Tim Hamlett's Hong Kong

南華早報 | 2009-03-18 | CITY2| CITY| By Tim Hamlett

Reports that some Hong Kong schools are treating their pupils to intelligent design in science lessons come as a shock, but as no surprise. This is shocking because intelligent design has no place in a science lesson. Science is a body of knowledge with its own tests for whether a theory can be taken seriously. By those tests, intelligent design fails. A teacher who supposes this to be an alternative to the theory of evolution should not be teaching science at all.

It is not surprising to find this going on, though, because our government has for surprisingly small sums of money bestowed whole chunks of the education system on religious bodies whose interest in the matter is in the possibility of converting their pupils to the religion concerned. People interested in missionary work tend to subscribe to a rather extreme form of their own religion.

Actually the argument is not really about religion. Many people who are deeply religious find no difficulty in incorporating the theory of evolution. The Lord is said to move in mysterious ways for His (or Her) own reasons and if those mysterious ways include a circuitous scheme for the creation of personkind, it is not for us to question them.

The problem is not with people who believe in religion but with people who believe that every word in the Bible must be regarded as literally true. This collides with science - and indeed with common sense - at numerous points: turning ladies into pillars of salt, talking bushes, water into wine, devils taking over pigs and so on.

There are also matters on which the great book is self-contradictory, and some passages - urging, for example, the killing of witches - that most of us now regard as reflecting the prejudices of the mortal author rather than the instructions of his ghostly inspiration.

I once collided with the consequences of this. During a freelance period (which is what journalists call being unemployed), I was retained to voice some tapes to accompany an English textbook. The book had, I was told, already been approved by the relevant department but it had stipulated that the voice on the tapes should be replaced by that of a native English speaker. Lurking among a selection of the sort of boring passages usually found in books of this kind was a lurid account of the death of Charles Darwin, claiming that in his last moments he repented of his blasphemous publications and was terrified of the punishment to be expected for them in the hereafter.

I later discovered there was not a word of truth in this. People of a religious disposition seem to have been willing to make up stories in those days. The story about a boat builder claiming God himself could not sink the Titanic is another fiction. Then there are all those sightings of the Virgin Mary ...

Still, the story against Darwin was being smuggled into a language lesson, not disguised as science. It is too late, I suppose, for us to adopt the French system, in which public education is strictly secular and religious-minded parents can take their children out of the system or stick to Sunday school. It is too early for us to adopt the mainland system, in which children are encouraged to worship the Communist Party and the current Party Lama in Beijing.

It could also, I suppose, be pointed out that adults are not setting a very good example. Few of us defend the intelligent-design diehards, but respectable newspapers still devote large amounts of space to astrology, which has even less going for it, and its Chinese counterpart, which curiously rarely offers the same prognostications. There is room for loopy variations on alternative medicine involving rocks, candles, unlikely diets and ... um ... colonic irrigation. Respectable public companies have their premises inspected by fung shui masters and the Hong Kong Bank positively boasts that the curious angles at which its escalators hit the floor are in harmony with the wind and the water. Few of us suppose any longer that banking is a science, but a more empirical approach might help.

Then there is the curious question of who is or is not a doctor. When this presented itself in the form of a contest between the conventional medical crew and the chiropractors, the government seemed, on the whole, to side with the medics. But it now seems to have abandoned this preference when it comes to traditional Chinese medicine, which is being allowed to dress itself in the white coat of university qualifications, clinics in proper hospitals, and subsidised consultations.

Still, government is no more a science than banking. I am not sure if there are any signs of intelligent design in the universe; there is clearly very little of it in our constitutional arrangements.