And Peter remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out, and wept bitterly.
Matthew 26:75
Ken Mercer says evolution is disproved by the absence of any transitional fossil forms between dogs and cats and cats and rats.
Cynthia Dunbar would like to make it required that “any person desiring to govern have a sincere knowledge and appreciation for the Word of God in order to rightly govern.” She also calls public education a “subtly deceptive tool of perversion.”
And Don McLeroy, the leader of this group, argued passionately at last month’s public hearing that someone in this country needs to stand up to the science experts.
As members of the 15-member Texas Board of Education, Mercer, Dunbar, and McLeroy are some of the most powerful decision-makers in the country in terms of what children read in public school science class.
And last week they, and a bare majority of their fellow board members, pushed through new science standards that could very likely determine what your kid learns in biology class in the next decade.
For more than a year, board members, led by McLeroy, a Young Earth Creationist, had been leading efforts to preserve wording in Texas’ science education standards that waters down the teaching of evolutionary theory:
The student is expected to analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information. (Italics added)
At a series of hearings in late March, they were unable to muster a majority vote in favor of the “weakness” language. However, in a last-minute push for alternative amendments, they were able to eke out a majority vote to insert other dubious phrases through a back door. As a result, creationist and pro-intelligent design organizations like the Seattle-based Discovery Institute are now claiming victory “for science education.”
But science watchdogs say the board actually created a road map to pressure publishers into putting false arguments into their textbooks attacking the validity of evolution.
In what was a confusing and convoluted flurry of back-and-forth motions—during which science experts who had testified earlier in the week were not permitted to come back and address the proposals—the board finally agreed to what some board members thought was compromise language.
After ignoring a petition from fifty-four scientific and educational societies urging the board to reject language that misrepresents or undermines the teaching of evolution, the board adopted a new standard that directs students to “analyze and evaluate the sufficiency of scientific explanations concerning any data of sudden appearance, stasis and the sequential nature of groups in the fossil records.”
It also passed another amendment that says students will “analyze and evaluate the scientific explanations concerning the complexity of the cell.”
Dan Quinn, a spokesman for the Texas Freedom Network, said “They’ve opened the door to junk science.”
He said the “complexity of the cell” is undoubtedly an invitation to include language in the textbooks about intelligent design—the idea that life is too complex to have evolved and therefore demands a divine guiding hand. And the phrase “sudden appearance” and “stasis” are codes for the Genesis account of creation in which living creatures didn’t evolve, but appeared fully formed in the Garden of Eden.
The new revisions also eliminated the reference to the age of the earth; it originally said, “about 14 billion years ago.” Now it only says, “current theories of the evolution of the universe including estimates for the age of the universe.”
The revisions will surely influence the writing of science textbooks, and publishers were paying attention. But in case they weren’t, McLeroy drove his point home to the Dallas Morning News when he said publishers heard the debate and know that “they’ll have to get their textbooks approved by us in a few years.”
With almost $30 million set aside in the budget, Texas is second only to California in the bulk purchase of textbooks. But Texas, unlike California, approves and purchases books for all the state’s school districts. Publishers often edit and revise textbooks in order meet the specific demands of the Texas board members. Other states pay attention too, and what’s adopted in Texas is also adopted in many conservative states.
Now the issue is whether there is enough prima facie evidence to challenge the Constitutionality of the wording now, or wait for the textbook review process in two years.
“They have shown clear religious motivations that certainly raise some questions,” Quinn said. “But if the board requires phony religious arguments in the science textbooks, I can’t imagine somebody won’t challenge it.” Publishers may end up producing a textbook for Texas and other conservative states and a separate version for other states—because under the new guidelines, a Texas textbook “will be poison in states that value education,” Quinn said.
While the results may not yet be clear, one thing is evident in the tactics.
Four years ago, near the conclusion of Dover, Pennsylvania’s First Amendment trial in which intelligent design was exposed as a religious fraud, plaintiff attorney Eric Rothschild asked in court, “Will we be back in a couple of years for the ‘sudden appearance’ trial?” Judge John E. Jones III retorted, “Not on my docket.”
And McLeroy’s speech on standing up to the experts sounded little different than Dover’s creationist board member Bill Buckingham who proclaimed at a public meeting that someone needs to stand up to “liberals in black robes.”
Roll back the clock to earlier battles—in Kansas, in Ohio, in Cobb County, Georgia, even 1989’s Edwards v. Aguillardin Louisiana—and the motives are always the same. People of fundamentalist faiths say they are only standing up for science. They deny that they are trying to lead a religious revolution.
An Evolving Creationism
But Don McLeroy says he has evolved.
In January 2008, as I was reporting on the “strengths and weaknesses” controversy, he wrote me an e-mail in which he referenced the words of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail:
“Here is an example of my strategy to point out to my friends on the board the inconsistency of holding a completely naturalistic scientific system with other personal belief systems. Children are either ‘disinherited children of God’ or they are not.”
King was writing of a people denied their civil liberties sitting down at lunch counters and “standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage.” McLeroy, in contrast, was outlining a strategy was to attack science’s naturalist worldview by upholding the strength and weakness language in Texas’ science standards.
“These two systems of thought, with completely different starting points for their worldview, are not slightly opposed to each other but fully dispute the other’s claim; to not do so would show a weakness in their own beliefs,” he wrote in the e-mail. “Also, these two opposing systems give a foundation for thought that conflict along the entire range of scientific and moral philosophy. To try to blend them would be intellectually impossible and dishonest.”
But in a recent interview, McLeroy says he changed.
“I’ve evolved. I don’t argue for two separate belief systems,” he said. “I never pursued that strategy.”
He said the reason for change is the National Academy of Science’s revision of its definition of science as “the use of evidence to construct testable explanations and predictions of natural phenomena as well as the knowledge generated through this process.”
As McLeroy also wrote, on March 25 in the Austin-American Statesman, the change from the previous definition from “natural explanation” to “testable explanations,” leaves room for the supernatural.
What McLeroy fails to grasp is that supernatural explanations aren’t testable, for one can never disprove a God-did-it hypothesis. But that’s beside the point. McLeroy was saying to me a year ago, just as he has said in conversations before Texas churches, that he was leading a righteous movement to return God to science class. Now he says he’s merely interested in making sure students are taught the best science standards from the best science textbooks.
After the “strength and weakness” wording was rejected, McLeroy launched into an impassioned speech during the recent hearings about the fossil record. He spoke of the “sudden appearance” of life forms during the 70- to 80-million-year-period known as the Cambrian Explosion and evolutionary stasis, in which life forms exist long periods with little change.
“Someone has to stand up to these experts!” McLeroy said.
In his Austin-American Statesman op-ed, he wrote of inserting questions about sudden appearance and stasis into the standards, “It should not raise any objections from those who say evolution has no weaknesses; they claim it is unquestionably true. And the standard is not religious but does raise a problem for the evolution hypothesis in that stasis is the opposite of evolution, and ‘stasis is data.’”
But when I asked him how these raise questions about the validity of evolution, McLeroy at first said, “Are you kidding me?”
He then brought up paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium, which offers an explanation for the Cambrian Explosion, but does not contradict evolutionary theory. Finally, McLeroy would only say that this lets “kids critically examine these issues and I don’t see anything wrong with that.”
He’s right. Teaching students to critically examine the evidence is a laudable goal. But that’s not what this is about. If it were, McLeroy’s fellow board member Ken Mercer would never display such an astonishing ignorance of even a most rudimentary knowledge of evolutionary theory with the argument, “Have you ever seen a dog-cat, or a cat-rat?”
No. McLeroy’s echoes of Dr. King and religious revolution seem closer to the philosophy of the Discovery Institute, which played a prominent role in the revisions process. Discovery’s vice president Stephen Meyer was a member of the curriculum review panel, advising McLeroy and other board members.
Discovery’s Wedge Document outlines the ultimate goal: To use intelligent design to “reverse the stifling materialist worldview and replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”
Tags: creationism, culture war, discovery institute, education, evolution, intelligent design, lauri lebo, texas, textbooks
Deliberately mandating the provision of "teaching" materials promoting scientific illiteracy to school children is a tragedy. Sneaking in code-words and phrases casting doubt on evolution and the age of the universe and the earth is just the start for what these religious fanatics really want - the destruction of all of science, and a retreat to the Dark Ages of ignorance and religious intolerance. How can the voters have let this travesty happen? How can so many anti-education and anti-science religious ignoramuses be on a Board of Education?
"What McLeroy fails to grasp is that supernatural explanations aren’t testable, for one can never disprove a God-did-it hypothesis."
Sure they can-- you just have to make the person saying "God-did-it" transform that claim into something falsifiable...which they can do, because they are after all claiming that God did something which had an effect on the physical world, which makes God a physical entity, which puts his behavior within the bounds of scientific study.
That was the only aspect that pained me about the prosecution's line of argument in the Dover trial. I agree with Richard Dawkins that God's existence and his acts are a scientific hypothesis-- that is, it's an empirical hypothesis and thus treading on science's turf. If someone who wants to claim that God did something is willing to offer conditions under which that claim can be scientifically proven or disproven, then experiments can be conducted to do so. The main reason, above all, why creationism should not be taught in science classes is not that it is at heart religious-- it's because it's not science. Those two statements are not saying the same thing. Ken Miller demonstrated as much in the trial when he explained the concept of exaptation using a modified mousetrap (or, for his purposes, a primitive tie clip). If supernatural explanations were by definition out of the bounds of scientific study, then such an explanation would mean nothing. All that would be necessary would be the testimony of Eugenie Scott making it clear that the origins of ID are in fact religious, and it would be case closed. Instead, what had to be proven was that not only is ID bad science, but that it is also religious. I find that kind of a shame, because while I thoroughly appreciated Eugenie's efforts (and boy, her evidence was unquestionably damning!), I found them superfluous to the central question at hand. Ideally, the results of the trial should've been the same even if the 1st Amendment did not exist.
Yes, I know you know all about the Dover trial-- sorry for rehashing it so much! But again, if the supernatural can't be tested then there is no point in doing studies on whether prayer actually has any effect on helping people with cancer, no point in performing MRI scans to find out what prayer "looks" like in the brain, no point in testing whether psychics can actually predict the future...and scientists are doing all of these things. They can test them because they're empirical claims, and religion makes a lot of empirical claims. If it didn't, it would lose a lot of ground....it is, for that matter, losing precisely this ground amongst non-believers in Gould's NOMA everyday.
There are a lot of things you can say about a believer who rests her "faith" in God on empirical claims. You could say she is wise, not to trust faith alone. You could say she is cowardly, to be unwilling to make that leap. You could say she is brave, to risk the foundation of her faith being disproven. But to some extent or another, she is also the majority. Most believers subscribe to a set of tenets about physical acts in the world, physical attributes of gods and spirits, and these are at least in theory-- and increasingly in reality-- scientifically testable.
All this language does is encourage students to EXAMINE the THEORY of evolution.
Nothing is said about the FACT of evolution, which all creationists agree DOES happen; it is the THEORY of evolution, properly called 'common descent' that is in question, as it does not even qualify as a scientific theory!
Discuss this, and any Origin issue in a CIVIL manner at Talk About Origins
www.tao.invisionzone.com
AmPaTerry, I'm sorry. You almost got it right, but not quite. Evolution is indeed both a fact and a theory. The fact is that it happens and has happened--including common descent-- and the theory concerns how it happens. And contrary to what you say, creationists do deny evolution. A creationist is a person who insists that species came into being exactly as described in Genesis, and were not evolved.
You could, with some justification, tell me to butt out. I am, after all, an Englishman living in England and retired from teaching.
I've seen this debate acted out over and over again on all sorts of sites but rarely do I see anyone consider the possible effects on the children.
Asking eight and nine year olds to consider "strengths and weaknesses" is asking something they aren't equipped for. What happens when a non-specialist teacher from a creationist viewpoint tells them that the Bible gives a true account of men and dinosaurs living together while a man named Darwin came up with a lie to discredit God and said that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago? In three or four years time they go to a specialist science class where a science trained teacher tells them how descent with modification and natural selection is the best way we have to explain how life grew from simple chemicals into the wonderful world of nature we see today. There are problems with evolutionary theory - there are problems with all of science. Science by its very nature is open ended. Who knows what we will discover this year, next year, in ten years' time? Perhaps Darwin, like Newton, discovered a theory that holds true for certain aspects of space/time but not others. I'm not a biologist. I don't know even how that could work. But as a scientist, I am open to the possibility. The moment you say "God said" you've closed the door on all that.
Children shouldn't be burdened with issues like this just so that people with shaky faith in their own God can silence any voices that make them uncomfortable.
Creationists of the six day young earth kind are quite open about this. If you can't accept the Genesis myth as actual historical and scientific fact then you cannot accept any part of the Bible. Any science that does not conform to the Genesis myths must be silenced. That's what the "Wedge" is all about.
And if you let this happen, it's the children in your schools who will suffer.
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