If you are of Epicurean persuasion you have to have sympathy with the fundamentalist pastors and professors in Christian colleges and churches in America. All their lives they have believed in the literal words of the old testament. They have preached it from the pulpit or have taught it in class (I am not saying that all teachers in dedicated Christian colleges have fundamentalist beliefs – clearly that would be untrue).
By now it is clear that the Earth was not created in seven days, that it is not six thousand years old and that the old testament is an anthropamorphic, self-contradictory collection of folklore, some of it very violent, that seeks to explain the world to a collection of iron age wandering tribes. Even given that the scriptures are thought to have been written ages after the events depicted (while the Hebrews were in captivity in Babylon), it is remarkable that they survived. But they are the work of man, with all the fallibility of his memory.
What do you do in the middle of a sermon or a semester? Suddenly announce that after all the Earth is 13 billion years old, that life on the planet derives from sea creatures, and that human beings gradually evolved from apes over a million years? Imagine the uproar! For a start, you would be shunned in the community, and possibly lose your job. No. In the face of overwhelming evidence you have to continue to be consistent or lose credibility and livelihood. You continue with the old discredited explanation of life on Earth. Truth is too troubling.
Thus, young people in 2015 are still being taught that Darwin was some sort of misguided devil and that some obscure and complicated part of the human body proves that human beings were put on Earth by an intelligent creator (must be male and white) only six thousand years ago. Thus, ignorance is perpetuated and may never be eliminated. All this has nothing to do with science – it is to do with tribal belief and inertia. It is frowned upon by modern Catholics for bringing religion into disrepute and by other Christian denominations for not being Christian anyway.
The malaise afflicting much of America is one of poor education.
Recently, my wife and I walked round the campus of MIT in Boston. What struck me was the small percentage of white men and women among the hordes of students milling around. Most semed to come from South East Asia. We later talked to a member of staff who told us it had been this way for years. Meanwhile, a disproportionate amount of the technological work done in Silicon Valley is done by Chinese or Indian immigrants. (A similar situation can be found in Europe.; it isn’t only the US).
We all have some misgivings about where technology is going and what it is doing to ordinary human beings. But, like it or not, technology is driving the economy, and for that you need educated, trained people. The agonising over the quality of American education is a sign that the challenge has been recognized, if not overcome. But when you have swathes of the country where the opinions of pastors take precedence over those of the educated teacher, you will gently sink into irrelevance.
If fundamentalist Christianity is having a bad effect on education (which I believe it is) then how do you explain the underrepresentation of whites in European technology? In Europe, Christian fundamentalism is far less mainstream.
An interesting point. Do you have statistics on that? I haven’t seen any commentary on it, although I am aware that the British are pretty pathetic when it comes to anything technical these days. That goes back many years. But I wan’t aware that non- Europeans dominate technology in Europe.
It was you who said that “a disproportionate amount of the technological work done in Silicon Valley is done by Chinese or Indian immigrants. (A similar situation can be found in Europe.; it isn’t only the US).” I was wondering why you thought that?
I stand corrected. I did say that and thought I had excised it, because I didn’t know what proportion of Indians and Chinese are involved in hi- tech activities in Europe. I intended to take it out., and must have benn distracted. Well spotted!