“It’s very interesting that you have a situation where science will only allow things in the classroom that are consistent with a non-Creator idea of how we got here, as if somehow or another that’s scientific.” – Rick Santorum

By now, the brainpain that comes from reading asinine quotes from the current crop of Republican Presidential candidates that refer to their support of teaching creationism as science in public schools is well-known. You can’t avoid them. Whenever one of them makes a statement about “teaching the controversy,” a mental image of a festering, stubborn cold sore leaps forward in my mind and all I can think of is, “make it go away.” But it obviously won’t. Teaching BFT’s (Bullshit Fairy Tales) in science class is still a goal for many officials, and not just the GOP hopefuls, but a plethora of state and local politicians, legislators and even school boards, as well. This, of course, is a travesty as well as an insult to the collective of human scientific discover.

Facts? We Don’t Need No Stinking Facts…

Because there lacks empirical evidence to prove creationism, many proponents of this particular BFT attempt to disprove real science by using sources from, you guessed it…other creationists. These buffoons cite references from pseudo-scientific sources or from scientists whose judgments have been clouded by religious belief. The fact is that there is no “controversy” to teach, and putting a BFT up against reality only generates a false sense of equality.

Creationism should not be presented as competitive or comparative because it lacks equal footing with evolutionary theory. Period. End of story. Evolution concerns itself with change through natural selection and genetic drift and comes complete with empirical data and research. As well, it aligns with other sciences because it remains absolutely true to the scientific method. So, let’s review… Creationism = fantasy / Evolution = reality.

Reason Fail…

Creationism has been tested and re-tested via all aspects of the scientific method and has failed in every conceivable way possible. It has been disproved and any vestiges of science that remained have been discredited due to the inclusion of magic or magical events. Magic is untestable, which happens to be really convenient for Creationists. Imagine that…

Evolution has occurred and continues to occur. It is not random or by chance. It is, without question, the best explanation for the mechanism of change. Logic and evidence leads to these conclusions. Evolutionary theory is the result of hundreds of thousands of observations and the resultant logical conclusions. The creationist, with fingers in ears and hands covering eyes fail to consider,

• A vast knowledge base that has been accumulated, tested and proved for evolution.
• The continuing flow of new information that further adds to the knowledge base of evolutionary theory.
• A century and a half of unsuccessful attempts to falsify it by the scientific community.

But, alas, these denizens of denial still choose to believe in the bizarre details of the Genesis creation myth as actual truth.

For The Record…

We can go as far back as the “Scopes Monkey Trial” back in the 1920’s, but the controversy didn’t get started until 1968 with the Supreme Court in Epperson v. Arkansas, which reads

“…the First Amendment does not permit the state to require that teaching and learning must be tailored to the principles or prohibitions of any religious sect or dogma…the state has no legitimate interest in protecting any or all religions from views distasteful to them.”

In McLean v. Arkansas case (1982), the judge specifically stated that creation scientists:

“…cannot properly describe the methodology used as scientific, if they start with a conclusion and refuse to change it regardless of the evidence developed during the course of the investigation.”

Then, in 1987, the Supreme Court ruled on Edwards v. Aguillard that:

“…Because the primary purpose of the Creationism Act is to advance a particular religious belief, the Act endorses religion in violation of the First Amendment.”

In Webster v. New Lenox School District (1990), the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals made the ruling that stated:

“If a teacher in a public school uses religion and teaches religious beliefs or espouses theories clearly based on religious underpinnings, the principles of the separation of church and state are violated as clearly as if a statute ordered the teacher to teach religious theories such as the statutes in Edwards did.”

In 1994, The Ninth Circuit Federal Appeals Court wrote a decision in the California case, Peloza v. Capistrano School District, that:

“The Supreme Court has held unequivocally that while belief in a Divine Creator of the universe is a religious belief, the scientific theory that higher forms of life evolved from lower ones is not.”

More recently, US District Judge John E. Jones III stated in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 2005, that:

“We have concluded that Intelligent Design is not science, and moreover that I.D. cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious antecedents.“

Creationists stubbornly continue to reinvent religious propaganda in spite of continued court defeats, rejections by state school boards and worldwide refute of their “research” by the global scientific community. Instead, they get their information from dubious sources, like this guy:

Contrary to the deluded beliefs of the religious, Creationism lacks any merit of truth. In fact, it does a wonderful job of exposing the absurdity of biblical mythology and abandons anything that even remotely approaches what we have classified as scientific research. What the Creationist have come up with is horrifically inaccurate, misinformed and unscientific. It is not evidence against evolution. Creationists try to prove their myths by attempting to disprove science. Their results are preposterous and include the ridiculous notion that plants existed before the sun and that the whole spectrum of life and all the aspects of nature that we have come to understand just magically appeared in an impossibly short time, and looking pretty much the same as we observe them today.

Don’t Take My Word For It…

I am not a scientist, nor do I play one on TV. I am just a well-informed ape. However, Jerry A. Coyne, Ph.D, is a scientist. Here are some credentials, from his official CV:

Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago and a member of both the Committee on Genetics and the Committee on Evolutionary Biology. Coyne received a B.S. in Biology from the College of William and Mary. He then earned a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology at Harvard University in 1978, working in the laboratory of Richard Lewontin. After a postdoctoral fellowship in Timothy Prout’s laboratory at The University of California at Davis, he took his first academic position as assistant professor in the Department of Zoology at The University of Maryland. In 1996 he joined the faculty of The University of Chicago.

Coyne’s work is focused on understanding the origin of species: the evolutionary process that produces discrete groups in nature. To do this, he uses a variety of genetic analyses to locate and identify the genes that produce reproductive barriers between distinct species of the fruit fly Drosophila: barriers like hybrid sterility, ecological differentiation, and mate discrimination. Through finding patterns in the location and action of such genes, he hopes to work out the evolutionary processes that originally produced genetic change, and to determine whether different pairs of species may show similar genetic patterns, implying similar routes to speciation.

Coyne has written over 110 refereed scientific papers and 80 other articles, book reviews, and columns, as well as a scholarly book about his field (Speciation, co-authored with H. Allen Orr). He is a frequent contributor to The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement, and other popular periodicals

With that said, here’s a clip of Dr. Coyne explaining why evolution is true.

Rock on, Jerry…

Nature Is Super, Not Supernatural…

The natural world is the domain of science, it is where hypotheses are derived. All experimentation radiates from this point. The scientific community thrives on probabilities, working theories and fact based hypotheses. It is through these aspects of the scientific method that we have made the advances we have in fields such as medicine and technology.

The Christian community thrives on miracles.  Christians generally define a miracle as “an event brought about by the power of god that is a temporary exception to the ordinary course of nature for the purpose of showing that god has acted in history.”  This is very convenient because it removes the logical possibility for scientific investigation. It basically makes a miracle impossible for anyone to recognize even if they saw one. Because of this, they take the liberty of using mental gymnastics to string together an otherwise unlikely connected stream of natural events to “prove” their miracles. This, of course, perverts science into a laughable and largely inconceivable set of ridiculous improbabilities.

This is the type of shallow analysis that is the result of superstitious thinking. Consider how utterly ridiculous it is to believe that miracles exist because miracles exist and can only be caused and explained by a god that cannot be proven to exist. Bends the mind, doesn’t it?

Never Argue With The Data…

There is extra-biblical confirmation of some of the details in the bible, which poses a problem for many believers. Because they believe the entire bible to be “true,” many of them are forced to believe that these proven data points constitute confirmation of all of the bible. Arguing with scientifically proved or disproved data that contradicts the bible is typical of the all-or-nothing mindset of the religious believer. It’s like reading Mother Goose and believing the entirety of the fable is true because there exist geese.

The point is, if Creationism were not just a BFT (along with most of Scripture), then the bible should have provided scientists with huge amounts of data, evidence and records, have provided exactly nothing. It is only through superstitious ignorance that an otherwise intelligent individual can believe that god created the entire universe in six days, less than ten thousand years ago and that man came into existence looking pretty much the same as we do now.

The Truth Is Marching On…

Science will continue to progress forward in spite of religion and in spite of the willful ignorance of what seems to be an endless procession of dimwitted politicians and school board administrators. Ignoring facts do not make them magically disappear, and eventually Creationism will be relegated to the bookshelf with the rest of the BFT’s that clutter the mythology sections of libraries and bookstores.

Of course, this would be accomplished a lot faster if we quit electing and appointing fundamentalist, superstitious, myth-believing people in positions that can negatively affect our society. Nothing positive comes from the continual infusion of ancient, ignorant beliefs into academia. Truth saves, lies cost. Of that you can be sure…