After evolution, classroom fights over climate science and The Big Bang Theory are the next front in the education cultural war.

I appreciate Tim Kowal’s long, thoughtful response to my post on Ben Stein and intelligent design, but after reading and re-reading it I’m afraid it misses the mark.  Lines like “Strictly speaking, natural selection is not a scientific theory” only help to harden that impression. They don’t call it the Theory of Evolution for nothing.

Science, as I see it, is the process by which we as humans attempt to better understand the natural world.  Whether we want to phrase this as “God’s creation” or merely as “the natural world” is unimportant.  When it comes to actually taking apart the radio and figuring out how it works, we don’t need to ask whether it was made by hand or by a machine, in America or overseas. All we need to do is take it apart and then put it back together.  Similarly, with science – whether it is biology or geology or physics – all we need to do is ask the question “how?”

How does it all tick?

That, to me, is science.  The exploration of how the natural world ticks.  To me, as a person of faith, I think of this as a way to better understand God also, to understand how creation ticks. I find the anthropomorphizing of God in “theories” like Intelligent Design to be insulting both to God and to my intelligence.

Let me explain.  Let’s take, for example, the rock cycle.  This is the natural cycle whereby rock is pressed down into the earth and then reemerges as magma.  That rock – now igneous rock – is  pressed slowly down into the earth, turns into sedimentary and then metamorphic rock, and finally is melted down once again into magma.  It is a process which takes millions upon millions of years.  Understanding this process helps us understand the earth beneath our feet (and a great deal more) and it is entirely irrelevant to our understanding of this process whether or not it was created or designed by God.  If a group of Intelligent Rock Cycle Designers came around arguing that instead of this being a natural process it was instead one guided by some other Intelligence, I simply fail to see how their alternative theory would be at all useful to our understanding of the rock cycle.

But does it diminish from it? [Read more →]

Ever since Will posted about Roger Ebert earlier I’ve been reading Ebert’s blog (which is fantastic) and came across this explanation of why he never formally reviewed the Ben Stein mockumentary (er, documentary) Expelled.  For those of you who don’t know the premise of that film, it’s basically Stein’s extremely dishonest propaganda exposé on Intelligent Design.  Here’s a passage (though you should read the whole thing):

This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (not a single identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of speech and freedom to teach religion in a university class that is not about religion.

And there is worse, much worse. Toward the end of the film, we find that Stein actuallydid want to title it “From Darwin to Hitler.” He finds a Creationist who informs him, “Darwinism inspired and advanced Nazism.” He refers to advocates of eugenics as liberal. I would not call Hitler liberal. Arbitrary forced sterilization in our country has been promoted mostly by racists, who curiously found many times more blacks than whites suitable for such treatment.

Ben Stein is only getting warmed up. He takes a field trip to visit one “result” of Darwinism: Nazi concentration camps. “As a Jew,” he says, “I wanted to see for myself.” We see footage of gaunt, skeletal prisoners. Pathetic children. A mound of naked Jewish corpses. “It’s difficult to describe how it felt to walk through such a haunting place,” he says. Oh, go ahead, Ben Stein. Describe. It filled you with hatred for Charles Darwin and his followers, who represent the overwhelming majority of educated people in every nation on earth. It is not difficult for me to describe how you made me feel by exploiting the deaths of millions of Jews in support of your argument for a peripheral Christian belief. It fills me with contempt.

I know that both Ebert’s post and Expelled are old news at this point, but the debate itself is ongoing.  Will linked to this frightening story of the revanchist push in Texas to infuse creationism into Texas public school classrooms.  Whatever else Texas may have going for it, teaching religion in science class is inexcusable, whether or not it’s dressed in the deceptive language of intelligent design.  My (very) conservative Catholic grandma believes that evolution and faith are compatible.  Plenty of people do.  That’s because they are compatible.  The evolution vs. creation debate is less about that issue than it is about cultural dominance in general. It’s just one battleground chosen in the ongoing culture wars. [Read more →]

This interview with Andy Schlafly [below] of conservapedia.com is hard to watch.  It’s almost embarrassing.  I think Colbert is at his best for most of the exchange, and the zinger about creating his own reality is marvelous.  Schlafly really is the ultimate self-parodic conservative, and I’m not just saying that because he has one of the most annoying laughs in the history of television.  He says, and I shit you not, that most of Jesus’ parables were lessons in free market economics. I really am spoiled reading the conservative writers that I do read at the Scene and the Porch and Pomocon and the other little pockets of intellectual conservatism remaining.

But really.  Good grief.  I’ve heard of conservapedia but I never realized how utterly inane the project really was.  Of all the silly things on the internet, this one is beginning to take shape as a future hall-of-famer. That’s the magnificent thing about the internet – there’s always room for one more elegant disaster.

Let’s see – here’s the opening paragraph in the entry on evolution: [Read more →]

Due to being sequestered for four days last week, it took a little later for the recent Gallup poll that provides some fairly damning evidence against the GOP directive to stay the course to catch my eye. The mountain of that evidence continues to grow and,  as E.D. notes, the calls to double down on a notion of  remaining “true conservatives loyal to the base” are revealed as delusional given the dwindling nature of those quarters. The uncomfortable fact of the numbers is that the Republican Party in particular and conservatism in America generally need to engage in the process revisioning with an eye to revitalizing if the country is to avoid some kind of decades long liberal catechism.

Of course, there are numerous conservative pundits whose primary complaint is centered on the notion that the GOP ceased to be a conservative party in any meaningful way over the past eight years and that the corrective measures that need to take place turn a return to conservative principles proper. And while I might not be inclined to disagree with this notion that government under the Bush administration was largely conservative in name only, I don’t correspondingly think that a back to the trenches game plan is going to seal any deals. The fact of the matter is that a.) people started poisoning this well long before Bush Jr. arrived on the scene and b.) there has been so much partisan mortar fire that if you look back, the trenches just aren’t where you left them.

So the question becomes, what is it that conservatives must return to? The answer, of course, varies depending on which camp you happen to ask, and the schisms that have developed around what constitute true conservative principles aren’t so easily filled in as to avoid a meaningful discussion about what the contents of conservatism in America herein constitute. I would suggest that conservatives who deny that such a conversation need take place are operating in a land of self-constructed and reflexively reifying delusion designed to obscure the hard reality of significant concessions nestled in their future. [Read more →]

Reading through this whole, excellent series on atheism, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc. has been an extremely worthwhile experience.   As I wrote in the comments to Chris’ post (you have no idea how much I’m loving that we have a student of theology in our little crew here):

I’m reminded of the old – and classic – Simpsons episode with Stephen Jay Gould, in which the judge orders “religion to stay five hundred yards away from science,” but in which Gould acknowledges that he was unwilling to test whether the apparent bones of an angel were real or fake. I’ve long thought this was one of the most poignant Simpsons episodes; I also think it (ie, the episode as a whole) does a good job illustrating the way in which faith (which as you correctly note is synonymous in many ways with trust) should not – and cannot – attempt to masquerade as science, even as science should not – and cannot -seek to take the place of religion.

I think this old Simpsons reference gets to the crux of the problem, not only with respect to overly evangelistic atheists, but also to overly evangelical, uhh, evangelicals.  It also explains why I think the Flying Spaghetti Monster, in its original incarnation in the context of the Kansas Intelligent Design debate, was perfectly within the realm of legitimate dialogue…and why its occasional subsequent use as a way of mocking religion is not.

I think Chris is absolutely correct when he writes that “faith=trust,” and that “I’ve never met a human who does not trust in something or someone.”  This, to me, is the central issue – ultimately, even the most hardcore atheist must put a certain amount of blind trust in SOMETHING, even if that trust is something as fundamental to atheism as the idea that reality exists and can be understood purely through rationality.

But whereever one chooses to place their trust, the fact is that whether that trust is properly placed is more or less unfalsifiable, and not subject to scientific proof or disproof.  For the religious person, there is simply no way to prove through science that god exists or does not exist – as long as there is something in the universe that cannot rationally be explained, there is a basis for trusting in the existence of god.  For the atheist, there is likewise simply no way to prove through science that god exists or does not exist – as long as a scientific or rational explanation for anything in the universe is theoretically possible, there is a basis to trust in the ability of reason to explain everything, and no basis to trust in the existence of god.

[Read more →]