Science Under Renewed Attack: New Zealand Proposal to Equate Māori Mythology with Science

Already under assault from many directions, science has recently come under renewed attack in New Zealand, a country perhaps better known for its prowess in rugby and its filming of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The attack involves a government working group's proposal that schools should give the same weight to Māori mythology as they do to science in the classroom.

The proposal prompted a letter to the New Zealand Listener, signed by seven professors from the University of Auckland, questioning a plan to give mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) equal standing with scientific fields such as physics, chemistry and biology. The letter was critical of one of the working group’s new course descriptions, which promotes:

discussion and analysis of the ways in which science has been used to support the dominance of Eurocentric views … and the notion that science is a Western European invention and itself evidence of European dominance over Māori and other indigenous peoples.

The letter went on to say that such a statement perpetuated “disturbing misunderstandings of science emerging at all levels of education and in science funding,” and concluded that indigenous knowledge “falls far short of what we can define as science itself.” 

The professors did acknowledge the role that Māori knowledge in New Zealand has played in “the preservation and perpetuation of culture and local practices.” One of the letter’s coauthors, biological scientist Garth Cooper, is of Māori descent himself.

But the letter sparked a firestorm of complaints from fellow scientists and academics. The New Zealand Association of Scientists said it was “dismayed” by the comments. An open response signed by the staggering number of over 2,000 academics condemned the authors for causing "untold harm and hurt," and said they “categorically disagree” with their colleagues’ opinions, claiming that:

Mātauranga is far more than just equivalent to or equal to ‘Western’ science. It offers ways of viewing the world that are unique and complementary to other knowledge systems.

and

The seven professors ignore the fact that colonisation, racism, misogyny, and eugenics have each been championed by scientists wielding a self-declared monopoly on universal knowledge.

New Zealand’s Royal Society also issued a statement rejecting the authors’ views, saying it “strongly upholds the value of mātauranga Māori and rejects the narrow and outmoded definition of science”. The society is now contemplating drastic action by investigating whether Garth Cooper and another coauthor, philosophy professor Robert Nola, should be expelled from its membership as a result of the letter.

Aside from the politics involved, the reaction to the letter constitutes an enormous onslaught on science. True science emphasizes empirical evidence and logic. But indigenous Māori knowledge – which includes the folklore that all living things originated with Papa, the earth mother and Rangi, the sky father – is pseudoscience because it depends not on scientific evidence, but on religious beliefs and therefore can’t be falsified, as required of a valid scientific theory.

In the U.S., the issue of whether to teach schoolchildren creationism, a purely religious belief that rejects the theory of evolution, was settled long ago by the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. Later, the Supreme Court struck down the last of the old state laws banning the teaching of evolution in schools; in 1987 it went further, in upholding a lower-court ruling that a Louisiana state law, mandating that equal time be given to the teaching of creation science and evolution in public schools, was unconstitutional.

As for the claim of the Auckland letter’s critics that science has been colonising, Professor Nola responded:

I don't think science is a coloniser at all: all people are colonisers, and we've done plenty of colonising, and we may have used our science to help do that. But science itself, I can't see how that is colonising – Newton's laws of motion, colonising of the brain or the mind or whatever, it's nonsense.

Nola added that such a claim could deter young New Zealanders from studying science at all.

The Royal Society’s investigation continues but not without opposition. Several fellows of the Royal Society have threatened to resign if the letter coauthors are disciplined. These include two recipients of the Society’s prestigious Rutherford Medal: Peter Schwerdtfeger, the director of Massey University’s Theoretical Chemistry and Physics Centre and Brian Boyd, University of Auckland literature professor. Schwerdtfeger called the investigation “shameful” and accused the Society of succumbing to woke ideology.

Famous UK evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has recently weighed in on the controversy as well, writing that:

The Royal Society of New Zealand … is supposed to stand for science. Not ‘Western’ science, not ‘European’ science, not ‘White’ science, not ‘Colonialist’ science. Just science. Science is science is science, and it doesn’t matter who does it, or where … True science is evidence­-based, not tradition-based.

Next: No Evidence That Islands Are Sinking Due to Rising Seas

Why Creation Science Isn’t Science

According to so-called creation science – the widely held religious belief that the world and all its living creatures were created by God in just six days – the earth is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old. The faith-based belief rejects Darwin’s scientific theory of evolution, which holds that life forms evolved over a long period of time through the process of natural selection. In resorting to fictitious claims to justify its creed, creation science only masquerades as science.    

Creation science has its roots in a literal interpretation of the Bible. To establish a biblical chronology, various scholars have estimated the lifespans of prominent figures and the intervals between significant historical events described in the Bible. The most detailed chronology was drawn up in the 1650s by an Irish Archbishop, who calculated that exactly 4,004 years elapsed between the creation and the birth of Jesus. It’s this dubious calculation that underlies the 6,000-year lower limit for the age of the earth. 

Scientific evidence, however, tells us that the earth’s actual age is 4.5 to 4.6 billion years. Even when Darwin proposed his theory, the available evidence at the time indicated an age of at least a few hundred thousand years. Darwin himself believed that the true number was more like several hundred million years, based on his forays into geology. 

By the early 1900s, the newly developed method of radiometric dating dramatically boosted estimates of Earth’s age into the billion year range – a far cry from the several thousand years that young-Earth creationists allow, derived from their literal reading of the Bible. Radiometric dating relies on the radioactive decay of certain chemical elements such as uranium, carbon or potassium, for which the decay rates are accurately known.

To overcome the vast discrepancy between the scientifically determined age of the earth and the biblical estimate, young-Earth creationists – who, surprisingly, include hundreds of scientists with an advanced degree in science or medicine – twist science in a futile effort to discredit radiometric dating. Absurdly, they object that the method can’t be trusted because of a handful of instances when radiometric dating has been incorrect. But such an argument in no way proves a young earth, and in any case fails to invalidate a technique that has yielded correct results, as established independently by other methods, tens of thousands of times.

Another, equally ridiculous claim is that somehow the rate of radioactive decay underpinning the dating method was billions of times higher in the past, which would considerably shorten radiometrically measured ages. Some creationists even maintain that radioactive decay sped up more than once. What they don’t realize is that any significant change in decay rates would imply that fundamental physical constants (such as the speed of light) had also changed. If that were so, we’d be living in a completely different type of universe. 

Among other wild assertions that creationists use as evidence that the planet is no more than 10,000 years old are rapid exponential decay of the earth’s magnetic field, which is a spurious claim, and the low level of helium in the atmosphere, which merely reflects how easily the gas escapes from the earth and has nothing to do with its age.

Apart from such futile attempts to shorten the earth’s longevity, young-Earth creationists also rely on the concept of flood geology to prop up their religious beliefs. Flood geology, which I’ve discussed in detail elsewhere, maintains that the planet was reshaped by a massive worldwide flood as described in the biblical story of Noah’s ark. It’s as preposterously unscientific as creationist efforts to uphold the idea of a young earth.

The depth of the attack on modern science can be seen in polls showing that a sizable 38% of the U.S. adult public, and a similar percentage globally, believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. The percentage may be higher yet for those who identify with certain religions, and perhaps a further 10% believe in intelligent design, the form of creationism discussed in last week’s post. The breadth of disbelief in the theory of evolution is astounding, especially considering that it’s almost universally accepted by mainstream Churches and the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists.

Next week: On Science Skeptics and Deniers