Daytona Community

5 February 2008

To the Florida Board of Education

Dear Board Members:

I urge you to adopt the new standards for teaching science in Florida schools. Here I shall outline a framework for a decision on a part of that issue that I suspect is a bit different from others recently under your attention.

I am a retired professor of philosophy. The question of standards for branches of knowledge of any sort is external to those branches, but lies within the branch of philosophy known as epistemology, or theory of knowledge.

Knowledge is conventionally thought to be the holding in mind, as belief, of propositions--statements--that are true. Hence, to consider standards of knowledge, we need to consider what truth is.

There is afloat in the recent discussions about evolution an informal notion of truth as "the way things really are," suggesting that all you have to do to have truth is to match up the words of your propositions correctly to that which is not words, and you'll have truth--knowledge worth teaching.

Each side in these discussions speaks as though this ideal is functioning for it, whether reached or not. But I believe that the proponents of the two sides, though they accept the above concept of knowledge, are actually using different definitions of truth, without saying so and perhaps without being aware of it.

In extended discussion, the pro-science speakers find themselves saying, "But you don't understand what science is. You don't know why we always talk about theories and hypotheses, not final truths. We don't claim final truth. You don't realize what we mean by a theory. All theories are subject to correction, and to teach a theory is simply to teach the best available set of beliefs."

Their opponents find themselves saying, "You're just agreeing with us. You're saying you don't have truth. And if you don't have truth, you shouldn't be teaching it as if you did. We on the other hand have truth, and we want opportunity to spread it, alongside the opportunity you have in your science classes to spread your (unbelievable) theory."

This latter group speaks of the truths of religion. They appear to regard truth as a body of propositions that exemplify the kind of belief for which mankind yearns. Yet their discourse contains no test whether these beliefs are in some additional sense true. It makes only the appeal to authority. But the appeal to authority doesn't supply criteria for belief. It merely shifts that responsibility to somebody who came earlier.

Science accepts the deliverances of the eyes, nose, ears and touch, the physical senses. It gathers and organizes these, using multiple observers to create an intersubjective and rationally consistent structure. Though it acknowledges that sometimes the senses deceive us, it asserts that on the whole they deliver a workable and ever-improving conception of the way things really are.

On the other side, in place of a test, what is offered is faith. (Remember the Judy Garland song, "Wishing will make it so"?) One of the most acute minds of the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas, addressed this question. In his Summa Theologica, he reviewed five well-known proofs for the existence of God. He found that none was conclusive. What he did about it was to praise faith as a virtue, and exhort prospective believers to believe in God on faith, without any evidence, or even in the face of contradictory evidence. This was the value judgment that at bottom the opponents of teaching evolution are acting upon. This, obviously, is simply not science, creational or otherwise. Its time is the Sabbath, and its place is the place of worship.

Thus the fundamental question underlying endorsement of new, stricter standards for teaching science, without dilution, is the question whether the basic mechanism to justify what we teach is to be an act of faith, unsupported by any structure of evidence, or is to be rational, scientific method, backed by disciplined fact-gathering and production of possibilities for experimental testing.

As a society, a culture, or a government, we could make the value judgment that what we want is a body of belief whose "truth" matches what we desire, not our sense perceptions and projections from them. If that's our choice, we might as well have stopped improving our schools in the twelfth century, when Aquinas lived.

On the other hand, we could make the judgment that we want an ever-self-improving picture of the world, gained by the disciplined, cumulative thinking of science, through which we may move steadily to a better future shared by all mankind rather than solely our dominant religious culture. If that is our choice, then we will teach the sciences as intensively as youthful minds can absorb them, inculcating skills of fact-gathering and thinking that are vitally needed in a highly competitive world.

Sincerely,

John T. Goldthwait

49 Sandpiper Drive

St. Augustine Beach, Florida 32080