In  Stephen Kinzer’s recent book “Reset: Iran, Turkey and America’s Future,” the author, writing as a regional expert in Middle East  history and politics, has attempted to formulate a new pathway for reconciliation in the Middle East, one that advocates a lasting peace and insures prosperity for the region, by reducing the tensions through recruiting two new players in the peace process that heretofore have not been inserted as major partners for a settlement. This new vision for peace, includes the participation of  Turkey and Iran as major players, two countries that would probably not be on the top of the list drawn up by most Americans. We are still locked in a mode in which we think negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel can lead to a magical formula for peace, but only if thousands of clauses and sub-agreements get adopted as conditions for talks or preconditions for peace. But Kinzer argues that until all the major players in the region are included, such negotiations are all destined to fail. He argues that a negotiation strategy between two partners only is completely naive and that the United States needs to more maturely step up to the plate and insist on a peaceful solution involving all those in the region, because the stakes are too high for the economies of the world to continue taking oil in exchange for arming every country to the teeth, in order to protect the national interests of each new nation that comes to the area looking for black gold. Furthermore, Kinzer argues that bringing in Iran and Turkey will make the peace process easier, though the United States will have to deal with Iran more effectively than what we have done to date, and a big step forward for that objective could be achieved if the U.S. stopped behaving like an emotional child towards Iran and finally recognized the fact that Iran is a major player, not a minor leaguer, and that our invasion of Iraq helped to make it that way. Are you listening Dick Cheney?

Continued conflict in the Middle East increasingly risks the danger of evoking a wider conflict between any number of countries that are increasingly competitive with one another in hopes of establishing oil contracts in the new cutthroat game of searching for scarce new oil and gas leases, as China, India, Japan, South Korea and many other countries have become and will continue to insist on being players in the region. The history of the United States in viewing Persian Gulf oil as something that it owns, sparked in part by the “Carter policy,” and preceded by FDR’s secret agreement with Saudi Arabia, forged in 1945, to provide their protection in exchange for rights to the Saudi oil fields–all that history seems to be the policy mantra that we are moving forward with, which cannot help but evoke serious conflicts in the future: not that the region needs any new ones. It wasn’t just 9/11 that changed things for us, it was the emergence of a new world-wide panic that we are headed for “global peak oil.”

Kinzer has written several books about the Middle East. One of my favorites is “All the Shah’s Men: an American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,” published in 2003 that explains how the CIA, at the request of the British Government, overthrew the democratically-elected Prime Minister, Mossadegh, in 1953 because he had nationalized what was then known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil company (today’s BP); the United States replaced him with the Shah (Mohammad Reza, the son of Reza Pahlavi), who in turn, was overthrown in the 1979 coup that led to the Islamic cleric Khomeini as Iran’s new leader.   The success the CIA had in overthrowing Mossadegh, served as the U.S. template for eliminating other democratic governments in favor of installing autocratic despots, especially in South American countries, beginning with Guatemala in 1954. The point of all this CIA intrigue was supposedly based on an assault against communism, but every American should know by now that it was really all about securing a favorable climate for American corporate interests. The Truman administration refused to act on the British outrage (Truman apparently admired Mossadegh), of the nationalized oil company, as they demanded return and control of Iranian oil. In fact, they had an embargo against Iran.   But, a few years later, during the Eisenhower years, when the CIA and the Secretary of State positions were occupied by  Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles (each of whom favored American corporate interests over the sanctity of internal nationalist movements), they agreed to help the British re-establish their control of Iranian oil. According to Kinzer, we are still paying the price for what we did in overthrowing Moassadegh in 1953. When the Iranians revolted against the Shah, the Mossadegh story was the first one they mentioned to their American captives. Americans didn’t find out about the CIA overthrow until 2000, when the New York Times got hold of a secret CIA document and published the details of the story.

In his book “Reset,” Kinzer takes us through the early 20th century history of Turkey, the first democratic Muslim state and Iran, a more troubled country, but one with deep democratic instincts, as we all witnessed by the turmoil that took place following last year’s presidential election. In the 1920s, both Turkey and Iran generated leadership who were committed to advancing their countries through a pathway of secular modernity. In the case of Turkey, it was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, made famous by his military success at Galipoli,  who led Turkey from its planned destruction and occupation by the victors of WW I, through a decisive military victory over the Greek army,  followed by the consolidation of modern Turkey into a secular state. For Iran, the new leader to emerge was Reza Pahlavi who wanted to help modernize Iran through the formation of a secular state, using the Turkish model he admired. However, Reza had to settle for a new monarchy in which he was crowned king, as the 132 year old Qajar dynasty was abolished. The difference between the two countries was that Mustafa Kemal was successful in unseating the power of the clerics in Turkey, whereas Reza had to accommodate the religious leaders, which remains today as one of the fundamental differences between the two countries. But, as Kinzer points out, we need to form relationships with large countries that are committed to peace and democratic reforms. Turkey is already there and could be the first Muslim c0untry admitted to the European Union. They also have good relationships with Israel and they have gained experience in their diplomatic dealings with neighboring countries. Iran right now is a conflicted state, but one that cannot be ignored as a major player in any peace settlement for the region. Kinzer suggests that it may not be possible to deal with Iran right now, but our hardline attitude towards the country only insures that hardliners within Iran will have the advantage of leadership, much like how our attitude towards the Soviets during the Cold War extended the lifespan of their dictatorship; we surely prolonged the life of the Soviet Communist state through our obsessive confrontational policies.

Now is the time to recognize that the primary result of our invasion of Iraq was to strengthen the hand of Iran, who has become a far more important player in the region in the post-Iraq invasion world; our actions served to push Shiites in Iraq into leadership positions, and they have established friendly relationships with Iran. That’s as it should be and there’s no getting around it.  That train left the station the moment we entered Iraq and declared war on the Bathists. Today, we continually tell ourselves that our main fear is that Iran may be enriching Uranium on its way to building nuclear weapons. But there is very little evidence supporting that view and Iran is a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which,  neither Israel nor India has signed.  In reality, what we are worried about with Iran is having a hostile country that is too close to our prized partner in oil production–Saudi Arabia. We had relied on the Shah of Iran, whom we armed to the teeth with American weapons, to serve as our surrogate army in the Middle East. But with the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, something that dumbfounded our State Department,  together with the humiliation we endured when our embassy workers were kept hostage for more than a year, Iran quickly converted from friend to foe and ever since we have reacted like an emotional child to Iran, insuring that they in turn react emotionally towards us. Bush calling Iran a member of the “axis of evil” was hardly realistic or knowledgeable about our mutual history. But any realist can see that no peace settlement in the Middle East is possible without the inclusion of Iran as a major player and we have to recognize that our best partner for approaching the peace process is  Turkey. So we should be doing everything we can to facilitate Iran’s conversion to a more cooperative partner, and engaging Turkey as a full partner, not a messenger boy.

Few Americans are aware that Iran has been very cooperative with America in the post-9/11 era. Iran is a bitter enemy of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In the months following 9/11,  Iran and American officials met constantly. At the request of the U.S., Iran expelled hundreds of foreigners within its borders that the U.S. believed were connected to the Taliban or al-Qaeda.  Iran connected the U.S. to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan,  which we engaged to fight a proxy war in that country. In early 2003, after Bush’s silly “axis of evil” speech,  Iran tried to approach the United States in a cooperative mode. They proposed comprehensive talks and laid out an agenda in which the United States would end its “hostile behavior” towards Iran, lift the economic sanctions, guarantee Iran access to peaceful nuclear technology and recognize its legitimate security interests. In exchange, Iran offered to do the two things demanded of them by the U.S.: full transparency in its nuclear program and the elimination of any material support for militant groups in the Middle East, specifically referring to Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This was the most forward-looking proposal that the U.S. had received from Iran in a quarter century and quite astonishingly (maybe not so surprising when you think about the American actors on the stage at the time), Bush turned the offer down because he and his cohorts wanted to destroy Iran not compromise with it. It is is simply mind-boggling to think that GWB would  turn down the Iranian offer for negotiations on the very issues we claimed were important to us, and all of this took place after he had given his axis of evil speech. It is sometimes hard to know whether the destructive hard line attitudes that prevent reproach between the two countries belong to the U.S. or Iran. Perhaps a little of both. But if our objective is that of establishing peace rather than dominance, we must recognize that Iran cannot be left out of the equation. I haven’t done justice to Kinzer’s book “Reset,” but it’s a fascinating read and brings a whole new perspective to the  equation table that we will need before we have a legitimate and just fix for the Middle East. One of the problems we face in confronting issues of the Middle East is that of basic competency and judgment on the part of our State Department. Kinzer talks about the acute need for sage officials among our diplomatic corps, and stresses a time when we did have a better, more informed State, which had a more longitudinal view of the world. As he talks about the need for more cultural knowledge of Iran, he quotes Nassir Ghaemi who is knowledgeable about both countries. Ghaemi points out that i) Americans are willing to compromise principle for results; Iranians are willing to sacrifice results to principle; ii) Americans worship the future, Iranians the past; iii) Americans value forthrightness and simplicity while Iranians prefer complexity and iv) Americans have imbibed science while Iranians have done the same with literature. Yet, despite these cultural differences, Americans and Iranians have far more in common and it is this larger, common set of values that should bring Iran and America into a much closer alignment, particularly when thinking about the gravity of the issues that must be solved if more serious conflict is to be avoided.

RFM

A large sector of the research biologists in this country work in universities and feel comfortably isolated from the outside world, by the friendly surrounds provided by students and colleagues who share a common set of interests and commitments, though not necessarily a common political and social identity. But, it’s good enough for government work. Most research university campuses have a decidedly blue color to their political slant, if for no other reason than their support is very dependent on the Federal government. For the students, the coloration is often not quite so clear, though it seems to be shifting towards the blue end of the visible spectrum.  Expanding knowledge is a serious commitment for the research university  and has been hugely beneficial to American industry, public health and social progress. But the university environment is in many ways an odd place, something like an ancient castle, surrounded by a virtual moat to protect those within, well separated from those that are hostile to its purpose and mission. Sometimes I wonder if we don’t feel a little like the Irish monks must have felt in the medieval monasteries when they were the sole scribes of knowledge and scholarship, isolated from a more hostile and ignorant world, with their monasteries often perched on islands for their protection and life-long sanctuary.  While it is not always apparent, the attitude inside the castle of today is that of a serious learning environment on a crash program and a deep thirst for new knowledge,  with the campus insulated by the  virtual moat which protects the interior from the most culturally destructive forces in the country.

The crazies in America, on the outside of the moat looking in, include the religious fundamentalists, the born-again Christians, the right wing fringe groups, the skinheads, survivalists, neonazis and other white nationalists to name just a few.  Individuals from any of these groups may cross the moat and enter the castle, but thus far, the larger movements supported by these groups have not penetrated with sufficient force to change the mission, not nearly as much as they would like. But the university inside is not self-sufficient. Our research can only proceed with Federal support and already, in the case of stem cells or particle physics, these outside forces have helped to diminish the image of America as home to  the greatest centers  for science in the history of Homo sapiens. That image is fading rapidly, perhaps even gone for those living outside of America.

For any single researcher, there was a shared attitude that, as long as these outside  groups didn’t interfere with things, like the funding of science and the function of the university, they could get as large and as obstreperous as they wanted: under the most drastic of conditions, most university professors foresaw that the virtual moat would continue to serve its ancient function and people inside could continue to do science. As long as funding for research was maintained, the country could go into a state of political apoplexy and scientists  would still sleep well in Mudville that night. As bad as things might get, scientists could go to bed each night knowing that the Federal government needed them just as much as they needed funding from the government to keep their research enterprise afloat–interdependency–that was the original contract. This relationship of interdependency began at the close of WW II and the contract was more favorably redrawn after Sputnik I in 1957. But,  in the 1990s  some uncertainties began to creep into the formula. And, in the first year of the new millennium, the crazies won the presidential election and the Presidency of GW Bush began its vicious attack on science at nearly every level, including funding.

In the 1990s the interdependency between scientists and the Federal government began to change in fundamental ways. In 1993, Congress canceled the supercollider in Texas and put thousands of physicists out of work, drastically reducing particle physics in the United States as a viable discipline. But the more insidious and less direct impact on science was the changing way that Americans made money. As the corporate profits in America evolved from manufacturing to the financial service sector, the need for research and research universities seemed less apparent than it did when manufacturing was the more dominant form of capitalism in America: manufacturing companies recognized the value and need for scientific  research, since it would ultimately impact on the quality of their products or help them generate new ones. The same argument applied to health research. One can appreciate the vast materials science research that went into the Appolo Program for a trip to the moon, which resulted in many new manufacturing techniques and better knowledge of materials science such as ceramics. But the only research in the 1990s needed for the financial sector was market research–science was unnecessary, except that it might enhance the image of a country to invest in over that of another, or one currency to manipulate over another. International financiers no longer thought about national borders, but instead focused on corporate profits as internationalists: they insisted that corporate profits had to rise, just to keep up with Microsoft. These new internationalists seemed better at tearing companies apart than helping to make new ones, all under the false rubric of “increased efficiency.”

The shift in the major income stream for America in the 1990s left government advocates for research beginning to ask if government should be supporting research to the same level that seemed necessary in the past. Furthermore, the stimulus for initiating the “Golden Era” of the American research university was the Cold War competition with the Russians and the race to the moon in the 1960s. Biological research prospered in this period because Congress was more interested in funding medical research, since that’s what helped get them re-elected (“we are working on a cure for cancer”). But, with the Cold War over, combined with the reduced dependence on manufacturing, many in government, mostly Republicans, began to wonder if the government needed to support research anymore? Do you need to support university research when our economy is increasingly based more on financial markets that have less to do with ideas and new inventions and more to do with the advantages of capital in a market that seemed to have unlimited growth potential, with the new emerging markets in Asia and Russia?  Graduates from our elite universities went into the financial sector, committed to acquiring wealth early in their lives and far less committed to the concept of income distribution. They quickly learned the art of tearing things up to create personal wealth. As mentioned above, the first sign of this new emerging attitude was cancellation of the supercollider project in Texas in the early 1990s, an event which immediately threw thousands of physicists out of work and terminated America’s dominance in particle physics.

The past eight years under GWB produced a new low in the national climate for research. Before Clinton left office, he agreed with congress to double the NIH budget (1998-2003), and when Bush came in as President in 2001, he agreed to allow that process to go forward. So in 2003, as the NIH budget reached an all time high, Bush himself praised the doubling process and thanked his predecessor and Congress during his state of the union address. For a while it looked as though good research funding opportunities had returned and as a result, most universities hired new faculty, believing that the NIH doubling would be a new permanent part of the research climate. But, it didn’t work out that way. As soon as the doubling of the budget was completed, Bush began to apply draconian budget reductions to NIH, giving them an increase of ~1% each year, when NIH normally gets about 6.5% each year to help compensate for a higher rate of inflation in the industry of scientific research. In the last year of Bush’s 1% budgets, the NIH budget was less than what it would have been if it had not gone through the doubling period, but instead maintained on the traditional annual budget increase of 6.5% a year. The result of this process each year was to fund fewer and fewer grants.  So, on a budget promise that had encouraged universities to expand their research faculty, universities found themselves worse-off than ever and new faculty found it difficult if not impossible to get their research funded. Scientists found themselves writing grants, not scientific research papers, and a smaller and smaller pool of money was available to support scientific research and training.  The promise of Obama to restore funding for research to the highest levels in our history (as a % of the GDP), has brought a new sense of hope that research will resume, though a permanent scar and a sense of friction remains as to whether scientists can really trust the Federal Government as they once did, before the era of science politicization and before the crazies ran the country.

The government under Bush found ways to suppress scientific research and ushered in a new relationship that was profoundly different than that which scientists had enjoyed since the end of WW II. Under Bush, scientists were attacked from many different directions and in many different ways: for the physicist it was a loss of the “hole in Texas,” which took place before the presidency of GWB, but an action which anticipated the arrival of the Gingrich Republicans.  For the biologists the threat was creationism and its new moniker “Intelligent Design.”

It was Ronald Reagan, as governor of California, who launched the first volley against biological sciences by suggesting that creationism should be taught alongside science in the public schools: that was a thinly veiled attack on biologists and the biology teaching curriculum. Reagan’s suggestion was a trial balloon to see how well it resonated with his plans for a run at the U.S.  Presidency. He found that creationism could be a wedge issue, especially among the fundamentalists and born again Christians, whose numbers seemed to be on the rise. The promotion of creationism in the class room was going to serve as one of the initial thrusts for the Republican party to re-organize itself around wedge issues, some of which would appeal to Southern voters. As Reaganism was ushered in, he brought with him an innate hostility towards the research university that he carried over from his interactions with the California system, where he cut budgets, froze salaries and set that state on a new trajectory of diminished support for education, including increased tuition costs and ambivalence about having prestigious universities in the first place. Until Reagan, tuition in California colleges and universities was free. One of Reagan’s additional wedge issues was AIDS: he never mentioned AIDS until his friend Rock Hudson acquired the disease, late during his second term.  Reagan’s advisers encouraged him to treat AIDS as God’s punishment for homosexual promiscuity.  GWB modeled his presidency after that of Reagan and established a new trend of anti-science policies, that included his hostility towards the concept of global climate change and the World Health Organization.  Bush not only cut the budget of NIH, by slowing its rate of growth, but he instilled an anti-science mentality in the government that suppressed publications on global climate change and even forced some government scientists to change the title on their paper to avoid making too big a splash in favor of global warming. He also forced the Surgeon General to put his (Bush’s) name several times on each page, of his reports, so that the country would know who to thank for the information, as long as the reports dealt with material acceptable to the White House. While Reagan wouldn’t allow the Surgeon General to talk about AIDS until late in his second term, Bush didn’t allow the Surgeon General to talk about excessive sugar in the American diet for fear of alienating the American food industry. Under Reagan and Bush, the Surgeon General became the Surgeon Private.

Once the budget cuts (cut by reducing the increase below the cost of inflation) were put in place under GWB, the future for scientific research in America began to look increasingly dim: in many ways,  research science began to look as if it were headed for contract teaching and research.  Despite these early, shocking trends, scientists refused to criticize the government for fear of making their funding prospects even worse. In the middle of the Bush administration, I once gave a keynote lecture to a group of scientists at a scientific meeting, on how and why they needed to become science activists and speak out against the Bush policies.  That lecture was met by an eerie  silence,  except for one former communist attendee in the audience who seemed to resonate with it rather well—a woman I might add.

In the midst of daunting pessimism about the future, a funny thing happened, beginning in 2005. In that year, a famous trial took place in Harrisburg, PA over a case that began with the school board in Dover, PA; it was the first trial that tested the validity of Intelligent Design (ID) as a valid refutation of evolution and as something that should be taught in science classes alongside traditional biological views of evolution. This was an important trial, because the Supreme Court, in a decision in 1987 (Edwards v Auillard)  had already ruled that Creationism was not a science–it was a form of religion and had no place in the science curriculum–putting it there was a violation of the constitution, which provided separation between church and  state.  So, if the school board in Dover could prove that ID was something different,  scientifically meritorious, and could be classified as a science, then it could legitimately be taught alongside evolution in the classroom and this case had the potential of sweeping the nation into further degradation of the science curriculum in public schools. It would be one more giant step towards establishing America as a Christian Nation.

The facts behind this case are that the Dover school board itself didn’t want what they eventually got: when the discussions on this issue first surfaced in 2004, it was labeled as Creationism and everyone thought it would eventually get solved like all other cases, with a dash of embarrassment handed out, once the board came face to face with the 1987  Supreme Court ruling, of which they obviously had no knowledge when their deliberations first began. So, one expected that a few red faces would be handed out when the Supreme Court decision was made available to them and that would be the end of it. But then things changed. The More Law Center, a Christian Issues Legal group, heard about the case. They had been looking for a legal test case for Intelligent Design for several years and convinced the board to change their rhetoric to include ID and use the book “Of Pandas and People” to assert the validity of ID. Thus, the Dover board changed their promotion from Creationism to Intelligent Design and overnight Dover turned into an international show, with media attention from all over the world, as it focused on a single issue: did the book “Of Pandas and People” establish ID as a science so that its inclusion in the scientific curriculum could be justified? The transformation from Creationism to ID changed the trial into one of great national significance. Even George Bush weighed in by favoring the ID side of the debate.  The situation in Dover turned into one of the most celebrated trials of the Bush era and represented a showdown between the IDers and those who favored the traditional mode of teaching biological sciences with evolution and the process of natural selection as the central mechanism for all biological change: the trial became known as “Scopes II.” In a way this was also a referendum on the Bush Presidency, in the sense that his Presidency had served as an enabler for Christians to think more boldly about challenging legal restrictions on the insertion of Christian beliefs into the social and government fabric of the country. Dover would be also be battle ground for Bush’s war on science.

The Dover case began under obscure circumstances, when the school board passed a ruling that teachers in biology classes had to read a paragraph expressing the view that evolution was a theory, not a fact and that there were a number of holes in the theory of evolution. The students were invited to read an alternative point of view expressed in the book Of Pandas and People which was made available in the library. But, the three members of the board who voted against the proposal resigned from the board and the science teachers in Dover refused to read the paragraph to their class. Several parents organized an effort to sue the Board of Education and this case became known as Kitzmiller vs Dover. Both the ACLU, AAAS,  National Association of Biology Teachers and the National Center for Science Education joined the law suit for the plaintiffs. The More Law Center, the  Christian legal firm, handled the trial for the Dover school board, as they were instrumental in shifting the emphasis from Creationism to Intelligent Design. What was different and unique about this trial, was the quality of the arguments favoring evolution and disproving the case for ID. One of the unsung heroes of this trial was Eugenie  Scott from the National Center for Science Education. You can see her summary of some of the issues on YouTube. During the six week trial that ensued, Scott played a major role in selecting and coordinating the witnesses who were scientists that provided a beautiful and persuasive series of informed and often elegant discussions about the nature of science and the facts surrounding evolution. The list of prestigious scientists that came to testify represented a wave of biologists, many of whom traveled over the moat to engage and confront ID and disprove its claims.  Of course, the most convincing piece of evidence during the trial was provided by showing that “Of Pandas and People” came in two versions. The first version, published some years previous to the Dover case, had the words “creationism” whereas the second edition simply replaced those words with “intelligent design” making it rather easy for the judge to conclude that ID, as presented in the book, identified itself  as equivalent to “creationism” and therefore ID was nothing more than an attempt to insert a religious view into the science curriculum of the Dover school district. The scientists who testified not only excelled in presenting their views, but they discovered that the lay public were enthusiastic to hear their arguments and the judge himself was riveted to their testimony. There was a sense that the Dover decision, which declared ID to be a religious, not a scientific point of view, helped to turn a cultural corner and that perhaps the Bush attempt to Christianize the nation, and in the process to establish the Republican Party as a permanent ruling party, had utterly failed. The elections of 2006 and 2008 have verified how much of a corner had been turned though it is not possible to say how much impact the Dover decision had in helping America make an overdue left turn.

The Dover trial cannot be over-emphasized for its importance. Nova has produced an excellent docudrama of the trial and the National Center for Science Education has numerous publications on the Dover trial that can be accessed on-line. You can get to them through this site. As a result of the Dover trial, but also because of other similar cases, Eugenie C. Scott received the Stephen Jay Gould prize, awarded by the Society for the Study of Evolution, in recognition of how her “sustained and exemplary efforts have advanced public understanding of evolutionary science and its importance in biology, education, and everyday life.” She received high praise from  Scientific American, which listed her among the top 10 leaders who have “demonstrated outstanding commitment to assuring that the benefits of new technologies and knowledge will accrue to humanity.” That list also includes Bill Gates and Barack Obama. Chris Mooney has written a nice summary of Scott. Thanks to her, biological scientists can take greater comfort in crossing the moat to deal with prejudice and false ideas about science: such things still abound across America.

Eugenie C. Scott

The scientists who ventured over the moat of separation that has long existed between lay people and their own laboratory environments, discovered that people are hungry for knowledge when it comes from people who know what they are talking about; the trial of  Kitzmiller vs Dover pitted knowledgeable, informed scientists, who were comfortable with the fact that science doesn’t usually prove that something is right, but instead the role of science is to  look for new evidence that can be used  to further validate or invalidate a theory. The difference between the biologists and the IDers was plainly evident in the trial and powerfully visible for all to appreciate–the scientist is disinterested in whether his or her work confirms a theory (it’s typically more exciting to the individual scientist when it doesn’t), whereas the IDer only wants to accept the ideas that conform to their ideological beliefs, and more often than not, they have to distort the picture that is already in place in order to claim a kind of “gotcha.” That single difference is powerful–science has a binary output, but ID has only one result they can live with. That difference alone explains why we have understood the real world and the universe we reside in to an increasingly sophisticated degree of satisfaction, all achieved through the efforts of scientists working in the name of science. In contrast, we are about where we started 2000 years ago when we listen to Christians tell us about the origins of man and the birth of the universe. Go figure.
RFM

Most scientists that I know fall into the “closet” category of atheism, but I know few scientists who like to discuss the topic and many of them attend church or give nominal lip service to some sort of religious affiliation, for the purpose of belonging to ‘a larger social unit’ as it has been explained to me. The common scientific reaction to religion is that, because it is not a scientific issue, it is not proper to debate the matter as such. It’s neither possible to prove nor disprove the existence of God, therefore it is not an issue for science. But Dawkins wants the closet atheists to go another step. He asserts that, in the face of all the probabilities that God doesn’t exist, we should have denounced him as never having existed a long time ago. Science is in fact the process whereby we draw conclusions based on probabilities. Most things we think we know are probabilistic truths, like the structure of the atom, or the expansion and creation of the universe. We believe, with some evidence to support it, that our experiments and dialogs grow ever closer to the core nuggets of how things are organized and how they came about. I suspect that most religious people get the same satisfaction from the scientific explanations of things because either the Bible couldn’t address the issue or did so with completely erroneous derivations, like the age of the Earth and the fact that the Sun was supposed to revolve around the Earth, etc. Dawkins goes a step further. He asserts, that the probability of God’s existence is so minuscule, that the issue is like other probabilistic, scientific truths and we should treat it as such. Dawkins’ emphatic attitude about God as a scientifically valid issue of debate, when done on scientific terms, is beneficial not only to science but for society as a whole. Who could argue that, in America, the absence of a dialog about science within our political spectrum has allowed religion to gain an increasingly worrisome foothold and an expanding dominance in our culture. Would George Bush have invaded Iraq if he didn’t believe he was a prophet of God? I personally don’t think so, since religious convictions are the enemy of reason and that invasion was not supported by reason or logic.

Dawkins believes that raising children in a strict religious environment is a form of child abuse, since children are highly vulnerable to adult beliefs, as a spin off of their survivalistic gene pool behavior, which accepts adult beliefs as those that will provide the child with his/her best survival outcome. Religion becomes a vicious cycle, handed down from generation to generation, always taking advantage of the child’s vulnerability and apparent need to accept parental mores as their own adaptive strategy. Dawkins quotes polls which show that half the people in America look at the Bible as a literal document, which means that half the people in America haven’t read it. He goes on to conclude that the three Abrahamic religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam (perhaps a fourth with Mormonism), all sharing a monotheistic core, have done and continue to do more to inflame the world and suppress the growth of their constituents along the lines that evolutionary biology intended for them, as hominids, to express a natural curiosity about the world and the environment around them. Religion completely suppresses these more natural tendencies. 9/11 brought home the extremism of religious indoctrination that serves to prepare people for martyrdom, with the understanding that they will be given lots of virgins in the life hereafter for their noble deed. So, in one little belief system, we have martyrdom and gender exploitation all wrapped up into one.

I believe that our instantaneous anti-communist lurch, right after WW II, beginning with the death of Franklin Roosevelt and the beginning of the Truman presidency, eventually became a kind of national religion: and, it did so through the indoctrination process of children, aided by scary stories about atomic bombs and nuclear threats, holding drills where children had to get underneath their desks, preparing them for incineration in a fetal-like position, something totally absurd and designed solely for the purpose of scaring them into alignment with the Godless communist red scare of that era. This transition (wholly unnatural as Russia had been a powerful ally in defeating Hitler), was created by a huge effort from a small number of adults to get the country re-oriented to view communism as the Godless threat that it was before the war. But, it was greatly intensified because Russia at the end of the war had become a world power. Though this cultural lurch started with adults, it quickly spread into the lives of our children and, within a generation or so, created a much more unified culture which denounced Godless communism with knee-jerk mentality, just as people swear that the Bible is a holy book, or God created the universe in six days.

Richard Dawkins has written many other famous and popular books, including “The Selfish Gene,” published in 1976. and “The Blind Watchmaker,” published in 1987. “The Selfish Gene” has been an endless source of discussion and controversy by placing the emphasis on the evolution of the gene pool rather than the organism. It’s like the chicken is the egg’s way of making another egg. I personally resonate with this view (it isn’t so much a separate theory per se, but a way of viewing evolution through a different set of spectacles: the processes and outcomes remain as Darwin specified). Although this viewpoint did not originate with Dawkins, He has popularized the concept and emphasizes how it helps to account for mechanisms of socially adaptive behavior as an evolutionary outcome, obtained through natural selection, as first advocated in the sociobiology concept of E.O. Wilson.

When my wife Rosemary and I decided to start a family, eventually having two sons, we discussed the issue of religious upbringing for our children. I was very strongly opposed to any religious influence on their childhood; I wanted them exposed to a neutral climate on the issue, until they reached adulthood, when they could make up their own minds on the topic (of course the religions themselves make it hard to have inter-religious marriages and hence adult conversions are sometimes created out of this dilemma, committing young people to religion when they really didn’t want it in the first place). My own upbringing in a Mormon community in Salt Lake City Utah taught me about the atrocities of such indoctrination. Rosemary was not as dogmatic on the issue as I was and she wanted to find some sort of organization that could meet my insistence on the absence of religious indoctrination and her subscription to the idea that religion could be an organizational means of feeling part of a community. We explored “The Ethical Society” which was my favorite (and the place where we sent our children to pre-kindergarten), and several other quasi-religious organizations, like a nearby Unitarian Church. But we did not find a mutually agreeable common environment and, quite satisfactorily for me, we didn’t raise our sons under any hint of religious influence. In fact, their environment was quite the opposite. I took great pleasure one summer, when we gave permission for our youngest son, at age 13, to go to a summer camp with his friends for a few weeks, a trip that was organized by one of the local Lutheran churches. I didn’t realize that during the camping experience, one of the adult leaders would meet with the kids and try to indoctrinate them about the Bible and their belief in God. But our son challenged this leader from the start and kept the entire camp group up until the wee hours by holding his own about Biblical interpretations and the logic behind believing in God. I couldn’t help but laugh when thinking about the camp leader’s experiences, unexpectedly running into a young kid who challenged him in a way that might have caused him to challenge his own beliefs, had he not been already so heavily inculcated and indoctrinated with religion. But the conventional Lutheranism is mild compared to the Evangelical camp. If you want to see the process of childhood indoctrination, watch the documentary “Jesus Camp” where a Christian Madrasah is fully visible and quite disgusting to watch and contemplate the intellectual damage that is being done to these young children. As an adult, my youngest son is not a closet atheist, but he believes and advocates a firm conviction that God does not exist and is a preposterous invention that everyone should think about abandoning, like yesterday.

Now that my two sons are adults, I delight in discussing religion and all other aspects of the human condition with them, knowing that their biases are few and their insights are many. They are proof-positive to me, than when you strip religion away from our childhood experiences, religion itself would disappear or fade into the social background within a few generations. Under those conditions, the hatred and venom of religion would be stripped away, because, for religion to appeal to adults with no religious upbringing, they would have to drop their attacks on science, on other religions, leave out the fire and brimstone and appeal to people on the basis of advantages in joining a religion when people don’t have the reflexes of automated devotion. All religions know that their future depends on childhood indoctrination: the earlier the better. We complain about the Muslim Madrasahs as schools for indoctrination and breeding centers for terrorism, while completely ignoring the fact that our own religious indoctrination schools, most notably those of the Evangelicals, are just as mind-distorting, and through them we have also produced Christian terrorists and fanatics who have killed abortion providers, themselves living within the law of the land. If we didn’t have a public school system and other forms of public engagement, where the American Madrasah children could assimilate into a more balanced view of life, we could create a new Crusade against Islam, if GW Bush hasn’t done so already. Dawkins refers to the American Evangelicals as the American Taliban and who can disagree about the threat that this mentality poses to our culture. Who do you fear the most: al Qaeda or the American Taliban? Who will do the most damage to America? Who has done the most damage to our country as of today?

If you are an atheist, you are in good company. One of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and perhaps the greatest genius in all of our political history, was probably an atheist, judging by his own writings on the topic. But then, as today, it would have been political suicide for Jefferson to acknowledge his feelings on religion in a public way. In America we are creating a culture in which scientists are beginning to look and feel like prisoners or indentured servants. Science may be necessary for some things, but scientists themselves need to be kept away from us and certainly science should never be mentioned in our political dialog: science is the mortal enemy of the American Taliban. America is badly in need of another period of enlightenment. Perhaps if all the millions of closet atheists publicly declared their true beliefs, a new constituency could emerge, where competition would exist for the indoctrination processes of our children. According to Christopher Hitchens, in his book “Thomas Jefferson: Author of America”, Jefferson wrote to his nephew Peter Carr, in 1787, who had earlier expressed concern about religion and his own beliefs and Jefferson wrote, “If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in this exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you.” Amen!

This was all taking place during the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Alito Jr., whose confirmation was hailed as another step towards total victory for God’s army. Strict social and learning customs are enforced and most contemporary issues are considered evil. For example, Harry Potter is a taboo, as he would have been stoned to death in the days of the old testament for promoting belief in warlords. Creationism is emphasized while science is downgraded. These camps look for and promote those young kids who may have special talents for becoming evangelical preachers and one such young boy is identified. Several young kids get to speak and act out inspirational preaching. When you realize that most of these kids also get home schooling to further promote their religious zealotry, and the fact that evangelicals claim to have 30 million members, you can appreciate how polling data consistently shows that the majority of Americans believe that God created the universe and that creationism or intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution in science classes. International polls have revealed that Americans finished second to last among Western nations for identifying evolution as an established principal. I couldn’t help but get a kick out of the special prayers that were offered to God by Pastor Fischer, just before the camp began, imploring him to keep the lights on for the entire camp, only to see the lights go out during an electrical storm, which brought out the mischievous little kids with their flashlights.

At the end of the documentary, we get to see the now infamous Ted Haggard, who was then the leader of the National Association of Evangelicals. The documentary takes place before Haggard was defrocked for homosexuality and drugs, which took place after the release of the film (2006). In the documentary, we see Haggard preaching in Colorado Springs (a city that has the largest number of evagelical mega churches in the country) and it was emphasized that he was conversing on a weekly basis with GW and Cheney (once suspects that those conversations have ceased). Haggard appears in the movie as taunting and hostile towards the filmmakers, so it was more than a little gratifying to see him go through his self-inflicted humiliation. Haggard is now in “recovery” at the same Phoenix center that helped Jim Bakker get over his dilemma. But Haggard reminds us of something that will be with us for a long time to come when he said that if the evangelicals come out to vote, they will swing any election. So, right away, we have to imagine that Huckabee has 30 million votes waiting for him should he get the nomination. What is it that we are witnessing in these camps and through the eyes of evangelicals? Are these the yellow canaries in the mine hole of America’s future? Is it economical? Most of these evangelicals are in the heartland and many have southern lifestyles. Mid-Missouri was the site of the non-camp experiences, in regions where signs dot the roadsides promoting faith and Jesus. Have these people always been there and we see them now because they have learned how to organize into an effective political voting block? The fact that international polls show Americans declining in their appreciation of science over the past 20 plus years speaks to something other than just organizing a group of people that were always there, but muted. Their views are becoming more mainstream and they have a president to prove it.