Ray Comfort has a blog, and one of his entries claims that the Bible is a science text, and that it is better than science. His style of argument is to first list a “fact” from the Bible (usually something that is completely open to interpretation, and he chooses to interpret it as being in conformity with modern science); then he mentions a corresponding fact derived from modern science, that always agrees with the Bible; then he lists something from “science then,” which is dead wrong.

It’s so clueless it hurts to read it.

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Minnesota is going to be revising their science standards this year. Last time we went through this, it was a circus, with our education commissioner (the notorious Cheri Pearson Yecke) trying to pack the review committees with creationists and doing last minute swaps of committee-approved drafts with drafts edited by creationists. We had John Calvert show up at hearings, along with a few other home-grown kooks, including a guy with a replica of a giant leg bone that he claimed proved there were giants in the earth in those days.

This time around, though, we have guidelines that will limit the nonsense, we hope.

In its call for volunteers, the department offered a list of assumptions that will guide the committee. The assumptions deal with topics ranging from increased science rigor to new graduation requirements.

One assumption stands out. Assumption number seven: “Science standards will reflect the scientific facts, laws, and theories of the natural and engineered world and will not include supernatural, occult or religious ideas.”

Of course, I can hear the ID crowd right now: “ID isn’t about the supernatural — teach the alternative theories! Teach the controversy!” In that article, we already have Dave Eaton (another infamous local creationist) saying he he has no problem with the restriction. You know he’s already planning to try and subvert the process.

Greg Laden, that romantic evolutionary gastronome has several good posts on the mess in Florida (and, by the way, here’s a map if you’re having trouble keeping track of all those counties). These are documents produced by the activist creationists down there, and they really reveal how inept and uneducated these wankers are.

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The Center for Inquiry in Austin hosted a meeting that asked the question, Will Texas Support 21st Century Science Education? The good news is that the place was packed, and there are a lot of rational, intelligent people in Texas who are fed up with the lunatics running the show and are motivated to do something about it. That’s kind of the theme here; we’re having a rising grassroots revolution here that’s going to throw these rascals out.

But here’s the bad news: we’ve been slacking off, and the raving fundie nitwits have taken a lot of political power.

Here’s why the situation for science is so dire right now. Science standards are coming up for review later this year, and right now, the State Board of Education is not only run by a YEC, but out of the SBOE’s fifteen members, seven of them are YEC’s.

And it gets worse…there’s a chance that the Texas board will gain a creationist majority, and the Democratic party is absolutely spineless and worthless.

Now this part is important: Right now the fundies are running some fundie wingnut against Patricia Hardy, a non-fundamentalist, non-creationist Republican. If Hardy loses to this person, then the YEC’s will flip to a majority on the SBOE and every schoolchild in Texas will be assured of a 19th century education. In other words, they’ll be fuct, and Texas will become as bad a laughingstock as Kansas was a few years back.

What about the Democrats, you ask? Who are they running? Well, no one. Apparently the Democratic party in Texas doesn’t care about the SBOE, preferring to devote its efforts toward the legislature. So that means there’s no outright progressive, solidly pro-science candidate to vote for. The best we have is a moderate Republican. But that’s better than nothing, I imagine.

Now if you think Texas is bad, take a look at Florida. The school boards there are an amazing collection of the most ignorant and obtuse members of society — in Clay County, the board members went on and on, openly discussing the fact that they didn’t know the meaning of “theory” or “concept”, and then went ahead and voted to reject the theory of evolution. They had an overwhelming majority of the community members in attendance argue against their resolution and favoring teaching evolution (again, demonstrating that community members are not as stupid as their school boards), and the board ignored them to vote for the resolution (demonstrating that they are not representative, as well as ignorant.)

I can imagine how the residents of Texas and Florida feel. They’re trusting that their schools are well run, that smart, educated people are in charge of making curriculum decisions, and then one day they wake up and notice that a gang of dumb-as-rocks yahoos with a bizarre religious agenda are calling the shots … and just maybe, after Dover, they’re realizing that these gomers are going to cost the school district a million dollars, as well as crippling the science education of a whole cohort of students.

Wake up NOW. Look at your local school board, and realize that those races are important. Run for office yourself. Start a local group to promote better science education, and recruit candidates from your ranks. Get out and vote. Those counties where the fools have taken hold are facing a few years where the curriculum is going to be wrecked for the students — and those are years that are going to be simply lost to those students. Don’t let it happen to your schools.

Those wacky fellas behind the movie Expelled are at it again. First, we have an
interview with Ben Stein. You can tell that the interviewer has drunk deep of the Discovery Institute spring.

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I have mixed feelings about this article in Inside Higher Ed on the issue of approving an ICR degree program in Texas. On the one hand, it’s clear that the Texas bureaucracy is being cautious and thorough and working its way through their official protocols. Raymund Paredes, the commissioner of higher education, has raised concerns about the proposed program—online graduate degrees in he sciences are problematic because they lack the laboratory component; the proposed curriculum is not equivalent to other graduate programs in Texas; they haven’t documented that the ICR is a research institution. He’s said that because the subject is controversial, it’s going to be examined “thoroughly and fairly.”

OK, that’s all good. Let’s all calmly work through the proper channels.

On the other hand, though, it’s freaking insane. The ICR is an organization that demands a loyalty oath for its employees:

The statement of faith for everyone at the institute requires support for both “scientific creationism” and “Biblical creationism.” The former includes the belief that humans were created “in fully human form from the start” and that the universe was created “perfect” by the “creator.” The latter includes the beliefs that the Bible is literally true and “free from error of any sort, scientific and historical as well as moral and theological.” Specifically, the statement requires belief in the literal creation of the earth in six days, that Adam and Eve were the first humans, and in the virgin birth of Jesus.

This is a sectarian theological program, a rinky-tink mob of cultists with no scientific credibility at all, demanding that a state recognize its work as equivalent to, say, that of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Texas Austin. Alarmed? Every Texan ought to be furious at the idea that any yahoo with a Bible and a flaky idée fixe can set themselves up as logistically equivalent to a multi-million dollar research institution.

And these people are proposing to teach the state’s teachers, who will then go on to teach the state’s children.

The whole idea is subversive, lunatic, and destructive to the educational system as a whole, and the commissioner can simultaneously say that it is “controversial” and that he could still authorize the program? Insanity.

Texas is in the spotlight on this issue, but there’s another state that needs to be examined: California. The ICR is moving from California, where they have been handing out degrees in creationist inanity for many years — where has the quality control been, California?

Maybe every state ought to reexamine its approval processes. It’s hard to believe that we’re actually seriously considering whether fundamentalist nonsense and distortions should be regarded as equivalent to modern science, and that these crackpots and their clown college proposal weren’t laughed at and rejected out of hand.

I heard this third hand, so it’s not exactly the most well-founded rumor around, but a contact with inside information in the Southern Baptist Ministries has heard that they want to help out with the koo-koo descent into creationist madness that is Florida. They have asked their Florida churches to send information to businesses and school boards — a fine idea, and perfectly acceptable practice, I would think — but you have to see the “information” to believe it.

The rumor is that they’re going to send a tract called Apes, Lies, and Ms. Henn. That’s right, a Jack Chick tract.

I’m torn. It seems unlikely, but on the other hand, it’s just stupid enough that it could be true. On our side we have the whole of the scientific literature; on theirs, a comic book featuring a little girl saying “We didn’t come from monkeys.” And which one will win is uncertain.

Floridians, keep an eye open and let me know if there is a sudden influx of Chick inanity in your community.

• Remember the creationist trying to raise money by selling off his mastodon skull? Now we know why he is trying to get money fast. He got into a nasty, mud-slinging lawsuit with a fellow Christian creationist over ownership of another fossil. The wonderful news: if he doesn’t get enough cash from the sale of the skull, he may have to close his museum.

• Man, you people sure jumped hard on that poor Canadian who thought the title of Darwin’s book was sufficient to damn it. Now he has replied with another post in which he demonstrates his stupidity. He really should stop. He has put up a long list of “ironic” claims that show he also doesn’t know what irony is — here’s part.

  3)Irony is being accused of not reading the atheist bible (and even being told I have “no excuse”) when I’m actually a couple of days into this.

  4)Even greater irony is that I can probably guess on one hand, probably even less, how many of these accusers have read my Bible — and mine’s been completed for almost 2000 years!

  5)Even greater irony is that I might or might not need my other hand to count how many of the above-mentioned have read their own bible…

  How clueless can you get? There is no atheist bible, and the Origin certainly wouldn’t be it if there were; his bogus criticism was specifically of the title of the book, and reading the NAS booklet on evolution is irrelevant to that point. He’s got a lot to learn, too, if he thinks atheists haven’t read “his” Bible, since many of us came to atheism precisely because we were unimpressed with the content of that book. Somebody else will have to break the sad news to the poor fellow that the Bible wasn’t completed at the time of Jesus, but is a pastiche put together many centuries later…and that there were multiple versions of the Bible before they settled on the particular chapters now in the canonical version.

  I’m sure a fair number of us here have read the Origin, and it is a darned good book, but it is not required reading anymore, and it is greatly out of date.

• Answers in Genesis is starting a fake science journal. Now you can actually read the first issue, which contains a grand total of two articles. One claims that granite can form very, very quickly, therefore the earth could be young (as if that is the only reason we can see that the earth is far older than 6000 years old). The second tries to puzzle out where the bacteria fit into the six-day creation account — it’s quite an exercise in absurdist reasoning, since bacteria weren’t even imagined in biblical times.

  Not recommended, unless you’re a masochist.

Talk about clueless gomers—here’s a Canadian blog praising the Expelled movie, and bringing up a very tired argument against evolution.

For the trolls (and you know who you are!), I simply offer the original title Darwin gave to his book,

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

,and ask you to explain how such a social (and Holocaust-endorsing) statement can be classified as the title of a purely scientific work — until I get a direct answer to that, I will not respond to any of your inquiries as I haven’t seemed to get much of a response on mine and think I’m overdue!

First of all, the logic is deeply flawed: if evolutionary theory did have undesirable social consequences, that wouldn’t be a valid argument against the truth of evolution.

Secondly, and more conclusively, the question reveals quite a bit about the questioner. He hasn’t read the book he’s criticizing, beyond copying down the title! The Origin is using “race” in an antiquated way that refers to what we’d now call varieties — he doesn’t discuss human races at all, but does talk a great deal about domesticated breeds of pigeons and horses and vegetables. It certainly doesn’t endorse any kind of holocaust. Darwin doesn’t advocate any action, but is offering a descriptive explanation for what is.

The Origin is a purely scientific work, rich in detail and experiment and offering a useful framework for subsequent research. A man who can barely read past the title is in no position to make demands for explanations or deplore the unread contents of the book.

(via Canadian Cynic)