Religious Education – the thin end of the Creationist wedge. Part Two

As you’ll see from the previous post, we were looking at schemes of work from the UK’s Education Department for the teaching of Religious Education (RE) for children of twelve to fourteen. In the last post we noted that the scheme of work for twelve year olds entitled “Where do we look for God?” used two philosophical arguments for the existence of a deity that twelve year olds would be unlikely to be able to critique; moreover, the scheme gave no guidance for teachers on the known flaws in these arguments, preferring to lead the discussion into realms of comparison between the two.

My argument was that, for the unwary teacher, this constituted the establishment in children’s minds of the idea that the existence of God was highly likely on philosophical grounds.

The next scheme of work is further along the RE syllabus. It’s called “Where did the universe come from?” and is aimed at thirteen to fourteen year olds, in their third year of secondary school.

Turning to the second lesson, entitled “Did God create everything, including us?”, we find that the idea behind it seems to be to get the students to examine various accounts of how the world came to be here, both scientific and religious. On the face of it, there’s no problem with that, but the suggested teaching activities propose that evolution and the Big Bang are introduced after a discussion of the chances of winning the National Lottery. It’s hard to think of a reason why you would do that, unless you wanted to sow in the students’ minds the idea that the scientific explanation is unlikely.

Of course, this is precisely what creationists believe about these two theories, which is what bothers me about the inclusion of this introduction. The tone of the whole document makes it seem in places as though the text has been imported from a United States curriculum, where opinions are much more polarised. The words “evolutionism”, “creationism” and “creationist” keep cropping up, and the choice between ideas becomes much more sharply demarcated than Britain’s tradition of liberal protestantism would allow.

The scheme advises that pupils read the creation account in Genesis and asks teachers to ensure that the language of the text is explored, giving the example of how the word “day” can be understood by a theist. I am suspicious of this line: it refers to the chapter in Genesis where God created the Earth in six days, and the only people I’m aware of who would concern themselves with this are biblical creationists, who wish to take Genesis literally, but who are bothered by the weight of evidence showing that a six day “creation” is nonsense. The number of people in Britain who believe this may be growing, but it is still small.

The final learning outcome for this lesson is that students should “understand that science leaves questions of ultimate meaning and purpose unanswered”. I object to the phrasing of this sentence: it would be more accurate to say that science does not concern itself with questions of meaning and purpose because of the difficulty of framing a testable proposition from them.

Of course, any RE syllabus has to have an enormously wide scope, having to cover everything from animism through metempsychosis to Zoroastrianism. There’s bound to be lots of things for an atheist like me to object to. If that is the case, why does this scheme of work restrict itself to an almost exclusively Christian, Bible-belt-versus-evolutionists world-view?

I would like to think that the folks at the Standards Site did what our education industry is so fond of doing, and borrowed ideas wholesale from the American education industry. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, the US state school system does not teach RE because of the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. This leads me to believe, because of the language used in certain places in the document, that the committee that assembled this scheme of work was under the influence of a creationist member among the many faith group representatives that were doubtless involved. This might not matter, but the existence of the wedge document makes me slightly paranoid about the whole thing.

Religious Education – the thin end of the Creationist wedge. Part One

After reading an article in the Guardian about the R.E. curriculum in the UK having a distinctly religious bent in this age of secularism, I took a look at the Standards Site, an online arm of the UK’s Education department which contains, among other things, schemes of work for teaching subjects in the National Curriculum, including R.E.

As the article in the Guardian explains, “Kids have a legally protected “entitlement” to religious studies, but there is no control over what is taught.” The scheme of work for religious education, downloadable from here, is a case in point. I got a nasty shock looking at it. Some of the units read as if they were written with the intent of introducing Intelligent Design into schools, and betray distinct traits of U.S. style old-Earth creationism.

The unit designed for teaching to children in their first year of secondary school is entitled “Where do we look for God?”. After a lesson or so on the nature of truth, the unit focuses on the question of whether the natural world can reveal God, and begins with a discussion of the argument from design.

This argument was famously articulated by philosopher William Paley in 1802, though in various forms, it existed much earlier. Paley pointed out that if one were walking along a heath and hit a stone with one’s foot, one would hardly bother to wonder how the stone got there. However, if the object struck had been a watch, the question asked would be very different, because the watch is clearly an object that has been designed, and that implies a designer. It could not have arrived in that location unaided, or by chance. Paley went on to argue that the complexity of the world, and in particular the complexity of living things required an intelligent designer. (i.e. God).

It should not surprise us to find that a scheme of work for RE requires us to look at the argument from design, what should surprise us is the way in which students are being asked to put forward both reasons why it might be true, and reasons why it might not. A “learning outcome” of this section is that the student should “write about the main arguments to prove God’s existence from the design of the world”. Forgive me, but isn’t this assuming that there is a design?

It may be that I am being too hasty, because the next section appears to bring relief: it’s about “problems posed by the argument from design”. Now students have to read material like a report of an earthquake, which shows that the world is not always wonderful and beautiful, and to examine the implications of this for the argument from design. It seems as though evidence for and against the argument are being presented.

Hold on, though. The idea that bad things can happen in it says absolutely nothing about whether the world was designed or not. This is not an argument against design, and although some of the students may realise that a God might allow bad things to happen as part of his mysterious purpose, they will probably not spot this. They are then asked to write down what they think of the argument, but without having been given the tools to critique it properly. Indeed, I think it’s unlikely that the average twelve year old could see the flaws in the argument, given that it’s fooled intelligent minds from Cicero onwards for at least 2000 years.

For a valid criticism of the argument from design we have to get a little philosophical. There are two objections. One is that, since the argument posits something that is designed, this necessarily requires a designer. To put it another way: the mere fact of using the word “design” implies that there was a designer. The argument has assumed what it seeks to prove, and is therefore circular.

The second objection is this: What is it more reasonable to assume: that a complex world just happens to exist, or that a complex creator just happened to exist beforehand to make it?
If we assume the first, then we must look for a mechanism by which the complexity came about. If we assume the second we must look for a mechanism by which the complex creator made the world and also how the (presumably more complex) creator came about. Occam’s razor tells us that it is best not to multiply hypotheses, so we plump for the first assumption unless and until we’re shown to be barking up the wrong tree – well, we do if we’re thinking rationally.

Call me Mr. Churlish, but I don’t think the twelve year olds are going to appreciate this ratiocination. It’s not on the scheme to be covered and it’s far more likely that they’ll just accept some version of the argument from design unless the teacher really knows what he or she is doing. This I doubt, as whoever downloads and uses this scheme of work is not likely to have intact critical faculties, as a glance at the next lesson shows.

This lesson, entitled “Can the universe reveal God” starts off by asking the teacher to use dominoes, or the game “Mousetrap” to illustrate cause and effect, then to introduce the cosmological argument for the existence of God. The argument goes like this:

Everything in nature has a cause, and nothing can cause itself; nor can a chain of causes be of infinite length. Therefore, there must have been a first cause, or Prime Mover – with most religious people taking this to be God.

Again, the problems with this argument are not something I would expect a twelve year old to be able to get at, and once again the scheme is strangely silent as to what the teacher might say to stimulate meaningful criticism of it. The students are asked to say why they think some people would say this doesn’t prove God’s existence, and might get as far as realising that “First Cause” does not necessarily imply God. They are unlikely to be able to get at the main problem with the argument: that the prime mover is somehow uncaused, despite the first premise stating that everything has a cause. To put it another way, the problem is that a series of effects, complex in nature must have been set in motion by a prime mover which was itself simple, and uncaused.

Fortunately, the scheme sidesteps these issues by telling the teacher to get the students to vote on which of the two arguments for the existence of God are the most convincing, and to display the results in a bar chart. Arguments for the non-existence of God don’t get a look in.

The result of learning via these schemes of work these could well be a group of schoolchildren who will have no intellectual defence against the idea of a God. A secularist would then be relying on that hoary mainstay against religious revival: apathy. This is something that will be sorely needed by the time the students reach the third year of secondary school, because the second unit to be taught in this year is “Where did the universe come from?” Of which, more next time, including the ineluctable seepage of creationism into British schools.

Madeleine Bunting

Friday’s Guardian carried an article in the “Comment is Free” section by Madeleine Bunting. She writes about Richard Dawkins’ recent debate with John Cornwell on the Today programme for 6th September. Ms Bunting alleges that Dawkins has “repeatedly refused a head-to-head with protagonists such as his Oxford colleague, Professor Alister McGrath”, and implies that this is the first such debate. She goes further, and says that the Today programme snippet shows him

1) “com[ing] over all conciliatory” under Cornwell’s challenge.

2) Making non-existent distinctions, as when she quotes him thus: “I never said religion was a disease, only “a virus”. She goes on to say that “It was a shame we didn’t have time to establish the fine distinction Dawkins was trying to make.” Implying, of course, that there was no such distinction.

The background to this debate is Cornwell’s book, Darwin’s Angel, in which he writes a riposte to Dawkins own God Delusion.

Ms Bunting’s article arouses the Sceptiphreniac’s ire for the usual reasons: blatant misrepresentation of the facts and outright untruths. As usual, the unfortunate recipient is the hapless British Public, who have to have read Dawkins’ works and sought out his debates in order to know that Madeleine Bunting is being less than honest.

Take her early point about Dawkins not debating his critics. I may have been deluding myself that Dawkins interviewed Alistair McGrath as part of his “Root of all Evil” TV series. Clearly this link to a video of said interview is a figment of my imagination. I also seem to recall hearing audio of a lengthy debate with McGrath at the Oxford Festival, but surely a humble blogger like me can’t know better than Ms. Bunting?

What about Dawkins coming “over all conciliatory”? Well, it seems that atheists have been “aggressive” and “shrill” in their attacks on religion, and that Dawkins’ conciliatory tone during the debate was “welcome”. I myself thought that this is how Dawkins always comes across when he speaks in public, but perhaps that’s my subjective opinion. On the other hand, Ms Bunting might think that statements like “There almost certainly is no God” and “religious ideas are outrageous violations of rational thought” are aggressive and shrill. To me they seem no more so than the polemics one encounters on Newsnight, or in the House of Commons.

Finally, the part of her article where Bunting accuses Dawkins of making non-existent distinctions: when Dawkins refers to religion as a virus, he is referring to the way that the ideas of religion propagate from mind to mind, not because they have any truth value, but because they possess characteristics that make people want to believe them and spread them. This is an example of one of Dawkins’ favourite topics, that of the meme, which he introduced in his 1970’s work “The Selfish Gene”.

Expert opinion appears divided as to whether the idea of a meme is a useful concept or not, but anyone who has read Dawkins’ works would know instantly that he was referring to the meme theory of idea dissemination, and could not possibly make the mistake of thinking that Dawkins was talking about religion being a disease. Only someone who was completely unfamiliar with Dawkins’ work could make such an error, with its obvious scope for, albeit unknowingly, setting up a straw man to attack.

Having only got as far in this critique as the third paragraph, I would be disinclined to read more on the very reasonable grounds that Ms Bunting was caricaturing Dawkins’ position in order to attack it.

Stressed benefits claimants must jump another hurdle

An article in the Observer today reports that Harrow Council has piloted the use of Voice Risk Analysis software in its benefit offices and found that, after its introduction “126 benefit cheats [have been caught] in just three months, saving [the] local authority £110,000″.

The VRA software “enables trained operators to identify suspect cases at the start of a claim, helping to keep fraud out of the benefit system”. It apparently does this by means of “thousands of mathematical calculations, resulting in the identification of different categories of emotional content.“

A device that makes so many mathematical calculations naturally arouses our respect, and you are probably now thinking “Wow, let’s roll out this technology across the country.” Before we do, it’s worth asking the question “What evidence is there that this technology can detect people in the act of lying?”

The answer so far seems to be “Not a lot”.

The use of electronic devices to analyse the human voice has a venerable history dating back at least thirty years. A range of industries, from insurance and banking to the legal profession claim to use some sort of voice analysis to carry out their work. There is an obvious law enforcement value in using such a device to detect when people are lying, and this is the reason so many police departments, particularly in the US have got in on the act. Despite this widespread adoption, a 2002 report “Voice Stress Devices and the Detection of Lies”, published by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) National Law Enforcement Policy Center concluded that the accuracy of devices then on the market was “modest to poor”.

Another test of two devices: the Vericator and the Diogenes Lantern concluded that “After reviewing the three technical tests performed, it could be stated that these two VSA units do recognize stress. Although these systems state they detect deception, this was not proven.”

To be fair to companies licensing voice analysis software, the IACP report rightly said that the dismal showing they’d seen so far did not preclude the invention of an effective “lie-detector” in the future. So, which system is Harrow Council using to catch its benefits fraudsters?

Well, the actual software Harrow uses has not been disclosed, but a little tracing reveals that Harrow Council uses Capita as its IT partner. A quick search of Capita’s website reveals a press release from 2004 announcing the acquisition of Brownsword, a claims investigation service that came with a ten year license of “Advanced Validation Solutions”.

This is a package that includes “Voice Risk Analysis” software developed by a firm called Digilog, who in turn license the core technology from Nemesysco: an Israeli company who claim that their algorithms underlay products like the Vericator and The Truster, the first of which fared so badly in the tests described above.

Interestingly, Nemesysco also market a “Love Detector” for both Pocket PC and a version that works with Skype.


I would therefore make an educated guess that Harrow is using software that comes originally from Nemesysco. Nemesysco say that its pre-2002 technology (discredited for the purposes of detecting falsehood in speech) is obsolete, and that its latest offerings are much more the ticket. The trouble is, I can find nothing in the scientific literature that attests to its fitness for purpose. This means that Harrow Council, and soon the Department of Work and Pensions, could well be detecting and prosecuting fraudsters using software whose only claim to be efficacious is that the company that makes it says it is.

Durham’s explanation of its rising GCSE results eagerly awaited

Durham county council, roundly criticised in the on-line community for conducting a trial on its year 11 students without a control group, has seen its percentage pass rate of 5 A* to C grades at GCSE rise for the fifth year running.

To put you in the picture, Durham CC’s education people took advantage of a deal offered by Omega 3 fish oil supplier Equazen to supply its entire cohort of year 11 pupils with a year’s supply of tablets to see whether GCSE exam performance would be improved. There was just one catch: they didn’t bother to supply a similar number of pupils with dummy capsules, to make sure that any increase seen wasn’t down to something else, like easier exams for instance.

This omission was quite serious because it meant that the results of the exercise could not possibly have any scientific value. A pity, since a properly conducted trial might have provided schools with a badly needed weapon in the fight against falling standards of learning; or if the outcome had been different, might have discouraged Equazen and other pill pushers from indulging in a profligate waste of sardines and pilchards.

Having launched this process in September 2006 with a slew of scientific claims made directly to the media, the Council came under fire for lack of said control group, and hurriedly rebranded the whole sham as an “initiative”. Later on in the year, in an interview with the boss of Equazen, a reporter for Radio 4’s “You and Yours” programme asked the question “If GCSE pass rates go up this year, what will your publicity department say?” Well, naturally he couldn’t say that the publicity department would be proclaiming the efficacy of Omega 3 in boosting brain power, so he chose to answer somewhat evasively.

According to a press release from Durham CC on 23rd August 2007, the percentage of students obtaining at least five A* to C grades rose by more than 3% to over 59%. Missing from the press release, and also absent on the website of Equazen was any mention of the fish oil initiative. I wonder whether they’ve just decided to quietly drop the whole thing. I hope we’ll find out soon, as, according to Equazen’s own figures, they’ll be ten million capsules lighter by now.