I don’t know if it’s truly conservative to throw federal education dollars to the states without setting any expectations for how the money will be used. But that’s basically what Michele Bachmann is proposing. Of course, she also thinks it would be a swell idea if local education boards included discussion of the Intelligent Design theory in the core curriculum of their students. I find this theory particularly odd. I don’t really understand why the theory of evolution precludes intelligent design. Yes, I get that it contradicts the Book of Genesis explanation for the origin of mankind, but there’s nothing about the theory of evolution, or the laws of nature for that matter, that precludes the idea of a Creator. If we just look at the Big Bang Theory, which is currently in good standing in the scientific community, we can always ask who lit the match. If you don’t insist on having a Sunday School understanding of the Cosmos, it’s really not too hard to reconcile a belief in God with science. But, if you’re still thinking about the world like there is heaven above with a sky-god looking down, you’re not going to do too great of a job teaching kids what we’ve learned about our universe. In any case, you can’t understand biology if you don’t learn the theory of evolution. You won’t be able to become a life scientist or even a decent doctor if you don’t understand how life forms evolve and mutate. Just think about the flu shots that people get each year. Studying Intelligent Design is not helpful and it’s basically just a way to shield kids from the fact that we’ve learned some stuff in the last six or seven hundred years.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I was taught the Biblical Creation story in church and at home when we read the bible. I was taught to think and the big bang and other theories at school and at home. There is a time and a place for both types of education. It is called expanding a child’s mind. What the child believes as an adult is something they come to by all different kinds of input. I am a Presbyterian and Nichiren Buddhist who believes in a a higher power but also understands and believes in evolution.
People like Michelle only want to stifle children and keep them from understanding or succeeding in life unless they are surrounded by unthinking zombies.
But that’s the point: this isn’t about “God”, it’s about the fairy tale monster the Jews made up and the Christians market. There’s no conflict between science and the idea of a creator-thing, if that’s what you need — Hinduism, among others, figured that out ages ago. For the Bachmann/Robertson/Beck crazies, science is no more the enemy than other beliefs are. All that matters is that everybody falls into line behind their made-up monstrosity. If anyone were paying attention, even the Bible itself is their enemy.
Right.
Evolution might not preclude the idea of a Creator, but it does pretty much preclude their idea of a Creator, however vague and irrational that may be.
Science is based on the idea that knowledge moves forward through the falsification of error. Intelligent design is a theory specifically constructed so as to not be falsifiable. Evolution, more properly the origin of species through natural selection, is a posited mechanism that has defied attempts at falsification for 150 years. The null hyptothesis that natural selection doesn’t predict the mutation of bacteria into drug-resistant forms has be proven false again and again. The problem is not that the theory of evolution has holes. The problem is that the theory of intelligent design will not allow for holes.
Teaching science in schools needs to be founded on this notion of skepticism. Those seeking to defend the literal truth of the Bible, whatever the heck that means, cannot allow skepticism as a method in any intellectual endeavor. That is where the battle-line is. Unfortunately, it has caused science curricula to become rote recitations of facts that imply an ultimate and unchanging validity that science does not claim. This unfortunate situation is the result of the philosophical positivism of Herbert Spencer and others who saw science as weakening the authority of a religion they did not like.
On the other hand the “Biblical inerrancy” philosophy is a reaction to scientific liguistic and archeological analysis of the Biblical texts. And the proponents of the “literal truth” of the Bible are making claims that the Bible does not claim for itself nor did church traditions claim before the Enlightenment. And to complicate the situation more, the Enlightenment was a reaction to the sectarian wars and absolute monarchy of 17th century Europe.
Intelligent design is not science because it does not permit falsification of any element of its theory. The theory of natural selection, however, would be abandoned as fast as the steady state theory of the origin of the universe should the data show strong falsifying evidence.
What folks like Bachmann really want is to destroy the American idea of the common school. Their argument is not with Darwin as much as it is with Horace Mann. They want their “science”, their history of the United States, their literature to be the exclusive curriculum for the common public schools. Because they see themselves as being in a war of ideas that they cannot win. And given the nuttiness of some of the ideas, they are right.
The whole thing just strikes me as a remarkably shallow view of what intelligence is.
I mean, watch a nature show about ants and think about how they exhibit intelligence in a collective form.
Watch a garden grow and see plants compete for sunlight and space.
All life forms display some degree of planning. It’s built in to the nature of things.
Consciousness is just the most powerful form of intelligence we know and understand, but a strand of DNA knows what it’s doing in a certain sense.
It just seems to me like the universe is totally suffused with intelligence.
Then you have this theory that says the world must have this other intelligence that created all the intelligence (complexity) that we see.
It’s like they’ve picked up on the miracle way too late in the game.
You can find examples way “below” the level of ants or even plants. Prions are the ones that blow my mind: protein molecules with the power to fold in a nonstandard way and “induce” surrounding proteins to follow suit, ultimately leading to mad cow disease and other neurological disasters. Even protein molecules seem to have a kind of community intelligence and will to power.
That’s the thing, isn’t it: I’d be happy to let schools teach creationism as an alternative to evolution. Let them give it their best shot. But the reality is that that can never happen because rational criticism of Biblical literalism would be attacked as “bigotry” and even “hate speech”. The teacher would be working with a gag in her mouth that only let the “faith” part out.
The fundies know this, of course. Otherwise their worst nightmare would be an objective, fact-based exploration of the philosophy of science as opposed to “faith” in the public schools.
Yep, and to think that it all started with a minor Supreme Court decision about the separation of church and state that took mandatory prayers and devotions out of public schools.
I went to elementary and middle school before this decision and every day we had the Pledge of Allegiance and then a devotion — generally out of publications called Guideposts (Billy Graham) or The Upper Room (Methodist Publishing House, Nashville, TN). As best I can tell the only effect it had on me and my classmates was to signal “this is the start of the day”. In other words, it was insignificant and ineffective at whatever it was supposed to be doing. I know of none of my classmates whose strong memory of school in those days is of that super devotion in Mrs. Williams’s class.
By the time I was in high school, the Impeach Earl Warren signs were up.
They can’t bring it in the front door. So they are trying to bring proselytization (in its most irritating and ineffective form) in through the back door. They are still trying to flip off the ghost of Earl Warren.
Bachmann’s newest line of argument is more sinister. She is arguing that Obama wants Medicare to fail so that he can force elders into Obamacare.
Whoever she has creating her messaging is dangerous.
I think we’ve been deceived by the tactics she used in order to gain the affection of the extreme right and the Tea Party movement and jump ahead of other GOP Congresscritters.
Better watch this. Democrats are already vulnerable for even talking about doing something about Medicare and Social Security. Thanks, Kent.
Really? I know of no scientific argument for a ‘creator’. Dualists punt by saying these are two different ‘realms’ as though logic has no place in that other realm. Perhaps you can enlighten me?
Science can’t test whether there is a Creator, so it does basically nothing to answer the question either way.
Science can tell us some things, like the age of the Earth, or how long ago hominoids appeared on the scene, but it can tell us what came before the Big Bang or how the Big Bang came about.
Science can discover universal laws, but it can’t explain why they exist in the form that they do.
So, really, if you want to believe that some intelligent force created the universe to be this way, science isn’t going to refute you.
OK, let’s see.
But hey, don’t let reason get in the way of your prejudices…
You need to define what you mean by “reconciling”. A person can be religious and believe in science, this is true. There is no problem at all with individual scientists holding all sorts of incorrect beliefs, including about science. After all, we have scientists who don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change.
However, science and religion are NOT compatible. Besides, I like that the religious nutjobs who won’t believe evolution is true because it goes against their religion in a sort of way. If people are convinced that this is the dichotomy, I say let them believe it. We have the evidence that evolution is true, and if they can be led to be convinced of this, then their make-believe sky-person goes away.
Moreover, you could never convince me that God exists. See PZ Myers:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/10/eight_reasons_you_wont_persuad.php
THANK YOU!! Someone finally said it. Evidence based science and faith based religion are, and always will be, at odds. They do not operate under the same criteria. People are still trying to make the Steven Jay Gould argument of non-overlapping magisteria; an argument which has been roundly refuted many, many times.
This cartoon by Sidney Harris has always been a perfect representation to me of this argument that there can be some sort of compatibility between science and religion.
“Compatible” is probably the wrong word. The problem between science and religion arises when they stray off their own turf. Science, by its nature, does not pretend to know everything. Religion, at least Bible-based religion, does pretend to know everything, and that’s the rub.
Wherever there is room for speculation there is room for religious interpretation. Nobody has the faintest idea of what consciousness is, or where it comes from, or what happens to it when the body that it seems to animate dies, or if it even exists. Nobody has a provable answer to what happened before the big bang, if anything. Nobody knows how the spark of life animates matter. If it makes somebody feel better to think the big bang was lit by some being with a humanish face, that’s fine with me. As long as they don’t try to use politics and government to enforce that belief on everyone else.
As I tried to point out above, the conflict is not really about science vs religion, it’s about religion trying to BE science. That’s when the trouble starts. In order to insist that an old mythology is the inerrant history of the universe as set down by a supreme creator, all other belief, including but not limited to science, has to be suppressed. At that point religion becomes, instead of a guide and comfort, ground zero for a special kind of madness.
I think those of us who are not convinced do better to focus on the folly of trying to make a book of myths into a science book than attacking the myths themselves, because when we do we are doing pretty much the same thing the fundies do: insisting on the truth of things for which we have no evidence. Myths do no harm, and even sometimes enrich our lives when they stay where they belong. It is, after all, the fundies who are the most virulent destroyers of their myths by trying to make them something that they cannot ever be and sending them to battles they can never ever win.
Religion, at least Bible-based religion, does pretend to know everything, and that’s the rub … In order to insist that an old mythology is the inerrant history of the universe as set down by a supreme creator, all other belief, including but not limited to science, has to be suppressed.
Isn’t creationism a peculiarly American fetish? I believe Judaism, the source of the Old Testament passages the fundies depend upon, doesn’t find any conflict between the myths and science. Neither does the Catholic Church, for that matter (although, according to many fundies, Catholics aren’t real Christians in the first place).
Yes, creationism is indeed a peculiarly American fetish. And the reason goes back to the personalities in the theology department at Princeton University when The Origin of Species, actually it was The Descent of Man, came out. “Descending from apes” in an American context in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s had a distinct racial reading for Americans that did not occur elsewhere. That is what still drives the argument and explains the geography of the popularity of creationism and “intelligent design”; in looking at this, you have to understand the origins of the migrations that have taken place into areas like Southern California. And the cultural roots of places like southern Ohio, southern Indiana, and southern Illinois.
I’ve always thought that God was a big picture guy and as he swayed in the Heavens and waved his hands to create life, of which he surely should be proud, that the complexities (the details like proteins, DNA and the like) would be his second gift of creation and that would be the ability to adapt to the interactions of life and yes evolve.
What would be the point after all of going to all that work to create if you didn’t hand over the tools to perpetuate?
If you can believe in Creationism, you can believe that God created evidence of Evolution.
Boo, you sound like a Deist, which would put you in good company — some of our founding fathers , including george w. himself, were Deists. Personally, the idea the there was a Creator, even a distant uncaring one, is somewhat too human-centric for my taste. The Universe (or is it a multi-verse?) is a miracle; our existence within it is a miracle. Whatever brought this all about is vastly beyond our puny imaginations. I think the best we can do is continue to grope through the darkness using the tools at hand, and hope for an occasional glimmer.