Creationism Strikes Out in Alabama Legislature
By Irreligiosity on May 10, 2008 in Around the World, Basic Biology, Christianity, Creationism, Education, Evolution, Featured, Intelligent Design, Politics, Pseudoscience, Rational Thought, Religion, Science, Secularism, United States
The National Center for Science Education is reporting that an effort to get Intelligent Design into the state science curriculum under the guise of academic freedom for teachers has failed. This is definitely a good thing. The Intelligent Design crowd had their asses handed to them in the Dover trial back in 2005, establishing a legal precedent that Intelligent Design is nothing more than an underhanded attempt to sneak religion into the schools, and ID proponents have been desperately trying to find a new way to sneak religion into the science classroom ever since.
The “academic freedom” tactic is just another example of Intelligent Designers taking a good idea and perverting it as a means to their own disingenuous ends. I wholly agree that academic freedom is a good thing, but that freedom doesn’t extend to allowing teachers to dress up their religion in vaguely scientific terms and poorly thought-out logical fallacies and teach it as fact in the classroom.
Let’s be clear, what the ID crowd is advocating isn’t academic freedom, it’s institutionalized ignorance. Intelligent Design can’t be proven. Religion is taken on faith, and as such there is no test that man could ever devise to prove or disprove the existence of God. Any student who has taken biology and genetics courses in college can easily poke thousands of holes in the “scientific” rationale for Intelligent Design with evidence to back up their claims while the Intelligent Design groups are forced to rely on facile appeals to the ignorance and incredulity of the masses. As the courts and the overwhelming evidence has proven time and again, Intelligent Design is nothing more than an attempt to sneak religious teaching into the school system, and teaching religion is most definitely verboten.
Of course that didn’t stop the Alabama legislature from trying to use a false appeal to “academic freedom” in the language for the bill:
“[teachers have the right to] present scientific information pertaining to the full range of scientific views in any curricula or course of learning “
The last time I checked, no reputable scientist opened up their copy of the Bible and took every cosmological statement found therein at face value. Even people who study the Bible for a living admit that there’s a lot in there that’s contradictory and just plain wrong when seen through the lens of a modern world view. Intelligent Design and creationism are not part of the scientific debate anywhere but amongst the creationist academic pariahs at the Discover Institute. The ID crowd is attempting to create the illusion of scientific controversy where none exists, because the hard evidence consistently disproves just about every idea they espouse.
“no student in any public school or institution of higher education … shall be penalized in any way because he or she may subscribe to a particular position on any views.”
I don’t know about you, but I certainly hope that the future doctors and scientists of America are flunked if they fail basic 100 level science courses because they insist that religion trumps reason and evidence. The country will be in a sad state in a few decades if the people who wrote this bill eventually have their way. Of course I do have to admit that it would have made the biology and genetics classes I took in college much easier if we were simply allowed to say “God made it happen” on exams instead of drawing detailed cladograms and blending nasty smelling chunks of beef to isolate and analyze the genetic material over the course of several weeks.
On the plus side, the language in that bill would have provided legal protection for the teaching of Pastafarianism in the schools, but it’s probably a better idea to just keep all religion out of the classroom no matter how noodly and delicious it may be.
via Bad Astronomy
Technorati Tags: alabama, creationism, intelligent design, HB923
the chaplain | May 10, 2008 | Reply
The Scopes Trial occurred in 1925 and we’re still fighting the same battle. It’s not over by a long shot.
Irreligiosity | May 10, 2008 | Reply
Yeah, and more’s the pity. I can understand why people get confused though. I studied the stuff in college and it was damned complicated, so I can see where the lay person has trouble with the leap from single-celled organism to the modern biosphere.
That just means that we have to keep fighting the good fight against ignorance and superstition though. Constant vigilance is the price of a good science education.
C. David Parsons | May 11, 2008 | Reply
The National Center for Science Education is antichrist.
Text taken from The Quest for Right, a 7-book series on origins based on physical science, the old science of cause and effect:
Special note on obstructionism: In 1916, one thousand scientists were polled as to their belief in a deity (i.e., God). Of the ones responding, 60 percent had no religious belief. A follow-up study 80 years later revealed that the percentage of atheists, someone who does not believe in or denies the existence of God, among scientists remains shockingly high: 78 percent of physicists, 58 percent of biologists, and 55 percent of mathematicians are atheists. Sixty percent of those polled by the University of Georgia historian Edward Larson snubbed Judaism, Islam, and Christianity by equating “belief in a deity and an afterlife with superstition based on fear and wishful thinking.” Nature, 4-09-1997
Even more disturbing, only 10 percent of those polled “expressed an intense desire for immortality” (that is, going to heaven), thus, signifying that on the average only 10 percent of physicists, biologists, and mathematicians are under covenant. The great majority (90 percent) have little or no regard for God but, rather, oppose Him, promoting the error that the earth and all that is in existence happened by chance. The mystical tenet governs every aspect of academic science. To the point, obstructionists: scientists, biologists, mathematicians, and the NEA, teach the innocents within the classroom that there is no God. The appalling statistics serve to add insight into the obstructionist stalwart confronted by the investigation on every hand.