The Big Story: Rough year for the Christian Right
February 5, 2008 at 5:52 pm by Wayne GarciaSure, they managed to force the anti-gay rights Marriage Amendment onto the November ballot, but for the rest of the social conservative movement, it hasn’t been a great 12 months. Their top presidential candidate, Fred Thompson, bit the dust without a fight. Mike Huckabee never really had a chance. And now, according to the Florida Baptist Witness executive editor James A. Smith Sr., it looks like Florida educators are going to do (gasp!!) actually put science into the science curriculum:
In spite of growing concern and opposition, Florida education leaders are on the brink of requiring an evolution-as-dogma approach to teaching origins in public schools in the Sunshine State. Fortunately, there’s still time to change the outcome on this critical matter.
All the state committee looking at the science curriculum for public schools is doing is recognizing the vast storehouse of evidence that supports evolution, as first posited by Charles Darwin. I wrote about the movement to interject creationism or Intelligent Design two years ago in CL and in this blog post last year, and the fight continues today. The Baptist Witness writes that anti-Darwinists aren’t trying to put ID or creationism into the curriculum:
Like the first draft, what is missing from the revised standards is any recognition that there is controversy about Darwinian evolution and that students should learn about that controversy. Whatever happened to academic freedom and exposing students to all sides of a debate? For the evolution-as-dogma crowd, there is only one side when it comes to Darwin.
This arrogant approach, however, has prompted a growing backlash from parents, teachers, interested citizens and at least a dozen school districts in Florida that have passed resolutions urging the State Board of Education to not impose the evolution-as-dogma model on their school districts.
Contrary to claims of Darwin’s defenders in the education and science establishments, few opponents of the proposed science standards are requesting the addition of creationism or Intelligent Design in the standards. Exposing students to serious, scholarly critiques of Darwinian evolution is all that is asked for from most critics of the standards. Such an approach to teaching evolution is hardly unique or unprecedented.
Challenging a theory with scientific evidence is what science is all about; no theory can be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, but they can be disproved. Theories, however, have an extensive bulk of scientific evidence that supports them; Intelligent Design and creationism has no such evidence in wide acceptance, and hardly any evidence at all, even in the disputed category. That doesn’t make those ideas wrong; it just makes them unproven hypotheses (at best), far from being scientific theory and not of value in a science class.
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February 5th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
That’s why they’re in such knots. They can’t say what they really want or they’d get laughed out of the state. So they retreat to this mealy-mouthed phony argument about “exposing kids to all sides of the debate”, when they know that’s the last thing they really want.
They don’t really understand, deep down, what it means for a scientific theory to be supported as well as evolution is. It isn’t in their heads that you let evidence and not faith decide a question like that, but they have to try and sound reasonable and open-minded. That’s when Bill Foster and the other gomers who recite Discovery Institute (a creationist “think” tank) talking points are so easy to spot and expose.
February 5th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
When I was beginning my studies of geology, I remember my physical geology professor going over the theories of the creation of the solar system. One of the theories began with “In the beginning . . . ” As he discussed each method, he was very unbiased in his approach and just laid out the details. In the end, he told that us that each of us had to decide on our own as to how we thought it all started.
But he warned us that if asked us a test question on one of the theories, we had to be prepared to answer it. We couldn’t get out of the question by claiming to believe in another theory.