I’d point at England and give a Nelson Muntz laugh if it weren’t so depressing. A survey of UK students on evolution is showing large numbers falling for the creationism/ID scam.

In a survey last month, more than 12% questioned preferred creationism — the idea God created us within the past 10,000 years — to any other explanation of how we got here. Another 19% favoured the theory of intelligent design — that some features of living things are due to a supernatural being such as God. This means more than 30% believe our origins have more to do with God than with Darwin — evolution theory rang true for only 56%.

Of course, you know whose fault this is: Richard Dawkins. Who else could possibly have filled English children’s heads with these kinds of ideas?

“As a Christian, I have believed in it for a long time and I have no reason to doubt it.”

“When I look at things in the world I think it is amazing that God has created it for us. If you have faith in God you can believe he has done it, whether there is evidence or not.”

“

As a practising Muslim, the holy Qur’an — that’s our proper evidence.”

Why, those are straight out of Dawkins’ books! I think. Maybe. Some books, anyway…the author was probably an atheist, so that’s close enough.

Although I do think Lawrence Krauss’s op-ed in today’s NY Times, How to Make Sure Children Are Scientifically Illiterate, is a good, strong piece of work, it doesn’t go quite far enough. He’s specifically targeting a couple of the Kansas state school board members for ridicule. First he slams Steve Abrams:

The chairman of the school board, Dr. Steve Abrams, a veterinarian, is not merely a strict creationist. He has openly stated that he believes that God created the universe 6,500 years ago, although he was quoted in The New York Times this month as saying that his personal faith “doesn’t have anything to do with science.”

Then he takes on John Bacon:

Another member of the board, who unfortunately survived a primary challenge, is John Bacon. In spite of his name, Mr. Bacon is no friend of science. In a 1999 debate about the removal of evolution and the Big Bang from science standards, Mr. Bacon said he was baffled about the objections of scientists. “I can’t understand what they’re squealing about,” he is quoted as saying. “I wasn’t here, and neither were they.”

And then he explains how science works, and that their complaints are fallacious.

However, he also waffles and misses the major lesson of the problem of creationism. Abrams and Bacon are advancing these complaints about evolution for religious reasons, but Krauss backs away from that battle.

I have recently been criticized by some for strenuously objecting in print to what I believe are scientifically inappropriate attempts by some scientists to discredit the religious faith of others. However, the age of the earth, and the universe, is no more a matter of religious faith than is the question of whether or not the earth is flat.

Ah, you see, when it’s a matter of physics and astronomy, the professor of physics and astronomy resolves the problem of conflict with faith by declaring his domain to be a non-religious question, and therefore those who argue otherwise are not doing so out of faith, but out of ignorance. That’s fine, I agree, but I also think the whole of our understanding of the natural world is completely outside the purview of religion—they have an ugly history of always getting it wrong, you know—and that clearly the root cause of Abrams’ and Bacon’s ignorance is their faith. And that’s an observation he’d like to hide away, because it knocks his conclusion all cockeyed.

But when we win minor skirmishes, as we did in Kansas, we must remember that the issue is far deeper than this. We must hold our elected school officials to certain basic standards of knowledge about the world. The battle is not against faith, but against ignorance.

I will remind you all that the title of Krauss’s piece is “How to Make Sure Children Are Scientifically Illiterate.” He’s right that one way is to elect school board officials who are raving ignoramuses who advocate the insertion of nonsense into public school curricula. But he’s missing an even more pernicious and common way to make children scientifically illiterate: raise them in a household that values faith above reason. He’s choosing to fight the symptom rather than the disease, and I think his approach is doomed to ineffectuality.

Here’s an interesting leak, if true. Someone (“Yellow Rose”, or YR) is a mole within a religious group trying to subvert the Wikipedia:

YR gathered intell on a baker’s dozen fundamentalist techno-geeks, resembling a cult within a cult, who have become Wikipedians. Lacking a Y chromosome and being thus subordinated to menial church chores, she could not herself get closer than the loneliest of the 13 guys, but the Pentecostal sexual prohibitions at least afforded her the ability to avoid sacrifices espionage agents often have to make. YR emphasizes that their names mean nothing, and their ages mean less, and that the country they come from is called Texas. They were brought up there and taught there the church to abide, and that the worldview they live, by has God on its side. Empowered by God, and led by a charismatic, MIT, computer science sophomore (who also plays lead guitar in a Christian rock band), this squad-size cohort of Christian soldiers is chipping away at Wikiscience, in subject areas entirely predictable. Clever they are too, in taking advantage of Wikiethics, specifically NPOV (i.e., Neutral Point of View), where all views must be represented, even if demonstrably incorrect; any fundamentalist worth his salt can drive a truck threw such a loop hole, and they have begun doing so. Intelligent design and biblical floods are being commingled with Darwin and DNA. The process is so far more apparent on the discussion pages than on actual pages, where God’s soldiers employ a Pentecostal version of good cop, bad cop. The bad cop is an apparent Christian trying to interject religion where science contradicts his worldview, and the good cop(s) is disguised as an atheist lending support by invoking the NPOV rule.

This wouldn’t be at all surprising. Creationists really aren’t necessarily stupid—just wrong, deluded, and dedicated to advocating a stupid point of view.

Reading through Good Math, Bad Math, I saw a classic example of creationist foolishness: a fellow who insists that math will vindicate the Bible by proving that π = 3. It reminded me of this old post where a creationist had the thread jumping in her need to prove that the story of Jacob and Laban actually demonstrated a valid form of biblical genetics. So here it is; the original comments are also amusing.

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It’s not just the US that is infested with creationists; take a look at Canadian Christianity. Like their southern brethren, they seem to be greatly concerned about homosexuals and evolution; I’m always astounded at how much conservative Christian identity is tied to the denial of civil rights and opposition to science. There are several juicy tidbits of benighted ignorance there, but I’m going to focus on one incredible claim made in an interview with a Kirk Durston, who is apparently a director of some Campus Chrusade for Christ ministry…which, apparently, means he is now a fully qualified creationist biologist. In the interview, he’s asked this leading question:

As you know, evolutionists tend to use ‘evolution’ as a blanket term, without making the crucial distinction between ‘micro-evolution’ (physical changes within a single species) and ‘macro-evolution’ (transformation from one species into another). Because micro-evolution is scientifically provable, they can say that evolutionary theory is legitimate science—and by using the general term ‘evolution,’ they imply that macro-evolution is also legitimate science. Do you think there is sufficient awareness of the fact that there is no concrete evidence for macro-evolution? Are evolutionists simply afraid to admit this to the public—and perhaps to themselves?

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Joe Carter is making a curiously convoluted argument. He’s trying to get at why the majority of the American public does not accept the theory of evolution, and he’s made a ten part list of reasons, which boils down to placing the blame on the critics of intelligent design creationism. We’re all bad, bad people who are doing a bad, bad job of informing the public and doing a good job of antagonizing them. There is a germ of truth there—I do think we all have to do a better job of educating American citizens—but what makes it a curious and ultimately dishonest argument is that Joe Carter is a creationist. It’s one thing for an evolutionist to complain that the facts are on our side and we’re doing a piss-poor job of communicating them, but it is a weird thing for a creationist to complain that we do a poor job of communicating the facts, while neglecting to mention that the facts are all against his personal view of life’s origins. The impression it leaves is that Joe Carter doesn’t like evolution because those dang ‘Darwinists’ are all poopy-heads.

Let’s go through each of Carter’s 10 complaints (which you can find in parts I, II, and III), and you’ll see that he even bungles the task of putting together a logical argument: it’s loaded with false premises and inconsistencies.

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Hey, Wilkins! I know you were a lucky dog who got to visit Darwin’s home a while back, but did you know who else had been there?

Ken Ham.

He seems to have had a different reaction than you did.

It was a book that attacked the foundations of the Christian faith,
with an impact that was felt around the world. I prayed, “Lord, bring down this
‘house’—this ‘house’ of evolution that has permeated cultures around the world.”

Ol’ Ken does have a sense of mission, though. I guess mumbling to a nonexistent being isn’t effective in accomplishing his ends, even if that nonexistent being is supposed to be superpowerful.

The ministry of AiG is one the Lord has raised up to combat Darwin’s
legacy. In reality, AiG vs. the evolutionary establishment is a battle between
two opposing legacies. Darwin’s legacy has permeated nations around
the world, and wherever there’s a formal education system, Darwinian evolution
is taught as fact. 

Millions around the world are being led astray by this horrible legacy.
We can see the effects of it nearly everywhere: millions of
students are being taught that Genesis is “nonsense.”

Actually, we don’t teach that Genesis is nonsense—we don’t even mention the Bible, for the most part. Students who are taught to think and evaluate the evidence manage to figure out for themselves that Genesis is nonsense. If he wants to defeat us, he’ll need to campaign against logic, evidence, skepticism, the scientific method, and thinking…oh, wait. Darn. That is his strategy. Curse you, Ken Ham, you’re always one step ahead of us!

The story about the ranking of evolution support in Western nations did not include any data on Africa. America’s standing might have looked a little better if it did; the news from Kenya is not good. Evangelical churches want to suppress the Kenya national museum’s fossil collection. This includes some of the most impressive examples of humankind’s ancient history, such as multiple australopithecine specimens and Turkana Boy; it’s arguably one of the world’s foremost collections of hominid fossils. This is where many of Richard Leakey’s finds are stored.

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A columnist in the Cincinnati Post, Kevin Eigelbach, has a few words for Answers in Genesis. He got a letter from them asking for money to protect the Bible from the wicked secularists who want people to think critically about its contents.

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Rick Moran at Right Wing Nut House is moved to complain about the declining understanding of science in our country, which is a good start. Waking up the wingnuts to the fact that science is doing poorly in the US is a good thing, far better than the usual science denial we get from that side of the political divide. However, he takes exception to the idea that a good part of the blame belongs to the religious and to the far right. Instead, he blames the failure on schools run by Democrats.

It goes without saying that those school systems — mostly located in large cities and the rural south — don’t need a belief in God to keep them from understanding evolution. All they need is local government (run by Democrats for the most part) to run the schools so incompetently that students can graduate while lacking the scientific fundamentals.

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