Recently in Creationism Category

As everyone in the science blogosphere knows by now, banana man Ray Comfort, he who cannot understand sex, is planning to distribute on the order of 170,000 (his claim) copies of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in late November on various U.S. and Canadian university campuses. The book is prefaced by an introduction (2 Meg PDF) by Ray that contains the standard creationist argle bargle.

NCSE has created a page in response called Don’t Diss Darwin that has a variety of resources and suggestions. It has an appropriate flier, posters, and a lovely banana bookmark ready for downloading.

Most important for our immediate purposes, it contains a list of universities currently targeted. That list is reproduced below the fold. (I note that Lehigh is on the list; I wonder if Michael Behe will avail himself of the opportunity to learn some evolution.)

I urge scientists and interested folks on the infected campuses to seek immunization from the NCSE page.

Hat tip to Florida Citizens for Science.

Just last week over at the Thinking Christian blog there was a huge stink raised over the alleged inappropriateness of linking ID to creationism. After much argument the anti-linkage people more or less conceded that there were some good reasons to link ID to a somewhat generic definition of creationism (relying on special creation), but still protested loudly about how inappropriate it was to make the linkage, because most people (allegedly) would assume that creationism = young-earth creationism, and linking ID to young-earth creationism was oh-so-wildly unfair.

Well, it’s now a week later, and, what do you know, but right there on the latest blogpost on William Dembski’s Uncommon Descent is a big fat advertisement for a straight-up young-earth creationist conference. And who is endorsing the conference? Dean Kenyon, Discovery Institute fellow, coauthor of Of Pandas and People, and one of the most-cited inspirational figures in the whole ID movement, who is mentioned dozens of times in Stephen Meyer’s new book Signature in the Cell. Here he is, endorsing young-earth garbage:

According to US biophysicist Dr. Dean Kenyon, “Biological macroevolution collapses without the twin pillars of the geological time-scale and the fossil record as currently interpreted. Few scientists would contest this statement. This is why the upcoming conference concentrates on geology and paleontology. Recent research in these two disciplines adds powerful support to the already formidable case against teaching Darwinian macroevolution as if it were proven fact.”

…proving that, yep, he’s still YEC, as has been his consistent position since at least 1980, even though this was widely doubted over on the Thinking Christian blog, and even though Stephen Meyer and all other ID advocates systematically obscure this fact.

So who is the one confusing ID and YEC? Not me. They do it themselves.

To the earth. According to Archbishop James Ussher, of course.

Hat tip to Epsilon Clue for the reminder.

As some will recall, a while back the Lousiana state legislature adopted one of the “Academic Freedom” acts pushed by the creationist lobby. At that time it was clear that the act would open the door to teaching creationism in the public schools of that state.

Now the creationists are going further, rigging the procedure by which classroom materials are evaluated for appropriateness. Barbara Forrest, stalwart in the defense of teaching honest science and the separation of church and state, has a long press release outlining what has happened. [Note: URL now fixed.] From that release:

On September 16, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education [BESE] ignored the recommendations of science education professionals in the Louisiana Department of Education (DOE) and allowed the Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), a Religious Right lobbying group, to dictate the procedure concerning complaints about creationist supplementary materials used in public school science classes under the 2008 Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA).

In other words, the creationists are now the umpires in Louisiana.

The Sensuous Curmudgeon has an excellent post on the press release, as well as a good background post. Read them, and help as you can in Forrest’s efforts.

Back in June 2008, in a post reporting about the Mt. Vernon Board of Education voting on a resolution to terminate John Freshwater’s employment as a middle school science teacher, I described a conversation with one of Freshwater’s supporters at the special meeting of the BOE. I wrote this:

I also spoke with one of Freshwater’s adult supporters. The No True Scotsman fallacy was alive and well in that conversation. There was an enlightening moment when I recommended that he read Francis Collins’ The Language of God to get an idea of how an evangelical Christian who is a scientist tries to deal with the conflict. The man asked if Collins accepts Genesis. I replied that Collins is an evangelical Christian, but that he doesn’t read Genesis literally and believes that evolution is the means by which God created the diversity of biological life. The man then refused to consider reading it, saying “I don’t need to look at beliefs I don’t agree with.” That level of willful ignorance pretty much says it all.

This evening I happened onto the perfect phrase to describe that mindset. In a March 2009 talk (video) to the British Humanist Association, Daniel Dennett outlined his approach to the roots of religion. A questioner in the Q&A period asked why people (his relatives, actually!) hang onto religion so tenaciously, “so locked in until they die.” Dennett answered, in part (around 1:13:30ff):

One of the really powerful ideas [in religions] is the idea of sacred truths. And a sacred truth is one that even thinking about it is evil. Don’t even think about it! And when you can establish that about anything, when you can build that taboo against thinking and internalize it – and people internalize it – then they become their own jailers. They become very effective protectors of their own incarceration. (Emphases in Dennett’s intonation)

That is exactly the right phrase: “they become their own jailers.” It perfectly describes my fellow’s mindset.

To add to the various accounts of tours of Ken Ham’s creationism museum, Rationality Now has an excellent series of six posts starting here The posts are particularly noteworthy for the excellent photographs, and I commend them to your attention. The last two paragraphs of the last post are quoteworthy. Referring to children with their families he saw in the museum, Dan writes:

Some of those kids will be stuck in that world for their entire lives. They’ll be raised that way and protected from any alternate viewpoints or ideas. They’ll be shuttered away from any kind of real, intellectually challenging science. They’ll be constantly given misleading or incorrect information about our world. Their parents will steep them in dogma, ritual, and ancient scripture for as long as they can manage… and the Creation Museum will be right there to back them up with pretty lights, bells, and whistles.

The museum is loathsome and its creators should be very, very ashamed.

But they aren’t, of course.

Hat tip to the Friendly Atheist.

You will recall that in June John Freshwater filed a federal suit (see PT post here) against the Mt. Vernon City School District, several Board members, several administrators, and a bunch of John and Jane Does. Included among the defendants was David Millstone, attorney for the Board.

Now, according to news reports, Millstone has moved to be dropped as a defendant, arguing that it is improper to sue an attorney in order to pressure the attorney’s client. The news report describes a June 9, 2009, letter from R. Kelly Hamilton to the Board of Education that apparently suggested a settlement, including this sentence: “It will be interesting to observe the developments between Mr. Millstone’s representation and the interests of the Mount Vernon City School System.” According to the news report, Millstone’s filing characterized that sentence as “a ‘veiled threat’ to force Millstone out of representing the school board.”

The news report quotes Millstone’s attorney as saying “The claim against Mr. Millstone appears to be a pressure tactic aimed at the administrative process to terminate Mr. Freshwater’s contract.”

This is of a piece with Freshwater’s basic strategy, which is apparently to attempt to force a settlement one way or another. Freshwater’s pastor, Don Matolyak, has been making noises about settlement for some time now, always, of course, on Freshwater’s terms.

In other legal news, responses to Freshwater’s application to the Ohio Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus to compel testimony from Board members are coming in. They’re linked from here. The administrative hearing was due to resume September 10, but I strongly doubt it’ll happen that soon.

This week is the ninth quadrennial meeting of the North American Paleontological Convention in Cincinnati, and Thursday the 25^th is “Evolution and Society” day. There are plenary talks in the morning by several people including Genie Scott and Ken Miller, and several parallel discussion panels around noon. One of the discussion panels is “Countering Creationism” with Jason Rosenhouse, Art Hunt, me, and Professor Steve Steve from the Thumb all free associating to the topic title. If you’re at the convention we invite you to participate: we need all the help we can get! Public school educators in the area have been specially invited to the day’s talks and discussions, and we enthusiastically welcome them.

The latest issue (July/August, 2009) of Discover Magazine had a handful of splendid articles, but what really caught my eye was a remarkably detailed image of a 100-million-year-old wasp that had been fossilized inside an opaque piece of amber (p. 39). I could not find the picture on the Discover website, but I easily tracked it to here, where you may see it along with a number of other images.

According to the Discover article, Paul Tafforeau and colleagues at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility used a beam of x-rays to probe the interiors of bits of amber that are opaque to visible light. They found hundreds of fossilized beetles, ants, wasps, flies, and bits of plants, and made tomograms (or 3-dimensional reconstructions) of some of them. None of the trapped insects was bigger than a few millimeters, presumably because larger insects were not so easily trapped by the resin.

Discover notes that the team found more than 600 insects, none of which appears to be a modern species. It is not clear how many different species those insects represent, but Tafforeau says, “Each scan is a new discovery,” so I infer that they have discovered a great many new, ancient species - and that is among small insects only.

If you believe, with Lucretius and certain of our creationist colleagues, that species are not born but only die out, then all I can say is there must have been at one time one helluva lot of species.

I just received an e-mail from the Center for Inquiry, which begins thus:

Matthew LaClair … has alerted us that his former history teacher, David Paszkiewicz, is at it again. You may recall Mr. Paskiewicz–he’s the one who was recorded by LaClair telling students that dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark and if “you reject the Lord’s salvation, you belong in hell” (New York Times, 12/18/06). This time, he is acting as the advisor of a Christian club at Kearny High School (located 10 miles outside of Manhattan in New Jersey), called the Alpha and Omega Club, which has scheduled [a field trip to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, June 5-7].

LaClair, who is no longer a student at the school, learned about the trip from the student newspaper. He evidently alerted the school district’s lawyer and also contacted Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. He convinced the school board to postpone the trip till school was out today, June 5, so that the trip would take place entirely out of hours (I infer, therefore, that the trip is no longer an official school field trip). In addition, he got the school board to remove the listing of the Christian club under history and social science.

The Center for Inquiry notes that there are still some troubling problems. School officials initially approved the trip, which suggests to CFI that they were “asleep at the wheel.” CFI adds that

a public school teacher with strong religious convictions and a record of proselytizing is being allowed to serve as the advisor of a religious club and use his position to have a public school approve a patently religious-based fieldtrip.

Religious clubs are permitted in schools, but the adviser is supposed to be “neutral.” CFI questions the teacher’s neutrality since he

has overtly and repeatedly discussed and promoted religious beliefs with his students in the past, and his proposed fieldtrip to the Creation Museum demonstrates that he continues to do so today, dangerously blurring the line between his own personal faith commitments and his obligations as a teacher in a government-funded public school system.

Anyone who thinks it’s worthwhile debating creationists should listen to this podcast of a recent radio ‘debate’ between Michael Schermer of Skeptic Magazine and Eric Hovind, offspring of Kent Hovind. Hovind’s arguments show up a lot out in the boonies and his videos are circulated among fundamentalist congregations. One was in a backpack in John Freshwater’s middle school science classroom in the spring of 2007. If you are involved in these kinds of discussions you must know the arguments that are used, bizarre though they may seem and as irony meter threatening as they are. (The management recommends the Line Noise Laboratories Mark V Excelsior with the new optional emergency override capability for extreme situations.)

Sorry for the delay in posting on the most recent days of the hearing in early May. I’ve been up to my eyebrows in alligators for the last few weeks. I’ve got 50 pages of notes on the most recent two days of the hearing but haven’t had the 10 or 12 hours to spare to write them up. Soon, I think. Meanwhile, the Mt. Vernon News ran stories on those days here, here, and here.

Update at the bottom

In the context of some flailing against theistic evolution, Denyse O’Leary has finally scraped the bottom of the barrel. On Uncommon Descent she writes

I just got done reading a book published in Turkey called Evolution Deceit, which helps me understand why Turkey alarms many materialists - but more on that later.

“Evolution Deceit” is by Adnan Oktar, who publishes under the name Harun Yahya and is a Turkish creationist. It’s a standard issue creationist diatribe; nothing new to see there. That O’Leary cites it as a reason to be alarmed about Turkey is entirely appropriate, but not for the reason O’Leary wants us to believe. In fact it’s an indication that the creationist pathology infests more countries than just the U.S.

Recall that Harun Yahya is also the purported author of The Atlas of Creation that was mailed to thousands of scientists a while back. It’s also the book in which a fly fishing lure was presented as a photograph of an insect along with other obvious mistakes. I knew the ID creationists were getting desperate for allies, but this is a new low. Soon I expect to see Denyse wearing a burqa.

Update: Larry Arnhart at Darwinian Conservative notes that Denyse has now interviewed Oktar. See Arnhart’s post linked above for commentary on the interview, particularly Oktar’s claim that intelligent design is the product of a Masonic conspiracy to promote atheism and Deism. This just gets weirder and weirder.

I’ve been thinking about comets a lot lately, trying to image C/2009 G1, reading “The Hunt for Planet X”, wondering why Galileo was so wrong about them and recently reading a Young Earth creationist blog post on them. The latter referred to a very interesting pre-publication article. And I’d like to discuss this article, as this illuminates not only the origins of comets but also how science is done.

One of the threats made by the fundamentalists both recently and during the 2003 attempt by John Freshwater to inject ID creationist material into the science curriculum is that they will punish the district and the board of education in elections if the board opposes their efforts to corrupt science education. So far that doesn’t seem to be working out real well for them. Yesterday voters in the Mt. Vernon City School District passed a renewal of an operating levy by a 61%-39% margin. Like the Dover, PA, school board elections in 2005, it appears that the ballot box clout of the fundamentalists is a whole lot less powerful than they’d like us to believe. I’m cautious about interpreting that vote simply as a referendum on the board of education or Freshwater, but I know I heard rumblings around the district about it prior to the election. It certainly doesn’t support any claims of general dissatisfaction with the district.

The hearing on Freshwater’s termination resumes tomorrow, with members of the Dennis family being called by Freshwater’s attorney, R. Kelly Hamilton. Recall that Hamilton passed on cross examining Zachary and his mother last fall during the presentation of the Board’s case by David Millstone, the Board’s attorney, knowing he’d call them as hostile witnesses during Freshwater’s presentation.

Richard Dawkins has a classic essay on Kurt Wise’s beliefs titled Sadly, an Honest Creationist. Dawkins wrote

Kurt Wise doesn’t need the challenge; he volunteers that, even if all the evidence in the universe flatly contradicted Scripture, and even if he had reached the point of admitting this to himself, he would still take his stand on Scripture and deny the evidence. This leaves me, as a scientist, speechless. I cannot imagine what it must be like to have a mind capable of such doublethink.

Now another creation “scientist,” trained in a secular university with a legitimate science Ph.D., has acknowledged much the same thing in a little stronger terms.

Todd Wood is Director of the Center for Origins Research and an Associate Professor of Science at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee. He has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Virginia and is a member of AAAS, the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution, and the Society for Systematic Biology. He is an active participant in BSG: A Creation Biology Study Group, the Baraminology Study Group founded to do research on discerning the original Biblical “kinds,” mostly via hybridization studies.

Now Wood has made a statement similar to Wise’s but stronger. Wise said only that

Although there are scientific reasons for accepting a young earth, I am a young-age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand.

Wood goes further. In a post titled Give an exegetical answer he wrote

I have hope because I’m a sinner saved by grace. That’s my whole reason. It’s not because I can refute evolution (I can’t) or because I can prove the Flood (I can’t) or because I can make evolutionists look silly (I don’t). (Italics added)

He can’t refute evolution, he can’t prove the Flood, but nevertheless he believes. (I strongly doubt he can make evolutionists look silly to anyone but a flock of ignorant believers.)

Yup. Sadly, another honest creationist. Would that Ken Ham and his house “scientists,” people like Georgia Purdom and Jason Lisle, were at least that minimally honest.

Last month I was a judge at a regional science fair for middle- and high-school students, and it was great to see aisle after aisle of smart and hard-working kids doing interesting and careful science. A few weeks later, at a Science Cafe where I was presenting, I had the chance to talk with (and coach a little) two of them who are going to nationals. Those kids are bright shining examples of what we want public education to produce.

On the other hand, there’s the creation science fair. PZ has recently posted on a creation science fair in Minnesota, but now they’re going big time: Ken Ham’s Creation Museum is hosting one next year. (Added in edit: I see PZ has posted on this one already this morning, too.)

There’s a catch, however: In order to enter, kids have to agree with AIG’s Statement of Faith.

Previous posts on the Freshwater hearing are linked at the end of this post.

The administrative hearing on the Mt. Vernon, Ohio, Board of Education’s resolution to terminate the employment of John Freshwater as an 8^th grade science teacher resumed this morning for just half a day. Due to attorney conflicts and witness unavailability issues, the session was adjourned at 12:15 after hearing just three witnesses, all former students of Freshwater. The hearing will resume on March 20.

Opening Maneuvering

Today saw the resumption of Freshwater’s defense case. The first witness called by R. Kelly Hamilton, Freshwater’s attorney, was Mr. James Beroth. He is the father of a woman named Melanie Dobson from the state of Oregon who apparently overheard a conversation in a restaurant between Ian Watson, the President of the Board of Education, and an unidentified second person on December 29, 2007 (I’m pretty sure it was 2007 – see subpoena note below). Hamilton entered an affidavit from Ms. Dobson as an exhibit and began to examine Mr. Beroth on it because if would be a hardship for Ms. Dobson to come to Ohio from Oregon to testify. The examination got just far enough to establish that Beroth himself had overheard nothing, and that Melanie’s affidavit referred to Watson talking in the restaurant about “decisions” or “strategies” or “goals” regarding Freshwater when David Millstone, attorney for the Board, objected on the ground that the affidavit must speak for itself, and that Mr. Beroth could only reflect hearsay since he himself had not heard Watson. After some discussion the hearing referee upheld the objection and Mr. Beroth was excused from testifying. Immediately Hamilton handed a subpoena to Millstone requiring Ian Watson’s personal and work calendars from December 2007 to the present.

That is relevant because December 29, 2007, was after the Dennis family complained to the school administration about Freshwater burning a cross on Zachary’s arm (early December 2007) but before the independent investigation occurred in late spring 2008. Hamilton’s move here is consistent with other hints he’s made to the effect that the investigation was not actually independent but rather was a sham designed to provide justification/cover for firing Freshwater.

Hamilton then called Karl Heck. Heck is the uncle and guardian of Corbin Heck, a current 9^th grader and former student of Freshwater in 8^th grade science. Heck was sworn and Hamilton began questioning Heck regarding an affidavit that Corbin had signed just yesterday in front of Hamilton that reflected a conversation Corbin had with Hamilton several weeks ago. Millstone objected on the ground that Karl Heck could not testify to the content of the affidavit but only to hearsay, and that unlike Melanie Dobson, Corbin Heck is available a mile or so away at the high school.

Hamilton told the hearing referee that he intended to call parents of a number of former students to testify about affidavits their children had signed, and Millstone indicated that he would enter the same objection to their testimony. Hamilton got dramatic about preserving the childrens’ anonymity and protecting them from having to testify in public. (Recall that it was Hamilton who earlier successfully urged the hearing referee to breech the Dennis family’s anonymity and have Zachary Dennis testify in public.) Hamilton’s histrionics had little effect and the referee ultimately ruled that since there was no availability issue with the students, they and not their parents would have to testify if their affidavits were to be entered in evidence. So Karl Heck was excused and we had a lengthy recess while the first student, Corbin Heck, was fetched from the school.

Update: I am advised that the video linked below won’t be up for much longer, so if you want it, grab it now.

Once in a while an analogy comes along that deserves wide dissemination. I got one such this afternoon on the Ohio Citizens for Science list, and I’ve got permission to quote it from Joe Hern, its author. Joe was musing on the video of Michael Schermer interviewing Georgia Purdom, creationist geneticist at AIG. (I don’t know how long that URL will be good, so grab it if you want it.) Joe, who IIRC is a former YEC himself, captured the creationist mindset perfectly:

The psychology behind why Creationists seem to make up stuff that fit their theology is best understood by recognizing precisely how we feel when we see a magician pull a rabbit from its hat in a magic show. We do not need to know how it works to “know” it is not really magic. We do not entertain ideas that we may be ‘missing’ a step in our epistemology. We would roll our eyes at anyone who insists to us we are not thinking critically to accept that there may be true magic involved. The key component of this thought process is that we ‘know’ we do not have to look into it… it’s a foregone conclusion that there is no magic involved.

To the creationist, this is the exact same thought process. They ‘know’ God is real, that what he wrote is literal, and there is no reason whatsoever to even begin to entertain the idea that the ‘evidences’ for evolution are really evidence. It’s a foregone conclusion that such ‘evidences’, regardless how intellectual or damning they sound, are “simply” ways man makes data fit their own ideas, as Dr. Purdom stated.

…

She said it best when (the only part in her talking with which I agreed) she said that once a Christian moves away from the scriptures in one area (the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, etc) then it is a slippery slope to using the same kind of logic about Mary being a virgin and giving birth or Jesus rising from the dead. I will add other biblical claims as well, such as the miracles of Jesus, his divinity, and the existence of God himself. In fact, Dr. Purdom’s point is one used by many former Christians (now atheists) who wonder why some Christians believe some of the stuff in the bible, but ignore other aspects of it. Nonetheless, Dr. Purdom goes the opposite direction by saying one must accept that evolution is not real since it’s already a fact that the virgin birth and Jesus’ resurrection occurred. “Clearly” there is no issue with agreeing that Adam and Eve began the human race ~4000 years ago.

That really is what we’re up against: presuppositionalist thinking vs. evidential thinking, in Purdom’s terms. As I remarked in my AIG creationists on the jury post last week, for creationists evidence is not a means of testing presuppositions: evidence must be interpreted so as to corroborate them or one will fall into apostasy. Therefore any ‘interpretation’ of the evidence that doesn’t corroborate them is a false and mistaken interpretation, and to accept such a false interpretation is to risk one’s salvation and that of one’s children. (For more on creationist fears in this respect see here and here.)

We’ve received emails wondering what’s going on in the administrative hearing on John Freshwater’s termination. It was due to resume Friday of last week but that session was canceled at the last minute, apparently because of schedule conflicts among the attorneys. It is now scheduled to resume tomorrow morning, Feb 26, and as far as I know – and I’ve talked this afternoon with people who should know – that’s still on.

Late Update Just got a call at 5:00 pm. The referee has canceled tomorrow’s session for some reason, but Friday is still (allegedly) on.