Missing Shades of Grue

An entry at Threequarksdaily re-examines explanations of religion, and in particular focuses on the work of Pascal Boyer (Religions Explained) and Paul Bloom ("Is God an Accident?").

The new approach to explaining religion that Boyer and Bloom (and Scott Atran and Justin Barrett and Deborah Kelemen and others) represent does not see religious belief as a corruption of rationality, but rather as an over-extension of some of the very mental mechanisms that underlie and make rationality possible. In other words, rather than religion having emerged to serve a social or other purpose, in this view it is seen as an evolutionary accident.

There is also a nice video interview of Boyer over at onegoodmove.org.

3quarksdaily: Monday Musing: Reexamining Religion

When your back is against the wall, just redefine science.

On Tuesday, fueled by the popular opposition to the Darwinian theory of evolution, the Kansas State Board of Education stepped into this fraught philosophical territory. In the course of revising the state's science standards to include criticism of evolution, the board promulgated a new definition of science itself.

The changes in the official state definition are subtle and lawyerly, and involve mainly the removal of two words: "natural explanations." But they are a red flag to scientists, who say the changes obliterate the distinction between the natural and the supernatural that goes back to Galileo and the foundations of science.

The old definition reads in part, "Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us." The new one calls science "a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena."

Is this something an individual school board can do? Change the meaning of "science"? Or have they merely introduced a variation of science, perhaps called "Nonnatural Science"? In Kansas, apparently, you can "discover" supernatural explanations for natural phenomena and call the discovery scientific. I'm not even sure what that means: I don't see (immediately anyway) how the language of the supernatural could serve to explain phenomena posed in naturalistic terms. The little reductionist voice inside my head says that were I to explain supernatural phenomena in terms of the natural, I would have effectively reduced the one to the other--eliminating the supernatural in favor of something natural. Does the reverse hold? They don't seem to want to go that far.

Even if we were to change what we mean by "science," I don't see how this helps ID. Standards for evidence haven't changed, and there is still no good reason to think that ID provides a better explanation for speciation (or any sort of natural change) than does modern evolutionary theory.

Fortunately, there is as of yet no reason to change the meaning of "stupid."

Philosophers Notwithstanding, Kansas School Board Redefines Science - New York Times

My naturalistic bent leaves me sympahetic. It should be pointed out, however, that opportunism would be hard to universalize and would not hold up as a social norm.

stranger fruit

Finally some good news.

Voters came down hard Tuesday on school board members who backed a statement on intelligent design being read in biology class, ousting eight Republicans and replacing them with Democrats who want the concept stripped from the science curriculum.

CNN.com - Pennsylvania voters oust school board - Nov 9, 2005

Kansas supplies even more evidence against intelligent design.

The Kansas Board of Education on Tuesday approved new science standards for the state--public schools that--over the objections of scientists in the state and nationwide--question evolution and require that students be exposed to challenges to evolution, such as "intelligent design." Scientists say that the alleged challenges are inaccurate and will hurt the education of Kansas students.

Inside Higher Ed :: Defeat for Evolution in Kansas