Steven Novella (photo) is a skeptic and a neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine. He publishes a podcast called Skeptics Guide to the Universe. In the April 30th edition he discusses the proposed Florida Laws on "Academic Freedom" with Bob Novella, Evan Bernstein, and Jay Novella [Skepticast #145].About one quarter of the way into the podcast they turn their attention to the issue of educating creationists at university. They discuss my views on the subject as described in Do Fundamentalist Christians Actively Resist Learning?. Here's what I said ...
Keeping all these cautions in mind, it is still quite remarkable that some significant percentage of fundamentalist Protestants can go to college and still reject the basic scientific fact that humans evolved. Note that in all of the other groups the college educated subset are more inclined to accept evolution. (Do most of those "college" educated fundamentalists go to some cheap reproduction of a college run by a religious organization?)I stand by this statement.
As we've seen time and time again on the blogs (and elsewhere), the Christian fundamentalists have erected very strong barriers against learning. It really doesn't matter how much they are exposed to rational thinking and basic scientific evidence. They still refuse to listen.
This is one of the reasons why I would flunk them if they took biology and still rejected the core scientific principles. It's not good enough to just be able to mouth the "acceptable" version of the truth that the Professor wants. You actually have to open your mind to the possibility that science is correct and get an education. That's what university is all about.
Of course, we all recognize the problem here. How do you distinguish between a good Christian who is lying for Jesus and one who has actually come to understand science? It seems really unfair to flunk the honest students who admit that they still reject science and pass the dishonest ones who hide their true beliefs.
Let's take a simple example. Imagine that you are teaching a course in history and you assign readings about the holocaust. On the exam you ask students to describe the history of Nazi occupied areas of Europe from 1940-1945. Imagine that a student describes all of the historical facts that you have taught in class but then rejects them by denying that the holocaust ever happened. The student claims that belief in the holocaust goes against the student's religious convictions. Should the student be given a passing grade in order to avoid discriminating against religious beliefs?
What if you are a Professor of Medicine at Yale University? Imagine teaching a course on basic neurology and the treatment of, say, Parkinson's disease. What would you do about Scientology students who can recite correctly all of the data on effective drug treatment but then reject it all because it conflicts with their religion? Should they still get an M.D. degree? Is evidence based medicine a requirement or can it be sacrificed when it conflicts with sincerely held beliefs? Imagine that you are teaching a geology class and as part of the exam you ask students to give the age of the Earth and explain the evidence supporting that age. Let's say a student describes the radiometic data correctly but then goes on to reject the 4.5 billion year old Earth because it conflicts with the Bible. This student insists that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old in spite of the scientific evidence. Should that student get a passing grade on the exam on the grounds that flunking them would be religious discrimination?
I'm sure you can make up similar scenarios involving the common ancestry of humans and other apes.
Here's the question. We flunk students who cannot demonstrate that they understand the material and the scientific facts. Should we make an exception for those students who claim that their ignorance is part of their religion?
Listen to the debate between Steven Novella and his friends. Part of the problem is their concept of what "understanding" the material really means. They think that as long as you can correctly regurgitate the words of the textbook then you have demonstrated understanding. That should be sufficient to pass the course. Do you agree with them?
{Hat Tip: BigHeathenMike]
15 comments :
Students who claim that the facts support a conclusion that the facts do not support should not pass. In recent semesters I've been changing the way I teach my course on the Bible. Although there is a benefit to allowing students to draw their own conclusions and work through the issues themselves, they also need to learn that the evidence may at times be compatible with more than one conclusion, but there are in almost every case conclusions that are simply incompatible with the evidence. To claim in a science class, or in answer to a question about history, that one can bypass the evidence "by faith", merely shows the student doesn't understand how biology, or history, or whatever academic method of study works.
In short, they may be able to lie and pass, but if so then that doesn't say much for their allegedly superior values. But that just goes to show that it is not academic inquiry that is antithetical to honesty, it is fundamentalism.
Larry,
When you talk about the students' beliefs, are you talking about what they express on tests, or what they express in extra-curricular arenas?
It sounds like you're saying that if you suspect that students are just mouthing the correct answers but that they don't really believe, then you will flunk them. The SGU was saying that if you give the right answers then you should pass, no matter what your "real" beliefs are.
I'm going to side with the view that students should be evaluated by the work they do in class and not on anything they might say outside. If they are a YEC but are still able to give the scientifically accurate answers on a geology or biology test, then they have demonstrated that they understand the evidence and deserve the grade.
If their minds are disciplined enough to take in the evidence, digest it, and regurgitate it along with all the other students and yet still not accept it, what can we do about it? We have no way of testing what's truly going on in their minds and would be effectively punishing private, free speech. Science would become a genuine dogma, where dissenting beliefs are expelled, literally.
I don't like that world.
If, instead, you're saying that the students are giving answers on their tests which honestly say that they reject the science, then yes, flunk them.
"Should the student be given a passing grade in order to avoid discriminating against religious beliefs?"
No. And no one in the SGU or anywhere else that has criticized you has ever implied that we should.
I get the feeling that you two are talking past each other. I (and it seems Novella too) read your post and conclude you want to police private beliefs. I thought they were clear. Now you're shifting that to saying students shouldn't be given religious exemptions for their pseudoscientific answers which isn't what anyone has been saying.
If you think that students can hold bizarre religious or denialist beliefs but pass as long as they give the right answers on tests, then I think you should say that clearer. If you think they should be passed or failed based on their beliefs and not on their test answers, you should say that clearer. I really don't understand what your position is.
I find this question difficult to resolve. I don't think that one can fail a student for what they think (science shouldn't provide its own form of 'thought police'), but rather from what they do. The test for whether or not they understand the material should be by their application of said material.
For example, if a student performs a mutagenesis experiment, and claims either in verbal or written evaluation that 'god did it', they may be failed for their lack of understanding and proper application of the scientific method. However, whether or not they believe that 'god did it', if they apply all the proper methods of science to their report, should not be used against them.
Many university educated people hold all kinds of beliefs that are incongruent with different fields. For example, many of us science bloggers are of 'democratic socialist' bent. However, some economics majors I know scoff at some of our beliefs, based on analysis of evidence in their field. I wouldn't like to be told that I unilaterally don't understand economics (and thus have no credibility in economics based discussions) just because I disagree with this-or-that minimum wage policy.
It's a difficult question, and I'm not perfectly certain of my own opinion. However, I see alternatives (e.g., thought police) as more frightening.
Education is far more than a quantitative assessment of test scores as is science far more than mere facts.
As a a teacher, you SHOULD be bale to evaluate if the student has a GENUINE undesrstanding and capacity to apply evolutionary knowledge.
If you are not capable of this the blame is on YOU to make evolutionary understanding truly relevant to your questions (I suspect this is the REAL problem).
For isntace, I would interrogate student on the capacities of tree-thinking and darwing crrect evolutionary inferences. I would evaluate which of them can guess data that is yet unknown to them, but that they should be able to predict on the basis of phylogenetic inference.
Suppose you do. Yo may indeed have a student that really understands everything, but simply chooses to BELIEVE otherwise. Imagine this: you can have a student that can perfectly understand that a person will sink in water, but chooses to believe that jesus walked on water. Does he deserve to flunk physics?
What we CANNOT do is reject someone who has shown that he UNDERSTANDS, on the grounds of his BELIEFS.
Tyro says,
If you think that students can hold bizarre religious or denialist beliefs but pass as long as they give the right answers on tests, then I think you should say that clearer. If you think they should be passed or failed based on their beliefs and not on their test answers, you should say that clearer. I really don't understand what your position is.
If students tell the truth on the test abut what they actually believe and that belief runs counter to accepted scientific facts, then the students is at risk of failing. Let's think of denying the holocaust as an example.
If they lie, the risk is greatly diminished. They can pretend to accept the evidence for the holocaust while secretly believing that it's a myth. If they are good at lying, we will never know.
This is horribly unfair and that's why I mentioned this point in my original posting. Honest students risk failure and dishonest students aren't penalized.
I think then that you and I and the SGU are in agreement, we just misinterpreted some of your writing. Thank you for the elaboration.
I won't lose sleep over any unfairness in failing Creationists who are stupid/ignorant/resistant enough to attend a science class and still stick to their religious answers. If they really thought they could pass despite ignoring the content of their chosen class, then a few F's will be a much-needed wakeup call. If they can give the science-based answers on tests and still reject it in private, they're only harming themselves.
No. The teacher is to blame for making a test where no true understanding is required (for instance, that is a mere exercize of memorization).
This CAN be challenging but is completely necessary. A historian MUST make sure that his students UNDERSTAND why a historical fact such as the holocaust is considered to be true; what is the standard of the evidence, and why the holocaust meets it (while fictional accounts don't).
If the teacher himself does not know how to do this, as I said, it's clearly the TEACHERS problem. What kind of history teacher would that be? A very bad one, since he can't tell if any of his data are true or not.
I think lots of teachers have this problem with evolution, for the simple reason that they do not really know that much evolution (even if they know it's the scientific thing to believe it)
Sanders says,
No. The teacher is to blame for making a test where no true understanding is required (for instance, that is a mere exercize of memorization).
Nobody disagrees with you. It's pretty easy to make up such a test.
What do you do if a student lies?
If the test is good, he is going to have to UNDERSTAND to be able to provide the right answer. A wonderful capacity for lying won't be enough if you don't understand. And understanding is all what the teacher is concerned with. He cannot, and should not, evaluate BELIEF.
As in the jesus miracle example above, it actually is possible that a student understands the physics of sinking and floating objects, yet truly believes that
was not the case with jesus. Does this make him a "liar"? Nope. You can wilfully choose to pee against the wind; in case of the miracles that is pretty much it.
I think our duty is to evaluate that they understand WHY questioning these facts is not compatible with science, as clear as we can understnd why jesus walkig on water is not what we'd expect to happen. Thta is, all you can do is that they exactly understand what is it that they would be wiping their asses with if they decide to simply not believe.
"It's pretty easy to make up such a test"
Not so if you think all it requires to trick you is a conscious effort to lie. That would be a silly question, a question of belief, not of understanding. "Did humans evolve from another species?" is, actually, a question that even if truthfully answered in the positive does not tell us that the person understands why this is the scientific choice.
Any creationist would immediately know how to lie himself out of that question. But if on the contrary I ask this question:
Which of the following is false
A) Humans are primates
B) Humans descend from primates
C) Humans do not descend from primates but share a common ancestor with them
D) Humans share a common ancestor with Pongids (orangutans)
Do you think it is easy for a creationist to "lie" himself out of that one?
Students should be required to answer science questions in the context of methodological materialism regardless if the students have confidence in methodological materialism. And they should fail if they cannot correctly answer the questions in the context of methodological materialism.
If a student can not only remember the various facts, but understand concepts, then the chances of them rejecting them is unlikely. This is all that you need to do. If they can somehow do this and remain creationists, they're welcome. But they will be in the minority.
Larry - Thanks for taking the time to respond to our podcast. I think the discussion here has been great. I also think we are closer in our positions than it may seem.
I think the key is that we should be testing understanding and not belief. Understanding is more than regurgitating facts - I think it would be really hard for someone who rejects the fact of evolution to adequately describe the lines of evidence that show common descent or natural selection.
But it is not impossible - because people can and do compartmentalize their knowledge and beliefs. Within the "compartment" of methodological materialism students should be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the material. If this conflicts with other "compartments" derived from their religious beliefs - that is not something a teacher should concern themselves with.
This does not mean that there is a religious exemption for giving pseudoscientific answers - we agree on this point. Students cannot use their religious beliefs as an excuse for wrong answers. There is a very practical and "operational" line we can draw here.
The doctor analogy is not apt because medicine is an applied science. What matters is what doctors do. If they practice substandard medicine (for whatever reason) it doesn't matter that they can recite what they should have done according to the standard of care.
Along these lines - we did say during the show that if you were hiring someone for a job that involved the application of evolutionary principles - then it is reasonable to assess them on their belief to the extent that it would affect their practice.
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