[A note from Big Ugly Jim: I was approached a while back by someone who wanted to know if we would be interested in some guest posts by the people she worked with. I'm always up for a guest post, and I agreed. This is the first, from Cindy Laurenti. When I read the piece, I felt it would be an interesting post to have a discussion about, because I am very much in opposition to what Cindy wrote. She and I discussed, and I have written a response to this. As ever, I love to have people provide their own thoughts on the topic in the comments.]

Although scientific rationality is certainly a feature of most curricula in higher education, for many scientists and academics who frequently find the most basic scientific principles under attack from elementary school to master’s degree programs, it often doesn’t seem like enough. Furthermore, attacks on the basic tenet of empiricism come from a wide variety of people and interest groups, not (as many think) only from religious fundamentalists.

For many in the Baby Boomer generation that grew up in the wake of World War II and lived through the Cold War, the view of human progress as a straightforward march toward perfection that began in the Enlightenment began to diminish. For this generation, which currently occupies the vast majority of professorships in major universities, the atomic bomb that was held over their heads for decades ready to destroy the world was something science had created.

It was also in this generation that many groups previously discriminated against gained more civil rights, such as African-Americans and the disabled. Unfortunately, many scientists in the past held views we would now consider prejudiced, though usually no more so than others of their time. Many anti-evolutionists will, for example, cite Darwin’s speculation that Africans and and Australian aborigines are closer to apes than Europeans as a way of discrediting his entire theory.

There was also the Eugenics movement that prevailed in the first half of the 20th century. Though usually associated with Nazi Germany, in North Carolina over 7,600 people, most of them poor African-Americans, were deemed unfit to reproduce and forcibly sterilized. For many academics, this and similar programs tied science and oppressive authority inextricably together.

In the broader educational spectrum, scientific rationality is indeed often mistrusted by religious people who view it as an assault on their belief systems, particularly because of the theory of evolution. While research shows a majority of members of most major churches in the US accept evolution in some form, they are often far less vocal than those who oppose it.

In many cases the situation is also exacerbated by strongly atheist scientists who feel, like fundamentalists, that there can be no middle ground between belief in God and acceptance of natural selection. For many science teachers in public schools, teaching evolution is simply impractical if they have to spend untold hours fighting objecting parents over the matter, and thus they skip the chapter on it in their textbooks without comment.

In higher education and throughout the educational spectrum, the most effective way for academics to encourage scientific rationality is to present it as a useful means of gathering accurate information, rather than as a superior way of understanding the universe. Even if scientists believe science is the best epistemology, the best way of knowing things, by presenting it as simply a sort of rule of thumb they can help defuse much of the potential opposition from those with different epistemologies by adopting this standpoint. Even those who believe intuition is the best way to understand the world will at least realize that their cell phones weren’t built using intuition, and will then be able to take the first step toward recognizing the value of scientific rationality.

Cyndi