At first glance the idea of Fundamentalist relativism might seem strange. After all they believe in the inerrancy and literal truth of their holy book. They are right everyone else is wrong and because they believe so must you. Pretty absolutist so far, but watch what happens when the subject of creationism arises.

When seeking to get access to the classroom and thus the minds of the young creationists will start moaning about the tyranny scientific orthodoxy and insist that Darwinian evolution is “just a theory” and thus we can have alternative theories (Einstein’s theory of relativity is also “just a theory” but do they really doubt it?).

Epistemologically speaking this is relativism. Evolution is massively supported by the evidence and discoveries after Darwin died (most notably DNA) have only confirmed it. 150 years on from the publication of the Origin evolution has stood up to everything its opponents have thrown at it and come through with flying colours to be at the core of our understanding of biology, virology and so on – quite an achievement. The ideas proffered by creationists on the other hand are not tested and not testable (how does one prove that a god did anything without first proving that this god exists?) they fail to account for what evolution accounts for and we cannot make predictions based on it. Evolution can explain the emergence of new diseases, just in the last couple of decades Ebola, SARS, bird flu and swine flu have all come into existence where previously they did not exist; creationism cannot account for this fact. Evolution tells us that the emergence of new types of life is based on genetic mutations that are favourable to the organism thus we worry about whether bird flu will mutate so that human to human transmission is possible and attempt to make drugs to attack the virus. Creationism leaves us with an intellectually crippling ‘it must be God’s wrath’ non-explanation.

There are many other examples of the power of evolution’s explanations and predictions but the point is made. Creationism just can’t compete yet its proponents insist that it be given equal weighting in the science classroom with evolution. “There are other ways of knowing!” “Teach the controversy!” we hear. The assumption being that religion is just as good at explaining the natural world as science. Evidence be damned, equal time is the demand. Yet this is a call to set unproved and unprovable religious ideas alongside well tested and supported science as being equal as theories and thus equally true – the basis for this call is an a priori belief that the faithful are right and everyone else is wrong. You put in absolutism at one end and you get relativism at the other, the very thing Fundamentalists decry.

Strangely creationism has its secular defenders in the science studies area of the sociology departments of certain universities, their chief argument being the ‘imperialism of science’ in disproving alternative explanations. The most notable of these unusual people is Professor Steve Fuller of the University of Warwick. You can read more about these guys here.

As Richard Dawkins asked “if science is just a patriarchal western orthodoxy why is it that delegates going to a conference overseas on cultural relativism go by plane and not by magic carpet?”

I hasten to add most Christians are not creationists. However the ones who are are sufficient in number to be a problem, especially in the US where 40% of people claim to have been born again and a majority think the world is only about 6000 years old.

For some time now, there has been a trend amongst the religious, particularly at the more conservative end of the Christian faith to claim that their voices are being driven from the public square. This is obviously a reaction against the increasingly diverse societies of Western countries, partly a hankering after the good old days when they could say how it was gonna be in society and people followed and partly a reaction to the ‘new’ atheism of people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, AC Grayling and so on.

This claim is most often heard when ‘hot button issues’ for at least some Christians arise – the troika of abortion, stem cell research and gay rights (and same-sex marriage in particular), but it can also be heard less frequently when it comes to demands to teach biblical myths in the biology classroom.

Several things stand out about this claim. Firstly, its patent falseness, religious figures are never backwards about coming forwards with their views on any number of issues and the ones just mentioned in particular. Their views often make the headlines of the corporate media and there are well organised lobbying outfits that can quickly mobilise significant numbers of the lay supporters to write to their local representative or a government inquiry with their views. In the US, the religious right has had an enormous influence over the past thirty years on everything from education to foreign policy, although it is highly likely that this will abate with the shift that put Obama into the White House.

Secondly, they recognise that they can’t just say “we must do X because the bible tells us so” in secular societies where the percentage of people professing a religion is sharply declining, the varieties of religious beliefs are diversifying and active churchgoers comprise a tiny segment of society. Thus they have to appeal to some other grounds for arguing what they do; typically this involves some sort of claim of objectiveness and/or appeals to the consequences of deciding against them. It is at this point that they will start saying that things like that it is undemocratic or oppressive to silence religious voices etc even though we’ve just established that religious voices are not being silenced and thus not being oppressed in the 21st century. They’re confusing being heard with being followed and they ignore the fact that there are any number of views out there that we don’t take seriously while accepting people’s right to hold them. No one would seek to persecute someone who believed that they had been abducted by aliens, but would we formulate public policy on the basis of such a view? No and nor is it oppressive to refuse to do so.

Ironically for people trying to claim objectiveness for their views (based as they are on a foundationalist or foundherentist epistemology) and who decry relativism, this is a distinctly relativist approach to epistemology. Policies based on evidence, reason and science (e.g. teaching evolution in the classroom) should be discarded they say, or at most given equal weight to those based on divine revelation because there are ‘other ways of knowing besides science’. This is of course exactly what every new-ager and ‘science studies’ professor says when arguing for the validity of everything from homeopathy to astrology and has the capacity to undermine scientific and cultural progress if ever this way of thinking was to gain currency.

Incidentally, they never establish objectiveness because often they don’t propose criteria by which objectiveness is established that people would agree on and the wide disagreement in the general community with their views on the issues indicates something less than the objectiveness of the proposition of, say, murder being wrong. The dark warnings of the consequences are never actually fleshed out, we never hear a clear explanation of what they think will happen if society doesn’t follow them because if they did favour us with their predictions, we’d be able to look and see if they are in fact borne out in other countries where they have already lost the argument or where there are comparable experiences, so better to keep things vague. Of course it goes without saying that appeals to the consequences are a logical fallacy.

Finally, and perhaps most ironically of all, they whinge about oppression when the effects of their ideas, if they were taken up, would be profoundly oppressive to others. One of the differences between conservative and liberal believers is the level of control they would exercise over others and a quick glance at the ‘hot button issues’ shows clearly that one group of people (the ones claiming they are being oppressed) would have control of another (the ones who really would be oppressed):

· Abortion – why should men control women’s bodies?
· Gay rights – why should straight people be more empowered in society than gay ones?
· Stem cell research – why should people be denied the benefits of scientific progress to treat, perhaps even cure their conditions in the name of philosophical idealism?
· Teaching evolution – why should obscurantism retard scientific understanding and why should people be confused to protect the power claims of religious dogma and its priesthood?

In each case, the people arguing against abortion, gay rights, stem cell research and teaching evolution seek to be empowered and conversely, large sections of the population would be (and in some cases are currently) oppressed by their power. Indeed, so called ‘hot button issues’ are flags for their broader quest for power. That they can generate debate on any of these issues at all shows they are certainly being heard, but thankfully despite their best attempts, they aren’t getting their way.

What is actually happening when we hear claims of oppression by reactionary religionists is that would-be oppressors are posing as victims of oppression to build sympathy for their position. In doing this they are trying to dethrone reason, the notion of equal rights, evidence-based policies and science in the name of ‘open’ inquiry and what might loosely be termed alternative ‘knowledge’. Above all they are conflating being heard with being followed.

This contemptible tactic is a reaction to a loss of power and its practitioners must be called out on it when they try it on.

Amongst the rubbish that has come out of the Vatican of late we have this gem:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/01/04/1231003847091.html

In brief, the article says that the pill is causing male infertility by feminising men. Castellvi's claims are based on research from Canada by Dr Karen Kidd that showed estrogen was affecting fish numbers because of male feminisation.

Three points are relevant here, firstly, as the article says, estrogen is found in all sorts of things, from plastics to meat (to say nothing of the estrogen that naturally occurs in women's urine). Secondly, the Vatican makes no mention of the other main source of artificial medical estrogen - HRT and finally according to the researcher herself, the problem is not the pill, the problem is lack of proper water treatment. Once secondary or tertiary water treatment is applied, the problem goes away.

You can read Dr Kidd’s findings for yourself here.

Having dispensed with its pseudoscience will the Vatican now retract this claim as a rationale for banning the pill for Catholics? I doubt it. The Vatican’s objection to the pill is not environmental, it’s religious. If it can find some other reason to back up this objection so much the better for it but that will only ever be secondary. Whilst it’s free to have its views on contraception, it should not misuse science to back them up.