I have mixed feelings about this article in Inside Higher Ed on the issue of approving an ICR degree program in Texas. On the one hand, it’s clear that the Texas bureaucracy is being cautious and thorough and working its way through their official protocols. Raymund Paredes, the commissioner of higher education, has raised concerns about the proposed program—online graduate degrees in he sciences are problematic because they lack the laboratory component; the proposed curriculum is not equivalent to other graduate programs in Texas; they haven’t documented that the ICR is a research institution. He’s said that because the subject is controversial, it’s going to be examined “thoroughly and fairly.”

OK, that’s all good. Let’s all calmly work through the proper channels.

On the other hand, though, it’s freaking insane. The ICR is an organization that demands a loyalty oath for its employees:

The statement of faith for everyone at the institute requires support for both “scientific creationism” and “Biblical creationism.” The former includes the belief that humans were created “in fully human form from the start” and that the universe was created “perfect” by the “creator.” The latter includes the beliefs that the Bible is literally true and “free from error of any sort, scientific and historical as well as moral and theological.” Specifically, the statement requires belief in the literal creation of the earth in six days, that Adam and Eve were the first humans, and in the virgin birth of Jesus.

This is a sectarian theological program, a rinky-tink mob of cultists with no scientific credibility at all, demanding that a state recognize its work as equivalent to, say, that of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Texas Austin. Alarmed? Every Texan ought to be furious at the idea that any yahoo with a Bible and a flaky idée fixe can set themselves up as logistically equivalent to a multi-million dollar research institution.

And these people are proposing to teach the state’s teachers, who will then go on to teach the state’s children.

The whole idea is subversive, lunatic, and destructive to the educational system as a whole, and the commissioner can simultaneously say that it is “controversial” and that he could still authorize the program? Insanity.

Texas is in the spotlight on this issue, but there’s another state that needs to be examined: California. The ICR is moving from California, where they have been handing out degrees in creationist inanity for many years — where has the quality control been, California?

Maybe every state ought to reexamine its approval processes. It’s hard to believe that we’re actually seriously considering whether fundamentalist nonsense and distortions should be regarded as equivalent to modern science, and that these crackpots and their clown college proposal weren’t laughed at and rejected out of hand.

I heard this third hand, so it’s not exactly the most well-founded rumor around, but a contact with inside information in the Southern Baptist Ministries has heard that they want to help out with the koo-koo descent into creationist madness that is Florida. They have asked their Florida churches to send information to businesses and school boards — a fine idea, and perfectly acceptable practice, I would think — but you have to see the “information” to believe it.

The rumor is that they’re going to send a tract called Apes, Lies, and Ms. Henn. That’s right, a Jack Chick tract.

I’m torn. It seems unlikely, but on the other hand, it’s just stupid enough that it could be true. On our side we have the whole of the scientific literature; on theirs, a comic book featuring a little girl saying “We didn’t come from monkeys.” And which one will win is uncertain.

Floridians, keep an eye open and let me know if there is a sudden influx of Chick inanity in your community.

• Remember the creationist trying to raise money by selling off his mastodon skull? Now we know why he is trying to get money fast. He got into a nasty, mud-slinging lawsuit with a fellow Christian creationist over ownership of another fossil. The wonderful news: if he doesn’t get enough cash from the sale of the skull, he may have to close his museum.

• Man, you people sure jumped hard on that poor Canadian who thought the title of Darwin’s book was sufficient to damn it. Now he has replied with another post in which he demonstrates his stupidity. He really should stop. He has put up a long list of “ironic” claims that show he also doesn’t know what irony is — here’s part.

  3)Irony is being accused of not reading the atheist bible (and even being told I have “no excuse”) when I’m actually a couple of days into this.

  4)Even greater irony is that I can probably guess on one hand, probably even less, how many of these accusers have read my Bible — and mine’s been completed for almost 2000 years!

  5)Even greater irony is that I might or might not need my other hand to count how many of the above-mentioned have read their own bible…

  How clueless can you get? There is no atheist bible, and the Origin certainly wouldn’t be it if there were; his bogus criticism was specifically of the title of the book, and reading the NAS booklet on evolution is irrelevant to that point. He’s got a lot to learn, too, if he thinks atheists haven’t read “his” Bible, since many of us came to atheism precisely because we were unimpressed with the content of that book. Somebody else will have to break the sad news to the poor fellow that the Bible wasn’t completed at the time of Jesus, but is a pastiche put together many centuries later…and that there were multiple versions of the Bible before they settled on the particular chapters now in the canonical version.

  I’m sure a fair number of us here have read the Origin, and it is a darned good book, but it is not required reading anymore, and it is greatly out of date.

• Answers in Genesis is starting a fake science journal. Now you can actually read the first issue, which contains a grand total of two articles. One claims that granite can form very, very quickly, therefore the earth could be young (as if that is the only reason we can see that the earth is far older than 6000 years old). The second tries to puzzle out where the bacteria fit into the six-day creation account — it’s quite an exercise in absurdist reasoning, since bacteria weren’t even imagined in biblical times.

  Not recommended, unless you’re a masochist.

Talk about clueless gomers—here’s a Canadian blog praising the Expelled movie, and bringing up a very tired argument against evolution.

For the trolls (and you know who you are!), I simply offer the original title Darwin gave to his book,

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

,and ask you to explain how such a social (and Holocaust-endorsing) statement can be classified as the title of a purely scientific work — until I get a direct answer to that, I will not respond to any of your inquiries as I haven’t seemed to get much of a response on mine and think I’m overdue!

First of all, the logic is deeply flawed: if evolutionary theory did have undesirable social consequences, that wouldn’t be a valid argument against the truth of evolution.

Secondly, and more conclusively, the question reveals quite a bit about the questioner. He hasn’t read the book he’s criticizing, beyond copying down the title! The Origin is using “race” in an antiquated way that refers to what we’d now call varieties — he doesn’t discuss human races at all, but does talk a great deal about domesticated breeds of pigeons and horses and vegetables. It certainly doesn’t endorse any kind of holocaust. Darwin doesn’t advocate any action, but is offering a descriptive explanation for what is.

The Origin is a purely scientific work, rich in detail and experiment and offering a useful framework for subsequent research. A man who can barely read past the title is in no position to make demands for explanations or deplore the unread contents of the book.

(via Canadian Cynic)

You’ve got a real winner running for mayor down there. Bill Foster is another ignorant creationist running for political office.

“Evolution gives our kids an excuse to believe in natural selection and survival of the fittest, which leads to a belief that they are superior over the weak,” Bill Foster wrote board members in a letter received this week. “This is a slippery slope.”

He continued: “One of the Columbine shooters wrote on his Web site, ‘You know what I love? Natural selection! It’s the best thing that ever happened to the Earth. Getting rid of all the stupid and weak organisms.'”

Rather than reducing our kids’ exposure to evolution, let’s increase it. The problem with what Bill Foster believes, a belief he shares with the Columbine punks, is that it has nothing to do with evolutionary biology — in their ignorance, they’ve swallowed a whole pop-culture, religious line of bullshit about the theory. Biology does not advocate killing the stupid and weak; it does not preach some kind of objective superiority of one class of people over another; it merely describes what happens in the natural world.

Maybe if the Columbine killers had gotten a more accurate version of evolution from a science teacher rather than the idiot’s version they got from people like their conservative preachers and the Bill Foster’s of the world, they wouldn’t have held those ridiculous distortions of the idea.

I hope all you St Petersburg residents are planning to vote for some other person. You don’t really want an ignoramus in charge of your city government, do you?

OK, you can all stop trying to win a copy of the Atlas of Creation now — the owner has decided who is to be afflicted with punished with tormented with given the copy. Scott Hatfield, I’ve passed your email address along. Look for a message. Get ready, it might take a month’s worth of a public school teacher’s salary to cover the shipping.

By the way, if anyone else wants to dispose of their copy, browse that thread — I can connect you up with recipients.

Texas has been considering this application from the Institute for Creation Science for approval to offer a degree in “science” “education” (a double misnomer!). Now there’s an excellent idea afloat by the Texas commissioner of higher education — go ahead, give ’em a degree, only call it “creation studies”. Perfect! It removes the problem of false labeling, and allowing people who aren’t actually qualified to teach science get jobs in the public school system. And it actually gives the graduates of programs in creation studies an edge in acquiring high paying jobs in the Baptist Sunday School sector. Everyone wins!

This is getting weirder all the time: the Miami Herald claims that 12 Florida counties have passed anti-evolution resolutions in their school boards. They all sound awfully similar, too, as if…

…as if there is intelligent design behind this campaign.

…as if there is some money backing this effort.

…as if someone has specifically targeted Florida as a good venue for the next evolution-creation trial, and is sowing the seeds.

So, anyone out there on a Florida school board, or knows someone who is? Have you got any information on the source of the anti-evolution boilerplate that’s being disseminated in your state? Let me know!

Would you believe someone has received a copy of Harun Yahya’s epic tome, Atlas of Creation, and doesn’t want it? Weird, huh?

Let’s imagine, though, that someone for some bizarre reason wants one. Here’s your chance: write a comment here that testifies to your deep and unholy desire to possess a copy, and the current possessor of a copy will judge them and decide to whom he will impart this strange book of lunacy. All you have to do is pay the cost of shipping it to where ever you are.

Here’s the way it works. Leave a comment here using a valid email address. The current owner will pick one of you as the lucky recipient, and will contact me; I’ll give him your email address (he and I will be the only ones to see that), and then the two of you can negotiate the cost of sending it.

Easy. Just be aware that if you comment in this thread and say anything, you may win a copy of the book. I’ll be curious to see if this thread goes instantly dead, or becomes amusingly entertaining.