If you're opposed to faith schools, should you work for them?

(I've been meaning to write this post for a while. It concerns a matter of integrity and could possibly brand me a hypocrite.)

I'm not in favour of faith schools. I think they are ideologically divisive and work against integrating different cultures into society at large. Isolating children in a learning culture that explicitly excludes those of different ethnic, cultural or religious origins may reinforce a specific social heritage, but it also encourages an undesirable "them and us" attitude. A particularly illustrative example is that of Northern Ireland where sectarian strife has been inculcated into generations of schoolchildren, leading to inter-faith violence that remains difficult to eradicate.

At the same time I understand why caring parents tend to favour faith schools: the standards of behaviour and academic achievement in those schools appear in general to be higher than in non-faith schools. The perceived differential, however, is less to do with the disputable benefits of faith-based education than with faith schools' use of a form of selection; faith schools, on the pretext of a religious test of applicants (actually of their parents), are able to screen out pupils who would tend to lower their averages.

So I think there's a good case for saying that faith schools are unfairly catering for a privileged elite, and the extra feature — religious indoctrination — is just an additional undesirable add-on.

I don't believe faith schools are in general a good idea. But in my day job I deal with faith schools — specifically, voluntary aided Catholic primary (and a few secondary) schools — providing services that are paid for 90% by the state and 10% by the church. I could therefore say that if 85% of my living comes from work in faith schools, 8.5% of that living is funded by the church.

Doesn't this run counter to my ethical principles? Am I not supporting the idea of faith schools by not quitting my job and finding something else to do?

Not necessarily.

The people who benefit from my work are the pupils, and to some extent the teachers. Improving conditions and facilities for children aged 4 to 11 (or 15 in the case of secondary schools), who are unlikely to have had any say in where they go to school, is a matter of making a difference where one can. The pupils and teachers are not responsible for the system, and meanwhile children need to be educated.

The indoctrination aspect is of course a concern to me. The schools I visit display religious imagery — and there's plenty of stuff about Jesus, as one would expect from Catholic schools, but I'm pleased to report that I've never seen any creationist nonsense. I'd heard that the Catholics don't like Harry Potter, but my observations indicate otherwise. The preponderance of religious ritual in these schools, however, is worrying — in the case of primary schools this is definitely indoctrination of children too young to know what's being done to them. Visiting a Catholic primary school on the day of First Communion is a disturbing experience (and goes some way to explaining the incidence of paedophilia in the Catholic priesthood — but that's probably best left to another blog-post).

If these schools didn't exist I would hope to be providing the same services to secular state schools — it's an accident of my employment that the firm I work for has connections with the Catholic Church, whose local administrators turn to us for professional services.

Ultimately it comes down to this: I'm against faith schools because although they may be giving children a good academic education, they do a disservice by indoctrinating them with religious dogma that's incapable of objective substantiation, and they are socially divisive. If I can improve their conditions to the extent that their environment is more conducive to learning in general, I hope the children will get an even better academic education, as a result of which they'll have a better chance, as they grow older, of seeing through the religious nonsense.

Being as it were on the inside, I also get to see how one particular denomination of faith-based education operates. It's far from ideal, but I believe I can live (and work) with it.

Creationist twaddle in the Guardian

This article by Alastair Noble in the Guardian's Comment is free section was flagged at RD.net. No doubt it will be kicked to death — deservedly so — but I did find some particular dumbosities that made me wonder whether the Guardian is being deliberately provocative having it appear on their site:

As a former science teacher and schools inspector, I am disturbed that proposals for science education are based on near-complete ignorance of intelligent design. I also think the views of most British people in this matter should not be so readily set aside.

I am disturbed that a former science teacher and schools inspector should propose the teaching of non-science in a science class. "Near-complete ignorance" is pretty much the most anyone can know about intelligent design, because there's nothing there. And scientific truth is not a matter of public popularity — even if every last British citizen thought creationism was true, that would not make it so.

It is an all too common error to confuse intelligent design with religious belief. While creationism draws its conclusions primarily from religious sources, intelligent design argues from observations of the natural world. And it has a good pedigree. A universe intelligible by design principles was the conclusion of many of the great pioneers of modern science.

Intelligent design is a religious belief (and was declared so by Judge Jones in the famous Dover trial in America). If you look at the natural world and conclude that it was intelligently designed, you must take the next step and ask who designed it. Aliens? God? You choose, but you must base your choice on scientific evidence. If you have no evidence, then why are you proposing this as science? Intelligent design does not have "a good pedigree". It's true that great pioneers of modern science were creationists, but they were pre-Darwin. They were also religious, along with the majority of the population at the time.

It is easily overlooked that the origin of life, the integrated complexity of biological systems and the vast information content of DNA have not been adequately explained by purely materialistic or neo-Darwinian processes. Indeed it is hard to see how they ever will.

Actually the integrated complexity of biological systems has been largely explained by evolution and natural selection. The information content of DNA will probably be explained too. It may be hard for you to see how, Mr. Noble, but just because you can't imagine it, that's no excuse for throwing your hands in the air and proclaiming it must have been done by aliens or God. There's progress on the abiogenesis front too — I understand it's been suggested in some quarters that the production of life in the laboratory may be achieved within a few years.

In an area such as this, where we cannot observe what happened directly, a legitimate scientific approach is to make an inference to the best explanation. In the case of the huge bank of functional information embedded in biological systems, the best explanation – based on the observation everywhere else that such information only arises from intelligence – is that it too has an intelligent source.

The "observation everywhere else" is that information is created by human intelligence. That's a sample of one, from which you cannot extrapolate anything because it's statistically unsound. Much of biology that was once thought to be irreducibly complex has now been shown to have evolved, or to have plausible evolutionary pathways to its present form. There's no reason to suppose that the presence of information in DNA will not be similarly explained.

There is a tendency in school science to present the evidence for evolution as uniformly convincing and all-encompassing, failing to distinguish between what is directly observable – such as change and adaptation over time through natural selection – and the more hypothetical elements, like the descent of all living things from a common ancestor. The evidence for these various strands is not of equal strength.

The research accruing from the complete sequencing of both the human genome and the genomes of other animals makes it far more likely that all living things have a single common ancestor, now that we understand so much more about how DNA works. Evolution by random mutation and natural selection is a scientific theory that's been consistently hammered for 150 years. Every scrap of new evidence uncovered has had the potential to falsify the theory, but instead has reinforced it, to the extent that evolution can be considered as much a scientific fact as the "theory" of gravity.

If you insist that intelligent causation is to be excluded in the study of origins then you are teaching materialist philosophy, not science.

I'm at a loss to know how intelligent causation could actually be taught in a science class. What do you tell the students? What demonstrations do you devise? Let's say, for instance, you're looking at the structure of primitive, single-celled organisms and you want the students to understand how they might have come into existence. You might talk about amino acids and self-replicating molecules — or you might simply close the textbook and say, "An intelligent causative agent caused the first cells to come into existence." That's not science, that's an intellectual cop-out.

I believe current government guidance is wrong in denying intelligent design the status of science. However, it does encourage teachers to handle it "positively and educationally". That's a small step in the right direction.

"Intelligent design" is not science.

Burnee links for Saturday

BBC rejects call for non-religious speakers on Thought for the Day | Media | guardian.co.uk
Bummer. I'm not surprised though, as I seriously doubted that the BBC would budge an inch on this. Nevertheless I think they should change the name so it more accurately reflects the content. Obviously "thought" is not necessarily religious.

BBC Trust approves continuing discrimination against humanists on Thought for the Day — BHA
Told you.

BHA responds to critics: "take the time to read the adverts and think"
The media response to the "Please Don't Label Me" campaign illustrates precisely why the campaign is needed.

Hey, preacher – leave those kids alone | Ariane Sherine | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Ariane Sherine launches the latest stage in the Atheist Bus/Book/Billboard Campaign.

New Humanist — "Vote rationally with Skeptical Voter"
Should be worth checking out, if you care who represents you.

The Acts of the Apostles (of Science) - Reciprocal Space - Stephen Curry's blog on Nature Network
Ever since I first heard the story as a child, I've been on the side of "Doubting Thomas" — Stephen Curry articulates why.

On Faith Panelists Blog: Influence on equal terms - Paula Kirby
The brilliant and incisive Paula Kirby tells "secular humanist" John Denham precisely what's wrong with his "belief in faith".

How to get inner peace - DC's Improbable Science
One reason why advice should be specific.

Atheism is the new fundamentalism' by Debate - Intelligence Squared - RichardDawkins.net
I'll be there. Expect a report of some kind.

Richard Dawkins at Conway Hall (June 2009)

My own effort at recording a snippet of Richard Dawkins' opening talk at the BHA Darwin, Humanism and Science one-day conference at Conway Hall last June was less than successful, so I'm glad to see this at last posted on YouTube. (I imagine the delay might have been something to do with the book tour for The Greatest Show On Earth. Dawkins gave a similar talk at the AAI 2009 convention, but I'm embedding this one, which I actually attended.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_f3B45E4dw


(The day was opened by Richard Dawkins and closed by A. C. Grayling, and I'll be hearing them both in person again at the Wellington Squared debate in Crowthorne on Sunday.)

"News Quiz" discusses "Thought for the Day"

Friday's "News Quiz" on BBC Radio 4 had a couple of minutes on the BBC Trust's decision this week not to allow non-religious viewpoints on the Today Programme's "Thought for the Day" segment. The participants are Francis Wheen, Carrie Quinlan, Jeremy Hardy (who has a go at Richard Dawkins) and Sue Perkins, with Sandi Toksvig in the chair.

Relevant excerpt (2'46" 1.3 Mb mp3):
http://rapidshare.com/files/309794336/NewsQuiz_excerpt_BBCR4i-20091120.mp3

Podcast episode (28'06" 25.8 Mb mp3) downloadable for seven days:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/fricomedy/fricomedy_20091120-1855a.mp3

Audio stream from iPlayer for seven days:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nws6r/The_News_Quiz_Series_69_Episode_9/

For iPlayer-deprived listeners, download the relevant episode's mp3 here:
http://rapidshare.com/files/310177682/FriComedy__The_News_Quiz_20_Nov_2009.mp3

Burnee links for Monday

The Great Desecration : Pharyngula
This seminal event of the atheist blogosphere in July last year has come up for discussion again recently (it never really went away), so I decided to link to it — for some reason I didn't at the time. "Crackergate" — or the sentiment behind it — is to an extent fueling the controversy over accommodationism, and though some may consider that PZ Myers was unnecessarily provocative in his actions over the consecrated Eucharist that came into his possession, I personally feel that he judged the whole affair pretty shrewdly. If you read the blog post that accompanies the photograph depicting said desecration you can see that the entire incident serves to illustrate much that PZ espouses in his writing and speaking. Even the existence of his hate-mail (including death threats) contributes to the points he made — and continues to make.

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe
Such a simple message.

(Click the image to see the whole strip.)

When antiscience kills: dowsing edition | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine
You thought that staring at goats in order to give them heart attacks — and similar nutty stuff — was all in the past? Think again.

A Leicester skeptic visits a business making some strange claims - This is Leicestershire.co.uk
I'm sure there's a perfectly rational explanation for why two separate tests for 400 allergens came up with almost entirely different results despite using samples taken from only one person ... such as, "it doesn't work".
(Via Jack of Kent)

Off The Wall - JREF
It's disheartening to know that Derek Acorah still commands TV ratings in the UK, despite how obviously fake the various programmes are. Incidentally Derren Brown has an amusing Acorah anecdote in Tricks of the Mind.

'Casey Luskin: Let's restore civility to the debate on evolution and intelligent design ' by Casey Luskin - washintonexaminer.com - RichardDawkins.net
Luskin is being (to put it mildly) disingenuous. But my reason for linking to this is the particular comment by "NiceMrSmith". I share his frustration.

Shoddy Sewell in Sunday Times Shocker — New Humanist
Shoddy indeed, and deserving of the opprobrium this article is getting. (Here's my own opprobrium on it.)

The Meming of Life » [fuehrer221 has logged out] — Parenting Beyond Belief
Made me laugh. And think.

Confessions of a Catholic Atheist: Moral Relativism, or Why Everything Isn't OK
Moral relativism is a dirty word*, but we have to ask: relative to what?

Faith groups to be key policy advisers - Telegraph
John Denham may have his heart in the right place, but one cannot help wondering about his brain. A. C. Grayling follows up:
John Denham's misplaced 'faith group' faith | AC Grayling | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

_________
(*Yes I know; two words.)

Charles Darwin and the children of the evolution - Times Online

There's so much wrong with this article.

For a start, whatever these psychopaths are saying about following "natural selection", that's not what they're doing. They are instituting their own kind of artificial selection — trying to give what they see as Darwinism a "helping hand". This is no different from what Hitler attempted with eugenics, which was based not on "random mutation and natural selection" but on the kind of artificial selection that dog-breeders (for instance) have been doing for centuries. All this article shows is that many people don't understand what Darwin's theory says (and have probably learned what they "know" from creationists — who consistently get Darwin wrong).

Dennis Sewell, the author of this article, also seems to fall into the trap of somehow associating morality (or lack of it) with Darwin's theory. Unfortunately for morality, scientific facts are not amenable to opinion. The science is either true or false. Creationists are fond of saying that Darwin's theory leads to immorality, which, even if that were the case, has no bearing whatever on its scientific validity.

All this article shows is not that Darwin's theory has somehow been detrimental to some people's morality, but that some people are appallingly ill-informed about it. The fault lies squarely in the lap of education, and illustrates perfectly why evolution should be part of the primary school curriculum.

One last thing: citing Ann Coulter in support of your argument is, to put it mildly, ill-advised.