An open letter to the Indiana legislature

The Indiana Senate has approved this bill:

The governing body of a school corporation may offer instruction on various theories of the origin of life. The curriculum for the course must include theories from multiple religions, which may include, but is not limited to, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Scientology.

I’ve heard a few complaints from Hoosiers about this, including teachers. One high school science teacher has asked me to post this open letter on the subject; they’ve asked that I not include their name, which is sad in itself. Not only is the legislature passing stupid laws, but the environment is so oppressive that the science teachers who are expected to implement it cannot speak out against it, for fear of losing their jobs. Indiana, you suck.

At least I don’t have to worry about the politicians of Indiana gunning for my job, so I can post this letter for my correspondent.

Honorable Representatives of the state of Indiana,

I am quite dismayed to learn of the passage of SB 89 which will give Indiana school boards the authority to require the teaching of various origin stories in public schools. There are several reasons I feel this is an inappropriate action for our state to take.

First, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in 1987 in Edwards v. Aguillard that balanced treatment of creationism and evolution violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Then in 2005 the U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania ruled against the inclusion of Intelligent Design in the science curriculum. As Judge Jones wrote, “To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions. The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy.” Now it appears that the citizens of Indiana are being poorly served. If this becomes law, our citizens will have to foot the bill for the lawsuits that will certainly ensue.

Second, I appreciate Indiana’s need to educate our citizens about the beliefs and cultures of our planet’s people. Our students would greatly benefit from learning about the multitude of worldviews that exist, in a philosophy or comparative religion class. Such understanding would make our citizens better prepared for international commerce and political discourse. I do not believe that SB 89 was introduced for this reason, however. The implication is that the introduction of various religious beliefs would take place in the science class room. As a biologist and science teacher, I understand the evidence for evolution is as strong as the evidence for any other theory we teach. I also understand that religious belief is based on faith, which by definition requires no evidence. I do not comprehend how exposing my students to ideas based, not on evidence, but faith could constitute good science education. When I read that this bill will allow school boards to require the teaching of “theories from multiple religions”, I interpret this to indicate that a school board may specify which religions may be taught. Two constitutes “multiple”, so if a school board so chose, they could require teachers to teach Christian and Jewish creation ideas only, which are essentially the same. This would not serve to enlighten students on the diversity of ideas, but to reinforce ideas that either they already hold or that they will find in conflict with their beliefs. In either case, it could set students at odds with each other, while not teaching any science at all.

If I am misinterpreting the spirit of this bill, please change the language to indicate that this is not to be applied to science classes, and/or specify which religions’ views must be taught if the local school board chooses to require this. In my opinion, if this is to be done in any way consistent with spirit of the Establishment Clause, all religious views must be taught. In this case, teachers will not be able to cover the state science standards in 180 days and also teach religion.

Third, the misunderstanding of the word theory in the bill is a sad indication of the ignorance of the authors. In science, the word “theory” does not mean an “idea”. A theory is an explanation for how something happens, based on a great deal of research which has been reviewed, published, tested, re-tested, accepted by most scientists in the field, and not yet disproven. No religion has a “theory” of the origins of life that meets the criteria we require to give an idea the full weight of the title “theory” in science. I would be happy to speak with any representative who would like to learn more about what the theory of evolution actually says and what evidence supports it.

Sincerely,

Indiana High School Science Teacher

(Also on Sb)

Your state’s report card

The Fordham Institute has released their annual evaluation of state science standards. They are very tough graders — Minnesota got a “C”. Ack! Mom & Dad are going to be pissed, how will we ever get into a good college at this rate?

The Institute does a fairly thorough breakdown, so there are some bright spots: Minnesota is doing a good job in the life sciences, but where we got dinged hard was on the physical sciences, which are “illogically organized” and contain factual errors. Here’s the introduction to their evaluation of our life sciences standards:

Important life science content is presented quite minimally, but the flow and logic are such as to convey an understanding of the concepts rather than coming across as a list of topics to check off. The inclusion of examples from Kindergarten through eighth grade helps to further explain what students should know and be able to do.

Minimal is OK, as far as I’m concerned; it think it’s more important to get across a solid conceptual understanding. Of course, given that some teachers do a very poor job of getting those concepts across, more specific guidelines might be useful.

What’s really awful about our C, though, is that that’s the same grade Texas got. Oh, the ignominy!

I think we got robbed, though. The detailed breakdown says that a major problem is inconsistency: some bits of the Texas standards are stellar, others are terrible; different grade levels get variable quality of coverage. Texas gets slammed for life science standards that are “woefully imbalanced, with poorly developed material in the early grades and strong, sometimes excellent, content in the upper levels.” The major flaws are entirely predictable.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the middle school standards, however, is their coverage of evolution. For instance, the seventh-grade standards mention the Galapagos finches, giving the impression that the Darwinian paradigm is being presented. Unfortunately, it is not. Instead, the example of the finch Geospiza fortis apparently refers to studies by Peter and Rosemary Grant on beak size in this species, made widely known by Jonathan Weiner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Beak of the Finch. Creationists often distort these important findings to argue that Darwinian macroevolution does not occur—instead, microevolution does. In addition, the word “evolution” is never used in any of the middle school standards, and the term “natural selection” is never explained.

What’s really telling, though, is the reactions. I just told you I’m disappointed with Minnesota’s “C”; we can do better, and I hope the next round of standards will improve ours to an “A”. In Texas, creationist kook Don McLeroy was happy with his “C”.

McLeroy told the Texas Independent he is “very pleased” with the study and believes it only serves to validate the role he and the conservative bloc played in crafting the standards.

“The work of religious conservatives has been vindicated,” he said, pointing to the report’s positive review of high school evolution standards. When asked about the poor evaluation of middle school standards, McLeroy said blame could fall on the writing teams and review committees and/or the whole board who could have stepped up to improve them. “In the end, what we wrote was legitimate, sound science and the study proves it.”

That is so completely backwards. The weaknesses in the standards are the direct result of the meddling corruption of science pushed by the religious conservatives on the board; everything the Fordham Institute said was bad about their standards were the points the creationists pushed. The strengths are the product of the motivated, hard-working scientists and educators who fought against the religious conservatives. McLeroy can take credit for that “C” in the sense that it could have been an “A” if he and his fellow travellers in superstition had been kicked out of the process…and that’s nothing to be proud of.

(Also on Sb)

Why I am an atheist – SP

I’m an atheist for all the standard reasons of logic and evidence that others have already articulated, but I’m also an atheist because of a feeling that religious belief can blunt one’s sense of wonder. As a child, the things that struck me as most beautiful and awe inspiring appeared to be off religion’s radar screen. Where were the giant sequoias in the bible? The Grand Canyon and the other National Parks? Bears? I would have been a sucker for religion had my parents been Mormons or animists. My grandmother showed me a 3-D postcard of Christ wearing a bloody crown of thorns. My mom didn’t like this, so grandma revealed the postcard as if it was pornography, something hidden and very special. I didn’t get it. Jesus would blink his eyes open and shut as you tilted the postcard. This freaked me out a little; normal kids prefer live people to dying ones. Even as a five year old, I can remember being revolted at the cruelty of a doctrine that had no place in heaven for cats and even considered the question ridiculous. Richard Dawkins called religion a crime against childhood. That resonates with me, although I grew up without much distortion from religious education.

I married a lapsed but still religious Catholic. (We all have criteria, and I drew the line at Republicans or smokers.) Charles Darwin is a bit of a role model for me in terms of reconciling my total lack of faith with my dear wife’s residual attachment to her religion. He lost his faith, but loved his wife enough to support and accept that she retained hers. Anyway, like Darwin, one of the crosses I bear is occasional attendance at church. Last Easter, the priest was talking about the miracle of the resurrection. My usual Church-service meditation on the history and sociology of the Hellenistic world wasn’t doing it for me. I actually listened to the priest, and I was getting pissed off. Torture is not some abstraction. It is a grotesque crime with nothing redeeming about it, and real people suffer their entire lives from having been tortured. The Father tortured the Son to death and then resurrected Him to free us from sin? That’s obscene. What kind of manipulative organization would glorify it? And why would anyone pick an event like this as the foundation to build some elaborate theological structure and claim that it reflects something fundamental about the universe?

Just when I thought I could stand no more, a warbler appeared outside the window, gleaning insects off of the forsythia bush. Call it a miracle: A bird weighing less than the change in my pocket flew from Colombia en route to Canada. It makes this journey twice each year, and it can do this for a decade. Here was something of tremendous beauty, real and tangible and available to anyone with curiosity. The priest would probably offer some Hallmark sentiment about God’s love for all of His creations, at least until they fly into windows, or toss off a phrase about the beauty of God’s creation that has the effect of stifling inquiry more than encouraging it. To be fair, the Catholic Church accepts evolution and there are Jesuits who have a pretty solid understanding of biology. But even they would insist on Easter Sunday that the defining event in all time was the brutalization of a man during the expansion phase of the Roman Empire.

I don’t get it. I’ve never heard a believable rationale for separating religion and science, and the whole progression of science pretty much proves we’re not the center of the universe. This warbler seemed like a small but welcome messenger from the vast and impersonal universe outside the church. The mysteries of the resurrection and the volumes of theological speculation built upon it seem like weak tea, pale and downright unimaginative compared to the remarkable fact that this warbler and I share the same basic architecture and chemistry, that the warbler has even more in common with the tyrannosaurus down at the Field Museum, that a creature so small uses the stars to navigate, or any of the millions of other things that can be known or asked about both human and bird. The church has nothing emotionally or intellectually satisfying to say about the terrifying vastness of time and chance that created me, the world’s most easily-entertained mammal, or the warbler I was observing. I am an atheist because the universe is unexpected and beautiful in ways that bear little relationship to the myths or beliefs humans create to interpret it.

SP
United States

…and South Dakota follows suit

There was no opposition to a bill that encourages South Dakota public schools to study the bible. This one is as sectarian as they come.

Scripture study and science projects? That’s the prospect some students in South Dakota may face after a substantial majority in the state’s House of Representatives helped pass a resolution to encourage public school districts to incorporate Bible education into curricula. The House passed the resolution last week by a vote of 55-13 after a short floor debate during which no member from either party voiced opposition.

The sponsor of the bill, Steve Hickey, is a pastor, of course. This is clearly a law intended to promote Christianity and Christianity alone in the schools.

Hey, let’s not forget Pennsylvania in the roster of bad, lazy state legislatures. They passed a resolution declaring this the “year of the bible”. That one is just plain dumb: citing vague “great challenges” that the US is facing, it wants Pennsylvanians to turn to an ancient magic book to find strength. They won’t. Real problems need to be confronted with real solutions and hard work, not superstition and a retreat into fairy tales.

Indiana takes another step towards lunacy

Remember how Indiana managed to get a creationist bill through their Education committee? Crank up the dread, dismay, and disgust another notch: it has now passed the Indiana Senate, and is awaiting the approval of the house.

This is the bill that tries to avoid accusations of sectarian religious teaching by encouraging science classes to teach “Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Scientology”. They really don’t get it. None of them are science, and they shouldn’t be taught as if they were.

Yessss…come over to the Dark Side!

One of us! John Cole has seen the light…err, dark?

But from where I stand these days, the only thing I see religion doing in the public sector is gay bashing and telling women, mostly poor and desperate and in deplorable financial and personal situations, what to do with their bodies. I see busybodies deciding what drugs they can dispense to which customers, or deciding that they don’t have to issue a marriage license because of some petty deity that I don’t believe in told them to hate their fellow citizens and ignore the law. In a country in dire financial straits but still spending billions and billions of dollars on education, I see religious folks actively and openly working to make our schoolkids dumber. I see them shooting people who provided a medical procedure, and I see others rummaging through people’s personal lives to find out who hasn’t lived up the word of God. I see glassy-eyed fools running for President claiming that vaccines that save lives actually cause cancer, or that if you get raped and are pregnant, you should just lie back and think of Jeebus and make the best of a bad situation. In fact, everywhere you look these days, if Christianity or religion is getting a mention, it means something ugly is happening and someone somewhere is being victimized, marginalized, or otherwise abused. Go read some of the arguments against integration and you’ll see the same bible verses used today against homosexuals. Fifty years from now, they’ll be recycling them again to trash someone else they don’t like or who isn’t good enough for them.

Why I am an atheist – mandrellian

Why am I not an atheist …

… and why I am.

I am not an atheist because:

  • I hate God
  • I prayed to God and my prayers weren’t answered
  • Militant/fundamentalist atheists converted me away from God
  • I worship science and the works of man instead of God
  • I’m rebelling against God like I rebelled against my parents & teachers in high school
  • I think I’m better than God
  • I had a bad experience with a priest or church or religious person
  • I can’t decide which religion to subscribe to
  • atheism is my religion
  • I think religious people are idiots
  • I worship Batman
  • I worship Satan
  • I’m immoral/amoral and would rather do what I want
  • I want to destroy religion

I distrust and criticise certain organised religions because:

  • they are human inventions and many seem to be more preoccupied with obsessively controlling aspects of peoples’ private lives than improving them
  • many Christian churches are primarily concerned with attracting money and then keeping it rather than using it charitably
  • many holy books get descriptions of the world & nature completely wrong, which you would not expect had they been dictated by the omnipotent creator of the universe
  • many holy books contain descriptions of human events that cannot be historically verified and in all likelihood never happened (eg. Exodus)
  • many holy books contain numerous laws, acts & stories of a morality that modern, free societies find repugnant; these societies have passed many of their own laws contradicting them
  • there are so many separate & often violently opposed sects of each religion that it is more likely that none of them are correct than just one of them being so
  • many religious groups demand special treatment such as the right not to be offended by statements, artworks, songs or anything else that may criticise or disagree with their dogma
  • religious groups frequently try to have laws passed which unfairly impose their narrow standards of behaviour, based on interpretations of specific holy commands, onto the rest of society
  • religious people often tend to pick & choose from, or “interpret” their holy texts, discarding what does not conform to modern standards of morality, law & political freedom; they then imply that modern morality, law and political freedom rests on the foundations of their particular religion
  • there is such a wide spectrum of religious belief & adherence to dogma, ranging from light, barely-existent deism to the kind of rigid fundamentalism that oppresses and kills many, many people in its name, that it leads me to conclude that either God wasn’t clear enough with his message, didn’t spread it to enough people or that humans have basically made their religions and associated rules up as they went along and have been in conflict with each other about them ever since
  • many religious people & groups wilfully mis-characterise atheists as immoral, empty beings with no appreciation for beauty or mystery simply because we prefer natural explanations for the universe’s phenomena rather than defaulting to “God did it”; they believe that any explanation, even a wrong one or one which explains nothing, is better than “we just don’t know yet”
  • many religious groups continue to deny long-accepted scientific facts such as the divergence of species through evolution and the verified age of the Earth; some wish their particular mythology taught as fact in science classes and go to extraordinary lengths to accomplish it; some even insist there’s a huge, dark Scientist conspiracy quashing “academic freedom”
  • some religious people & groups attempt to cherry-pick science (as they do their scriptures) for those parts which conform to their belief system while actively denying others, e.g. agreeing with “microevolution” while denying “macroevolution” or attempting to use the Second Law of Thermodynamics to debunk evolution
  • some religious groups deny the efficacy of modern medicine in favour of treating an ill person with prayer, a practice which has led to many preventable deaths, often of children
  • they all make extraordinary claims based on their scriptures, provide no evidence beyond referring to their self-confirming scriptures and then insist that the onus is on atheists to disprove their claims
  • many religions have become inextricably intertwined with the laws of the patriarchal cultures which spawned or adopted them, leading to divine justifications for such horrors as female circumcision and “honour killings”, which more often than not punish women, already under the thumbs of domineering males, for seemingly minute transgressions of law
  • when it comes to the hot-button issue of sexual abuse by priests, many religions seem more concerned with good public relations, shielding themselves from culpability and keeping numbers in churches than with compensating victims and being active about preventing further abuse

I am an atheist because:

  • any & all claims of and explanations for the existence of God or any other gods have thus far fallen far short of my standards of evidence
  • my understanding of the natural universe is that it functions in such a way that doesn’t require (or indicate) the presence of any supernatural entity intervening in either the laws of nature or selected peoples’ lives
  • That’s it. They are the only two things that I can say I absolutely have in common with any other atheist. In matters of sex, politics, architecture, gaming, interior design, pets, music, clothing, hobbies, language, philosophy, education, sports, typing speed, preferred drugs, affinity with beagles & frogs and any number of other categories I may be diametrically opposite to any other atheist in the world. To label one atheist with the same attributes you label another atheist is ignorant at best, flat-out dishonest at worst. But all of us, if “atheist” is to mean anything at all, do not accept theistic claims.

But what could steer me in the opposite direction? Probably the same things that could steer any atheist…

I could be converted to theism if:

  • God, or a god, showed himself or performed an act that unambiguously proved both his existence and his attributes as an immortal, omnipotent being. As to what that proof would constitute: that god himself, if omnipotent, would be the perfect arbiter of what would conclusively prove to six billion people that he existed.

Such things as tortillas depicting blurred silhouettes of Mary (or any other second-tier deity) do not count. If you’re there, God, you’re on notice! Any time is fine. No tricks – and come alone (if indeed there’s only one of you, otherwise, bring the whole parthenon).

mandrellian
Australia

Why I am an atheist – mjr

I’m an atheist because I grew up in an environment free of the notion that religious teachings were true, in any sense. Whenever atheists who’ve recovered from religion talk about it, they seem to have had to sometimes struggle to reject the claims of faith – imagine how easy it was, for me, growing up with the opposite assumption: that it was a historical artifact and belonged with times gone by. When I was a kid I learned about the ancient Greeks and Zeus and Olympus, the Romans and Poseidon, the Vikings and Odin, the Jews and Yahweh, and the Egyptians and Bast – and it’s blindingly obvious that these myths are just stories to tell around the fire. For most of my life I largely ignored religion, until I started to study political philosophy and became uncomfortably aware of religion’s long role as a technique for political control. It was Seneca’s quip: “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful” that made me realize that if you’re going to engage in a political dialogue with another person, you will often need to address religious indoctrination just as you sometimes need to overcome national or tribal indoctrination. Since I realized that, I now am willing to engage in frank dialogue with another person regarding their religious beliefs in much the same way as I would with a person I encountered who held repugnant racist ideologies, xenophobic politics, or a counterproductive political philosophy. So, I’ve always been an atheist but now I am “strident” about it because I’ve realized that religion is one of the things that exacerbates ‘normal’ conflict and therefore needs to be argued against.

mjr
United States

Islamic science has come to this pitiful end

The words of the Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu ‘aleihi was-sallam) have been tested scientifically, and found hilarious. In work carried out under the direction of Dr. Jamaal Haamid, students at Qassim University examined a saying by the prophet, and have published it in a freely available pdf, The Hadeeth on the Fly, which you can download if you desire. Or you could just read this post, which summarizes entirely the complete content of the short paper, which is pretty much unpublishable and unbelievable anyway.

Here are the holy words.


(Notice that I include the original Arabic so there can be no confusion!)

If a housefly falls in the drink of anyone of you, he should dip it (in the drink), for the one of its wings has a disease and the other has the cure of the disease.

I do find that rather disturbing: so in Arabia, if a fly touches your water, you’re supposed to catch it, dunk it in deeper and slosh it around, to prevent disease? Arabian flies buzz around with pathogens segregated to just one wing, while the other one is healthy? How do they do that?

OK, setting aside the sanitary habits of Arabians and the mechanism by which this holy aphorism could be true, our intrepid students do carry out the obvious experiment: they drop a fly in a flask of sterile water, and then they pluck out the fly and immerse it completely in a second flask of sterile water. But then it all goes horribly wrong.

Here is the result of experiment #1.


Plate 2- Cultured water sample taken from a flask containing sterilized water and where a fly fell (without submersion). Growth of pathogenic (disease causing) bacterial colonies of the E. coli type were identified after taking samples from the water in the flask for culture.
Plate 1- Cultured water sample from the same flask following the complete dipping of the fly. An entire disappearance of the bacterial growth seen in Petri-dish 2 is clear. The new bacteria growing in plate 1 was identified as Actinomyces, the one from which useful antibiotics can be extracted. This explains the complete inhibition of growth in plate 2

Plate 2 on the right is the one from water merely touched by a fly. There is no explanation for how the plate was produced, or how the bacteria were identified; the strange brown sludge suggests poor technique, though, and I’ve cultured E. coli myself — and that hideous thick fecal-colored glop looks nothing like E. coli.

Plate 1 on the left, made from water in which the fly was fully immersed, looks nasty too. It’s a poor photograph, but that looks like a thick lawn of colonies everywhere. How do they know it’s Actinomyces? I have no idea, they don’t say. It’s also a mistake to simply declare it beneficial — Actinomyces are opportunistic pathogens.

Experiment #2 was a different fly, two flasks of water, same result.

Experiment #3 was a third fly, two flasks of water, same result.

Having done the experiment to death, our brave students retired at the third repetition, wrote it up with no methods, no discussion, no literature cited (except for their holy book, of course), and no reliable, believable data. They also didn’t do the other obvious experiment, of snipping off the wings and examining the bacterial flora living on the left vs. right, but then, maybe they’re leaving that for the advanced students.

Any 10 year olds looking for a quick and easy science fair project, there it is. I’m sure you can replicate this experiment trivially — but please, talk to a real microbiologist first and learn how to streak a plate. You might also learn something about a control plate, which our U of Qassim students didn’t bother to do.

Of course, this work wasn’t carried out by 10 year olds. It was done by university students in a “Med 497” (a medical course?) in a department of medical microbiology. I strongly urge anyone visiting Saudi Arabia to avoid getting sick. They might try to treat you by swishing a fly around in your coffee.

(Also on Sb)