Intelligent Design

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The school board of a small central Ohio community voted Friday to fire a teacher accused of preaching his Christian beliefs despite staff complaints and burning the image of a cross on students' arms, according to the Associated Press.

The back-pedaling and loud protestations of injured innocence by this wack-job's attorney and friends are certainly amusing.

[link] John Freshwater discussed his creationism beliefs, disregarded evolution and failed to follow the standard curriculum while teaching eighth-grade science at Mount Vernon Middle School, board officials said.

An investigation revealed he continued teaching his beliefs even after he was ordered to stop, the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch reported Saturday.

The investigation found Freshwater said homosexuals are sinners and branded crosses into some students' arms, the board said.

Freshwater's attorney, R. Kelly Hamilton, said his client's rights to practice religion were infringed and he plans to call for a hearing with the school board to fight the dismissal.

Hamilton said the allegations are "fabrications created by a couple of students … Not a single child has ever been harmed."

"Well, except for the whole 'burning a cross in their forearm' thing, yeah. Except for that." continued Freshwater later. "But that was really just, um, a science experiment. Yeah! That's it! That's the ticket!

"You can ask my wife - ah, um, ah... Morgan Fairchild!"

All I can say is that if my kid had come home with anything at all fucking burned into his arm by his teacher, then I would have gladly gone to jail for assault. However, the teacher would have gone to the hospital with multiple injuries and burns made with the same tool that he used to burn my child.

PZ mentioned this the other day, but I was busy, so it wasn't until I was playing catch-up with his site and BoingBoing this afternoon that I went to check out the link:

'Big Science' is always suppressing The Truth with their blatant pro-evolution anti-wacko agenda: from the fact that UFOs built the pyramids to the reality of creationism and fact the universe is "Turtles All The Way Down". It is time to fight back and urge schools to Teach The Controversy with these intelligently designed t-shirts.

And now through the 30th they're having a 25% off summer sale! Excellent!

I ordered one of the "UFOs Created the Pyramids" t-shirts and a hoodie with another of their designs.

Have fun!

Jim Downey

I just read this on Wired News:

The Florida Board of Education officially upheld evolution yesterday.

In a 4-3 vote, the Board accepted a proposed curriculum that makes evolution central to public school science education.

Until now, Florida's schools weren't required to teach evolution. The old curriculum guidelines didn't even mention it by name.

The 4-3 vote was obtained by including a last-minute amendment to the standards. Suggested last Friday by religious conservatives and dubbed the "academic freedom proposal," the amendment required that the curriculum's references to "evolution" be replaced by the "scientific theory of evolution."

The amendment's supporters called the language change a victory -- and it is, though not in the way they imagine.

The biotech industry inserted a gene from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) that is responsible for creating a toxic protein into cotton to protect it against the bollworm moth. So now we have fields of human genetically modified cotton in fields across the south. Talk about putting pressure on the bollworm moth caterpillars. In response they have evolved a resistance to the Bt protein!

So either
1. God is taking time out of controlling world affairs and answering prayers to mess with the genetics of the bollworm moth so they can live to destroy the US cotton crop. (Maybe God really wants to break out his polyester from the 70's again.)
or
2. We have some more compelling evidence to add to the evolution "debate".

Florida State Board Of Education member Donna Callaway gets it so wrong that it's painful to read.

[link] Donna Callaway, a former middle school principal from Tallahassee, told the Florida Baptist Witness that evolution "should not be taught to the exclusion of other theories of origins of life."

She also said she hoped Christians would pray over the issue. "As a SBOE member, I want those prayers," Callaway said. "I want God to be part of this."

Evolution is not a "theory of origins of life", number one, and number two, the Christian God cannot, by law, "be a part of" the Florida State Board Of Education - unless you rescind the United States Constitution, or secede from the union.

But you've all heard this before, time and time again. It's been said, over and over, a thousand times or more. The facts are always the same; ignorant Christian creationist who does not understand what evolution is, or what science is gets elected to the school board. Then they convince other ignorant Christian creationists on the school board to "teach the (nonexistent) controversy" by reading the religious tracts put out by the Discovery Institute, WoTM, or Dr. Dino. Overworked civil-rights defenders like the ACLU and FFRF take the school board to court and win. Many indignant news stories and op-ed columns are written about the evil atheist plot to persecute innocent Christians by teaching science instead of Christian mythology in - ahem - science classes. Overwrought email chain letters get forwarded to everyone and their grandmother shouting about the nasty atheists and their evil plan to barbecue all the Christian children in the public school system for the crime of being Christian.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Things like this make me tired. It feels like we're bailing out a leaky boat with plastic beer cups. I mean, were doing something, going through the motions, making a lot of noise and fuss, but the reality of the situation is that the boat is filling up too fast. I fear that we are sinking, and that there is not a lot we can do to prevent it.

Still, we'll keep on bailing because what else can we do?

Why is it that I want to tag every religion-related post with "Stupid Human Tricks"?

*Sigh*

Anyway, Happy Birthday, everyone! According to your friendly neighborhood creationists, today is Earth's 6,010th Birthday! Yay!

The really sad part? 43% of your fellow Americans (assuming you're here - the rest of the world already knows how crazy we are) basically agreed, saying the following statement was true: That God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.

So, when do we get cake? I need something to buffer the bottle of vodka I just got to help me forget this...

Jim Downey

(Via MeFi.)

7.21.07

I know you are supposed to actually read a book before you give it a positive review, but I have never been one to follow the rules.

I just finished watching a C-SPAN2 program called Book TV that featured an author named Peter Irons and his new book called God on Trial: Dispatches from America's Battlefields. Mr Irons is a brilliant man and spoke for a little over an hour about some very famous cases that have come up before the Supreme Court or are pending review by the Supreme Court. These cases include The San Diego Cross, the 10 Commandments in Austin and Kentucky, and the Intelligent Design in the Dover Pa. schools. He also discussed the Rev. Barry Lind and his organization called Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, as well as Michael Newdow and his lifelong battle to remove god from the pledge and our currency.

Via MeFi, word of the self-made mummies of Japan:

For three years the priests would eat a special diet consisting only of nuts and seeds, while taking part in a regimen of rigorous physical activity that stripped them of their body fat. They then ate only bark and roots for another three years and began drinking a poisonous tea made from the sap of the Urushi tree, which contains Urushiol (same stuff that makes poison ivy), normally used to lacquer bowls. This caused vomiting and a rapid loss of bodily fluids. Finally, a self-mummifying monk would lock himself in a stone tomb barely larger than his body, where he would not move from the lotus position. His only connection to the outside world was an air tube and a bell. Each day he rang a bell to let those outside know that he was still alive. When the bell stopped ringing, the tube was removed and the tomb sealed.

Well, shoot. There's 2 minutes and 5 seconds of my one and only life I'll never get back. I could almost feel my brain cells atrophying as I watched this. Creationist Chuck Missler takes evolution-denial to a hilariously all-time low.

I sure hope that we make it through the next few years because shit like this is just depressing.

(If you just want to get to the point and avoid much background bio, read just the first and last paragraphs.)

Now, I am not a philosopher, did not study philosophy in school or in college (took a logic course to satisfy that requirement), and have no formal or informal education in philosophy. What I have are my brains and my experience. I have noticed that in plenty of areas of life I have reached conclusions of personal philosophy about which people spent the time to write complete tomes. Anyone else here experience this?

Like Brent, around the age of 16, I abandoned faith as nonsense. It was a gradual procession throughout life but got a kick start with my father (the ordained, born-again, intermittently evangelical Presbyterian), when I was around 12 years, who said to me with no viciousness mind you, 'I've done what I think is right in bringing you up but you obviously can't accept faith as openly as I have. You have a different path to follow and you need to find that on your own.'

So, now that science seems to be closing in on a genetic or at least developmental basis for homosexuality, the Religious Right is taking an interest. Why? So they can stomp it out, of course.

Now, I'm not gay, and I don't have kids, so in one sense I don't have a dog in this fight. But saying that is like saying that I don't care what happens down in Gitmo, just because the likelihood of me ever winding up in that situation is nil.

Besides, I like the hypocrisy of how the Religious Right will disavow the power of science to determine truths about some things, and yet embrace other aspects of science when it conveniently fits with their agenda.

Via Andrew Sullivan, comes this piece by Albert Mohler, The President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary: Is Your Baby Gay? In the article you find some remarkable comments:

First of all, I apologize for my (second) long absence. In addition to finding out I had to move and then actually having to move within the course of 30 days, I had two family members die - one before and one after Christmas, so this has been a pretty hectic and emotional time for me these few months.

One of the first things I noticed (other than the fact that when you reach the age of 35 your friends and family will no longer help you move) was how death brings people from all religions together, but tends to exclude atheists. If death is the end, then what does it matter? Why even bother attending a funeral if you don't believe in God? It can be very upsetting and sometimes depressing to realize that one day it will be me that dies. It is a very hard reality to face.

But I also spent a good bit of time watching astronomy shows with my son (thank you Science Channel), who wants to be an astronomer when he grows up. (It is amazing to hear a 10-year-old boy tell me that he wants to invent a telescope that will allow humans to see ‘dark matter’). One scientist made a particularly astounding comment, and I paraphrase; ‘every molecule of matter on this planet and in our bodies was forged in the center of a star somewhere. So when we study the universe, we are actually studying ourselves.’

I've been thinking about the premise of The Fall which is central to the Abrahamic faiths. Even more important than the various methods of saving the soul from sin is the principle of why sin exists and why one needs to be saved from it. In addition, it has acted as a backward-looking brake on the progress of mankind because it asserts that once everything was great, but now things have decayed--which makes obvious that regression is more profitable than progress.

Chris Campbell is a hell-obsessed Christian opinion columnist for the online version of the Houston Chronicle. He also write a blog, sponsored by the Houston Chronicle, called Thinking Christian. Chris and I have tangled before.

Chris' latest post attempts to tackle Richard Dawkins' new book, The God Delusion. In it, Chris' employs possibly the lamest creationist apologetic of them all; The Argument From Personal Incredulity which says, basically, "I don't understand how it happened, so god did it".

[Chris Campbell] Also, I disagree with his arguement that complex things don't have to be designed and made by intelligence. When was the last time you saw a watch just evolve from a piece of metal all by itself. Even if you let the metal sit there for millions of years I bet you that a watch will never appear. What need was there for a human being to evolve by itself and how could it survive slow changes? It just makes no sense and sounds totally impossible that just by slow changes human would appear. Even over a supposed period of millions of years it just is not possible by chance or by slow changes.

More below the fold...

Sometimes theistic apologists go to great lengths to rationalize their belief in an imaginary magical man in the sky who poofed us all into existence with magic.

One of the silliest arguments that I read and hear all the time is the argument that while science is all well and good for, you know, those unimportant material things like kitchen appliances, automobiles, spaceships, and life saving medical pharmacology, the really important immaterial things, like "God" and "why are we here", can only be answered by religion - specifically, the apologist's own personal religion.

The Rev. Dan Marler, pastor at the First Church of God in Oak Lawn, IL, writes an opinion column today in the Daily Southtown and asks the question, "Are faith and science enemies?"

More below the fold...

Check out the Panda's Thumb deconstruction of creationist Jonathan Wells' new book called The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. It promises to be a hoot. PZ is dismantling the chapter on embryology.

Jonathan Wells is one of the most notorious activists of the political ad campaign known as “intelligent design”. He is most well known for his attacks on modern biology, specifically his 2000 book, Icons of Evolution, which was panned by the scientific community for its fraudulent presentation of modern biology.

Does Jonathan Wells, aiming once again at the popular market, restore his scientific and academic reputation with his latest book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, or is it just old trash in a new bag? To find out, you will need to read our multi-part review, which begins tomorrow.

One thing is for sure, Jonathan Wells is too modest. His recently published, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, is not only politically incorrect but incorrect in most other ways as well: scientifically, logically, historically, legally, academically, and morally.

Oh yeah, and help out with the Googlebomb by linking the title of the book with the Panda's Thumb article instead. Like this:

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design.

This is a science-related post about the sun, probably better written about by DarkSyde, but I want to make a slightly sidewise philosophical point.

I remember reading a story years ago in which the main character, a kid, first learned about the fact of internal organs. As the story told it, prior to that he’d assumed that he was solid inside like a potato. It stuck in my head because so much of what we have thought about the world, in the childhood of human history, came from just this kind of mistaken theorizing.

Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute and the team leader on the Human Genome Project is a smart guy, obviously. And yet he still falls prey to the Argument From Personal Incredulity, sometimes stated as "I don't know how it happened, so it must have been God".

[link] "When you make a breakthrough it is a moment of scientific exhilaration because you have been on this search and seem to have found it," he said. "But it is also a moment where I at least feel closeness to the creator in the sense of having now perceived something that no human knew before but God knew all along.

"When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion-letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can't survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can't help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God's mind."

This provides to me an underline in what I have come to accept as part of the human condition; that is to say the human tendency to become overwhelmed by something - information, data, whatever - and have your brain retreat into an unreal fantasyland, almost like a defense mechanism. It puts me in mind of a bunny rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, stuck, quivering, won't go forward, won't go back. At that point a human being uses it's wonderful brain to rationalize themselves into a position that they can accept without going insane.

In Collins' case he seems to have latched onto "theistic evolution" as his escape hatch.

More below the fold...

Duane Gish, VP of the hoary old ICR trotted out the same, tired creationist apologetics at a church fundraiser in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania that he's been bleating about for years.

[link] Gish said the fossil record also corroborates creation instead of evolution. In the Cambrian strata, no ancestors or transition forms of living organisms could be found. "You ought to find billions of ancestors and intermediate stages, but not one has been found," Gish said. Living organisms were "created fully formed, just like the Bible says."

Holy crap, Gish, give it a rest already. Why keep spewing this already-debunked hogwash?

Ah. Now I get it. P.T. Barnum was right; A sucker is born every minute. The quote below is from the comments to this story in the Lancaster Online:

[link] I agree with you, there are just too many unanswered questions when it comes to evolution. I think evolution does a pretty good job of describing how environmental conditions effect biological changes but doesn’t definitively describe how life was formed from a collection of chemicals. By what mechanism did these early groups of chemicals become self propagating? Very primitive organisms still exist, why didn’t they move up the evolutionary latter, how is it possible that these primitive organisms were not challenged by the environment during 5 billion years of existence?

More below the flip...

[Argh. Having once again missed the Carnival of the Godless...]

...

I confess to spending a certain amount of time in Yahoo chat rooms — mainly those devoted to religion. I'm fascinated with why people continue to believe in such stuff, when it is so easy to refute that children can do it.

I think the fascination can best be compared to the way kids react when they see someone with a noticeable handicap. Try to get a three-year-old, for instance, to look away from a man with a prosthetic hook for a hand.

I don't stare at people with prosthetics or handicaps. (Read The Shooting Gallery of Life for my take on that.) But RELIGION, that handicap-of-mind, seems not only easily correctible but almost wholly self-inflicted. Puts me in mind of a whole legion of perfectly healthy people resigning themselves voluntarily to wheelchairs ... simply because they won't listen when people tell them all they have to do is stand up and walk.

I can't look away.

Time after time after time, I read the comments of people who say "Jesus came to save us from sin," or "God wrote the Bible so we could find life everlasting." Or "Atheists are doomed to spend eternity in hell if they refuse to accept Jesus." "Christ alone is the answer to life." Or ... argh, could be any number of nonsensical formulaic statements.