Climate Change Deniers in US Schools

My last post here was on the education of our children - I called for the need to help them develop into decent citizens equipped with a spiritual literacy, and properly prepared to accept  responsible and fulfilling roles in the world.
Now I have found some disturbing news from America on the teaching of science. There has been a long running saga over whether or not Creationism should be taught in schools as an acceptable theory, as against evolution. Now there is a further twist. Apparently according to New Scientist the Oklahoma House of Representatives has moved closer to approving a bill that some fear will allow for the teaching not only of creationism but also of climate change denial in the classroom.
Now this is worrying indeed. The science behind climate change and man's contribution to global warming is just about indisputable now. The implications for our children and grandchildren are potentially serious. If children are brought up to share a cynicism and skepticism with their elders about climate change what hope is there to make any real moves towards more sustainable living in a country whose ecological footprint is something like twice that of Europe per capita.
Not that Europeans can afford to be complacent either. It already takes Earth something like eighteen months to replenish the resources we use globally in a year. If everyone shared our levels of consumption in the West, we would need somewhere between three to five planets like Earth to sustain us. Commonsense tells us that the figures simply do not add up. Our behaviour is totally unsustainable in the long term.

We can all see the violent natural disasters for ourselves, and observe that the poorest amongst us suffer the most for the damage caused when houses collapse or are washed or blown away, livestock drowns or starves to death, disease spreads through stricken areas. I know many would love to believe that the earth will always be able to sustain the profligate Western lifestyle as it spreads across the whole world.

But Earth has finite resources and is groaning.

Personal prejudices should not be allowed to stand in the way of teaching good science. 

A New Emerging Scientific Worldview of God

Since yesterday's posting I have finished Kauffman's book, Reinventing the Sacred,and this is a copy of the review I have posted on Amazon:

Kauffman trained in philosophy and medicine, and now specialises in Bio-complexity and Informatics. In this sometimes provocative but enormously fascinating book, he sets out to demonstrate the inadequacy of reductionism alone in explaining our world, and offers ideas for a future evolution steered by us for a safer and better global place to live. He aims to address the schism between faith and reason, between science and arts, between reason and other sensibilities, in a new way; it is time, he writes, to “heal the split,” for the sake of our world.

He starts by dismissing the once widely held scientific view (not now so widely believed by the physicists it seems), that everything in the universe can be reduced to natural physical laws. He looks around him and perceives many things that whilst not contravening the laws of physics, nevertheless cannot be reduced to physics in this way, including the evolution of the biosphere, our world economy, our history and indeed life itself. And he carefully and thoroughly explains why.

Through such observations he maintains that we can break what he calls the “Galilean Spell,” which we have lived with since Galileo and Newton; the idea deeply rooted in our Western worldview since those great minds, that all that happens in our universe is governed by natural laws. He shows that we need more than this to explain many phenomena. Without rejecting reductionism entirely, he carefully and fully shows why it is inadequate to explain everything, as he describes a new emerging scientific world view, proposing that we are all members of a natural universe of “ceaseless creativity, in which life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness and the full richness of human action have emerged.” In physics, he says, there are only “happenings,” not “doings,” and in the natural physical laws there is no logical possibility of signs, interpretations, mistakes. Not only does he demonstrate that his concept of “ceaseless creativity” is possible, he also describes it as awesome, stunning and worthy of reverence, something we can all view as sacred. He explains why, from the evidence of the origins of life in the universe, we do not need a creator God. (But what about the origin of the universe itself?) Instead he calls for one global view of a common God as being the natural creativity itself in the universe. This is his reinvention of the sacred that he proposes.

Kauffman explains why he thinks his ideas based on a broader scientific world view may provide a shared religious and spiritual space for us all, within which he hopes we can heal what he describes as the four injuries of the modern world, these being the artificial division between the sciences and humanities, the need for more value and meaning in our lives, the need for spirituality for all, atheists, humanists, agnostics as well as those of faith, and finally the need for a global ethic.

Clearly this is controversial, provocative. As a Christian who believes in an Abrahamic God I obviously cannot agree with all he writes. But I do have respect for others’ beliefs, although I hope that the Creationists may be even partly persuaded by Kauffman’s reasoning that their beliefs cannot be so and that those without faith can see it is legitimate for them to experience spirituality.

I am not sure for whom this book has been written? It deserves a wide readership by the thoughtful and intelligent public but I did find much of the logic in many of his examples quite hard work to follow through, sometimes having to skim over to get to the conclusion – and I am a scientist! But I did find much of this book truly fascinating and absorbing, although I cannot do full justice to the sheer depth and breadth of Kauffman’s analyses in this short review.

I am always interested in any ideas put forward that may shed some light on how we may be able to heal this dangerously wounded world. Thus I was drawn to Kauffman’s work and in particular his vision that by harnessing our personal and collective responsibilities we have the wisdom, ability and knowledge to develop a new global ethics, and steer our evolution forwards through his proposed “reinvention” of the sacred. May it be so.