Evidence: When to care?

A classic bit of ironic headlineage from the ever-oblivious Telegraph kicks us off today…

Faith schools undermined by ‘Government witch hunt’

The Telegraph
By Graeme Paton, Education Editor

Faith schools are being undermined by a Government-backed “witch hunt“, according to a new report.

Ministers have exaggerated claims that Christian, Jewish and Muslim schools cherry-pick the best pupils to justify a series of “plots and threats” against the religious sector, it is claimed.

Key changes to school admissions rules – including a ban on interviewing families – have been introduced despite a lack of real evidence that faith schools discriminate against poor pupils, the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank said.

Earlier this year, the Government caused controversy by claiming a “significant minority” of faith schools were breaking new laws designed to make the admissions system fairer. Jim Knight, the schools minister, said it was “shocking” that schools were using banned policies to weed out children from poor homes, including charging parents up-front fees for free education and failing to give priority to children in care.

But it provoked a furious response from faith schools who accused the Government of basing its claims on flawed evidence.

“The witch hunt is on,” said the latest study.

…and so on. I’m also rather tickled by the idea of ‘faith school’ leaders getting all indignant at the government using claims based on ‘flawed evidence’. Somebody needs to sit these people down and have a quiet chat about pots and kettles, methinks.

Behind the pointing and laughing potential, however, there is a serious point to be made here. Despite their attachment to the intellectual black hole that is faith (understood in epistemological terms, rather than as a positive outlook in the face of uncertainty, for example), the emphasis that the faith-schoolers place on ‘evidence’ in the debate suggests that the problem with religious people is not that they fail to value or recognise the importance of evidence in human discourse. Rather, they simply draw a convenient magic circle around a particular subset of their beliefs (namely those pertaining to the existence of a divine being and the provenance of various works of bronze-age literature), decreeing them immune from rational scrutiny and labelling ignorant and unsophisticated anybody who challenges this rather spurious distinction.

That this bizarre construct fails to cause intolerable cognitive dissonance is a source of constant amazement for me. It seems absurd that we humans are able to fence off certain areas of our mental world with such ease, creating peaceful enclaves where dubious extrapolations and outrageous non-sequiturs can relax and grow strong away from the hungry jaws of rational criticism and empirical observation.

Perhaps the most important insight to take from this is that the beliefs which lie inside the a person’s ‘fence’ (and clearly they are not always religious in nature) might tend to be those in which they are most invested – that they have the most to lose by giving up. The emotional, social and sometimes material consequences threatening the potential apostate or are enormous, whether for the Christian teenager whose social circle is centered on his church, or the skeptical Muslim in Yemen, for whom the penalty for renouncing his or her religion is death. Understood in this way, it becomes clear why the holding and changing of beliefs is not a simple matter of taking one’s best judgement about the state of the external world, and thus the gradual reinforcement of this compartmentalised thinking becomes rather more undestandable. It also sheds light on the memetic power of religious belief systems – the way in which nurturing and transmitting religious dogma becomes a matter of self interest allows us to better understand how such empirically and rationally dubious ideas can be transmitted across cultures and generations.