I don’t vouch for the book — yet, at least. I’ve not read it. I find the study of science, and especially of evolution, offers no barrier to my faith, nor does my faith offer any barrier to my study of science. My faith, which requires an ethical life, offers barriers to creationism — a subject of other posts. But thank God for Charles Darwin? Sure.
“Thank God for Charles Darwin.” T-shirt design from Redbubble
We also need to thank the federal courts, where the First Amendment is enforced, keeping unreasonable fables from diluting science education in public schools.
Again at Café Philos, the anti-Darwin fifth columnists do their best to continue distortions of history, in this case, in high irony, claiming NOT to defend John Freshwater.
Not in defense of Freshwater’s walking over the Constitution and zapping burns on students in the shape of a cross? Why bother to go after Darwin? No explanation is necessary. It’s like the story of the frog and the scorpion. Creationists are like scorpions. It’s in their nature. (I believe it is a corruption of human nature that creationism visits on those who allow the demon in.) (“Paging Bobby Jindal! Creationist Demon Possession in the Louisiana Governor’s Mansion; what? You’re already there? When’s the exorcism this time?”)
In a cartoon, Darwin bans “Laissez faire,” a shorthand for “Social Darwinism,” and eugenics from his house. Unknown cartoonist, from a short essay on Northwestern University’s discussion book, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, by David Quammen.
Here’s the exchange. If you find it boring, my apologies. I do weary at the prospect of having to do this again, and again. On the crashed hard-drive of my first laptop, I have files now 15 years old discussing this same silly claim. I’m posting here for the record, for my easy reference, with hope that someday it will not be necessary to post this stuff at all. You may need some of these links some day, and here they are, below the fold.
One might begin to think Louisiana really is cursed. Katrina, Rita, other political troubles — and then they elect the bright, young reformer as governor, and he turns out to be a voodoo history and voodoo science practitioner — heck, maybe he practices just plain old voodoo.
All this comes at a time when it may have saved John McCain from making a mistake that would make George McGovern’s selection of Tom Eagleton look like wisdom of the ages (when news came out that Eagleton had undergone convulsive shock therapy for depression, he was replaced on the ticket by Sargent Shriver, but not after much damage had been done to the credibility and viability of the McGovern campaign — why Nixon thought it necessary to sponsor burglary to defeat this ticket is one of the mysteries of the ages of Shakespearian tragedy come to life in in American politics).
Mind you, I like and respect McGovern, and I found working with Tom Eagleton on the Senate Labor Committee a great joy.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
In the end, Dr. James Dobson and other ideological Christians may be the worst enemies of the idea that intelligent design should be taught as science. They just can’t resist emphasizing that ID is, to them, good Christian doctrine.
Focus on the Family’s executive director Tim Sisarich said the material was intended to expose pupils to an alterative theory of cosmology.
“We’re a Christian organisation so we believe that God made the planet and God made the cosmos … Science takes a theory and tries to establish it as the truth, and that’s all this is.”
Education Ministry senior manager Mary Chamberlain said parents had a right to withdraw children from religious instruction.
Creationism does tend to require being flexible on the truth. When fundraising, or when trying to defend Christian ideas, intelligent design is Christian doctrine. When DI and others are trying to sneak ID into science curricula in the U.S., it’s not religion at all, but scientifically related.
Treating subjects in that fashion is a form of moral relativism, or to most people, simple dishonesty.
Update:P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula was already on it. Morris, Minnesota is just such a hub of scientific activity, it’s difficult to stay ahead of Dr. Myers when we’re stuck here in what appears to be the scientific backwater of Dallas.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
According to the Associated Press, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal signed the latest creationism bill to come out of the Louisiana legislature “in the last few days.”
Discovery Institute operatives claimed credit for authoring the bill and provided close support to advocates of the bill in Louisiana. Oddly, now that the bill has become law and is likely to be a litigation magnet, DI has backed off of supporting the bill.
That is an object lesson, which may be lost on Louisiana school boards. The bill is a bit of a stealth creationism bill. It doesn’t directly advocate creationism by name. It adopts the creationist tactics of claiming that criticism of evolution is critical thinking, a confused statement of what critical thinking is if ever there was one. Critical thinking should involve real information, real knowledge, and serious criticism of a topic. The bill is designed to frustrate the teaching of evolution. The part Louisiana school boards need to watch is this: The bill passes the buck on litigation to the school boards.
In other words, the Louisiana legislature, Louisiana Family Forum, and Discovery Institute will not support any school district that allows a teacher to teach the religious dogma that commonly passes as creationism and intelligent design.
As part of the War on Education and the War on Science, this is effective tactics in action. If any teacher in Louisiana seeks approval for anti-evolution materials as the law encourages, school boards are put on the spot. If the school board approves the anti-evolution material, it is the school board’s action that will be the subject of the suit; if the board disapproves the material, but the teacher teaches it, the teacher can be fired and would be personally liable for any lawsuit.
But if a science teacher teaches evolution as the textbook has it, the Louisiana Family Forum will complain to the school board that “alternative materials” were not offered.
So to avoid trouble, evolution will be left out of the curriculum. The kids are failing the tests anyway — who will notice, or care? Not the Louisiana lege, not the Louisiana governor.
As America slips farther behind the rest of the industrialized world on education achievement in science, Louisiana’s legislature has sided with those who promote the “rising tide of mediocrity.” If a foreign government had done this to us, we’d regard it as an act of war, the Excellence in Education Commission said in 1983.
So what is it when the Louisiana legislature and Gov. Jindal do it to us? Treason? Maybe Bill Dembski will ask Homeland Security to investigate this attack on America by Louisiana’s elected officials.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
A generalization: Many creationists complain that evolution “can’t be true” because it doesn’t exalt humans enough. This is the old Bishop Wilberforce whine, about whether you are related to the monkeys on your mother’s side or father’s side.
“Nothing good can come from humble beginnings” is the thrust of the creationist argument, apparently with the creationists who make the claim losing every neuron they ever had that held the story of Jesus in their memory.
Nature, art, and life, keep pounding home the fact that the creationist argument is seriously in error. But as Robert Frost wondered, how many times did the apple have to fall before Newton took the hint? Scott Wade has taken the rebuttal to the creationists’ argument to new heights, and made art out of it. From dust, is art:
BD-10A high frequency generator tester leak detector, from Electro-Technic Products. “BD10ASV OUTPUT: 10,000-50,000 volts at frequency of approx. 1/2 megahertz. Power 230 V, with a momentary ON/OFF switch”
As described at the company’s website:
Model BD-10A is the standard tester
Model BD-10AS features a momentary ON/OFF switch
OUTPUT: 10,000-50,000 volts at frequency of approx. 1/2 megahertz
Generally, this tester should not produce serious injury, even when misapplied. Standard middle school lab safety rules would suggest that it should never be used to “test” a human for leaks. Such voltages are designed to produce sparks. Sparks do not always behave as one expects, or hopes. High voltages may make cool looking sparks, but the effects of high voltage jolts differ from person to person. It may be harmful.
Cuzelis said he is not aware of anyone seriously hurt with the device and said that his company has never been sued for injuries.
What sort of lab safety rules did Freshwater have for other experiments?
If you discovered your child’s science teacher had this device, designed to produce high-voltage sparks to highlight holes in rubber and plastic liners of tanks, would you be concerned? If you know what should go on in a science class, you’d know there is probably little use for such a device in a classroom. It’s been described as a Tesla coil.
Tesla coils of extremely small voltages can be safe. They should be safe. But one occasionally finds a safety warning, such as this generalized note at Wikipedia:
Even lower power vacuum tube or solid state Tesla Coils can deliver RF currents that are capable of causing temporary internal tissue, nerve, or joint damage through Joule heating. In addition, an RF arc can carbonize flesh, causing a painful and dangerous bone-deep RF burn that may take months to heal. Because of these risks, knowledgeable experimenters avoid contact with streamers from all but the smallest systems. Professionals usually use other means of protection such as a Faraday cage or a chain mail suit to prevent dangerous currents from entering their body.
Freshwater was using a solid state Tesla coil, if I understand the news articles correctly. Knowing that these sparks can cause deep tissue and bone damage in extreme cases, I suspect that I would not allow students to experience shocks as a normal course of a science classroom, especially from an industrial device not designed with multiple safety escapes built in.
Freshwater had been zapping students for years.
Here is a classic photo of what a Tesla coil does, a much larger coil than that used by John Freshwater, and a photo not from any classroom; from Mega Volt:
Tesla coil in action, from Mike Tedesco
There is nothing in the Ohio science standards to suggest regular use of a Tesla coil in contact with students performs any educational function.
I offer this background to suggest that the normal classroom procedures designed to ensure the safety of students were not well enforced in Freshwater’s classrooms, nor was there adequate attention paid to the material that should have been taught in the class.
The teacher, John Freshwater, has been dismissed by his local school board. Freshwater supporters argue that this is a case of religious discrimination, because Freshwater kept a Bible on his desk.
Among the complaints are that he burned crosses onto the arms of students with the high-voltage leak detector shown above. This gives an entirely new and ironic meaning to the phrase “cross to bear.”
Amazingly, this misuse of an electrical device may not be the most controversial point. While you and I may think this physical abuse goes beyond the pale, Freshwater has defenders who claim he was just trying to instill Biblical morality in the kids, as if that would excuse any of these actions. Over at Cafe Philos, I’ve been trying to explain just why it is that Freshwater does not have a First Amendment right to teach religion in his science class. There is another commenter with the handle “Atheist” who acts for all the world like a sock puppet for anti-First Amendment forces, i.e., not exactly defending a rational atheist position.
Below the fold I reproduce one of my answers to questions Atheist posed. More resources at the end.
Ken, partly it’s because you don’t allow comments at your blog. Open your blog up for discussion, you might learn something.
It ain’t that the majority is silent, it’s that the wackaloons are deaf. Ham seems confused. He thinks Myers is worried that God exists. Myers is worried that Ham is a wackaloon. Those two statements are quite different, and mutually exclusive independent. God’s existence doesn’t change the fact that Ham is a wackaloon, and God’s existence is not conditional on Ham’s being a wackaloon.
Ham is a creationist who spends millions of dollars annually lying to children. Ham, it would appear to a rational person, does not believe God exists, and so thinks there is no penalty to be paid for doing this. “Wackaloon” might be a gentle term.
But, should creationists be allowed into the Pentagon without a full body search? People who don’t think radiation works in predictable ways should be kept far, far away from nuclear weapons and those who play a role in triggering them, I think. What if they required a sanity test before allowing people into the Pentagon?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
My earlier post urging readers to contact Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal to urge him to veto the latest creationist eruption the Louisiana Lege gave him, produced an interesting comment. A fellow named Wayne provided links to a presentation by some guy named Perry Marshall, in which Marshall flails vainly against evolution theory. The video is billed as one the Louisiana Coalition for Science “fears.” Wayne wants to know, should we keep children from seeing it?
Marshall apparently isn’t even an engineer, but instead designs ads for internet placement — at least one step removed from the usual joke about engineers as creationists. Of course, that doesn’t help any of his arguments.
Wayne linked to three YouTube presentations, about half of the presentation Marshall made at an unidentified church (there are five segments total, I gather). What you see is bad PowerPoint slides, with audio. Marshall suggests that evolution couldn’t get from the American pronghorn antelope to the African giraffe, but in classic creationist form, he doesn’t address the unique signs of evolution we find in giraffes (neck, vagus nerve, for example) nor in pronghorns (bred for speed to beat the American cheetah, which is now extinct, and thereby hangs a great tale of sleuthing by evolution).
Marshall’s presentation is insulting. To me as a historian, it’s astounding how he can’t accurately list sequences of events well known to history. The science errors he makes are errors any 7th-grade student might make — but he’s passing them off as valid criticism of evolution theory.
Here’s the first YouTube presentation, and below the fold, my response to Wayne.
These presentations are an omen. They are sent to us as a warning for what the Discovery Institute will try to sneak into classrooms if Jindal signs that bill into law — heck, they’ll try anyway, but we don’t have to drill holes in our kids’ heads to make it easier for con men and snake oil salesmen to get their fingers in there.
“Stop the World! I Want to Get Off!” won a Tony Award on Broadway in 1963. It was a musical play about a fellow who overreached. With book and lyrics by Leslie Bricuse and Anthony Newly, it spawned a string of hit popular songs: “What Kind of Fool Am I?” “Gonna Climb a Mountain,” “Once in a Lifetime,” and “Mumbo Jumbo” among them.
Oh, why not: Update, here’s Sammy Davis, Jr., singing “What Kind of Fool Am I?”:
How can one know that history and not think of it, when looking at the current Louisiana legislature? What kind of fools are they, indeed? Louisiana would like the world to stop, so they can get off.
Progress and science so much offend the Louisiana legislature that they have carved out what they hope is an exception so teachers can avoid hard science on issues like reproduction (cloning), evolution, and that pesky weather stuff that ransacked New Orleans, global warming. Sitting on Gov. Bobby Jindal’s desk right now is the enrolled version of S. B. 733, the misnamed “Science Education Act,” which gives teachers and local school districts the right to deviate from state curriculum and science texts in those three areas.
Why not the Big Bang and other cosmology? Why not gravity? Why not algebra? It may be that Louisiana’s preachers don’t know about those areas of science. Shhhhh! Don’t tell them!
A few observations.
First, having been slapped down by federal courts repeatedly when they’ve tried to introduce religion into science classes before, the legislature seems to have learned not to say much, in hopes that federal courts will have difficulty determining the religious intentions behind the bill. In 1987, in the case of Edwards v. Aguillard, federal courts didn’t even get to trial. They simply took the statements of the legislators as to their religious intentions.
This time around, the bill is being passed without debate at all.Legislators obviously hope that if they say nothing, they can’t be held responsible for anything. Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubts — and obviously, there is hope among Louisiana creationists that federal courts won’t be able to use their closed-mouthedness as to evidence their foolishness. Well, they may want to consider that intelligent design has been ruled religious dogma by a federal court, already.
Second, the legislature’s learnings seem limited to bellicose speeches. The courts have repeatedly struck down Louisiana’s yearnings to teach creationism, both statewide, and repeatedly in the Tangipahoa Parish schools, which tried warning labels on textbooks and a variety of other methods, losing in court each time. It’s not just the ravings of the legislators that get up the dander of the courts. When the laws that come out of the ravings offend the Constitution, especially the First Amendment, the courts have struck them down. It’s not enough to just play at being non-offensive: The actions of the legislature must also not violate the Constitution. They appear not to have figured that one out. (More remedial con law courses coming up? Perhaps.)
The state should just let science be taught. Sneaking religion in does no good for the students, and it’s no secret that’s what they’re doing.
Third, the bill wasn’t drafted by people with much experience drafting legislation, running schools, or defending the Constitution. The bill could be used in some districts to teach nothing but evolution. It opens the door for anything a local school board decides might be science in three specific areas, cloning, evolution and global warming. Fruitcake groups like Ken Ham’s “Answers in Genesis” will rush to produce materials noting the accuracy of Hanna-Barbera’s “Flintstones.” Kids could be allowed to watch cartoons and call it science. In contrast, teachers who don’t understand the science in the first place will probably have few sources to turn to for good science information. Maybe one way to kill the law would be to point out that this thing opens the door wide for the theology of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (may his noodly appendage . . . well, you know).
State Board of Education chairman David Bradley of Beaumont told GOP delegates [at the Texas State Republican Convention] that the board was about to take up the science curriculum for public schools. He forecasted a fight over evolution vs. creationism.
Bradley said there are some on the board (he’s among them) that believe God created Man.
“There are others who think their ancestors were apes. That’s okay. But I’m going to vote the right way,” Bradley said.
Is there anything there that suggests Bradley wants good science in Texas textbooks and Texas classrooms?
“Our nation is at risk. The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity. If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament. History is not kind to idlers.”
25 years later, Commissar Don McLeroy is leading the tide of mediocrity, doing crippling things to our education system that the likes of Nikita Khruschev and Mao Ze Dong could only dream about.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Not only is ICR appealing their case on granting creationism degrees for science teachers (see preceding post), the State Board of Education is gearing up for another battle in Commissar Don McLeroy’s War on Education and War on Science (two wars for the price of one! He’ll campaign as a budget cutter next time . . .).
Texas’s Institute for Creation Research (ICR) is appealing the decision of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board that denied ICR the power to grant graduate science degrees. According to the story in the Houston Chronicle, ICR plans to take the issue to court if THECB does not reverse itself.
Institute spokesman Lawrence Ford said the voluminous appeal — it is 755 pages long, including supporting documents — is based upon a claim of “viewpoint discrimination.”
The appeal described the board’s decision as “academic (and religious) bigotry masquerading as Texas Education Code ‘enforcement.’ ”
Board members and staff are accused of denying the request in April because the institute and its leaders believe the biblical version of the Earth’s creation is literally true.
Institute CEO Henry Morris III said last spring his school’s program includes information about evolution, although he and others affiliated with the school don’t accept the proof of evolution offered by mainstream scientists.
Board members and Higher Education Commissioner Raymund Paredes said they were concerned the degree would not equip graduates to teach science in Texas’ public schools.
The real issue, Stafford said Monday, is whether the institute’s course work — offered online and still available, although not accredited — fits the label of the proposed degree.
The disputed degree is a Master of Science in science education. “Either the curriculum or the label has to change,” Stafford said.
“That label has a particular meaning of preparing somebody as a science teacher.”
Paredes reiterated that in a May 21 letter to Morris. “It was determined that the designation of the degree and the content of the degree were not adequately aligned,” he wrote. “Approval would require either a change in the designation of the degree or a change in the content covered.”
The institute is not inclined to do either, Ford said.
Institute for Creation Research (I can’t find their set of documents as promised by the Houston Chronicle, other than this old press release — maybe you’ll have better luck; by the way, I think none of the pictures showing researchers or science in progress have any connection to ICR — just sayin’)
I’m often struck at how creationists, including advocates of intelligent design, cannot maintain an argument in favor of their perverse beliefs against science for more than about five minutes without descending into erroneous descriptions of science, or outright lies.
Joe Carter pens the very well-read Evangelical Outpost. He attends church regularly, I gather, considers himself a good Christian, and for all I know studies the Bible regularly and tithes. But he’s also an advocate of intelligent design. In 2007 he provoked a bit of a storm claiming that scientists were making the case for ID by advocating evolution (no, it doesn’t make much more sense in the longer argument). (See “The moral imperative against intelligent design,” and “. . . in which I defend the judiciary against barbaric assault.“)
Had the critics remained silent over the past decade, ID might possibly have moldered in obscurity. If they had given the theory the respect accorded to supernatural explanations like the “multiverse theory” it might even have faded from lack of support.
But instead the theory’s critics launched a irrational counter-offensive, forcing people into choosing sides. The problem with this approach is that the more the public learn about modern evolutionary theory, the more skeptical they become about it being an adequately robust explanation for the diversity of life on earth. For instance in Expelled, Michael Ruse and Richard Dawkins provide two explanations for how life probably began. Ruse says that we moved from the inorganic world to the world of the cell on the backs of crystals while Dawkins says that life on earth was most likely seeded by aliens from outer space.
When even Dawkins admits that intelligent agency is involved in creation of life on earth it isn’t difficult to see why other people think it is plausible.
Is there a claim in there that is not completely false? Is there one claim that is not demonstrably in error — or an outright lie?
What virus causes this rabid departure from truth-telling among creationists? For if it’s not a virus, it’s a moral failing of the faith, isn’t it? And knowing that, wouldn’t advocates of Christianity’s growth, like Joe Carter, take steps to hide their prevarications?
If you have an idea what the cause is, comments are open.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Some of my earliest and best biology professors were Mormons — Latter-day Saints, or LDS — and from them and a few others I learned that LDS beliefs not only do not cut against evolution, preaching against evolution is “false doctrine” in the faith, since there has never been a revelation against evolution to the LDS prophets.
But as we know from the Methodist and Presbyterian and Catholic and other examples, official church doctrine doesn’t prevent members of the churches from jettisoning their reason when they discuss evolution and demonstrate a failure to understand even the basics of the simple theory. Mormons aren’t immune there, either. Alas.
Here’s an LDS blog where the authors are trying to argue that “philosophically,” creationism should be taught alongside evolution, since it’s a “better” myth than science. Or something like that. All that high-falutin’ use of six-syllable words, e.g., epistemology, makes me think that the words don’t mean what the authors think they mean, especially when the authors then go on to make foolish claims based on something they think they’ve “proven” logically. My tolerance of six-syllable words has been reduced by dealing with actual laws, I think.
Or perhaps, as I suspect, they’re just trying to claim that pigs fly.
“Knowledge is the glory of God” is what I remember* one engraving over one entrance to the campus of Brigham Young University, except when the epistemology is found to be offensive, or something.
You might do well to check out these posts, and other resources:
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Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
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