All you Brits who pointed and laughed at our village idiot who built a major Creation “Museum” in Kentucky are going to get your comeuppance: Lancashire is about to get a “giant Christian theme park that will champion the book of Genesis and make a multi-media case that God created the world in seven days.”

We’re pointing and laughing ourselves now, but I assure you — we also feel your pain, and there are tears in our eyes.

Many people have been sending me this story about Texas considering accrediting the Institute of Creation Research for training teachers, and I’ve just been reluctant to mention it because poor Texas has been getting walloped over creationism lately, and I was feeling a terrible sympathy for the place. It’s as if the whole state has fallen into a pit of suck.

The ICR wants to offer Masters degrees in science education, of all things; they claim they’d be offering instruction in evolution alongside their science curriculum, but we know that is a lie, since the people at ICR aren’t competent to offer kindergarten level courses in pretty, pretty baby animals, let alone real biology. A state advisory board, in a fit of ignorance and insanity, has approved this plan, but it next has to go before the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board for final approval.

I hope Texas scientists can slap that Board into wakeful reality before that meeting, because if this goes through, the trust I can give Texas-trained teachers is getting flushed right down the sewer. And if Texans can’t fix this, the rest of the country has to step up and deny certification to anyone trained in Texas — their diplomas and degrees will be worth about as much as Monopoly money.

Sorry, Texas. It’s just getting to be a bit much.

There goes Bill Dembski again, revealing both his religious delusions and his ignorance of the state of modern biology in an interview.

4. Does your research conclude that God is the Intelligent Designer?

I believe God created the world for a purpose. The Designer of intelligent design is, ultimately, the Christian God.

The focus of my writings is not to try to understand the Christian doctrine of creation; it’s to try to develop intelligent design as a scientific program.

There’s a big question within the intelligent design community: “How did the design get in there?” We’re very early in this game in terms of understanding the history of how the design got implemented. I think a lot of this is because evolutionary theory has so misled us that we have to rethink things from the ground up. That’s where we are. There are lots and lots of questions that are now open to re-examination in light of this new paradigm.

Keep that quote in mind for the future, next time they try to claim ID isn’t a sectarian religious belief. Also note that the the “design” he is wondering how it “got in there” hasn’t been demonstrated at all.

It isn’t a Dembski interview without an inflated ego on display:

5. How will your research affect the world of science?

It’s going to change the national conversation. I don’t see how you can read this book, if you’ve not been indoctrinated with Darwin’s theory, and go back to the evolutionary fold. The case against this materialistic, undirected evolution is overwhelming. This really goes to the worldview issues that are underlying this whole discussion: Are we the result of a blind, purposeless, material process, and is our intelligence then just this evolutionary byproduct of our need to survive and reproduce? Or are intelligence and purpose fundamental to our existence? Were we planned? Or are we an accidental happening? That’s really what is underlying this whole debate, and what this book, I think, addresses very effectively.

Intelligent design goes a long way in this culture, which is so infused with materialistic and atheistic ideology.

I’ve got the book he’s talking about, and I’m partway through it. It ain’t convincing. It’s the same old bluster that Wells and Dembski have been pounding their fists over for the last decade; there’s absolutely nothing new in it, just more rehashed chest-thumping from failed religious revolutionaries; I predict it will die a rapid death, simply because the IDers haven’t been able to come up with anything we haven’t already heard multiple times, and that has failed every time to convince anyone in the biology community with a scrap of sense.

Take a look at this interview with Lizzette Reynolds, the Bushite behind the resignation of Chris Comer. The unbelievable claims come out in the second question.

Were you surprised she resigned?

Yes, because I had asked her supervisor to look into the e-mail issue. But I wasn’t kept in the loop. I was at a meeting some time later when someone mentioned, “By the way, she (Chris Comer) is resigning today.”

Oh, she was surprised? Lizzette Reynolds is the person who wrote this in response to the email:

This is highly inappropriate. I believe this is an offense that calls for termination or, at the very least, reassignment of responsibilities.

They’re getting burned on this, which is why they’re trying to back away with a pretense of wide-eyed innocence now. Keep the pressure on these dishonest anti-scientific frauds, Texas!

You may recall the event a few weeks ago at the University of Minnesota in which John West of the Discovery Institute attempted to tell us how Darwin was responsible for eugenics. Greg Laden has mentioned that we now have an account from Mark Borrello, who rebutted West in a too-brief ten minutes after the talk; he gets to stretch his legs a little more online and tears West’s premises to shreds. In addition, Jim Curtsinger, who missed the talk but watched it online, gets to tell us something about the practice of teaching science: we Darwinists often talk about eugenics in our classes (I did, just this week), and we tell our students not that the strong must destroy the weak, but that eugenics is unsupported by our modern understanding of evolution.

Keep those two articles in mind next time you hear a creationist spout off about the evils of survival of the fittest, trumpeting their simple-minded misunderstandings of evolution. And you will hear that, many times over.

I’ve already mentioned that the Texas biologists are coming out on the side of science, but there’s also another group gearing up to fight: would you believe that they are oxymoronically (or perhaps, just moronically) called Texans for Better Science? They’re no such thing, of course — they want Intelligent Design creationism taught in the schools.

When will they learn that naming your organization dishonestly merely testifies to the fact that if people learned what you actually want, they’d dislike you, so you need to mask your motives? It seems you only find right wing crazy groups doing this. Other groups don’t. The World Wildlife Fund, for instance, is honestly and upfront admitting that they are raising money to preserve wildlife; you don’t see them misrepresenting themselves with their name to raise cash by misleading people — they aren’t called “Gun Lovers In Favor Of Increasing Game Populations”.

They’re violent, murderous bastards. Rudi Boa, a scientist, got into an argument with Alexander York, an ignorant ass, while on a backpacking trip in Australia. Boa was arguing for evolution, while York was arguing for idiocy. Later, under the influence of alcohol, York attacked, stabbed, and killed Boa.

York was just tried and sentenced to five years in jail, eligible for parole in three. The judge apparently thought York was a man of good character.

As Greg Laden put it, “Stabbing an evolutionist to death, in Australia, is not considered a serious offense if you are a person of good character.”

Hector Avalos sent me his response to the Discovery Institute’s ‘shocking’ revelation that people had been discussing Guillermo Gonzalez’s affiliation with Intelligent Design creationism before they denied him tenure. It’s a classic pointless objection: of course they were, and of course his openly expressed, unscientific beliefs which were stated as a representative of ISU were a serious consideration. It does not speak well of the Discovery Institute that they had to cobble together quote-mines from the email to try and make a non-case for a non-issue.

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