First up from The God Machine this week is a story about the latest efforts from some religious activists to oppose school lessons on modern biology.
One of the great ironies of creationists, which often goes overlooked, is that their efforts follow an evolutionary model closely — descent with modification. They attack evolutionary biology from one direction, and when that fails, they adapt the strategy for a related but different attack. When that fails, they adapt again. And again. It’s natural selection applied to a culture-war context.
With “intelligent-design” creationism having been rejected by the courts (and common sense), the latest tactic is popping up in Texas. Now, religious activists aren’t using the usual buzzwords, they’re instead touting the “strengths-and-weaknesses” strategy.
The “strengths and weaknesses” language was slipped into the curriculum standards in Texas to appease creationists when the State Board of Education first mandated the teaching of evolution in the late 1980s. It has had little effect because evolution skeptics have not had enough power on the education board to win the argument that textbooks do not adequately cover the weaknesses of evolution.
Yet even as courts steadily prohibited the outright teaching of creationism and intelligent design, creationists on the Texas board grew to a near majority. Seven of 15 members subscribe to the notion of intelligent design, and they have the blessings of Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican.
What happens in Texas does not stay in Texas: the state is one of the country’s biggest buyers of textbooks, and publishers are loath to produce different versions of the same material. The ideas that work their way into education here will surface in classrooms throughout the country.
” ‘Strengths and weaknesses’ are regular words that have now been drafted into the rhetorical arsenal of creationists,” said Kathy Miller, director of the Texas Freedom Network, a group that promotes religious freedom.
This isn’t a positive development. The activists are appealing to some twisted sense of “fairness” — what’s wrong with exposing students to the strengths and weaknesses of various ideas — that doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny at all. They’re not, for example, recommending students learn the strengths and weaknesses of gravity. Or electromagnetism. Or plate tectonics. Or heliocentrism.
Just biology. I can’t imagine why.
The NYT editorial board tackles the subject today, and rejects the Texas approach as “nonsense.”
The chairman of the Texas board, a dentist named Don McLeroy, advocates the “strengths and weaknesses” approach, as does a near majority of the board. The system accommodates what Dr. McLeroy calls two systems of science, creationist and “naturalist.”
The trouble is, a creationist system of science is not science at all. It is faith. All science is “naturalist” to the extent that it tries to understand the laws of nature and the character of the universe on their own terms, without reference to a divine creator. Every student who hopes to understand the scientific reality of life will sooner or later need to accept the elegant truth of evolution as it has itself evolved since it was first postulated by Darwin. If the creationist view prevails in Texas, students interested in learning how science really works and what scientists really understand about life will first have to overcome the handicap of their own education. […]
The weaknesses that creationists hope to teach as a way of refuting evolution are themselves antiquated, long since filed away as solved. The religious faith underlying creationism has a place, in church and social studies courses. Science belongs in science classrooms.
Also from The God Machine this week:
* South Carolina drivers will be “the first in the nation to be offered license plates that carry the phrase ‘I Believe’ and a Christian cross over a stained-glass window under a law that took effect on Thursday. Critics have threatened to fight the law in court, saying the license plate represents an illegal state endorsement of religion.”
* For those who want to do more to prepare for The Rapture: “For just $40 a year, believers can arrange for up to 62 people to get a final message exactly six days after the Rapture, that day when — according to Christian end times dogma — Christians will be swept up to heaven, while doubters are left behind to suffer seven years of Tribulation under a global government headed by the Antichrist…. The e-mails will be triggered when three of the site’s five Christian staffers ‘scattered around the U.S.’ fail to log in for six days in a row — a system that incorporates a nice margin of safety, should two of the proprietors turn out to be unrepentant sinners or atheists.”
* And in Bakersfield, Calif., a religious activist on the city council is pushing local officials to endorse and promote “In God We Trust” signs. When a local woman urged council members to vote against the proposal, vandals went to her home to scrawl the words “In God We Trust or?” in shoe polish in foot-high letters across two windows and a sliding-glass door. Clearly, that’s what Jesus would have done, right?