Truth is the first casualty of war

Truth is the first casualty of war. The saying has its idiomatic cousins. Families have their “skeletons in the closet”, where awkward or unpleasant truth is carefully concealed. Our capacities for forestalling or evasion, our Ablett like deftness in dodging and weaving, supplement our inability to face truth and talk about things openly. Why choose January 26th for our national holiday? The question bristles. Best let’s avoid it.

As Basil Fawlty was at pains to remind everyone, “Don’t mention the War.”

I recall my secondary education, where topics such as politics, sex-education, and religion conveniently couldn’t find space within the curriculum. Sports excepted, in all of secondary school I never once heard a teacher say any words of controversy: Labor, Liberal, condom, abstinence, creation, evolution. While you could divert any class by asking the teacher, “From where did that umpire pull that ridiculous decision?” or “From which state should Australia’s cricketers be selected?” I’m left to guess the possible response had a student asked, “Where do our best leaders come from?” “Where do babies come from?” “Where did we all come from?”

That was high school. We proceed to university where we’re free to speak our mind. The demons of previous centuries following the wars of religion have been exorcised. We’re now enlightened by the miracles of scientific discovery. So I arrived at Latrobe University in 1985 with a green and eager sense of inquiry.

Latrobe University was founded in the 1960s in vacant paddocks on Melbourne’s outskirts. Unlike older universities such as Melbourne or Cambridge, it was not built around cemeteries, chapels, or missionary training colleges. The architects weren’t proposing any. The paddocks held no ghosts and none were invited. Darwin’s Origins had recently celebrated its 100-year anniversary, and its form of naturalism enjoyed total triumph.

That year at Latrobe, I happened to meet one particular lecturer in biology, Charles Pallaghy, who had acquired a position of tenure. Tenure is an academic practice designed to ensure freedom of thought, for any fellow with it can’t be dismissed for being radical or avant garde.

Yet Charles’ studies in biology had brought him to question the validity of the Darwinian view, and he was challenging certain lines of thought concerning biological origins normally taught at the university. The university asked Charles to please avoid associating himself with the name Latrobe when publically airing his controversial views. The matter was delicate. The university was looking for a sheet to hide the bones in the closet. I learned that even at university, there are some things about which we still can’t afford to be candid.

Charles kept to his convictions. And ultimately, Darwin’s namesake went on to have a productive career in biology and kept a good relationship with the university. Yet consider the predicament for younger academics who don’t have tenure.

So what of the Mother of all sensitive questions, “Is there a God?” Possible answers include: yes, no, maybe, can’t know, don’t care. But my question is: When will we be capable of talking about it freely?

Well, the world’s leading atheists are coming to Melbourne for the Global Atheist Convention, “The Rise of Atheism”, March 12-14, 2010. Atheists champion freedom of expression and won’t be vacillating.

The convention’s draw card presenter, Richard Dawkins’ 2006 book, the God Delusion, was little short of a declaration of war. “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, blood thirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

The audacious Dawkins can be admired for his frankness. He openly declares that studies in evolution have and do lead people to atheism. He has no time for those hedging to evade confrontation, those who delicately weave the line that evolution is somehow compatible with a God of purpose and intention. “Let’s be nice and pretend there’s no conflict,” Dawkins does not say. It is evolution that allows him to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

He squarely draws battle lines in front of his adversaries such as intelligent design proponent Philip Johnson, who says, “God is our true Creator. I am not speaking of a God who is known only by faith and is invisible to reason, or who acted undetectably behind some naturalistic evolutionary process that was to all appearances mindless and purposeless. That kind of talk is about the human imagination, not the reality of God. I speak of a God who acted openly and who left his fingerprints all over the evidence.”

So maybe it’s here, at the extremities of the philosophical spectrum that we’ll find some straight talking, spade identifying bluntness.

Both are brash, as prize fighters at a weigh in. Let’s imagine their comments before stepping on the scales. Dawkins goes first. “Evolution is a fact. It’s a fact which is established as securely as essentially any other fact we have in science. Since the evidence for evolution is so absolutely and totally overwhelming, no one who looks at the evidence could possibly doubt it if they were sane and not stupid. So the only remaining possibility is that they’re ignorant. And most people who don’t agree with evolution are in fact ignorant.”

Carl Wieland, representing Australia’s creationists, is just as plainspoken. “Non-living molecules evolving into all life forms, including man, over millions of years. We find that a frankly bizarre proposition.”

Now the two can afford a shadow box, as they won’t actually meet in the ring. Any contemplated confrontation between the world’s leading atheists and their natural counterparts residing in Australia will not now take place.

The reason it won’t is explained in email correspondence between Carl Wieland and David Nicholls from the Atheist Foundation of Australia, one of the organisers of the March convention. Wieland requests a public debate on the topic of which viewpoint, creation or evolution, is best represented by the empirical evidence. Nicholls is quick to dismiss the request. He’s not interested. And so, the two positions, being philosophically poles apart, will also remain rooms apart during Melbourne’s leafy autumn.

Why must this be? What might either side lose? For sure, after thousands of years of philosophical battle, it would be difficult for one side to conquer the other in an afternoon. But would there be no public interest in such a debate, enough for both camps to gain a little publicity?

As in chess, tactics are vital. But this battle has not the cleanliness of chess. It is less cerebral and more primal. It’s war. The gloves are off.

If the atheist team chose to defend evolution in public debate, they know that they’d be playing away from home. In recent times public debates have been the refuge of creationists. The evolution team would need to prepare and familiarise itself with the terrain of the home team. But Darwin’s theory already holds dominion in intellectual circles; the faculties of all mainstream universities speak as one in its support. As they already hold the title, they stand to gain little. What they would lose is their standing assertion that the issue is beyond discussion.

Nicholls gives his reasons for rejecting the offer. Debates do not attend to real science but to audience prejudice. Real science is found in peer reviewed papers in “accredited scientific journals”, which don’t include odd proposals such as creationism. Nicholls puts it back onto Wieland, accusing him of avoidance. “If you skirt the question about accredited articles, then it is no wonder you are having trouble finding people to debate.”

The shadow boxers dodge, both accusing the other of not being willing to face what is plainly evident. So the atheists and the creationists, the two philosophical straight shooters, have avoided the showdown at sunset.

Notice Nicholls’ reference to “accredited” journals. The editors of these journals, the signals of progress and guardians of scientific tenets, have declared what is correct. If your view isn’t published in these journals, your view must not be scientific. And since your view is not scientific, it won’t be published in these journals. If only real battles were won so easily.

We’re an adversarial society. We have a feel for a contest: Wimbledon, footy finals, Test Match bat against ball. We’re a little suspicious about this win on a technicality. There was no knock-out punch. Something has been dodged. The hollowness of the victory echoes in the public’s perception. In evolution, there is no greater scientific theory championed more by academics while appearing more doubtful to everyone else.

One person who did publish his peer reviewed article, “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories” in one of these “accredited” journals, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, was Stephen C. Meyer. Though concluding that the sudden appearance of new life forms in the fossil record could best be attributed to intelligent design, it passed through the “paper curtain” which usually filters such a radical suggestion. The incident became famous for the back peddling undertaken by the watchdogs of correct thinking. The Biological Society’s governing council quickly admitted they’d made a mistake. “Intelligent design will not be addressed in future issues of the journal.”

Questions were asked. How could a paper like that slip through? Was it an apparition? Who unlocked the closet door? Did anyone see Granny’s bones back there?

Of course, Western thought was not always so coy to consider the possibility of a higher intelligence. For scientific pioneers such as Isaac Newton, it was integrated into their thinking. “The most beautiful system of the sun, planet and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and domination of an intelligent and powerful Being.” Such an evaluation wouldn’t go down well with today’s scientific journals. Yet we daren’t annul the Principia Mathmatica on philosophical prejudice alone.

Were those of Newton’s era more open and honest than us today? I don’t know. But we must allow ourselves to admit that for science or any other part of society to flourish it must be free to face the tough questions, and be allowed to follow evidence wherever it leads.

Meyer later commented on the lack of openness in current scientific thought. “We don’t know what caused life to arise. Did it arise by purely undirected process, or did it arise by some kind of intelligent guidance or design? And the rules of science are being applied to actually foreclose one of the two possible answers to that very fundamental and important question.”

David Berlinski has a PhD from Princeton University and has taught at several others, and so understands academic cut and thrust. His opinion is that the appearance of living forms on the earth is, to our increasing knowledge, as inexplicable as if foam from the sea washed up and assembled itself into the Parthenon. He is not religious. He does not claim that God necessarily exists. Yet he makes this assessment: “The facts [on Darwin’s theory] are what they have always been: They are unforthcoming. And the theory is what it always was: It is unpersuasive. Among evolutionary biologists, these matters are well known. In the privacy of the Susan B. Anthony faculty lounge, they often tell one another with relief that it is a very good thing the public has no idea what the research literature really suggests. ‘Darwin?’ a Nobel laureate in biology once remarked to me over his bifocals. ‘That’s just the party line.’”

The other Charles in this story, Governor Charles Latrobe’s family motto was taken for the motto on the crest of Latrobe University: “Whoever seeks finds”. Yet those who seek truth will encounter the road blocks, detours, and “Wrong Way Go Back” signs. Experience suggests that many are just diversionary.

Some avenues of enquiry are declared off limits; with some honest questions denounced as unanswerable, invalid, or heaven forbid, unimportant. But these won’t go away until they are properly addressed.