When Progressives Promote Creationist Religion
New Zealand is Ridiculed for Equating Mythology with Science
The horseshoe theory in political science is that the political spectrum is not a straight line but a horseshoe. The further one moves to the extreme left the more one resembles the extreme right, and vice versa. Today’s extreme progressivism, especially those steeped in postmodernism identity politics, exhibits characteristics traditionally associated with the extreme right. These include censorship, dogmatism, suppression of freedom of speech and beliefs, racial essentialism and antisemitism, and skepticism of science. Some, including the late social and political philosopher Eric Hoffer, would argue that this has always been the case.
A recent well-publicized example of this is where, in the name of social justice and reparations, progressive social justice activists in New Zealand are working to insert fundamentalist creationism religion into public school science classes. This is something you would expect not from the political left but from Fundamentalist Evangelical Christians.
New Zealand was settled by humans relatively recently. East Polynesian ancestors of today's Māori came to New Zealand in the fourteenth century. New Zealand was colonized by the British in the nineteenth century. Today, New Zealand’s official language is English, about seventy percent of New Zealanders are of white European heritage and about sixteen percent are Māori (15 percent are Asian and 9 percent are other Pacific peoples).
The white European migrants often mistreated the Māori and wanted them to assimilate into white European culture. As with other countries, there has been an awakening to this history, and New Zealand has worked at reparations and reconciliation. This includes giving the Māori more rights and centering Māori people and culture.
Traditional Māori culture is much like that of other ancient ethnoreligious and aboriginal belief systems, including the Ancient Greek, Egyptian and Celtic mythology, mystical Christianity and American Indian religions. It includes myth and folklore, gods and deities, spiritual mysticism, superstition, legends and astrology. It is creationist, with a myth about how the sky father and earth mother came into being.
Most agree that it is important for New Zealand’s public K-12 schools to teach students about the previously ignored Māori culture, history and beliefs. The issue of contention is that the New Zealand government is not only inserting Māori mythology into history, social studies and other humanities classes. It is inserting it into science classes. It promotes Māori religious myths as empirically equal to “Western science” and to be included in chemistry, physics and biology classes.
The below-linked article shows how Māori folklore and theism are to be introduced into chemistry and biology classes.
This all is no different than the government mandating that Catholicism, fundamentalist Islam or Ultra-Orthodox Judaism be inserted into public science classes.
It also exhibits a misunderstanding of what is science. Science, mathematics and logic are universal systems developed all over the world including the Middle East, Asia and Africa. There is no such thing as Western science, African Science, Chinese science or Aboriginal science. Science is science is science.
Two of the biggest objectors to this insertion of religion into science classes are the world’s most renowned evolutionary biologists and organized religion critics, Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne. Dawkins is a professor emeritus at the University of Oxford and founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation For Reason and Science. Coyne is a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago and the author of the book Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible.
Dawkins and Coyne support uplifting aboriginal cultures and including Māori culture in New Zealand schools. However, they argue that religion has no place in physical science classes and that it is ludicrous to equate it as empirically equal to science. Coyne has regularly covered this issue in his popular blog, Why Evolution is True.
Coyne in part wrote: “I cannot abide the insistence that Maori ‘wisdom,’ which is a combination of mythology, religion, and questionable assertions about the Universe, be taught as scientific truth. As the saying goes, ‘You are entitled to your opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts. Clearly, this drive to incorporate indigenous beliefs into the science curriculum is part of an effort of the government and universities to placate and make reparations to the Maori, who were badly treated by European colonists. I applaud the drive for comity, but I deplore those who want to replace modern science with a melange of myths and faith."
In an open letter to the Royal Society of New Zealand titled, “Myths Do Not Belong in Science Classes,” Dawkins wrote, “(N)o indigenous myths from anywhere in the world, no matter how poetic or hauntingly beautiful, belong in science classes. Science classes are emphatically not the right place to teach scientific falsehoods alongside true science. Creationism is still bollocks even it is indigenous bollocks."
Numerous scientists and academics have argued that the insertion of myth into science and calling science “oppressive to minorities,” will set back science and science education in New Zealand. And, often attributed to the use of such postmodernist ideas, New Zealand’s literacy rates and public school education scores have dropped dramatically in recent years.
In response to the move to insert religion into science classes, seven prominent New Zealand academics signed an “In Defense of Science” public letter claiming that Māori mythology “falls short of what can be defined as science” and that placing indigenous knowledge on the same level of science in science classes would patronize and fail indigenous populations. The letter is reprinted here.
The reaction from the progressive establishment was swift. The letter signers were ad hominem attacked, publicly called bigots and racists. The Royal Society of New Zealand launched an investigation into the two authors of the letter, biological scientist Garth Cooper and philosopher of science Robert Nola, both professors at the University of Aukland and members of the Royal Society. As is typical in these types of public attacks, the letter writers and signers were accused of causing “harm.”
Numerous claimed the ongoing investigation was an attack on free speech and that scientists were being punished for defending science and evolution. Many academics and teachers have privately said that they strongly disagree with New Zealand's anti-science movement, but are afraid to speak for fear of being attacked and called racists.
The philosopher stoned for his defense of science - Free Speech Union (fsu.nz)
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International Pushback and Ridicule of New Zealand
Along with the megaphones of Coyne and Dawkins, there has been international bad press, pushback and even ridicule of New Zealand’s move to insert mythology into science. Coyne wrote that the Royal Society of New Zealand was in danger of becoming “a laughingstock.”
Seventy-three Royal Society fellows signed a motion of no confidence in the Society, and renowned American theoretical physicist and public science literacy advocate Lawrence Kruess wrote an in-depth critique. Both are linked below:
Letter to the Royal Society signed by 73 members
"Indigenous Myth and Science: From Egypt to New Zealand" by Lawrence Krauss
This has apparently embarrassed the Royal Society, and it removed from its website the public letter of censure of the letter writers. However, the whole bruhaha and questions of how to teach science in New Zealand continue.