It can be pedagogically useful to explain to students how some false beliefs were overthrown, e.g., the natural, empirical perception that the earth is flat can be overthrown by reasoning about what happens to a ship and its mast receding in the distance. Such discussion is helpful for showing how scientists reason. Another example is the Michelson-Morley experiment, regarding the ether, which we were taught about in ninth-grade science. Why did scientists stop believing in the ether? It is pedagogically useful to explain this.
Well, I agree that there isn’t time to cover even every minority theory, let alone every fringe and crackpot theory. But the question whether there is teleology in nature is not a “fringe” notion, but one that has been asked over and over again throughout the entire history of science, from ancient times to the present. The greatest thinkers, from Lucretius and Aristotle through to Boyle and Newton and Lamarck and Darwin and Bergson and Hoyle, have discussed it. It’s irresponsible not to devote some classroom time to notions of teleology and to explain why scientists tend to avoid teleological explanation – while conceding that the exclusion of all teleological considerations, though useful heuristically, may have a cost, i.e., lack of completeness of understanding of nature.
The whole point of Hedin’s course at Ball State was to explore these larger questions, which unfortunately are not typically considered at all in science classes. His course – which no one was forced to take – allowed students to think more clearly about the foundations and methods and metaphysical background of doing science. This is healthy. Almost every subject in the university – except the natural sciences – demands that its students do some critical thinking about the epistemological foundations of their subject. This is done very often in religion, sociology, anthropology, political science, history, literary criticism, and so on. I was shocked, when I studied university science, by how little interest professors and undergrads showed about these larger questions. I went in with the naive idea that science students and profs (or at least some of them) would be all fired up about foundational questions in the metaphysics and epistemology of scientific knowledge, that they would be constantly discussing things like Newton’s General Scholium, Schrodinger’s thoughts on life, Kuhn’s discussion of science as paradigm-driven, Hoyle’s remarks on fine-tuning, Bergson’s critique of Darwinism, Einstein’s semi-philosophical debates over chance and other aspects of physical reality with his fellow-physicists etc. I found nothing like that in most profs or most students. Most just wanted to do detail work within the paradigm in one little corner of science, and found “big picture” questions uninteresting and unimportant. The mentality was that of a polytechnic, not, to my mind, that of a university. But in Hedin’s class, it’s clear that students were not only allowed but encouraged to think about science in a big-picture way, and that’s all for the good.
I’m not here defending everything Hedin says in his book, which I have not finished yet. I am defending his overall enterprise, from a pedagogical point of view. Students who want to think about the big questions of life in relation to what is learned from the natural sciences should have a chance to do so. Hedin was not advocating belief in aliens at Roswell, that Bacon wrote Shakespeare, or that there is a civilization inside a hollow earth; he was not advocating any “fringe theories.” He was inviting students to do some big-picture thinking about the relationship between the truths uncovered by natural science and the truths human beings learn by other means. If that kind of thinking isn’t done in universities, it sure won’t be done anywhere else in society. The university, the place where scientists, philosophers, theologians, historians etc. can meet and exchange ideas, is exactly the right place to do it.