Go ahead, teach the controversy

November 26, 2005

Guest Post by Morbo

To follow up on an item the Carpetbagger raised the other day, a faculty member at the University of Kansas has decided to introduce “intelligent design” in the classroom — but not in a way that is likely to please that concept’s proponents.

Paul Mirecki, chairman of the Religious Studies Department, will offer a course next semester titled “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies.”

“The KU faculty has had enough,” Mirecki said. “Creationism is mythology. Intelligent design is mythology. It’s not science. They try to make it sound like science. It clearly is not.”

Kansas’ Board of Education voted earlier this month to water down the teaching of evolution in state science standards, a move many opponents believe is designed to open the door to intelligent design. Member of the higher education community have expressed alarm, believing the move could put Kansas students behind their peers in other states.

John Calvert, an attorney with the Intelligent Design Network, practically threw a fit, asserting that Mirecki will become a laughingstock and accusing the KU professor of trying to label every ID proponent is a “religious nut.”

Perhaps they’re not nuts, but they are all religious, and that’s why ID has no place in the biology classroom. Every ancient culture has its creation myth, and ID is nothing more than the Judeo-Christian one masquerading as science.

In his book “Secret Origins of the Bible,” Tim Callahan discusses three Mesopotamian stories centering on the creation of humankind. One story deals with a spat between lower gods and higher gods prior to the creation of people. The lower gods refuse to labor to keep the higher gods in luxury, so the higher gods create, from clay and blood, seven crude beings called lullu who are made to work on their behalf.

But the lullu are noisy, and their labor bothers the higher gods. The gods decide to destroy them via a flood. But one lullu gets tipped off by a god who advises him to build an ark and collect his family, animals and foodstuffs. This figure, Atrahasis, survives the flood and makes a burnt offering to the gods, thus placating them. They vow not to destroy humankind again.

Sound familiar?

Common themes run through all of these ancient stories, and one can see clear evidence of borrowing and editing. The tales, as Callahan points out, were often reshaped and edited to fit whatever political agenda was dominant at the time. They were never meant to be taken literally. This discussion is completely appropriate for the classroom, and I’m sure Mirecki’s students will find the topic stimulating.

Folks at the Discovery Institute, however, may find this version of “teach the controversy” less to their liking.

This course should be adapted and tought at the high school levels all across America in order to encourage our youth to think for themselves!

  • As a person who has had his appendix taken out because of appendicitis when he was a teen, and whose neice had an appendectomy when she was even younger, I reject that notion that Intelligent Design is ‘Judeo-Christian’. The idea that a loving caring God is sticking parts in me apt to explode before I’m twenty, and this is ‘Intelligent Design’ just sickens me.

    These ID pushers are heretics. They propose a cruel, evil god. I think it’s lucky for them we can’t burn them at the stake anymore.

  • I still want to know “where are the pictures?” Going back in time thousands upon thousands of years man has always tried in some manner to document his/her surroundings quite often in crude but effective drawings. If all creation began 6,000 years ago, where are the pictures of man and dinosaur–because I am sure a T-Rex would implant such an image in early man’s mind that this would be the subject of many attempts to document the experience.

  • It’s well-known to those who study such things that the Jewish Old Testament was written down until after the Babylonian captivity, which is where the Jews got the Chaldean Creation Myth they turned into the story of Genesis.

    I love how the fundies always claim that the King James Version of the Bible is the True and Unerrant Word of God, because this is the most politically-motivated translation of all the different bibles out there, and biblical scholars have shown it strays far from the original texts on many important points.

    The next time you hear one of these drooling morons say they believe what’s in the Bible, ask them which one? Mention the Catholic bible, and others, and when they say King James, ask them why they believe in the most inaccurate, most distorted translation of all.

  • I never had any trouble teaching Intelligent Design in my university-level statistics class.

    Partly to calm students’ fears of the subject, I began with a brief history of scientific thinking. Aristotle and his crowd lived in a poly-theistic world which was quite compatible with stochastic (statistical) thinking. In their epics and plays, all the various deities fought with each other, leaving outcomes for us here on Earth uncertain, chancy. Greeks sought prediction through activities which mirrored this uncertainty: entrails-reading or rolling knuckle bones (dice to us).

    Once a monotheistic religion pushed aside all those competing deities things changed. A single, all-powerful, eternally infinite Being couldn’t do anything “chancy” (even the hairs of your head are numbered, etc.). Popes and priests delivered the Will of God to the faithful (infidels were simply burned). As it happened science, from Copernicus to Kepler to Galileo to Newton, studied large-scale bodies like planets and falling rocks. The behavior of these objects could be described with exact equations. You could predict lunar eclipses centuries off in the future. Such precision, almost like clockwork, suggested a clockmaker, the Intelligent Designer. To know Newton’s calculus was to grasp the mind of God.

    Relativity raised a problem. The absolutes of Newtonian physics (space, time) were now dependent on who was doing the observing. Not so good, but equations could still “set things right” between the different observers. Quantum mechanics, however, really blew it all away. At the sub-atomic level you can’t even speak of locations in the old sense. There are “probability clouds”, most likely outcomes, large-N predictables with small-N (where we mostly live) uncertainties. Any given particle may have a 50-50 chance of going left or right, up or down, even though the behavior of a swarm of such particles is predictable. Most Republicans are assholes, but not all.

    Chance variations (mutation) leading to natural selection (survival of the “fittest”) blows away the Intelligent Designer. Hitler did succeed for quite a while and, but for a number of other events out of his control, might have established his 1,000-year Reich. Great nations do go under. Species become extinct every day. We’re not Ptolemy’s pretty system of circles but an incomprehensibly vast array of nearly countless galaxies of myriad form. There seem to be no end of “fundamental particles” comprising us and everything around us. What kind of weird Intelligent Designer produces a world of chance outcomes? An infinitely bored gambler?

    This approach worked well in a number of ways. It got me past the “free will” argument that you can’t find statistical laws governing human behavior (even gas particles, whose individual behavior isn’t predictable, can be predicted in a large swarm). It also treated monotheism as a view, along with the much more universal polytheistic one, and actually implied that neither view had anything to do with science (except as a mental bloc against its progress). Finally, it gave me a useful foil to talking about a very difficult subject: probability sampling distributions. Here’s how:

    On the right side of the board draw a cartesian axis with ‘amount of rain dancing” across the bottom and and “amount of rain” along the upright. Then put a few dots in a line indicating that the more you dance the more rain you get. Label that graph “your experience”. Then draw the same axes on the left side of the board and fill it with an enormous number of random dots, scattered all over the place. Label that one “God’s view”. Finally, put a circle around dots on the left which match those you drew on the right, with maybe an arrow from the circles to your dots to emphasize. So, if you had an infinitely large (god’s) view of things, there’s no connection between rain and dancing, even if in your own experience (a limited sample) there does seem to be a connection. Statistics is a way of measuring precisely how likely it is that your experience could arise from a random universe (the “null” hypothesis).

    I always felt free to talk about Intelligent Design in class because it was a way of connecting with students to begin an education. It’s like “the Earth may appear flat…” or “the Sun and stars may appear to go around the Earth…” Galileo did the same things in his dialogues. Trouble with us Puritans is that we really can’t abide debate in any form. We are so stupid and parochial we’re intolerant even of rejectable starting points for debate or learning.

  • I welcome Ed Stephan’s remarks.

    Greeks sought prediction through activities which mirrored this uncertainty: entrails-reading or rolling knuckle bones (dice to us).

    Entrails are tricky. One form of it is, literally, the slow drawing out of the intestines & the psychic states generated in the seer while the sacrificial animal (or human!) slowly dies in front of him. High-quality information is said to result from this revolting procedure, though I have no idea how. It’s possible the divinatory use of dice is more sophisticated than what goes on in Vegas (and if you haven’t been there, well…) One other means of Greek divination, one little known until a few years ago, was Katarche, an early form of horary astrology.

    Early in the 20th century, Otto Neugebauer (1899-1990), who eventually became Professor of the History of Mathematics at Brown University, did comprehensive work in the study of early mathematics, which led him directly to old astrological texts, since astrology was the most sophisticated use of mathematics in the ancient world. From this, we get students like David Pingree, also a professor in the Department of the History of Mathematics at Brown. By the mid-1970’s, Pingree is translating things like Carmen Astrologicum, by Dorotheus of Sidon, from Pahlevi (old Persian) to Arabic & English. Other than the urge to be comprehensive in his studies, I cannot understand why Prof. Pingree translated Dorotheus, unless he is a closet astrologer. The work dates from the first century AD.

    About the same time, Prof. Jean Rhys Bram (recently deceased) of Hunter College translated the Latin text of Firmicus Maternus’s Matheseos Libri VIII, which she titled, Ancient Astrology Theory & Practice. Though it dates from the mid 4th century, it is pure Greek astrology.

    Though these books had been celebrated for centuries, the impact of the rational, scientific age saw interest in them, and in many lesser books, fade. It was Neugebauer, his associates & students, who first revived academic interest in this area, but, it seemed, only among themselves. For the better part of 20 years, the translations of both these texts sat, an embarrassment to academics, unknown to astrologers. But as a result of a complex series of developments, astrologers have now discovered these books, and many others. So both are back in print. They are stunning books. They are in addition to the better known Tetrabiblos of Ptolemy, of the 2nd century. Greek culture, Greek science, is complex & sophisticated & still not well understood. Much remains to be rediscovered.

    Once a monotheistic religion pushed aside all those competing deities things changed. A single, all-powerful, eternally infinite Being couldn’t do anything “chancy” (even the hairs of your head are numbered, etc.).

    That’s what seemed to have happened, but a better explanation might be that Greek civilization was lost and in its place came mindless black & white cardboard. God is perfect, his creation, man, is perfect, and so, therefore, the existence of such a thing as an appendix can be given as proof that God does not exist. That otherwise intelligent people believe rubbish like this, or its inverse, that God demands crude obedience & will punish savagely if disobeyed, are indications just how dark our present age really is.

    As it happened science, from Copernicus to Kepler to Galileo to Newton, studied large-scale bodies like planets and falling rocks. The behavior of these objects could be described with exact equations. You could predict lunar eclipses centuries off in the future.

    Not much choice here. As they were understood to forecast events on earth, celestial movements had to be known precisely. The greatest civilizations ever seen on this planet, among them, the Greeks, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Chinese, the Romans, the Maya, were in unanimous agreement on this point. So were some of the greatest men who ever lived, including, specifically, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo & Newton. It is a modern conceit that astrology does not exist. This disbelief is based on no evidence whatever. It is sobering to consider that a likable boob named Ronald Reagan could use astrology to become governor of California, and later president of the US.

    So, if you had an infinitely large (god’s) view of things, there’s no connection between rain and dancing,

    This restates Newton’s view that mathematics reveals the mind of God, more or less, and that this mind can be plotted as x & y on a graph, or as x, y & z in three-dimensional space, with patterns (if any) evident to the naked eye, or at worst, revealed by further number-crunching. If only the world was so simple!

    Rain dancing on a graph only demonstrates our own limited perceptions. Our x/y graph may show individual cells, our rain dancing may very well have created a cell that was not previously there. Just as Edward Elgar once created Pomp & Circumstance no. 1, as an excuse to create the much better known march no. 3. On the x line, Elgar’s life in years, with the dates of his compositions marked off. On the y line, the popularity of his works, in units sold in the year 2000. Result: cells. Reason: So far as the mass of music lovers in the year 2000 were concerned, Elgar was better some years than others.

    Quantum mechanics, however, really blew it all away.

    It certainly does. One of the things that Quantum implies is that we are co-creators. We are, potentially at least, co-equal with whatever forces, whatever consciousness(es) brought the earth into being. That we often waste our energies, that, for the most part, only masses of men working together, or, individually, only the greatest of geniuses, are actually co-equal & can actually create, is a minor point. Quantum says we can, and have, and will continue to do so. Quantum compares the fact of Alpha Centari with the fact of Beethoven’s Missa.

    The issue is not Intelligent Design. It is not the words on any particular piece of paper, or the ideas of any particular individual or sect. It is the re-emergence of the world the “Age of Enlightenment” tried to bury. I’ve had my finger in this pie my entire life. There are many good things coming. There are many others that are downright creepy, and that’s putting it mildly. For many years I wondered if the astrological revival, to take one example, would actually come to pass. I wondered if it would not fade away, as it has repeatedly. There is not only scientific prejudice, but enormous inertia against it.

    It was the rise of religious fundamentalism that changed my mind. They are driving a non-scientific, non-linear understanding of the world. Theirs is not a very good cosmology (it still bears its original crude hallmarks), but because of religion’s inherent power, what is coming in its wake can only be stopped if the underlying religion can be stopped. Which it probably can’t. What we need, desperately, quickly, is a way of studying these things for what they are, for making intelligent distinctions, for recognizing and encouraging what is good, for discouraging what is bad, or perhaps, transforming it into something better.

    What we don’t need is simple minded, blanket condemnation by those who claim to be of the “scientific” mindset, which can only play into the worst of both sides.

    Astrology is the great tool, the original & first science. In its highest form, it is a penetrating window on reality itself. Beset with religious & scientific dogma, we ignore it at our peril.

  • Wish I could have attended some of your classes Ed. Must have been some far flung conversations bouncing around those classroom walls.

    I was pondering the argument of the Intellectual Deceiver’s which posits that some things are too complex to come into being by random chance. The eye is one that they throw out all the time.

    To me, it’s easy enough to fathom that with enough time cells could become more and more sensitive to light while “learning”, (by survival), to work with other increasingly specialized cells to become an eye, (or two). Look at what octopi and chameleons, among others, can do with their skins to quickly camouflage themselves. Stunningly idiosyncratic in their adaptation to their environments. Why didn’t the Infinite Deluder make all the creatures of the earth visual mimics? It sure comes in handy.

    I then wondered about the connection of stem cells to evolution. Since stem cells are extremely malleable and can become any, (almost any?), tissue, it seems like the stem cell is on the cutting edge of evolution. If stem cells with a certain purpose, (light sensitive tissue on top or on front of head), accumulate slight but significant mutations over millenia, then they can provide the foundation for any sort of modification needed.

    Are stem cells “evolution” cells? Proponents of I.D. don’t get it because they don’t want to get it. I.D. seems like a detour of miles around a short, straight stretch of road in perfectly good shape just so people will have to drive by a flashing sign saying bogus creationist crap, on sale today.

  • I listened to the audiobook of Gilgamesh this summer. It is the first known written book and it too comes complete with a variation of an apocalyptic flood story. I had to stop, rewind and re-listen to portions of the story to make sure I heard what I thought I heard.

    Oh, and God Bless the iPod and iTunes megalith!

  • Gilgamesh this summer. It is the first known written book and it too comes complete with a variation of an apocalyptic flood story.

    And let’s not forget the story of Prometheus. He stole fire from the gods and brought it down to man. For this he was punished by being chained to a rock. Everyday a vulture would come and tear out his liver (again). The men who had known him as a man stood around mocking him. “Others he saved; himself he cannot save.” Golgotha anyone?

  • It’s simply astonishing how people think.
    Fully 51% of the American people believe
    God snapped his fingers one day, and
    human beings – homo sapiens sapiens –
    appeared on the surface of the earth.
    Just like that.

    Science tells us that the known universe
    began about 13 billion years ago from
    a primordial explosion known as the “Big
    Bang.” The Hubble telescope has revealed
    the existence of some 200 billion galaxies
    in this vast cosmos, each containing 100
    to 500 billion stars or more, and who knows
    how many of these harbor solar systems.
    We don’t yet have the technology to answer
    this question, but we’ve already discovered
    more than 130 extra solar planets around
    neighborhood suns.

    Our solar system began about 4.6 billion
    years ago. One has to wonder how many
    billions of civilizations might have risen
    and fallen before we began to build ours,
    a mere 10,000 years ago. Most scientists
    consider that modern humans – homo sapiens
    sapiens, evolved some 150,000 years ago
    into our present form.

    It’s just mind boggling that more than half
    the American people believe that God
    sat around on his ass for 13 billion years
    until one day, about 150,000 years ago, on
    this teeny tiny insignificant planet located
    in one of 200 billion galaxies, that he planted
    human beings.

    But of course, most of these people probably
    know nothing about the cosmos, and those
    who do simply reject what science tells them
    because it’s inconvenient.

    Human nature simply baffles me.

  • The habit of dogmatic thought is deeply ingrained in our cultural mindset, and has been for millenia. The philosophers of the Enlightenment tried to provide a new foundation for thought, and partly succeeded, but too many of us, including many working scientists, think of science (operationally if not theoretically) as a body of factual knowledge, known by the power of science to be True, rather than as an approach, a process, a method by which claims of truth are evaluated.

    Dogmatic thinking is a sticky habit, hard to avoid when talking to children or the PTA. But those who care about preserving the gains of the Enlightenment and preventing the rise of an American Taliban probably need to work on talking about how scientific truth is arrived at, and how it differs from religious notions of truth.

    Perhaps starting with scientific truth always being subject to revision. Hey, guys, do you want your Adam and Eve stories to be subject to revision based on new evidence? No, I thought not.

    (It is perhaps worth noting that the Dalai Lama has said that if something in the (Buddhist) scriptures is shown by science to be incorrect, then the scriptures should be changed. What are the Kansas Bible-thumpers scared of?)

    -F.
    Oh, and what color is Grant’s tomb?

  • Running up against other relegions/cultures origins myths exposes the IDers goals. They believe in the Bible’s version of the origin of man/earth and ID is just a way to try and make it more palitable. If ID was taught in science classes then I think other version of the creation story should be taught as well. That would send the IDers around the bend.

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