Dave Badtke’s Blog

In my English classes I’m at that point in the semester when we discuss the three fundamental elements necessary to think and write critically about a thesis: description, compare-contrast, and effect-cause. (Until yesterday I would have said cause-effect, but then one of my students pointed out that actually we should say effect-cause since we notice the effect before we look for the cause. Go students!)

To make clear how these three fundamental elements work, consider the current health care debate which has as its thesis something like the following:

Because so many Americans do not have insurance or can’t afford the insurance they have or are surprised to find that the insurance they have doesn’t cover their illnesses or discover when they become ill that they are no longer covered, and because private insurance companies can deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions and because there is too often too little competition between insurers and because medical care has devolved into a profession in which doctors and their patients are no longer the primary focus of health care and because these intolerable conditions obtain right here in these United States of America, the only industrialized nation without universal health care, we, the American people, have decided to reform health care in such a way that all will be covered and that will enable doctors and their patients to focus on staying and getting well.

This is a mouthful I know, which probably, even at this length, has left some important concerns out. It certainly leaves out President Obama’s paramount point in his speech on health care reform that fixing health care is a moral imperative: we need to fix health care because the moral character of our country must extend beyond me to you; each of us is to a degree our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper because we care about others, not just about ourselves.

Ideally, we and our government representatives should critically examine this thesis using the three fundamental elements of critical thinking:

Description: We need to describe in detail each element of the thesis, using evidence as necessary as well as examples and illustrations. We can quote statistics, and certainly we want to hear the horror stories about those who weren’t properly served and about those who died or were injured for life.

Compare-Contrast: We then need to compare and contrast our health care system with others that seem to work better and worse than ours, looking in detail at the moving parts in and design of each.

Effect-Cause: And in each case we need to examine the why of our system as well as of the others. Why does a particular system produce better or worse health care? Why does a particular system cost more or less? (Actually, it seems that there is no system that costs more than ours.) Why do doctors and patients prefer one system over another?

Sadly, much of our “discussion” of health care here in the US is about as far from critical thinking as is possible for a people who have putatively evolved beyond  throwing stones at one another. Shrill cries from some that we are creating death panels, are enabling government to take over medicine, and are constructing a public-option Trojan horse that will lead inevitably to “socialized” medicine in which all will wear gray suits and speak without humor are hardly signs of a rational, critical discussion.

For an antidote to this sad state of affairs and to celebrate critical thinking, see T. R. Reid’s The Healing of America, reviewed by Dr. Abigail Zuger in The New York Times, in which Reid describes health care in the world, compares health care systems, looks carefully at why they work, and examines possible effect-cause solutions to what ails us in the US.

As an English teacher who practiced physics in his previous life, I find the conflict between science and religion odd since a scientist has faith that reason can explain the origin and evolution of the natural world while a theologian reasons that faith in a higher power is a necessary foundation for moral behavior. While the scientist needs to be moral, his science is almost always silent on ethics, and while the theologian constructs his ethics on a reasoned framework of religious beliefs, he does not use faith to engineer a flight from San Francisco to Hawaii nor guide the surgeon’s knife cutting out cancer.

On this controversy I’ve tended to agree with the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould who felt that the argument between science and religion was moot:

But no battle exists between science and religion — the two most separate spheres of human need. A titanic struggle occurs, always has, always will, between questioning and authority, free inquiry and frozen dogma — but the institutions representing these poles are not science and religion. These struggles occur within each field, not primarily across disciplines. The general ethic of science leads to greater openness, but we have our fossils, often in positions of great power. Organized religion, as an arm of state power so frequently in history, has tended to rigidity — but theologies have also spearheaded social revolution. . . . Henry Ward Beecher, America’s premiere pulpiteer during Darwin’s century, defended evolution as God’s way in a striking commercial metaphor: “Design by wholesale is grander than design by retail” — better, that is to ordain general laws of change than to make each species by separate fiat. (From Gould’s essay “Knight takes Bishop”)

Wholesale design, design that reuses fundamental components for economy’s sake while changing external features like the number of eyes and legs and fingers and toes, is the way living creatures have evolved. On the other hand, retail design, for which there is no scientific evidence, would focus considerable and unique effort on creating different species. A  PC and Mac, two significant retail developments, started out completely differently. While they both leveraged computer technology, they used different hardware and ran different software. It’s only over time that the two became more alike than different as efficiencies and competition forced them to become similar rather than different.

Evolution, however, works in the opposite direction. Built from shared DNA blocks, life started out the same and gradually became different as genetic variations and natural selection worked their way to our current time. As a result, there’s no chance now that an ant will become a human even though both share DNA that started on its evolutionary journey some 3.5 billion years ago, about one billion years after Earth formed.

Given the clear scientific evidence for evolution that is as solid as the evidence supporting physics and biology, it was a mystery to me why evolution is such a controversial topic in the US. Certainly there are scientists who approach their field with a theologian’s zeal, claiming that anyone who is religious is a nut job, and there are theologians who feel that faith can explain the natural world, claiming that anyone who denies the guiding hand of God(s) is a nut job, but such extremists should, for the most part, be ignored since they pronounce on rather than participate in the science-religion dialog.

This conflict was a mystery until I came across Robert Wright’s essay in The New York Times in which he references theologian William Paley’s claim, made a few years before Darwin’s birth, that a watch is like a living creature, like an ant. And since a watch is designed, so must be an ant. Here’s an extended quote dealing with the controversy and Paley.

But believers aren’t the only ones who could use some adapting. If there is to be peace between religion and science, some of the more strident atheists will need to make their own concessions to logic.

They could acknowledge, first of all, that any god whose creative role ends with the beginning of natural selection is, strictly speaking, logically compatible with Darwinism. (Darwin himself, though not a believer, said as much.) And they might even grant that natural selection’s intrinsic creative power — something they’ve been known to stress in other contexts — adds at least an iota of plausibility to this remotely creative god.

And, god-talk aside, these atheist biologists could try to appreciate something they still seem not to get: talk of “higher purpose” is not just compatible with science, but engrained in it.

There is an episode in intellectual history that makes the point. It’s familiar to biologists because it is sometimes used — wrongly, I think — to illustrate the opposite point. Indeed, that use is what led Richard Dawkins, one of the most vocal atheist biologists, to allude to it in the title of one of his books: “The Blind Watchmaker.”

The story involves William Paley, a British theologian who, a few years before Darwin was born, tried to use living creatures as evidence for the existence of a designer.

If you’re walking across a field and you find a pocket watch, Paley said, you know it’s in a different category from the rocks lying around it: it’s a product of design, with a complex functionality that doesn’t just happen by accident. Well, he continued, organisms are like pocket watches — too complexly functional to be an accident. So they must have a designer — God.

As Mr. Dawkins pointed out, we can now explain the origin of organisms without positing a god. Yet Mr. Dawkins also conceded something to Paley that gets too little attention: The complex functionality of an organism does demand a special kind of explanation.

The reason is that, unlike a rock, an organism has things that look as if they were designed to do something. Digestive tracts seem to exist in order to digest food. The heart seems to exist in order to pump blood.

And, actually, even once you accept that natural selection, not God, is the “designer” — the blind watchmaker, as Mr. Dawkins put it — there is a sense in which these organs do have purposes, purposes that serve the organism’s larger purpose of surviving and spreading its genes. As Daniel Dennett, the Darwinian (and atheist) philosopher, has put it, an organism’s evolutionarily infused purpose is “as real as purpose could ever be.”

So in a sense Paley was right not just in saying that organisms must come from a different creative process than rocks but also in saying that this creative process imparts a purpose (however mundane) to organisms.

Certainly both an ant and watch are chemically more complex than a rock, so finding either in a field of rocks and dirt gives one pause. If a watch must be designed by humans, doesn’t it follow that an ant must be designed as well?

This gets to the root of cause and effect, certainly, because what science does is follow the effect-cause chain back as far as it can go without adding variables, like a god, over which it has no control. And so the issue for a scientist is the problem of creating a model that can explain both the ant and human. This is evolution’s accomplishment, but this is not to say that nature is not designed. Coming across a watch lying next to an ant colony causes us to ponder both the workings of the watch and the complexity of the ant colony, created by cooperating insects little bigger than a speck of lint on your jacket. The inspired design, however, is the respective intricacy of the ant colony and human watch. Both are marvels of design, but neither requires the hand of an intelligent designer beyond the ant and human. The purpose, however, is another topic on which, it seems, religion has much to say as it helps us, who are not ants, form ever more cooperative, moral colonies.