Louisiana's Trojan Horse: Part One

Last night I gave my talk "Thou Shall Not Inhibit Academic Freedom: The Evolution of Anti-Evolutionism." About 80-100 people attended, there were 25-minutes of questions afterward, and six people asked for copies of my slides (if you'd like them, I can send them to you too). All in all, I'd say it was successful. I'll give a summary of the talk in two parts with some reflections at the end of the second post.

I began by explaining who I am and why I have come to this issue. When I was a little kid, I, like most little American boys, loved dinosaurs. "Ornitholestes! Triceratops!" My parents got me a really great book about dinosaurs when I was a kid that had a time line that showed how life evolved on Earth. Pictures of trilobites in shallow seas. The emergence of bony fish. Dinosaurs. Mammals. I grew up in a house with evolution, won biology student of the year in 10th grade, and later took some courses on evolution and ecology in college. That's where I discovered the raging controversy of the teaching of evolution in the United States. "Evolution is cool. But this was even cooler." That was about 10 or 12 years ago and I've followed the evolution wars ever since, such that in 2004-2005 I watched the situtation in Dover quite closely, eventually going to the trial's last day. Since then, I have read and/or written about it most days (as you well know).

But I am not a scientist. I am a teacher and graduate student who loves science and wants to make sure that reality matters in education. Everything that followed showed how Louisisana's SB 733 "LA Science Education Act" is a Trojan Horse to get religion in through the back door. The bill tries to wipe God and the Bible off of its face but its sponsors and promoters - Ben Nevers,. the Louisiana Family Forum, and the Discovery Institute - are pretending that this is all about teaching a "scientitic controversy" when there isn't one. The bill says that it seeks to promote "critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning." This tactic is an insincere sneak attack, what Justice Brennan alluded to as "a sham" in the Edwards v. Aguillard Before I dove into the bill, I defined terms. I used two definitions of evolution, the first from Douglas Futuyma and the second from Francisco Ayala Supreme Court ruling.

“The changes in populations that are considered evolutionary are those that are inheritable via the genetic material from one generation to the next. Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportion of different alleles within a population (such as those determining blood types) to the successive alterations that led from the earliest protoorganism to snails, bees, giraffes, and dandelions. (Douglas J. Futuyma in Evolutionary Biology, Sinauer Associates 1986)

“Common descent with diversification.” (Franciso J. Ayala, Darwin and Intelligent Design 2006)

I noted that the most commonly recognized mechanisms in the evolutionary process are mutation and natural selection though there are others - genetic drift for example - but that we needn't get technical. But definitions are important. What we need to understand is that the facts of nature have led us to conclude common descent with diversification - the tree of life - over a process that has take over 3 billion years on Earth. The theory of evolution explains this web of facts.

However, people accept evolution differently in such a way that we can represent it on a belief/acceptance spectrum. The spectrum goes from Young Earth Creationist's (YEC) powerful rejection on the left to assertive acceptance on the right with atheistic evolutionists.

I briefly discussed theistic and atheistic evolutionists whose only substantive difference (and it can lead to serious philosophical disagreement) has to do with whether God had anything to do with common descent with diversification. The atheist says, "No." The theist says something like, "Evolution is the tool God(s) used to get life on Earth. Human beings are specially gifted with souls in God's image." Or something like that. However, for the purposes of my talk neither of these groups pose much of a problem to evolution education in the U.S.

YECs read the Bible literally. They believe in a literal six-day creation of the world about 6,500 - 10,000 years ago by God, with animals all made in the created kinds in the Garden of Eden. Humans were specially created by God. Jesus is the literal son of God. In general, they reject huge swaths of evolution from geology, paleontology, anthropology, biology, genetics, etc. because they threaten Biblical literalism.

Old-Earth Creationists share a slightly diluted version of this view. The primary difference is that they don't care as much about the age of the Earth and universe but the special and unique creation must be true in order to believe that we are to be in communion with God. They might accept particular aspects of so-called "macroevolution" but dispute common descent and so-called "chemical evolution."

Both of these forms of creationism can be housed under Phillip Johnson's "big tent" of Intelligent Design creationism (ID). I characterized ID as follows:

“[I]ntelligent causes are necessary to explain the complex, information-rich structures of biology and that these causes are empirically detectable." (William Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology 1999).

“Theistic realism” or “mere creation” (Phillip Johnson, Reason in the Balance 1995).

ID is “the logos theology of John restated in the idiom of information theory” (William Dembski, Touchstone 1999).

I asked my audience to consider "How can this be a secular empirical theory given that it is so overtly Christian?" He emphasizes the empirical because creationism had to regroup following the Supreme Court's Ewards finding that creationism is religion and therefore a violation of the First Amendment's "establishment clause" and therefore illegal to teach in public school classrooms. The first quotation from Dembski says, essentially, that information-rich structures look designed, so they must have been designed. It's a subjective inference. Additionally, his claim is made in a book that appeals to theology - a decidedly non-scientific endeavor. This theological concept comes from or is related to a philosophical presupposition called "theistic realism": the belief that God is “objectively real as Creator, and that the reality of God is tangibly recorded in evidence accessible to science, particularly in biology." [See here for more.] It follows that this God is Jesus as the Gospel of John attested ("In the beginning was the word...") and William Dembski told the Christian magazine Touchstone. This reads like religion and not much like science. But this is the beginning of the Wedge.

What is the Wedge? It is the Discovery Institute's unified attack on the "cultural legacies of materialism." They hope, that by driving a wedge into evolution - what they perceive to be the weakest point in the tree of materialism - they will be able to open up a broadly theistic understanding of nature." In short, they want to redefine science such that it uses "God did it" as an explanation because they fear that God's place in Western life has dwindled. Thus they have done what they can in school boards, state boards of education, and in legilatures to promote attacks on evolution. At first they promoted ID for public school use. Then, worried about its legal tenability, they adopted a "teach the controversy" approach that could be justified by vague appeals to academic freedom. Enter Louisiana SB 733.

I won't quote SB 733 in total here. What is most important for our purposes here, are the following four excerpts:

“…create and foster an environment…that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.”

“Such assistance shall include support and guidance for teachers regarding effective ways to help students understand, analyze, critique, and objectively review scientific theories being studied…”

“A teacher…may use supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner…”

“This Section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.”

Why these four things - "evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning" - and not four others. The bill says "but not limited to" but it still points at these four. Why?

What supplemental materials are available and what are their contents?

Do the Discovery Institute or the Louisiana Family Forum have supplemental materials available? How do they help "students understand, analyze, critique, and objectively review scientific theories?"

I will answer these questions and more and finish in my next post.