Are Public Schools Teaching a Stealth Religion?

According to the account by educational authorities, there is no teaching of religious doctrine in United States public schools. We are told that such a thing is strictly forbidden, because it would be a violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which holds that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” This has been interpreted to mean that taxpayer funds should not be used to support any particular religion, and since public schools receive taxpayer dollars, it is held that such schools cannot be supporting any type of religion.

But while it is widely believed that teaching of a religion is forbidden inside public schools, it may be that exactly such a forbidden thing is actually occurring in almost every public high school. This is because a substantial case can be made that a particular belief system spoon-fed to our children throughout high school is itself a religion or a religious position or a faith-based ideology.

The particular belief system I refer to is what we may call Darwinist materialism. Below is one way to describe the tenets of this creed:

1. "Earthly biology can be explained entirely by naturalistic explanations such as natural selection and random mutations."
2. "The human mind can be explained entirely by brain activity."
3. "Charles Darwin provided some brilliant insight that eliminated the need to postulate any design or purpose in nature."
4. "Life appeared on our planet purely because of lucky random combinations of chemicals."
5. "Everything is pretty-well explained by science professors who assume there is just matter and energy; so there's no need to believe in anything like souls, spirits, or the paranormal."

Although constantly marketed and branded simply as “science,” Darwinist materialism seems to involve a very large element of faith. In particular, it has never been proven that any one complex visible organism or any of its organs or appendages or cell types has ever appeared mainly because of natural selection, or natural selection and random mutations. We can imagine no mathematically credible scenario under which natural selection could produce the fine-tuned protein molecules upon which life depends. An average protein molecule has a length of about 375 amino acids, and getting an arrangement of such amino acids by chance to produce the functionality of the protein molecule requires an arrangement with a chance likelihood of less than 1 in 10 to the two-hundredth power (even if you assume only half of the amino acid sequence has to match the actual sequence of amino acids in the protein). It would seem such molecules cannot appear through any gradually rewarded "each step yields a benefit" kind of process, because half-versions or quarter-versions of such molecules are useless. Yet Darwinist materialism wishes us to accept natural selection as an explanation for most or almost all biology. Since there seems to be a very large article of faith here, it would seem that we should at least be calling Darwinist materialism a kind of faith-based ideology.

But would it be correct to go even farther, and brand Darwinist materialism as a kind of religion? A supporter of such a belief system would immediately dismiss such an idea as an absurdity. He would vigorously argue: religion is some belief in God, and Darwinist materialism does not entail that.

But such a definition of “religion” is too narrow. Let's consider Eastern religions. These include Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. There are certainly major forms of each of these religions that do not require any belief in a deity. One can be either an atheist or a theist, and still follow either Taoism, Confucianism, or Buddhism. In a religion such as Buddhism, there are some sects that pray to some entity that might be called a deity or the equivalent of a deity, but there are other sects that do not do that. Consider also a modern American religion such as Scientology. Again we have a religion which does not have any belief in a deity at the core of its teachings. As a Scientologist, you can be either an atheist or a theist.

It seems, therefore, that defining religion as some belief in a deity or some system of worship is too narrow a definition of the word “religion.” Scholars have offered many conflicting definitions of “religion,” some of which are too narrow to cover some of the known religions such as Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. We need a definition that seems to cover almost all cases of religious belief.  One such definition was given by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. He defined a religion as " a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." 

Here is another rather similar definition: we can define a religion as  a set of beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality and life, or a recommended way of living, typically stemming from the teachings of an authority, along with norms, ethics, rituals, roles or social organizations that may arise from such beliefs. This definition covers Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Scientology, religions which stem from authority figures such as Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, the writers of the Bible, Lao-Tzu, Gautama Buddha, Confucius, and L. Ron Hubbard. Interestingly, using the same definition of religion, it seems we should also classify Darwinist materialism as a religion. It is a fundamental way of looking at the nature of life, stemming from the teachings of an authority figure (Charles Darwin).

The idea that Darwinist materialism may be a religion should not seem unreasonable when we consider the activities of two young men, Rod and Bill. Rod decides to become a minister in a church. He is indoctrinated for years in a regimented minister-schooling environment in which complete allegiance to the belief system of his teachers is demanded. He then spends lots of time standing before assemblies of other people (parishioners), preaching the teachings of his belief system. Using lots of specialized jargon, Rod may also spend a lot of time in scholarly writing to advance the beliefs of his church, contributing to things such as religion journals and theological books. If a heretic arises in his church to dispute the accepted teachings, Rod may chasten such a person by criticizing his belief deviance.

Bill, however, decides to become a professor of evolutionary biology. He is indoctrinated for years in a regimented professor-schooling environment in which complete allegiance to the belief system of his teachers is demanded. He then spends lots of time standing before assemblies of other people (university students), preaching the teachings of his belief system. Using lots of specialized jargon, Bill may also spend a lot of time in scholarly writing to advance the beliefs of his scholastic tribe, contributing to things such as science journals and science books. If a heretic arises to dispute the accepted teachings, such as someone suggesting there may be purposeful design in living things, Bill may chasten such a person by criticizing his belief deviance. 

Given all these similarities, it seems both Bill and Rod are kind of spear-carriers for a particular belief tribe, products of a sociological structure that encourages regimentation of belief and strongly sanctions deviations from its orthodoxy of belief norms. In this light, the idea that Darwinist materialism may actually be a religion does not seem too far-fetched. Darwinist materialism has a sociological and authoritarian structure strongly resembling the sociological and authoritarian structure of a religion, with evolutionary biology professors and neuroscientists acting like some new priesthood, and members of the National Academy of Sciences or Nobel laureates having a higher authority (just as bishops or cardinals have a higher authority than priests).

It may be argued that we should not call Darwinist materialism as a religion, because its proponents are very level-headed people who don't get all emotional and carried away about their teachings, in the way that religious people do. But that's not always true. Let us consider the following quote from page 93 of the book The Origins of Creativity by biologist Edward O. Wilson:

"The preeminence of this universal process was nicely expressed in 1973 by the great geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky and often quoted since: 'Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.'  This claim should now be boldly expanded: Nothing in science and the humanities makes sense except in the light of evolution. As the philosopher Daniel Dennett has put it, evolution by natural selection is the acid that burns through every myth about ordained purposes and meanings."

The quote by Dobzhansky is very often quoted, but is not at all correct. For example, the thirtieth edition of Harper's Illustrated Biochemistry is an 800-page textbook describing cells, genes, enzymes, proteins, metabolism, hormones, and biochemisty in the greatest detail, with abundant illustrations. The book makes no mention of Darwin, no mention of natural selection, and only a single mention of evolution, on a page talking only about whether evolution had anything to do with limited lifespans. So it is clearly not true that nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution. As for Wilson's claim that nothing in science or the humanities makes sense except in the light of Darwinian evolution, it is just nonsense. Darwin's theory of evolution has no appreciable place in cosmology, astrophysics, chemistry, physics, meteorology, computer science, poetry, mathematics, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and most forms of literature.

Clearly Wilson feels the same way about his Darwinist materialism as a fervent fundamentalist feels about his Bible, and we can compare Wilson's statement to a fundamentalist's claim that nothing in science or nature makes sense except in the light of the Bible. When a prominent figure of Darwinist materialism speaks with this type of over-the-top seething fervor about Darwinism, it seems to support the suspicion that Darwinist materialism is a kind of surreptitious religion. And when, in the next sentence, that prominent figure enthuses about some supposed theological effect of his doctrine, we can again take note of the very strong religious motivations here. Given a choice between categorizing such runaway gushing as science or religion, the latter term seems more appropriate.

In the book The Inflamed Mind by Edward Bullmore, we have another example of the same type of zealotry.  Referring to biological explanation on page 158, the book says, "Ultimately the answer must always be Darwin."  This reminds us of a Christian saying that the answer to everything is Jesus. The Royal Society may have the slogan of Nullius in verba or "Take nobody's word for it," but the  authorities of scientific academia seem to be following quite the opposite, a motto of, "Always take Darwin's word for it."  This smells more like religion than science.  The authoritarian structure of a university is very suited for the propagation of a religion, and the first universities were created largely to propagate Christianity. Over the centuries, authoritarian universities seem to have gradually switched from propagating an ancient religion to propagating the more modern religion or belief system of Darwinist materialism. 

For many decades there have been many groups such as the ACLU ready to "scream bloody murder" if anyone tried to teach in public schools any religion that was called a religion by its adherents. But throughout the same period there was a little-known backdoor allowing infiltration of religion into our public schools: the possibility that a religion-in-all-but-name could infiltrate our public high school curriculum under the guise or branding of "science education."  If you think it is incredible that the state has imposed on our children a kind of stealth religion, under the cover of “science education,” simply consider that it is widely admitted that such a thing did happen elsewhere for decades. Between 1920 and 1990, the Soviet Union force-fed a Marxist-Leninist ideology to its students, something that was followed in such a regimented and authoritarian way that it was essentially a religion. But such indoctrination was never called religious indoctrination. When students were taught the catechism of Marxism-Leninism, they were told that they were simply being taught “economic science.”

The main objection you could make to the claim that Darwinist materialism is a stealth religion is to say that it can't be a religion, because it is science; and something cannot be both science and religion. But using a strict definition of science, Darwinist materialism isn't science. Although science can be loosely defined in terms of scientific activity, a strict definition of science is "facts established by observations and experiments."  None of the core tenets of Darwinist materialism is a fact established by observations or experiments. 

Although we know that evolution defined merely as "gene pool change over time" does occur, we absolutely do not know that Darwinian evolution is the correct explanation for the most impressive wonders of complexity and organization we observe in biology.  There are actually very strong reasons for suspecting that Darwinian evolution cannot possibly be the correct explanation for such wonders. One such reason is that the theory of evolution by natural selection is not even a theory of organization, but is something much less, a mere theory of accumulation. Another such reason is the speed at which biological innovation can occur (which in the case of the Cambrian Explosion was an explosive speed). Another such reason is the fact that  DNA does not actually store the body plans of organisms or a specification of how to make them, meaning that no conceivable random DNA mutations could explain one species evolving into some other species with a very different body plan.  As for claims that the brain is the cause of all mental activity, there are very strong scientific reasons for doubting that the brain is the cause of the leading mental activites such as intelligence or memory retrieval.  You can read about some of those reasons at this site.  As for claims that life arose naturally from mere chemicals, there is zero scientific evidence for it. Both the  enormous information complexity of the simplest living thing and the very meager results of scientific experiments trying to produce some of the most important building blocks of life (in conditions simulating the early earth) are scientific reasons for disbelieving in such a thing.  As for the denial of the paranormal that is part of Darwinist materialism,  such a thing is not at all "science," and is actually inconsistent with a huge amount of observational evidence for the paranormal, a good deal of it collected in controlled scientific experiments.  

It is true that the adherents of Darwinist materialism constantly try to brand their belief system as "science," and deny that such a system is a religion.  A religion which positions itself as "science" can be called a stealth religion or a surreptitious religion. 

The average person may regard the claims of Darwinist materialism to be science, because he has been taught them in a science class or read them in books written by scientists.  Similarly, if it were taught in physics class that the Shroud of Turin proved the resurrection of Jesus, and we were taught this again and again in science books, we would regard such a claim as being science, and would look strangely at anyone suggesting that this was a bit of religion that had been sneaked into our science textbooks. And if we were taught in our history textbooks that Noah had saved all the earth's animals, and if such a claim was frequently repeated by historians, we would regard such a claim as simply being an example of history, and would look strangely at anyone suggesting that such a claim was a bit of religion that had been sneaked into our history textbooks. Over the years very much has been sneaked into our science textbooks that is not science (defined as facts established by observations and experiments), but merely belief dogmas that have become popular among scientists who belong to a belief community with its own sociocultural speech customs and speech taboos. 

In 1993 comments to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Darwinist philosopher of science Michael Ruse confessed the following:

"Certainly, historically, that if you look at, say, evolutionary theory, and of course this was brought out I think rather nicely by the talk just before me, it's certainly been the case that evolution has functioned, if not as a religion as such, certainly with elements akin to a secular religion.... And certainly, there's no doubt about it, that in the past, and I think also in the present, for many evolutionists, evolution has functioned as something with elements which are, let us say, akin to being a secular religion."

Many of the adherents of Darwinist materialism are trying to give this creed new features similar to features of Christianity: a world-transformation eschatology (in which the current world-order will be radically overturned by genetic engineering and intelligent robots), and a kind of afterlife eschatology based on ideas such as mind uploading (the uploading of minds into computer systems or robots).  The materialists saying "soon the robots will take over everything" may be compared to millenialist Christians saying "soon Jesus will take over everything." And the materialists saying "one day I will upload my mind into a robot or computer" are like millenialist evangelicals saying "one day Jesus will lift me and other true believers way up into the sky, when the Rapture happens."  Such transhumanist ideas (stemming from materialist assumptions) haven't yet made it into the high school curriculum, but it should be noted that Darwinist materialists are busy building what seems to be a belief system with all of the main features of modern religions.  In this essay, I list nine characteristics of modern religions, and I discuss how transhumanist versions of Darwinist materialism have all nine of these characteristics. 

Like a Catholic school controlling what its students are exposed to, the modern public high school makes sure to double-indoctrinate students in the creed of Darwinist materialism, and to exclude any teachings that might challenge such a doctrine. Our high school students receive not just one year of materialistic biology, but two years of such study, with the same subject matter being repeated in a different year. In the biology course it will be taught dogmatically that thoughts are created by brains, and that memories are stored in brains, even though scientists have no understanding of how a brain could generate a thought, no credible detailed theory of how a brain could encode human learned information in synapse states or neuron states, no credible theory of how brains could store memories for decades given rapid protein turnover, and no credible theory explaining the instantaneous retrieval of old memories (such as when you remember facts about a name you haven't heard mentioned in many years).  

The high school biology student will not learn about any of the many very substantial reasons for rejecting the dogma that the brain stores our memories and generates the mind, reasons that are mainly just neuroscience facts such as the low transmission reliability of synapses (which in the cortex transmit signals with a probability of less than 50%), and the short lifetimes of synapse proteins (only a few weeks). The student will be given the false impression that human biology has been largely figured out, even though everywhere there are still the most gigantic mysteries. The student will be go away with no understanding of how enormous are the unsolved mysteries of biology such as the origin of life, the origin of biological complexity, the source of human consciousness and cognition, protein folding and morphogenesis (how a newly fertilized egg manages to progress to become a full baby). In his textbook the student will see no chart showing almost all animal phyla appearing in one rather sudden burst of the Cambrian Explosion, lest his faith in the power of gradual random evolution be shaken. The student will probably go away with the false idea of DNA as a blueprint for the human form, when DNA is actually just a list of human chemical ingredients that does not even specify how to make any of the 200 types of cells in a human body. The student will not be well educated about the complexity of protein molecules, and will probably leave high school with no idea that in his body are some 20,000 complex inventions, the roughly 20,000 different types of protein molecules in his body, most of them about as complex as a 100-word computer program.  Education in such facts clashes with the causal ideas that our biology teachers are trying to foster. 

It's kind of like this in a public high school

Such students will also receive two years of physics studies. The physics courses will teach all kinds of mathematical calculation algorithms that 95 percent of students will very soon completely forget, but the courses will completely fail to teach the students something that they might remember the rest of their lives: an explanation of how the laws of nature and physical constants of our universe are very fine-tuned to allow for our existence. This is perhaps because teaching such a thing might conflict with the thrust of Darwinist materialism. Similarly, the high school student will also probably never be taught about the Big Bang, the baffling sudden origin of the universe, from what scientists say was a point of infinite density. Such a topic is conveniently omitted from the high school physics curriculum.

No course in psychology is normally required for high-school students. If the student takes such a course, there will be no discussion of any of the huge amount of evidence suggesting that the mind is something that cannot be explained purely by the brain. There will be no discussion of near-death experiences or accounts of apparitions or a discussion of very high-scoring subjects in ESP tests or people who managed to function well after half or 75 percent of their brains were surgically removed or replaced with fluid by hydrocephalus. The “we can't teach about anything spooky” rule will be followed.  In psychology courses and biology courses, there will be no discussion of biology facts that contradict the dogma that brains store memories, such as the extremely short lifetime of synapse proteins.  When the biology courses discuss morphogenesis, the growth of a human body from a tiny fertilized egg, the student may be given the false notion that such a growth occurs because of a reading of a body blueprint in DNA. There does not actually exist any such blueprint or recipe in DNA, which merely stores low-level chemical information, not high-level structural information, nor does there exist in a human womb anything sophisticated enough to read and execute a blueprint or recipe for making a human, which would be a set of instructions 1000 times more complex than a building blueprint (given all the incredibly complicated dynamics of cells).  The student may be given the impression that scientists understand how a fertilized egg progresses to become a full-sized human, even though such a progression is actually a thousand miles over the heads of scientists, being unexplained by any known biochemistry. 

The student enduring such a very dogmatic and one-sided course of study at his high school on a weekday such as Monday may rightfully wonder whether he is being religiously indoctrinated every bit as much as if he were attending a Sunday school class at a church.

Postscript: Julian Huxley has been called one of the founders of the so-called "modern synthesis" of evolutionary biology, and he coined that term. In an essay "Eugenics and Society," he made rather clear how Darwinism was to him pretty much a religion; for he stated this:

"Eugenics, Dean Inge writes in one of his essays, is capable of becoming the most sacred ideal of the human race, as a race; one of the supreme religious duties. In this I entirely agree with him. Once the full implications of evolutionary biology are grasped, eugenics will inevitably become part of the religion of the future, or of whatever complex of sentiments may in the future take the place of organized religion."

We saw the disastrous results of eugenics enthusiasm in the twisted work of the Nazis. A paper on Huxley states, "Julian Huxley was untroubled by this post-Orwellian 1984 nightmare – instead he continued to proselytize for the opposite: the idea of an evolutionary religion, based on objective science rather than revelation." So spellbound by his Darwinist religion, Huxley kept acting as a salesman for eugenics long after the horrors of the Nazis had been uncovered. 

Postscript: Another Huxley who acted as one of the chief advocates of Darwinism was Thomas Huxley. In his chief work arguing for Darwinism, he makes a statement that makes very clear how very much his considerations are motivated by a hatred towards the Catholic Church. He states this:  "In addition to the truth of the doctrine of evolution, indeed, one of its greatest merits in my eyes, is the fact that it occupies a position of complete and irreconcilable antagonism to that vigorous and consistent enemy of the highest intellectual, moral, and social life of mankind—the Catholic Church." The statement "makes mincemeat" out of Huxley's pretensions to be arguing on pure biology grounds, and makes it clear that his Darwinism has a very strong theological motivation, the motivation of antagonizing an existing religion. 

Why a Clique of Scientists Might Do Worse at Judging Truth Than a Jury

When newly awarded PhD's start writing papers and books and judging truth, they are rather like jurors who have been methodically exposed to evidence, and who then deliver a verdict that is a judgment of truth. A community of scientific experts may have much more prestige than a group of ordinary people chosen for a jury. But there are some reasons for thinking that the 12 ordinary people on a jury may be more likely to judge truth correctly than a clannish scientific community with some narrow subject specialty. Below are some of the reasons.

Reason #1: Jury Members are Randomly Selected, but Scientific Experts are Often Those Who Volunteered to Join an Ideological Enclave

One of the greatest strengths of the jury system is that jury members are randomly selected. A system in which jurors can volunteer for particular trials would not work well at all. If a particular defendant was on trial for murder, and jurors could volunteer for a particular case, then you might end up with only jurors predisposed to find that the defendant was guilty. Instead the jury system guarantees randomness. Jurors are randomly selected from the population. When they go to the court, they are randomly assigned to trials. So we usually don't end up with things like juries consisting mostly of people who were inclined to judge one particular way when judging a court case.

But this random selection process differs greatly from how scientific experts become scientific experts. A scientific expert becomes a PhD by volunteering for some particular graduate program at a university. These graduate programs are often ideological enclaves, places where there predominates some particular ideology not embraced by most people.

The fact that the graduates of such programs are volunteers creates the opportunity for sociological selection effects. Let's imagine an extreme example. Let's imagine there arises some new scientific discipline called groosology. It might be the opinion of 90% of the American population that groosology is utter nonsense. But groosology might be “all the rage” at some Graduate Program in Groosology Studies at a particular university. The people who sign up for such a program might almost all be from the tiny fraction of the population that believes in groosology. At this particular program there might then be tremendous sociological pressure for students to embrace groosology. So 90% of the graduates of this graduate program might be believers in groosology, even though a randomly selected jury from the general population would probably conclude groosology is worthless nonsense.

The diagram below illustrates this type of sociological effect. Such a sociological effect is going on at many graduate programs at universities, which are often as much ideological enclaves as are theology schools.

There is the additional fact that university graduate schools are not free, but often charge very high tuition fees, such as $30,000 a year. The number of scholarships for graduate programs is only a small fraction of the scholarships for bachelor's degree programs. Such facts tend to guarantee that the people who sign up for university graduate programs are not merely people predisposed to accept the ideology of such programs, but are actually people particularly eager to accept such an ideology. For example, you are not likely to shell out $50,000 to be trained as an evolutionary biologist unless you were really enthusiastic about the prevailing thinking of evolutionary biologists to begin with.

An equivalent situation in a jury pool would be if courts charged a high fee (such as $5000) for you to be a voluntary juror on a particular defendant's jury. This would guarantee that the juries would be populated only by those who were the most passionate about the defendant's guilt or innocence.

Reason #2: Juries Are Exposed to an Even-handed Discussion by People Arguing Opposing Cases, but Scientists Are Not Trained in Such a Way

One of the great strengths of the jury system and the court system is that equal weight is given to opposing sides. Imagine if someone is being tried for murder. First, the district attorney will give an introductory speech making the case for the defendant's guilt. Then the defendant's attorney will make a speech arguing for the defendant's innocence. Then the district attorney will present witnesses and evidence trying to establish the defendant's guilt, which at each stage may be challenged or cross-examined by the defense attorney. Then the defense attorney will present witnesses and evidence trying to establish the defendant's innocence, which at each stage may be challenged or cross-examined by the district attorney. Finally the district attorney will summarize the case for the defendant's guilt, and the defense attorney will summarize the case for the defendant's innocence. What could be more even-handed?

But unlike a juror who is exposed to both sides of the case with a fair balance, a student studying at a scientific graduate school gets no such even-handed exposure to opposing opinions and differing evidence. Such a student will be likely to be indoctrinated in only side of the case. For example, if you are studying to be a neuroscientist, you will get years of indoctrination that will give you one side of the story: the idea that mental processes are purely the products of brains, and cannot occur once a brain is dead. There will certainly not be a point in your training where your program director will say, “Very well, to give you an evenhanded education, you will now spend the next six months talking to psychics, those who had near-death experiences, and mediums who claim to be able to contact the dead through seances.” (Graduate schools may have courses on the thinking of those opposed to the viewpoints taught by the graduate schools, but such courses are normally taught by teachers hostile to such thinking, and simply amount to an attempt to immunize the student against such thinking.)

How would it be if juries had such experiences? We might imagine a jury that would hear only the prosecuting attorney's case, without ever hearing the defense attorney's case (or a jury which heard only the defense attorney's case, without ever hearing the prosecuting attorney's case).

Reason # 3: Juries Are Not Socially Pressured to Have Particular Opinions While They Are Being Exposed to the Evidence

If you are a juror, you are not socially pressured to have a particular opinion until you get into the jury room to reach your verdict. Jurors are silent while a trial is proceeding, and jurors are instructed not to talk about a case during a trial, until the final jury discussion after the evidence has been presented. So there is no peer pressure for you to think in a particular way until the very end of the process, nor is there any authority figure asking you about whether you have conformed to the expected thinking.

But it is a very different situation for the student training in a scientific graduate program. The student will be constantly asked to take tests and write essays, and he may be graded partially according to whether he accepts whatever ideology he is being taught. For example, someone training to be a neuroscientist may be asked to explain how memory works, and he may be graded by how well he parrots prevailing theories, and may be graded poorly if he suggests such theories are unbelievable. Having made a huge investment in tuition, the student is almost forced to “deliver his verdict” on the truth of what he is being taught before his training has finished; or he may risk flunking his courses and losing his huge tuition investment.

Reason # 4: Juries Have No Financial Interest in Reaching a Particular Verdict

If you are a juror and get into the jury room, you will have no vested interest or financial interest in reaching a particular verdict. You can then reach an opinion solely on the facts, knowing that it will make no difference to your financial health.

But we may contrast this with the person who has just graduated from a university graduate school. His financial health will now depend on conforming to whatever ideology was taught at his graduate school. If he speaks as if he accepted the prevailing ideas in his little science community, he will have a decent chance of getting research grants, and might even be appointed to be a professor (a decision that will be made by professors who have embraced the ideology of his scientific community). But imagine if this person announces a contrarian verdict. Imagine if he states that he disagrees with the conclusions of his scientific community. Such a person will have placed himself “out on a limb,” and his position will be financially precarious. He will have a hard time getting scientific journals to publish his scientific papers, since peer reviewers often exclude papers suggesting results contrary to the ideological taboos and norms of a scientific community. Lacking much of a publication record, and out of sync with the thought of those who decide whether he should be appointed as a professor, he won't be able to get appointed as a professor.

So many of our newly minted PhD's are like bribed jurors. They have a strong financial incentive to reach particular conclusions. If something similar were to go on with juries, we might imagine a situation like this. Near the end of the trial, when you went into the jury room to reach the verdict, you would find various pitch men who would tell you that if you voted in one particular way, you would be paid $10,000.

If Being a Juror Was Like Becoming a Conformist Scientist

I can put all these observations together into a portrait of what it would be like if being a juror was like studying to become a scientist at certain types of graduate programs. Things would work like this. The only way in which you would become a juror would be if you paid a big fat fee to sit on a particular jury – something like $20,000 or $40,000. Once you got on that jury you would find yourself with other jurors who had all volunteered for the particular case you were to judge on, jurors who had all paid large sums to sit on the jury. During the trial you would only be presented with one side of the case, the case of the prosecuting district attorney. During the trial breaks, you would have authority figures come to see you and your fellow jurors. They would ask you questions to make sure that you were absorbing and accepting the government's case, and they would try to squash any skepticism you might have about that case. Once the case had been presented, you and your fellow jurors would finally find yourself in the jury room, assigned to the task of reaching the verdict. But before you started, you would talk with various people who would offer you huge bribes to vote as the prosecuting district attorney wanted you to vote. You would know that rejecting authority and thinking independently would be very financially disadvantageous.

In the description above, the giant fee required for sitting on a particular jury corresponds to the tuition price of getting a graduate degree. The situation of hearing only one side of the case corresponds to the fact that you are pretty much taught only one standpoint if you sign up to get a degree in something like Freudian psychoanalysis, string theory, evolutionary biology or neuroscience. The part about trial breaks corresponds to the fact that graduate students are constantly monitored and graded in accordance with how well they are absorbing their indoctrination without resisting it. The part about the bribes in the jury room corresponds to the fact that any newly minted PhD knows that he will flourish financially by singing from the same hymn book as the other scientists in his specialty, rather than going out on a limb and judging that such scientists have come to wrong conclusions.

We don't have such a jury system like the one described above. We have instead a totally different system designed to maximize the chance the jurors will reach impartial decisions after hearing both sides. The common person who takes part in such a system – sometimes a low-paid cleaner, driver, or cashier – does not have the prestige of a scientist. But due to the strengths of the jury system, such a person may be more likely to judge truth correctly and objectively than some person with a fancy title who may be the assembly-line end-product of the mind-molding conformist machinery of an ideological enclave.

How to Run a School That Churns Out Standardized Thought-Robots

From the sociological considerations above, we can deduce some general tips that can be used by any person wishing to create an ideological enclave that will generate graduates that all share the same ideology.

1. Make it perfectly clear that your institution will be teaching a particular ideology (but avoid using that particular word).
2. Charge a very hefty annual tuition, making sure that the only people who sign up for the school are people strongly predisposed to believe in whatever ideology you will be teaching.
3. Give your students a one-sided curriculum that indoctrinates them in your ideology, with little or no exposure to alternate viewpoints.
4. Require that your students repeatedly voice assent to your ideology as you are teaching it, by doing things such as having tests in which the correct answers are those reflecting your ideology, and written essays that will be graded poorly if they do not reflect your ideology.
5. Flunk out students who show signs of rebelling against your ideology, or simply leave them in some “uncompleted curriculum” limbo that causes them to quit.
6. During the months leading up to graduation, make it perfectly clear that your graduates will enjoy a lucrative career in your organization and similar organizations if they continue to voice the ideology that the school has taught, but that they will receive no financial reward at all for their huge tuition investment if they defy that ideology.

This should work like a charm, and 90% of your graduates will probably end up voicing approval for whatever strange ideology you have taught them. Sadly the description above doesn't differ very much from how certain types of scientific specialists are trained.

Postscript: My previous post The Groupthink Problem in Modern Cosmology and Physics discusses complacent conformity problems in two branches of science. In my post Improving the Conformity Factories Known as Science Graduate Schools I give some ideas on how to lessen some of the "rubberstamp thinking" problems mentioned in this post. Besides the ideas discussed in that post, I can think of an additional way to reduce the problem: fund scholarship programs that offer "take it or leave it" full-tuition scholarships to randomly selected college seniors, offering to pay the entire cast of graduate education in one particular scientific area, without any option to change the field of study.  For example, a randomly selected English major might suddenly receive an offer to pay the full cost of becoming a PhD in neuroscience, with no option to change to some other PhD program. With such a program, you would have a higher percentage of graduate school beginners who were not predisposed to accept the ideology of a particular graduate program.  An additional idea is to set up a large prize fund consisting of many individual financial awards to be awarded only to scientists who publish results that contradict prevailing assumptions in their field.  A good name for such a fund would be: the "Shock to the System" awards. 

Improving the Conformity Factories Known as Science Graduate Schools

Modern science started out as a rather anti-authoritarian type of thing. The great scientists of the Enlightenment era often opposed ancient authorities such as Aristotle and more modern authorities such as the Catholic priesthood. But in the past hundred years scientific academia has itself taken on a strongly authoritarian character. Scientists have set themselves up as a kind of new priesthood. Of course, any priesthood requires conformity and regimentation. One key tool in the production of conformity and regimentation among scientists is the typical science graduate school.

Consider the way in which students are typically taught in such a school. In the modern Internet age with so many opportunities for computer-assisted study and self-study, there are 101 ways in which students could learn without being in the shadow or gravitational pull of authority figures, without being subject to conformity pressure. But it seems that the average graduate school seems to teach classes in the same old way.

Students are given some textbooks produced by professors (typically not the professor teaching the class). Students sit in lecture halls listening to lectures by a professor, who may assign certain chapters in the book for reading. The subject matter may have 1001 great uncertainties, but the combination of the officially approved science textbook and the similar lecture by the professor send a message to the student:

This is the official version of truth we want you to accept. This is the official party line that you should not question. Please accept this standardized pablum we are spoon-feeding you.

But, you may object, isn't it possible to engage in a debate in a science graduate school? Yes, it is technically possible, but the setup makes it pretty unlikely that a student will make any lengthy challenge to what is being taught in class. A setup in which there is a professor standing in front of a class sends a kind of “here is the guy who knows this stuff, so accept what he's saying” message that is enforced by the officially approved textbook. A setup in which there are lots of students sends a kind of “each student has just a little time slice to talk” message in which it would be considered weird for any student to stand up and make a substantive ten-minute challenge to what the professor is teaching. After one or two minutes, such a student would probably be cut off by the professor, who might do something like continue lecturing or ask some other student for his opinion. Then there's the fact that if your professor is giving you a grade, you may feel he will grade you more poorly if you challenge his teachings.

What are the output products of these type of science graduate schools? The output products are too often what we may call sheepentists, a word that can be constructed from the word “sheep” and the word scientist. A sheepentist is a scientist that has been conditioned to be a meek creature of the herd. He will move in whatever direction the members of his science herd are moving in. If a particular theory becomes fashionable among scientists, a sheepentist will be sure to parrot the claims of that theory. 

But how might we teach scientists differently? You might start with the textbooks. The first step would be to abolish the use of fixed hardcopy textbooks in science classes taught in graduate schools, making all books online. The second step would be to create a system whereby student comments could be anonymously inserted anywhere in the text of a textbook. Whenever any student read a claim in a textbook that he felt was dubious or unsubstantiated, the student could insert into the textbook his comments or rebuttal, at exactly the point in the textbook the claim was made. Any such insertions would be permanently preserved in the textbook, so that, for example, if a textbook was used in 2017, 2018 and 2019, then in 2019 students would read (in the middle of the text) all comments made by students in the previous years of 2017 and 2018.

Such a system presumably would not work in high school, and perhaps not even for freshmen college classes – since the text might be cluttered by junk anonymous comments. But presumably by the time someone has entered graduate school, we can assume that he will not be submitting sophomoric or obscene comments to be read by future students. Anonymous comments would be vital to allow people to express opposing opinions without fear of being socially ostracized or peer-pressured within the small subculture of the science graduate school. Some computer software could assign academic credit based on the number and length of comments a student added, giving an incentive for students to insert critical comments into the textbook.

Imagine the benefits of such a system. Now instead of being spoon-fed some “official party line” of truth written only by some conformists, our science textbook reader in graduate school might now get a full spectrum of opinions.

Another improvement would be a system of real-time anonymous feedback from students, which can easily be done using Internet technology. As a professor was droning on to his students, his slide show presentation might be interrupted by popup messages telling him his presentation was useless or unfair or unintelligible.  Also, allow any independent-minded student to opt-out of receiving professorial instruction, by using online options and self-study options (preserving in-class testing). 

Another way of diminishing the “conformity factory” aspect of science graduate schools would be to allow students to choose their own projects for a master's thesis or a doctoral thesis, without getting approval from professors. Requiring approval from professors discourages paradigm-challenging research projects, and encourages “same old same old” type of research. Let a vote of 3 graduate students be sufficient authorization for a master's thesis project or a doctoral thesis project.

Another way of diminishing the “conformity factory” aspect of science graduate schools would be to create a system of frequent public debates inside the school. All of the key assumptions that are rarely questioned would be publicly debated. For example, in a biology school there might be frequent debates such as this:

Do We Really Understand the Cause of Biological Complexity?

Does Your Brain Actually Produce Your Consciousness?

Are We the Only Intelligent Species in Our Galaxy?

Is DNA Actually a Blueprint for Making a Human?

Do We Actually Understand What Causes a Fertilized Egg to Become a Baby?

Are Mental Illnesses Primarily Biological in Origin?

Are Genetically Modified Foods Potentially Hazardous?

Do We Have a Credible Theory for the Origin of the Human Mind?

The debates might be between two contestants, the first having 40 minutes, the second having 40 minutes, and both having 15 minutes for rebuttal. One contestant would argue the “Yes” side and the other the “No” side. A contestant might be either a student or a professor. Academic credit could be given for any students participating as a debate contestant. A winner would be awarded for each debate, based on anonymous audience judging of which contestant won. Extra academic credit would be given for any student who was judged the winner of a debate in which a professor was the opposing contestant.

So if you were a student you might get 3 academic credits for being a contestant in a debate, and 6 academic credits for winning a debate in which a professor was your opponent. This would create an incentive for nonconformity and opinions challenging conventional wisdom, one that would help to counteract the enormous conformity pressure in science graduate schools. Students could also be given academic credit for simply attending a certain number of debates, which would help to make sure that they were exposed to both sides of issues.

These are only some ways in which our current “conformity factory” science graduate schools could be reformed to produce outputs other than conformist “sheepentists” who act like followers of the herd. Among the outputs of such improved schools might be bientests (scientists who have been educated in both sides of controversial issues) and defyentists (scientists who defy unwarranted but entrenched assumptions of the scientific community). If you don't like the idea of creating defyentists, you might want to study tech culture, which currently assigns a great value to what is called disruptive innovation. We need science graduate schools that will generate more disruptive thinkers who will challenge the ossified complacent assumptions of the science priesthood.