Mr. Moderate

I have written two recent posts, one about the lost art of logic and the other about young Earth insanity, where I discussed a recent poll reported in USA Today that claimed 66% of Americans now believe “that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” In this third post about that same poll result I’m going to discuss the long-term implications for this rise of fundamentalist religious belief in our nation’s population. What it really amounts to is a national death wish, as such beliefs require the abandonment and rejection of scientific thinking. This leaves science to “those other countries” which have no religious restrictions on scientific advances, most importantly nations like China. As China becomes the leading scientific power over the next few decades, it will take over the leadership of the world, and will eventually be in a position to dictate its policies to the west, including the United States.

Is this what you folks really want to see happen? Do you want to abandon the world to a Chinese hegemony of scientific power?

I grew up near the University of California, Irvine, which is located in the wealthiest part of highly-conservative Orange County, California. Recent statistics show that over 50% of the students at that campus are Asian or Asian-American. An hour’s drive inland at the University of California, Riverside, it is over 40% Asian or Asian-American. Systemwide, about 34% of undergraduates are Asians even though only about 13% of the population of California is Asian. (See HERE and HERE.)

Now, I have nothing at all against Asians or Asian-Americans. I quote the numbers above to note the decreasing number of traditional white Americans who are interested in pursuing a top-notch university education, particularly in science or engineering (the primary disciplines pursued by the University of California system; about 75% of undergraduates, as reported HERE). For comparison, we can look at Biola University, which reported for the 2006 year that 12% of its students were Asian (HERE). “Biola University is a private Christian university founded in 1908 and located in Southern California.” As Americans increasingly reject science, they are sending their kids to more religious universities which will promise to not fill their heads with faith-destroying scientific doctrines. And Biola isn’t at all unique. Virginia has two well-known religious universities: Regent University (founded by Pat Robertson) and Liberty University (founded by the late Jerry Falwell). And South Carolina is the home to the infamous Bob Jones University. All of these Christian universities are more dedicated to turning out faithful Christians than they are to turning out people dedicated to deep understanding of science.

Right wing pundits like Bill O’Reilly have proclaimed that America is embroiled in a culture war. O’Reilly’s book, Culture Warrior, is typical, touting religious faith first and demeaning science and scientific method, weather it discusses evolution or global warming. What O’Reilly fails to recognize is that by bringing science and scientific method into disrespect, he is actually signing the death warrant for the United States as a sovereign nation.

For more than two centuries, the economic engine that is the United States has been fueled by invention and scientific innovation. This has also allowed the United States to prevail in those wars where organized military forces confronted each other. (The exceptions are the Vietnam War and the current War in Iraq, both of which were largely waged as disorganized insurgencies against the organized US military.) But for the past 3 to 4 decades, the number of American graduates of “hard science” and engineering educational programs has greatly declined. Meanwhile, the number of foreign graduates of those same programs has greatly increased.

But whether those graduates stay in the United States after graduation is largely controlled by where the jobs will exist for them. If we take stem cell research as an example, the refusal of President Bush to allow federal funding for stem cell research means that more of those scientific jobs will be created overseas and fewer will be created here in the United States. And it is not hard to predict that if the Republicans ever manage to again control both the White House and the Congress, we may well see legislation which flatly outlaws embryonic stem cell research in the United States, in spite of voter-approved measures to permit (Missouri), or even fund (California), such research.

But the stem cell debate is only the tip of the iceberg. The next layer down concerns controversy over global warming. You might make a moral argument about the need to kill human embryos to perform embryonic stem cell research. But how do the right-wing Christians justify disrespecting scientific findings of global warming? Right-wing pundits like O’Reilly call scientific findings about global warming “junk science.” They do that over and over again so that the association gradually builds up in the minds of the majority of Americans. The end result is that fewer and fewer Americans are opting to study science or engineering since they are understood to be “junk” fields which do America harm rather than good.

But is this really good for America to think this way? OF COURSE NOT!

While the leadership in Iran may be trying to re-institute 7th century social policies, they are at the same time moving forward with 21st century scientific research into weapons technologies. And China is already nearly the equal of the United States in most scientific and engineering fields. If the United States is in the process of abandoning science and engineering, China is in the process of strongly embracing them. If you roll this process forward a few decades, it is easy to predict that the Chinese military will possess vastly superior arms to anything the United States has. If China should choose to use that military force in some way, how could the United States hope to prevail against both superior Chinese manpower and superior Chinese technology? The answer is that it can’t even hope to prevail, and if China wants to take over the USA, at that point we will be sitting here, ripe for the picking.

In other words, over the long run, rejection of science and engineering amounts to a suicide plan for America. This greatly concerns me. Does it concern you too?