America needs a Plan B, in case God flakes.
President Barack Obama agrees, stressing science's pivotal role in securing America's future, and so do the courts, which consistently find the teaching of Creationism in public schools unconstitutional.
But a recent poll found that only 28 percent of public school biology teachers present the theory of evolution as scientific fact -- the rest endorse Genesis or teach it alongside other "theories that frankly don't hold up," as the president once put it.
If Obama cannot prevent Evangelicals and abetting Republican leaders like Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin from tunneling under the wall of separation between church and state, then America is going to have bigger problems on its hands than outsmarting the Chinese. When enough people are ill-equipped to distinguish between a good idea and a bad one, democracy is compromised.
And if democracy is compromised, well, I think you get the point.
According to an international education test, American 15-year-olds rank 23rd in the world in science and 31st in math. According to a national assessment, less than half of students are proficient in science. It's no wonder then why so many people reject the theory of evolution: they just don't understand it.
Take Republican Congressman Jack Kingston on Real Time, for example: "I don't believe a creature crawled out of the sea and became a human being one day." Or Sarah Palin in Going Rogue: "I [don't] believe in the theory that human beings -- thinking, loving beings -- originate from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea." Even the flying spaghetti monster on Futurama: "You seriously believe I'm descended from some kind of flightless manicotti?"
Too many Americans have Darwin confused with Pokémon.
To be sure, the stunningly gullible and the helplessly indoctrinated are the victims of a plot. If you want proof of the insincerity of many Biblical literalists, look no further than the so-called Creation Museum in Kentucky, where there are exhibits of dinosaurs saddled like horses.
Evangelicals once denied the existence of dinosaurs, dismissing them as an atheist's lie or the devil's hoax, until they realized that little kids tend to like dinosaurs more than they like Jesus.
It's cool to deliberately mislead children when you're saving souls, right?
Evangelicals fear their children learning about evolution because they suspect that such knowledge would serve as the gateway drug to critical thinking and eventually -- gasp -- skepticism.
In a fundamental way, they're right: Even if science cannot prove negatives like the nonexistence of God, it does provide an alternative framework for understanding the universe that doesn't require divine inspiration.
That's not to say that advocates of science cannot also be religious, or that the two are entirely incompatible. Rather, as Obama told a Christian group back in 2006: "Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason."
He went on to say: "Now, I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons. But if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I can't simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will; I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all."
The inconvenient truth is that many Americans aren't as responsible about their faith as the president is: they can't distinguish between the logical and the fantastical. And they don't seem to mind much, either.
It is a troubling trend in America: a cultural aversion to thinking and a celebration of intellectual mediocrity. In many circles, going with your gut is better than using your brain, 'common sense' is code for 'the first thing that pops into your mind,' and Sarah Palin is a folk hero.
Which may explain why only 12 percent of Americans insist that evolution should be the only theory of life taught in biology class, even though it's the only theory accepted by reputable scientists, and even though religious education in public schools is unequivocally in conflict with the Constitution.
Of course, this has not stopped the eager-to-please pragmatists from suggesting: "Why not teach both? Or simply: 'teach the controversy' surrounding evolution? Surely there's no harm in presenting both sides."
Biologist Richard Dawkins has a good retort: "Why not teach the stork theory of reproduction, too?"
It's one thing to underfund public education, which America does. It's quite another to subvert education -- to mock and distrust it, as many Evangelicals and Republicans do -- when evolution is of the most essential tools for understanding, interpreting and interacting with the world. It underlies the scientific method that underlies our common reality.
No student should be coerced into accepting evolution -- people have the freedom to believe whatever they want. But everybody should at least have honest and open access to the theory, even if, in the end, they choose to reject it.
Access to education is America's only hope for salvation, so to speak.
Brad Hirschfield: Huckabee Swings and Misses Regarding Islam
Paul Pardi: What's So New About the New Atheism?
Rev. Jonathan Weyer: Raiding the Creation Museum with Peaceful Pirate Atheists
Rev. Jonathan Weyer: An Ordained Minister Visits the Creation Museum with Atheists
Laws and models are merely worded or symbolical statement of a theoretical fact; they derive from theory, and theories are made up from a complex system of intertwined laws.
I just think we need to fight back with semantics as our opponents have by replacing terms such as "global warming" with "climate change". Calling something "just a theory" casts a shadow of uncertainty over it leaving it wide open for skepticism by religious folks. Can't we make an exception and blur the lines for this one subject for the sake of education?
As you so perspicaciously state, “calling something just a theory casts a shadow of uncertainty over it leaving it wide open for skepticism”, so let me suggest that as long as you're "bending the rules a little" to "take away the ambiguity" for denialists who "don't have the attention span .. nor the intelligence to understand", that you don't merely change the nomenclature from the "Theory of Evolution" to the "Law of Evolution". Go all the way and call it the "Fundamental Irrefutable Law of Evolution as Revealed by the God, Science, to His Greatest Prophet Charles Darwin".
But to “fight back with semantics” is insufficient. In centuries past, the Catholic Inquisition tortured and executed denialists and skeptics, only back then they were called heretics. In the balance was the eternal damnation of humanity. VP Al Gore warns us that our present day heretics will damn humanity to global flooding and starvation. Existential threats to humanity require draconian responses. So, if skeptics and denialists nevertheless reject the Truth of Science, put them on trial for "crimes against humanity and Mother Gaea, the Beloved Daughter of the Lord of Lords, the Supreme God Science."
Might I also suggest an earthly representative of the God Science who, when pronouncing “theoretical fact” and “scientific fact” ex cathedra, is infallible. I nominate Professor Richard Dawkins.
Furthermore, “there’s no evidence” does not equate with “it’s incorrect”. Sans evidence, 2500 years ago the Greek, Democritus, hypothesized the existence of atoms.
The theory of evolution “is entirely made up”; it is the product of human speculation concocted to explain observation. All human knowledge “is entirely made up”.
You perhaps believe that the theory of evolution is supported by overwhelming, self-consistent, and non-contradictory evidence. Yet innocent people have been executed on “incontrovertible” evidence. The incontrovertible immutability of space/time fell victim to Einstein’s theories.
Yet far from incontrovertible, the nature of sentient beings belies the theory of evolution, marking it as sillier than your “flying spaghetti monster”. But silly does not necessarily equate to incorrect but rather to contradicting quotidian experience. A cat may simultaneously be dead and alive according to quantum theory.
Being mutually exclusive, free will is inconsistent with determinism. Atoms obeying deterministic laws cannot be the sole constituents of sentient beings able to exercise free will. The evidence supports the existence of free will, whose necessary consequents are individual liberty and inherent human imperfection.
The theory of evolution, in contrast, is the essential doctrine of an inherently totalitarian religion, Deterministic Materialism, whose God, Science, does not exist. Asserting that human life is deterministic and therefore comprehensible, it has arrogantly fashioned utopias in whose cause countless humans, deemed to be constituted of mere materialism, were slaughtered.
But the Bible is not a science book, and much of what it says is demonstrably false, or even self-contradictory.
So they're in a terrible position. If they let themselves think about this too hard, they're doomed. Any thoughtful fundamentalist must, at some level, live in existential terror. This accounts for the weirdly tortured attempts to reconcile the Bible with science, and for the virulence with which they reject modernity.
Non-fundamentalist religions -- Catholics, most of the Protestant denominations, and Jews -- long ago gave up on using the Bible as a science book. They're a lot happier for it, I think. But the fundamentalists have painted themselves into a corner.
Is “a science book” inerrant? How did the God, Science, reveal this to you?
Prove that something, anything, in the Bible is “demonstrably false”. I say it’s impossible; prove me wrong. Biblical fundamentalists must find that the Bible is self-consistent for otherwise, as you state, “their whole world crumbles”.
I, however, can prove that “a science book” is “demonstrably false” and “self-contradictory”. I rented my first house in the 1970s. In the basement I found a 1911 textbook with the stamp “Philadelphia School Board”. It asserted that only Caucasians were fully human; less than human were Chinese, followed by Jews, followed by Negroes. Today’s science books assert that we are all equally human. Since the two assertions are mutually exclusive, one must be false; QED.
The God, Science, is bloodier than Moloch. In the 100 years since 1911, over 100M humans were murdered by National and International Socialism, both claimed to be strictly “Scientific”. Nowadays we face an insane “science of global warming” which, if implemented, will murder even greater numbers of humans.
Evolution is the central religious tenet of deterministic materialism which asserts that humans are mere matter obeying deterministic laws. Judeo-Christianity preaches the sanctity of human life and inherent human imperfection. The evidence supports Judeo-Christianity.
Okay. Joshua 10:13: "And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day."
Why didn't the Chinese notice?
No single standard Darwin's Theory of Evolution exists; but whatever variations on to this cockamamie theory are extant, with near certainty, they all are incorrect.
Whether you place your trust in this very sill theory, or in astrology, or in creationism, or in intelligent design, it has zero effect on anyone's life. So go ahead and indulge in your insane beliefs; but whatever you do, don't coerce them on me and on other Americans.
Disprove this, then: everything around us was created one minute ago, with all the traces of the past in place, including the dust on the tables, the memories in our brains, the light en route from distant stars, everything. See? It's a completely ridiculous theory. But it can't be tested. So it's not science.
The theory of evolution was concocted by humans, and I don’t mean to impute a negative connotation to the term “concocted”, as an explanation for observations. Creationism likewise explains observations, as does intelligent design. The tenets of every religion are supported by evidence.
Some of the explanations associated with the theory of evolution are sillier than garden faeries. However, I don’t necessarily equate silly with incorrect. However for the same reasons that it is impossible to disprove the existence of garden faeries, it is absolutely impossible to disprove the theory of evolution.
I am unaware of a single firm prediction which can be attributed to the theory of evolution. Please provide one specific instance of time when a prediction was made and what additional evidence was discovered subsequent to that prediction which supported said prediction.
By what criteria do you determine that the theory that the universe was created one minute ago is “completely ridiculous”? Also prove that these criteria are infallible.
I do not abide your religion; and not because I consider it silly and intolerant. I am not so arrogant. Your religion is coercive; brooking neither infidels nor heretics. It is inherently totalitarian.
We have watered down the education degree for decades. They get special classes so they can pass them. So we get the results we have for the US in science and math. Bluntly, an ignorant electorate.
Pronouncements like "You don't get an option to reject it in a science class", and "it should be the only thing taught" make you come of as being as ignorant as Vice President Al Gore.
And you know what, the universe doesn't care what you think. It happened anyway.
American democracy has muddled through nicely for the last 234 years, despite overwhelming majorities of Americans believing in creation. Darwin's ideas--right or wrong--will have no measurable effect on that. Period.
But then having a sound understanding of evolution and biology gives modern American scientists a far better understing of the REAL world than possessed by the Romans, and by modern American creationist fantasists....
Keep on imagining that Darwin's ideas have had no impact on American life... ignoring the great improvements in agriculture and biological sciences that have occured based that understanding.