{"id":1422,"date":"2016-01-10T19:57:09","date_gmt":"2016-01-11T00:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1422"},"modified":"2016-01-10T19:57:48","modified_gmt":"2016-01-11T00:57:48","slug":"1422","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2016\/01\/1422.html","title":{"rendered":"In Defense of a Separation of State and Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest writer Myron Pauli, a Ph.D. in physics, argues for the need for a separation of State and Science.\u00a0 As always, Dr. Pauli offers much\u00a0food for thought.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Most of us understand the concept of separation of church and state (government). But few understand how that can carry over into separation of education and state or science and state. Government determination of \u201ctruth\u201d often winds up backfiring on both government and truth.<\/p>\n

Government had been pushing various enlightened concepts such as compulsory \u201cuniversal\u201d education since the mid-19th<\/sup> Century. State laws known as \u201cBlaine amendments\u201d ensured that taxpayer funds would not go to Catholic schools but only to \u201cuniversal\u201d (e.g. racially segregated Protestant-controlled) schools. By 1919, populism, feminism, and progressivism had advanced to better mankind (at government gunpoint) via Prohibition. When progressive Woodrow Wilson tilted us into the Great War, local governments undertook to ban teaching foreign language (Meyer v. Nebraska (1924)) and sectarian schools (Pierce vs. Society of Sisters (1925)).<\/p>\n

Another progressive concept to uplift mankind in the early 20th<\/sup> Century was eugenics, pioneered by Charles Darwin\u2019s half-cousin, Sir Francis Galton. Eugenics was enthusiastically endorsed by Margaret Sanger and the American Birth Control League and distinguished American eugenecist Dr. Charles Davenport. Like all \u201cpolitical issues\u201d, some tried to suppress this movement with legislation while others tried to enforce this with legislation. In 1924, Virginia passed two \u201cenlightened\u201d laws: the Sterilization Act and the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. Dr. Davenport, for example, founded the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations<\/a>\u00a0in 1925 which had a \u201ccommission on bastardization and miscegenation\u201d to campaign against racial mixing and advised Nazi Germany. The Sterilization Act was endorsed by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927) in a decision by progressive hero Oliver Wendell Holmes (\u201cthree generations of imbeciles are enough\u201d) with only one dissent (the \u201creactionary Catholic\u201d Pierce Butler).<\/p>\n

Davenport\u2019s science was incorporated into the standard textbook \u201cA Civic Biology\u201d which ranked the races: Ethiopian-negro ; Malay-brown ; America Indian ; Mongolian-yellow ; and \u201cfinally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians\u201d. Some did not like the modern eugenics including Catholics and the World Christian Fundamentals Association. The latter pushed through a law banning teaching of evolution in the Tennessee Public Schools although the official Tennessee biology textbook was none other than \u201cA Civic Biology\u201d! (thus teachers were ordered to violate the law!). A test case was set up with John Scopes as the teacher whose name became infamous and later led to such works as \u201cInherit the Wind\u201d.<\/p>\n

The popular view is that the ignorant Protestants were suppressing free speech although I would gladly wager that any public school teacher reading the white supremacy part of \u201cA Civic Biology\u201d in 2015 would be terminated permanently within 24 hours. Ironically, H. L. Mencken, a defender of evolution, wrote that the \u201canti-evolution law, whatever its unwisdom, was at least constitutional – – that policing school teachers was certainly not putting down free speech.\u201d Mencken, of course, stood FOR evolution but endorsed the right to of parents to keep their children \u201cignorant\u201d. What happens in both the \u201cInherit the Wind\u201d drama and in the actual court case is that Scopes loses but the fundamentalists make fools of themselves. Science, education, and politics all blended into one giant mess.<\/p>\n

In 1930, the ever-skeptical Mencken, reviewing a book by cosmologist Sir James Jeans, wrote \u201cI believe that fully four-firths of what cocksure physicists tell us about the nature of electrons will be laughed at on some near tomorrow\u2026\u201d. Ironically, the agnostic Jeans\u2019 \u201cSteady State\u201d cosmology later lost out to Catholic priest George LeMaitre\u2019s \u201cBig Bang\u201d cosmology as data accumulated.\u00a0\u00a0 Science eventually sorts itself out without \u201cofficial\u201d help.<\/p>\n

In the movie and the actual case, the \u201cbigoted\u201d William Jennings Bryan is not allowed to give his \u201cfinal speech\u201d and soon drops dead. In spite of my own belief in species mutation and evolution, I find this part of the \u201cignorant\u201d Bryan\u2019s 1925 speech to be quite prescient, especially in light of Hiroshima: \u201cIn war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before. Man used to be content to slaughter his fellowmen on a single plain – the earth’s surface. Science has taught him to go down into the water and shoot up from below and to go up into the clouds and shoot down from above, thus making the battlefield three times as bloody as it was before. But science does not teach brotherly love. Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelty of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Perhaps science and \u201ceducation\u201d should employ more skepticism and humility and less reliance on political endorsements and dogmatic certainty.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest writer Myron Pauli, a Ph.D. in physics, argues for the need for a separation of State and Science.\u00a0 As always, Dr. Pauli offers much\u00a0food for thought. Most of us understand the concept of separation of church and state (government). But few understand how that can carry over into separation of education and state or…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nIn Defense of a Separation of State and Science<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2016\/01\/1422.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"In Defense of a Separation of State and Science\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Guest writer Myron Pauli, a Ph.D. in physics, argues for the need for a separation of State and Science.\u00a0 As always, Dr. Pauli offers much\u00a0food for thought. 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