Synogenes.com

It is welcome news that the European Court of Human Rights has ruled against the display of crucifixes in classrooms in Italian schools, on the grounds that it violates the rights of parents to educate their children as they see fit, but more importantly, that it violates the child's right to freedom of religion.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8340411.stm

If schools decided to inculcate in children political beliefs in the same way as church schools indoctrinate children into irrational religious beliefs, there would be a massive public outcry. The schools would be charged with manipulating children, even abusing them. Somehow, our societies grant a free pass to churches to do the same thing with religious ideas.

In Italy now, catholicism is no longer the official state religion but the crucifixes remain. In countries such as Spain, there is an ongoing conflict between the secular state and the catholic church. There, the catholic church has benefited massively from a default tick box on tax forms which channels funds destined either for charity or the church itself. Even priests were paid for by the state. And despite formally being a secular state, the church still has a very strong involvement in education.

In the UK, the growth of faith schools increases the likelihood of religious indoctrination of children. Almost every new school now has a religious involvement despite education being officially secular.

It will be interesting to see how other countries react to the ruling. Although some have been only too willing to campaign against the wearing of islamic dress in schools, they've often shied away from including crucifixes, yarmulkas, fish badges and the like. But surely there's a difference between the individual expression of a religious belief, and the public display of an institutions support for it when that institution is entrusted with the education of children?

We should be teaching children to be critical when presented with irrational religious ideas. They should be able to think critically about them, understand their social and political significance, understand their consequences. They need to know about religions but that emphatically means not educating them into religions.

A recent Ipsos Mori poll commissioned by the British Council asked whether or not creationism should be taught alongside evolution in British schools. A staggering 54% agreed that "Evolutionary theories should be taught in science lessons in schools together with other possible perspectives, such as intelligent design and creationism."

Up till now the UK government has rejected the accounts of intelligent design and creationism as being unrecognised as scientific and therefore having no place in a science classroom.

The question though is why so many people can give credibility to such ideas? The notion of intelligent design argues that everything in the world is fulfilling some predetermined plan, that randomness is not a driving force in nature. This contradicts the evidenced mechanism of natural selection, the motor behind evolution.

When people have such little understanding of evolution, they can easily be led to consider it as simply a theory. But evolution is a fact, not a theory. Evolution is a fact with incontrovertible evidence.

The action of natural selection based on random mutations, in the development of species is now so well evidenced that it too is a fact. These are every bit as much facts as is gravity, the refraction of light, magnetism, or photosynthesis.

When evolution is demoted to the rank of just an idea, merely a theory, the door is opened to unevidenced ideas as if they are of the same rank, of the same validity.

We need to get across the idea that theories are derived from data, that they have to explain the data, and make testable predictions. Anyone can invent a story and creationism is just such a story. But there is a crucial difference between creationism and evolution and that of course is the evidence.

Considering creationism as a theory implies that it has some predictive power, that it adequately explains the data, when in fact it is nothing of the sort. It is nothing but a story. The questionnaire used the word perspective to describe creationism, rather than the word theory. One wonders what the results of the survey would have been if they had more accurately described it as a story.

Over the last few years there has been a growing availability of university courses and degrees in Complementary and Alternative Medicine, CAM, but recently there have been moves to examine the content of the courses.

Dr David Colquhoun has been using the Freedom of Information Act to request information about the course contents from a number of universities and has been met with a blank refusal. But David Colquhoun, being the way he is, insisted, appealed, won, and has obtained some frighteningly irrational content.

The quacklash has awakened some of the university administrations who, although they want to exploit the revenue stream coming from low grade private institutes, by validating degrees in CAM, are now seriously embarrassed by course content that includes crystals, magnets, healing energy, and the like.

All UK universities have now stopped issuing BSc degrees in homeopathy - doubtless on the grounds that it is difficult to award a science degree to a non-science, and to examine something with no real content. Some others have halted enrollment into the CAM courses in recognition that there is an academic standards problem. But some shameless institutions are trying to shy away from scientific scrutiny by rebranding the degrees as BAs. As if it is possible to hide lack of content by calling them arts courses.

But what happens to the students, those well-meaning folks who thought they would build themselves a career helping people, students who accepted that if they obtained a degree from a university they could expect to have received a university education. Instead they come out with a piece of paper stamped by a university that has woefully compromised its academic standards for commercial reasons. They will have been taught unregulated content with no scientific basis whatsoever, sat examinations which were marked outside of the university, based on course materials that the university may not even have seen. Their qualifications are a testament only to their deception.

Nevertheless, they will go out into the world, opening businesses and treating people as if their training meant something. They will call themselves healers and therapists, they'll display their certificates on the wall, and start taking money off people who know even less about human biology than they do. The deception of pseudoscience is given commercial respectability by the woeful negligence of the university administrators.

Many universities subcontract both the teaching and the examining, charging for the university stamp. The University of Wales for example validates 34 outside institutions and collects over £5 million per year.

It is to be hoped that the very many principled scientists and others who teach in universities, will wake up to what is going on and start to publish the irrational course content of these pseudoscience courses. Maybe that will embarrass the universities into keeping up their academic standards and will stop them deluding paying students into believing that they have had a university education in pseudoscience.