The Age of (Un)reason?

There I was, wondering slightly whether my earlier post today about Ann Coulter and evolution was perhaps...not so timely. Maybe even a bit out of date. After all, her book's been out for a while.

Sadly, though, this issue remains evergreen...and far from one limited to the USA.

As reported in the Guardian yesterday, a surprisingly large number of UK university students say they believe in creationism or intelligent design.

From the article:

In a survey last month, more than 12% questioned preferred creationism - the idea God created us within the past 10,000 years - to any other explanation of how we got here. Another 19% favoured the theory of intelligent design - that some features of living things are due to a supernatural being such as God. This means more than 30% believe our origins have more to do with God than with Darwin - evolution theory rang true for only 56%.

Opinionpanel Research's survey of more than 1,000 students found a third of those who said they were Muslims and more than a quarter of those who said they were Christians supported creationism. Nearly a third of Christians and 10% of those with no particular religion favoured intelligent design. Women were more likely to choose spiritual explanations: less than half chose evolution, with 14% preferring creationism and 22% intelligent design.

Also surprising, it seems that 'religious studies is now the biggest growth subject in schools'.

At the same time, we learn that subjects such as physics and chemistry are facing seriously dropping, and even 'plummeting', enrollments. Coincidence?

Perhaps not. Could this in fact be part of a broader cultural turning away from rational thought and evidence-based thinking?

Thinking along these lines, (also yesterday and reacting to the same survey) A. C. Grayling had some good - if unsettling - commentary on the decline in intellectual rigor and the decaying emphasis on reason in British education. He sees a growth in appeals to 'faith' to justify opinions not only about spiritual matters, but also beliefs about the real world. This is disturbing:

"With faith anything goes": here is why the claim that the resurgence of non-rational superstitious belief is a danger to the world. Fundamentalism in all the major religions (and some are fundamentalist by nature) can be and too often is politically infantilising, and in its typical radicalised forms provides utter certainty of being in the right, immunises against tolerance and pluralism, justifies the most atrocious behaviour to the apostate and the infidel, is blind to the appeals of justice let alone mercy or reason, and is intrinsically fascistic and monolithic. One does not have to look very far to find shining examples of this pretty picture in today's world, whether in the Middle East [or] the Bible belt of the United States. The rest of the world is caught between these two appalling instances of basically the same phenomenon, so it is perhaps no surprise, though no less regrettable, that the infection should spread from both directions.

More regrettable still, though, is the fact that the civilised quarters of the world are not taking seriously the connection between the world's current problems and failure to uphold intellectual rigour in education, and not demanding that religious belief be a private and personal matter for indulgence only in the home, accepting it in the public sphere only on an equal footing with other interest groups such as trades unions and voluntary organisations such as the Rotary Club.

[...]

As part of the strategy for countering the pernicious effects that faith and dogma can produce, we need to return religious commitment to the private sphere, stop the folly of promoting superstitions and religious segregation in education, demand that standards of intellectual rigour be upheld at all educational levels, and find major ways of reversing the current trend of falling enrolment in science courses.

Some very sensible proposals.

But, sadly, unlikely to come true any time soon.

The alternative, Grayling suggests, is grim: 'a return to the Dark Ages, the tips of whose shadows are coldly falling upon us even now.'

Goodnight. Sleep well, people.