If we turn science teaching over to religious zealots, a new Dark Age beckons

Had someone told me, when I started my university degree (maths/theoretical physics) back in 1982 that, in 2006, people in this country would actually be asking the question 'Should schools teach Creationism?', I would have laughed, assuming it to be a joke.

But now, almost 25 years on, it is anything but a laughing matter.

For a small island nation, the UK used to punch well above its weight in terms of scientific research and technological innovation. But I fear that reputation is now under grave threat. Because few things are more indicative of our nation's depressing decline into scientific illiteracy than the fact that we have certain school teachers and politicians (including our esteemed PM) who appear to think that there is nothing wrong with teaching Creationism and Intelligent Design in schools, and even including it within the science curriculum!

I do not blame this turn of events solely on the resurgence of religious fundamentalism, because there has always been a tendency amongst human beings that rejects 'complicated' and abstruse explanations for things if there are simpler, more emotionally appealing ones to hand. And there is no denying that modern science is complicated and abstruse, and no matter how hard writers and documentary-makers try to bridge the gap in understanding between academic scientists and the general public, by producing books and television programmes on scientific topics aimed at the non-specialist, there will always be the unfortunate belief that science is something only scientists understand, and that the general public should just accept that they don't understand it, and be content in their ignorance.

The decline in the quality of science education in schools over the last 30 years has only exacerbated this cultural divide between science and the general public, of course. But, until relatively recently, the majority who did not know much science were at least confident that scientists knew what they were talking about, and were content to let them get on with the business of doing science relatively unmolested. (There have been a few high-profile PR-disasters for science, of course, but these often originated from precisely those areas of modern science (e.g. nuclear power, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals) where the political and economic implications of new discoveries were very great, and where there was a correspondingly great temptation for scientifically ignorant politicians and corporate CEOs to make decisions of questionable scientific or ethical wisdom concerning them.)

However, in recent years, religious fundamentalists have begun to cynically exploit the general public's ignorance about science in order to serve their own selfish agendas; in their desperate attempts to reclaim the intellectual high-ground from science and reassert the intellectual credibility of theological precepts about the origins of the universe and of life, they are attempting to fool the public into believing that the impressive edifice of modern science is in fact built upon quicksand, and that even its most reliable and well-respected theories about the natural world are logically and emprically flawed.

To a true scientist, these claims are utterly absurd, of course; not only are such theories regarded as reliable and well-respected precisely because they have so far withstood our attempts to prove that they are logically or empirically flawed, but the religious fundamentalists who are attacking them are almost invariably people whose own scientific illiteracy is so glaringly obvious (to scientists, at least) that they are clearly disqualified from having anything intelligent or erudite to say concerning matters of science! They are simply relying on the even greater scientific ignorance the general public in order to foment distrust of scientific orthodoxy and promote their alternative, religious orthodoxies as having an equal - or even a superior - claim on the truth.

But they do not fool scientists. We know frauds and charlatans when we see them. And we know the difference between a body of scientific knowledge (Darwinian Evolution, in this case) that has so far survived over 100 years of tests and challenges to its claims on the truth (and which, with every passing day, seems an ever more reliable, comprehensive and compelling account of the origins of biological diversity), and a set of absurdly fanciful, metaphysical notions involving supernatural deities, having their origins in religious texts written over 2000 years ago by a bunch of relgious zealots who knew even less about science than the ancient Greeks - a people whose proud tradition of rationalism and scientific inquiry would be condemned as heretical by later religious zealots of the same ilk, and which would suffer their attempts to all-but erase it from human history, leading directly to the thousand years of intellectual stagnation we call the Dark Ages!

And we - scientists - know which type of knowledge should be taught in science classes, and which should not - under any circumstances! And unless we stand up to these scientific ignoramuses, and expose them for the devious, self-serving charlatans that they are, many of us fear that their fundamentalist beliefs could come to pose as great a threat to the survival of modern science as they did 2000 years ago to the rationalist philosophy of the Greeks.

We cannot - and we will not - allow these people to turn the 21st century into the dawn of a new Dark Age.