Mother Jones has a good overview of Zack Kopplin’s work against the terrible Bobby Jindal, but I object to them characterizing him as a troll: he’s a good investigator who honestly exposes Jindal’s views. And they’re pretty terrible views:
Jindal, who studied biology at Brown and was considering Harvard Medical School before attending Oxford, has left a bit of a paper trail as to where he really stands. In 1995, while still a student in England, he published an essay in a small Catholic journal, This Rock, attacking atheism. He asserted that there was “much controversy over the fossil evidence for evolution,” and he put himself squarely in the camp of intelligent design. “No evolutionary biologist has produced or ever will produce a conclusion with any relevance to the necessity of God,” he argued. “At best he can push the location of the supernatural assumption from the origin of life to the origin of matter, energy, and order.”
One interesting point is that Kopplin seems to think Jindal is smarter and more devious than most people assume.
But Kopplin, who attended the same magnet school in Baton Rouge as Jindal’s two kids currently do, suspects the governor’s support for the law is purely political. “I mean, who knows? I could be totally wrong, and maybe Jindal believes this with his whole heart,” Kopplin says. “Which is more why I go back to what his kids are learning. I had their seventh-grade biology teacher at [University Laboratory School] where I went for middle school, and I know she doesn’t just teach evolution—she’s absolutely obsessive about it. If Jindal actually was a creationist, I think he’d have a much bigger problem with his kids being taught what evolution is.”
I don’t know which is more charitable: to assume he knows better but is calculatedly making a bad decision, or to assume that he’s a delusional ignoramus who is pushing his views sincerely. Neither one would speak well of Jindal.
Shorter Jindal: It’s turtles all the way down.
Cthulhu, this is gibberish. I’ve never seen any indication that Jindal is very bright.
1. Oddly enough though, he is right that evolutionary biologists won’t produce a conclusion with any relevance for the existence of the gods.
That is because biology is the study of life. Not the study of the possible existence of invisible sky fairies or pink unicorns.
2. Jindal has dusted off the god of the gaps argument again. Or maybe dug it up somewhere, it so old and worn out.
Science has pushed the gods back before the Big Bang. And even there they aren’t looking too secure since the Multiverse probably exists. Such gods are unprovable or unfalsifiable and so remote their relevance to us is about zero.
Jindal’s god isn’t that one anyway. Jindal’s god knocks up teenage virgins and occasionally wanders around earth in a human meat suit.
Jindal argued:
yes. he got that right. Nothing ever written in evolution biology necessitates a God.
Jindal, they’re not proving HE doesn’t exist, nor are they proving HE does exist. There’s a difference between “no evidence of existence” and “proof of nonexistence”.
How about school districts that advocate Wiccan beliefs, Bobby? You all good with that? Or maybe districts that teach that the universe was created by the Lord Brahma? Is that a good use of state money, Bobby-boy?
Shouldn’t this be: relevance
to theor necessity of God?I think the GOP is going to need a bigger clown car…
Let me just cut to the chase and whip out the ‘Murica Bugaboo De Jour™: MUSLIMS!!!! Let’s
teachforce the Qu’ran to the kiddies and instigate the final war against Xians!@6
Ok, you owe me a keyboard. You may owe my nephew a keyboard as well, since I told him what you said.
Oh, never mind. It was worth it.
I thought the thing with clown cars is no matter how full they are, they can always fit in another clown.
Actually, Jindal and I could be in complete agreement here. As long as he acknowledges that the creator gods are Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo, Poseidon and the other Olympians, we’re simpatico. Now if he’s one of those atheists of the Christian cult who deny the Olympians, then of course all devout, intelligent, educated people will sneer at him. I’ve heard rumors that he’s secretly a member of that barbaric superstition which devout Romans, in their misguided sense of freedom, failed to suppress when they had the chance to remove those dangerous cultists and end their threat to society. I have long devoutly prayed that Zeus, Hera, etc. bring us back to the path of righteousness, morality and good sense. After all, everyone knows Zeus etc. created the universe, so the true gods ought to be able to clean up this mess. Unless they’re leaving it up to we puny mortals. If so, well, Zeus help us …
#6, #9
The shoes only look giant. They are highly compressible.
@2 raven
Actually, it is relevant to the existence of life-designing gods, who are now debunked. That’s a very large very major category of gods.
While “turtles all the way down” kind of felt right to me (#1) I admit it is not quite analogous. So I’m happy to find a relevant quote in the context of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
Bertrand Russell:
I agree with #2 that Jindal is essentially echoing God of the gaps. One thing that Russell points out eloquently is that God-did-it doesn’t really fill the gaps better than any other explanation. You are left with gaps in explaining the cause of God in scientific terms. And if you are willing to reach any point that you don’t try to explain causally, there is no reason why it has to be God rather than anything else.
wsierichs @ 10,
I think you’ve made a ……. Titanic………error.
Has it ever been proposed that anyone who demonstrates that they actually learned nothing by receiving their degree should have said degree revoked?
Is that overly tyrannical?
(Why does that make me think of MIB’s alien in an Edgar suit? — “Sugar!”)
But really, pregnant virgins and zombie rabbis are among the many observations predicted by the god-hypothesis that are disputed by modern biology. Other prediction failures would include gene frequency distributions that are incompatible with the genetic bottlenecks predicted by the Adam-and-Eve and the Noah theories; and the patterns of genetic and morphological similarities among fossil and surviving organisms that are predicted by evolution, but not by the various theories based on a creator god.
When a proposed unifying theory makes predictions of potentially observable phenomena that then fail to be verified, the post-observation probability of truth for that theory is reduced by a calculable factor, depending on the level of prior credence assigned by believers. The god-hypothesis survives by moving the goalposts (“we never really believed in that kind of god”), and by clinging to an ever-shrinking remnant of a possibility that evidence for Unicorns and Gods will be found if we just search one more magic glade or mount one more expedition to Mount Ararat.
Or, in the case of certain politicians, by ignoring or ridiculing science, while reducing funding for both science and education.
So… at best, biologists can remove the “necessity of God” from the field of biology altogether.
robinjohnson @17
Pierre-Simon Laplace, speaking about a different science, put it quite well:
Robert Westbrook @15,
I’d say that Jindal learned a lot at college. He got his BS in biology, and he’s been spewing it ever since.
The fact that it’s difficult, even impossible sometimes, to tell the difference between a creationist who is a delusional ignoramus and one who is an intelligent fraud says a lot about creationists. In fact, can there be any other sort?
Unfortunately, as has been apparent within the right-wing political movement for decades – winning votes is vastly more important than understanding and articulating the evidence supporting science. First, find out what ideas comprise the lowest common denominator that will win votes; secondly, apply that value within your voting base – then give those people what they want to hear whether it is factual or not. Now that’s the tea-party inspired GOP’s modern modus operandi!
Another possible explanation: Jindal started out semi-badly when it came to understanding all that top notch education he received; and then as he aged, he got dumber and dumber.
Now he’s prone to rote pronouncements from the echo chamber of conservative thoughtlessness.
Lynna, I’m sure you meant it humorously, but you don’t necessarily get dumber with age. Some folks even manage to get smarter, change their view points, and learn new tricks. Anyway, he’s not that old…he’s only 44. For crying out loud, how old is old? If 44 is an age excuse for being stupid, then we’re in serious doodoo.