AlterNet: Despite Overwhelming Evidence, Creationists Cling to Unreality

[marmar]

Despite Overwhelming Evidence, Creationists Cling to Unreality

By Nathan Schneider, AlterNet. Posted July 31, 2008.

Battling creationists will not fix science education. Teaching science will.




The great Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin once wrote -- or, rather, sighed -- that "creationism is an American institution."

As an institution, creationism has crossed social strata as easily as it crosses decades. Despite all that science and secularism can do to explain it away, the crusade against evolution -- the foundation of modern biology -- is as intransigent, and strangely modern in its anti-modernism, as ever. The actor-author-documentarian-presidential speechwriter Ben Stein, with his movie Expelled, has become only the latest in the long line of its media-saavy critics. Today, around half of all Americans prefer creationism, in some form, to the scientific consensus.

Few know this better than Lauri Lebo, author of The Devil in Dover: An Insider's Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-Town America. When the trial over intelligent design theory in Dover, Pennsylvania, caught the attention of the world, Lebo was the lead local reporter covering the case. For her, the controversy was personal as well as professional; as the trial unfolded, she struggled to come to terms with the impending death of her Pentacostal father, desperate for assurance that he would see her in the creationist-only hereafter. In The Devil in Dover, Lebo combines the dramas of family and

courtroom into an engrossing story, trading illusions of journalistic objectivity for hard-won personal truths.

An American Pastime

The Dover trial followed in the footsteps of its notorious predecessor, the famed Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. Like Dover, Dayton was a set-up, orchestrated by money and interests from far away. The ACLU backed Clarence Darrow, the great freethinking lawyer, against the towering populist politician William Jennings Bryan, who fought, literally, to his death -- he died, exhausted and disgraced, a week after the trial ended. All of it was immortalized by H.L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun, one of the foremost journalists of his generation. Since then, evolution trials have become a kind of national pastime, with a big one occurring every few decades and smaller ones even more often than that: Arkansas in 1968, the Supreme Court in 1987, and Georgia in 2004, to name a few.

By 2004, members of Dover's school board began working with the Thomas More Law Center, an organization of conservative Christian lawyers ("the sword and shield for people of faith"), to insert alternatives to evolution in the high school biology curriculum. They were joined by the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based group that formed following the 1987 Supreme Court decision against teaching "creation science" in public schools. It has aggressively promoted the theory of "intelligent design," seemingly an even more scientific creationism, which was specifically designed to slip past the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. When word got out about the school board's plans, the ACLU came to Dover looking to stop intelligent design in its tracks. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/rights/93188/despite_overwhelming_evidence%2C_creationists_cling_to_unreality/

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. what is so maddeningly frustrating is that this battle,

even in the 21st century, needs to be fought all over again and again.

[FiveGoodMen]

2. You got that right!

How do we ever settle this matter?

[mike_c]

3. that's a classic fundy technique....

Never accept "No" for an answer. Just keep trying. If they do it often enough, they will eventually be successful, or at least they can maintain the illusion that they're being persecuted for their beliefs.

[NorthCarolina]

4. It's geared for mass consumption by simpleton minds

and it generates lots and lots of money too.

[struggle4progress]

6. That's in part because too people many think science makes metaphysical claims

Certain people have a very strong attachment to creationist metaphysics -- which they regard as providing "The Truth." In some cases, one might be able to find psychological reasons for such metaphysical attachments -- but it is actually counter-productive to do so

Science, properly practiced, makes no metaphysical claims: it merely attempts to give a logically consistent and computationally accurate account of the material world, based on experimentally obtained rules governing material processes

One can always speculate whether There is something beyond mere material processes. That is a metaphysical question: it might be a meaningless question, or it might be a meaningful question -- but (in either case) one cannot expect science to answer such a question

The fundamentalists erroneously assume that, because science does not treat such metaphysical questions, science must actually take a stand on such questions. Because science makes great progress without adopting the metaphysical position of the fundamentalists, various other folk sometimes think that science must be hostile to creationist metaphysics. This sets the stage for extensive rantings in gibberish, which accomplish little except to convinced people on either side of the phony debate that they are correct and their debating opponents are evil or idiotic. Such a debate cannot be settled: it is best to avoid it altogether and rather to try to agree that Science makes no metaphysical claims. Then there is no real debate there: anyone can use the methods of science, uncontaminated by the baggage of metaphysics, and similarly anyone is free to engage in metaphysical speculations, without pretending that science sheds any light there

[ChairmanAgnostic]

8. quantum forces are pretty effin creepy.

The more I try to figure out what they act like, the closer it gets to something strange, or up, or down.

[longship]

5. Unsinkable Rubber Duckies.

They keep popping up over and over and over again.

BTW, if you want to read a good Creationist smackdown, you've got to read the judge's decision in the Dover case (Kitzmiller v. Dover).

Here's a link to the PDF file:
kitzmiller_342.pdf

[mwb970]

7. What dumb citizens America has!

I really don't see how the country can even survive, much less regain our pre-eminent position in the world, when we are constantly dragged down by the mind-numbing ignorance and stupidity of such a substantial segment of our population.

I am so envious of Europe! The people seem to be so much smarter over there. (Am I wrong about this?) To me, America looks like a nation of knuckle-dragging fools run by a criminal government. The Founding Fathers must be weeping now. Their bold experiment lasted just over 200 years before collapsing in failure, killed by idiots. It is ever thus.