The PITA factor

The creationists don’t have to win their court cases to have an effect: all they have to do is threaten and badger teachers, and they effectively intimidate many into avoiding evolution, or work to make sure qualified science teachers don’t get hired at all. It happens here, and now it’s happening in the UK.

Teachers in UK schools are avoiding teaching evolution in science classes to avoid conflict with students, especially Muslims, who believe in creationism.

I don’t have any sympathy for students or their parents who think an education is a process of affirming what you think you already know.

How not to manage comments on a blog

When you think of Uncommon Descent (something I’m sure we all avoid as much as possible), the weblog of Bill Dembski and friends, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Maybe Intelligent Design advocacy is near the top, but their pyrrhic censorship policies have also got to be up there. At least the reverse is true: if you think about blogs with bad policies on comments, on transparency, on maintenance, with capricious administration and a ruthless dedication to silencing any critics, UD is the premier instance.

Well, somebody had to vent about it. I think it’s fine, actually: it’s great entertainment to watch them strenuously work to discredit themselves, and the gang at the Official Uncommonly Dense Discussion Thread think so, too.

Tom DeRosa in Morris

As promised, I attended Tom DeRosa’s creationism talk this evening, and as expected, it wasn’t very informative but it was mildly entertaining. He’s a good, enthusiastic speaker — he’s just unbelievably wrong. We might have a recording later on; Skatje was taping it, but it was just with our little home digital video recorder, and we don’t have any idea what the quality will be like, yet. I’m letting her handle the A/V stuff on this one.

Anyway, it wasn’t quite what I expected. I was thinking it might be based on his recent book, Evolution’s Fatal Fruit, which blames every social ill of the last 150 years on wicked ol’ Darwinism. It was altogether different: he gave a talk on “God’s Amazing Animals,” which was far, far fluffier and harder to grapple with.

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I am not defending creationism, I’m defending academic freedom

Moi? Mentioned in the Waco Tribune? Defending a creationist? I knew that remark would come back to bite me. At least the author misspelled my name, so my shame won’t spread too far (except, unfortunately, that I seem to be more widely cited as “Meyers” than “Myers”). Anyway, it’s a letter by Robert Marks’ lawyer, complaining about Baylor’s decision to shut down Marks’ “evolutionary informatics” web page, and I’m mentioned as supporting him.

In Minnesota, where I live, a well-known biologist and faithful believer in evolution, Professor P.Z. Meyers, has followed what Baylor has done and called for it to reverse itself.

Meyers loathes ID and its proponents and blogs about it, frequently with exceptional humor. It is more than telling — shameful, perhaps? — that Meyers, a self-identified atheist, sees something amiss here that those in power at Baylor cannot or will not.

Yeah, I’m afraid it’s true (except the “faithful believer” part). As long as Robert Marks plainly labels his creationist web pages as unendorsed by Baylor, as long as his remarks are plainly associated with his personal views, not the university’s, they ought to be tolerated. And laughed at, but that goes without saying. That’s the price of academic freedom, that we have to allow the free expression of ideas that we don’t like.

I also sympathize a little bit with Baylor. They’ve got this persistent, obnoxious leech named Dembski who keeps trying to cling to the university, and I can understand how they might get a little overzealous in trying to excise him. It looks to me like they have gotten carried away, though.

Of course, I also experience a little inappropriate glee at the situation. What’s the lesson universities are going to learn from this? If you hire a creationist, you hire a lawsuit-happy twit who is going to embarrass you repeatedly and is going to get crazy crackpot lunacy associated with your academic mission. It doesn’t matter how good he is at his specific discipline, the creationism is going to poison everything.

For another example of embarrassing associations, remember Dembski’s ‘notpology’ to Baylor? Throw away any pretense of apology, Bill. His latest entry was a link to a hideous parody site by one Galapagos Finch (the site seems to consist only of very bad Photoshop jobs where faces are distorted into ugly unrecognizability) expressing resentment that poor Robert Marks was being martyred. That one was very quickly ripped down and tossed into the UD memory hole, but you can still find it preserved in its shameful putrescence at At the Bathroom Wall.

I’m sure hiring committees around the country will take notice of the Dembski style of collegiality.

There is a difference

Josh talks about the difference between teaching about ID and teaching ID. There is a huge difference that the Discovery Institute does not seem to understand.

I am opposed to teaching Intelligent Design in the classroom. It’s an absurd idea that is unsupported by any evidence — it has not earned a place in the curriculum as a legitimate scientific hypothesis. The propaganda novels that the DI has tried to peddle in the past, Of Pandas and People and their new one, Explore Evolution, do not belong in the classroom. They are badly written, and incompetently push completely false ideas as valid. They should be rejected on their low merit.

On the other hand, I do teach about ID … in fact, this next week is the week I’ve set aside to specifically address creationism in my introductory biology course. I’ve prepared them with some of the history of evolution, and maybe a little bit more of the evidence for the idea than was easily digestible, and now I’m going to cover the fallacies of interpretation of the theory, which will include social Darwinism as well as creationism. Students are bombarded with these bad ideas, and I don’t think we can afford to pretend they don’t exist — we have to confront them head-on.

The strategy I’m using is to ask the students themselves what arguments they’ve heard against evolution. They wrote some lists down this week, and this weekend I’m putting together a lecture where I specifically take these misconceptions and answer them. It was rather fun reading their lists: the arguments are very familiar, everything from “if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?” to “there are no transitional fossils” to “organisms are too complex to have evolved.”

I also encouraged the students to go to our local creationist tent revival meeting, which was very conveniently timed. We’ll also be discussing how to refute his arguments in class next week.

That’s teaching about creationism. I’m all for it. It’s how we prepare students to criticize lies after they leave the classroom.

Little imaginary beings

I recently mentioned the way some serious theologians believe in demons and exorcisms. I can’t help it; I find these notions ridiculous to an extreme, and the absurdity of serious scholars blaming diseases on demonic possession in the 21st century is something one has to find laughable. I was being hard on Christianity, though. I left out an important exonerating factor for these people.

Some of them believe in angels, too.

Yes, I’m joking when I say this is an exonerating factor. This merely makes them even more silly. But no, you say, they can’t possibly argue for demons and angels being real agents in the natural world, can they? This must all be metaphorical, not literal. Judge for yourself.

Here’s a passage from the foreword to a 2002 book by Peter S. Williams, The Case for Angels. This is a book that argues for the literal reality of angels, and that they are important because “Angels (with a capital ‘A’, good angels) are worth studying because they are true (real), noble, right pure, lovely, admirable, excellent and praiseworthy. Fallen angels (demons are worth studying because they are real and because it behoves every army, including the army of Christ, to know its enemy.” The author of the foreword agrees. Can you guess who it is?

Peter Williams’ The Case for Angels is about…the theological rift between a Christian intelligentsia that increasingly regards angels only as figurative or literary devices, and the great mass of Christians who thankfully still regard them as real (a fact confirmed by popular polls, as Williams notes in this book). This rift was brought home to me at a conference I helped organize at Baylor University some years back. The conference was entitled ‘The Nature of Nature’ and focused on whether nature is self-contained or points beyond itself. The activity of angels in the world would clearly constitute on way nature points beyond itself.

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Don’t get David Attenborough mad

The offenses of creationists aren’t always blatant: it’s the sneaky erosion of science, the quiet omissions, the gradual degradation of good science where they make the most gains, and it’s where they get bold and stick their heads out (like Dover) where they get slapped down. We need to be aware of the small stuff, too, because it adds up — like this effort by Dutch evangelicals to edit David Attenborough’s documentaries. Some changes have to be made in translations and so forth, and the BBC does allow cuts up to about 5 minutes per hour, but the nasty thing is how targeted the cuts are at slicing out just those bits a pathologically ignorant theist would find objectionable.

I’ve had some people complain that we ought to reserve our outrage for the big stuff, the dramatic crap the creationists try to pull. I’m going to have to disagree. The little stuff that nibbles away at accurate information and slowly destroys the public education of science that must be confronted just as strenuously.

Anyone want to go to church with me on Sunday?

Well, lookee here … an announcement in the local Morris paper.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 7

TOM DEROSA will be at Morris Evangelical Free Church at 6:30 p.m., to present a creationist’s perspective about evolution. DeRosa’s presentation is free and open to the public.

I don’t think I have any plans for Sunday night. Wouldn’t an evening with an old pal of D. James Kennedy and the founder of the Creation Studies Institute be buckets of fun?

You should listen to his testimonial. He claims to be an atheist who was teaching evolution in the public schools (he was teaching physics and chemistry, though — what was he doing teaching biology?), and got upset because they cut back the science curriculum from a year to half a year. So he’s talking to someone at D. James Kennedy’s private Christian school (why?), and offers to apply for a position opening up there (what?), and his wife organizes a prayer chain so that the interview will go well (what? what?), and at the interview he learns that salvation is not a consequence of works as he previously thought (what? what? what?) but faith, and takes the job and becomes a Christian. Why, He sounds just like a real atheist.

Oh, and they have a “museum”, too.

If you’d rather not come out to Morris, DeRosa is going to be scuttling about this part of the state for a whole week, so you might find him closer to home, poisoning your community’s children’s minds. Of course, the Morris event will have the advantage of a more interesting audience. Heh.