black holes produces gravitational waves fifty times greater than the energy output of all stars in the universe. (Do I have the foggiest notion of what I’m writing about here? Of course not. But I’m prepared to believe the trustworthy people who tell us that this is a breakthrough in how we understand the universe.) Perhaps the ultimate wonder of the story is this: A hundred years ago Albert Einstein predicted that such waves bending the space-time continuum (an implication of his theories) were bound to occur. He concluded this on purely theoretical grounds, without any empirical verification. Finally, the empirical verification is in. And more: The colossal cosmic event is a barely audible sound here on earth—a whisper of the universe in the big artificial ear stretched out from the Northwest to the Gulf of Mexico. As another commentator put it: With our new telescopes we can see ever deeper into the universe; now we can listen to it.
I don’t need to understand the astrophysics of the event, to get a sense of its import. This post begins with some very mundane cases of Protestant fundamentalists trying to relate their faith to religion. As far as I know, nobody in America today (not even in deepest Texas) advocates flat earth theory—although with the Bible as the only methodological criterion, the “evidence” is probably as good as that for creationism. But no reliance on scientific knowledge is needed to disprove flat earth theory: You just have to take a plane from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport going east—and return to DFW from the west! But something else occurred to me while I was writing this post: There are no more flat-earth fundamentalists. But there is a curious resemblance between the Protestant fundamentalists besieging the Texas Board of Education and the “New Atheist” fundamentalists that have been besieging us all with their mostly silly books. Both propose a very “flat” universe—enclosed in very narrow limits, without any sense of transcendence or mystery. Real science conveys both. It creates an experience of wonder. That wonder is not yet religion. But it is its antechamber.
