LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This article from Intervention Magazine talks about how the creationists are making life hell for teachers and school boards alike, and compares their ideology to that of the old Soviets.

Now that Creationists are in the White House, many public school teachers are afraid to discuss the science of evolution in their classrooms.

By Frederick Sweet

During his 2000 presidential election campaign, George W. Bush spoke about the Kansas Board of Education’s decree requiring each public school district in the state to teach Creationism alongside evolution. He told the Associated Press, “I’d make it a goal to make sure that local folks got to make the decision as to whether or not they said Creationism has been a part of our history; and whether or not people ought to be exposed to different theories as to how the world was formed.”

Bush took this position in spite of the fact that three years earlier the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Edwards v. Aguillard prohibited teaching Creationism in public school classrooms. The Court ruled that it constitutes religious belief. This decision was not arrived at casually. Seventy-two Nobel Prize winners testified as friends of the court that Creationism isn’t science. It’s basically religion.

Bush persisted by asserting his own preference: “Children ought to be exposed to different theories about how the world started.” Then just before he occupied the White House, Bush elaborated, “On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth [emphasis added].”

Secular listeners knowing the Court’s position probably misinterpreted Bush’s remark to be a gaffe on the campaign trail. But it wasn’t. Rather, it reflected a deeply held, paranoid belief among many American fundamentalist Christians that the theory of biological evolution could be used as an argument against the existence of God. Yet this has never been done by competent biologists. Religion is about God, and evolution is about science.

It’s only been one month into Bush’s second presidential term, and already reports are coming in about public school teachers saying they’re too afraid to teach evolution in their science classrooms. In a recent (1/30/2005) front page New York Times report, “Evolution Takes a Back Seat in U.S. Classes,” Cornelia Dean describes the growing fear among science teachers in America’s classrooms.

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There is no credible scientific challenge to the idea that all living things evolved from common ancestors, that evolution on earth has been going on for billions of years, and that evolution can be and has been tested and confirmed by the methods of science. But in a 2001 survey, the National Science Foundation found that only 53 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.”

Today, the United States stands apart from all other industrialized nations, said Dr. Jon Miller, director of the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University who has studied public attitudes toward science. Americans, he said, have been evenly divided for years on the question of evolution, with about 45 percent accepting it, 45 percent rejecting it and the rest undecided.

In other industrialized countries, Dr. Miller said, 80 percent or more typically accept evolution, most of the others say they are not sure, and very few people reject the idea outright.

“In Japan, something like 96 percent accept evolution,” he said. Even in socially conservative, predominantly Catholic countries like Poland, perhaps 75 percent of people surveyed accept evolution, he said. “It has not been a Catholic issue or an Asian issue,” he said.

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In 1965, at the height of the Cold War, as a chemistry graduate student I was shocked to learn that in the USSR the teaching of the well-established molecular-electronic theory of resonance was forbidden in Soviet classrooms. How could that have been?

For openers, it was an American chemist, Linus Pauling, who had experimentally confirmed resonance theory in his studies on the nature of the chemical bond. Indeed, he had received a Nobel Prize for this. But a group of Communist Party zealots pinned resonance theory on the enemies of dialectical materialism. The nature of the chemical bond was linked to bourgeois anti-Soviet revisionism, and resonance theory was out.

Their American Creationist counterparts have twisted biblical doctrine into pseudoscience and replaced testable, biological evolutionary theory with mumbo jumbo, which cannot be experimentally tested. But, of course, it’s not biological truth they’re after. What they really want is power.

Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, recently said he thought that the great variety of religious groups in the United States leads to competition for congregants. This marketplace environment, he said, contributes to the politicization of issues like evolution among religious groups.

He said the teaching of evolution was portrayed not as scientific instruction but as “an assault of the secular elite on the values of God-fearing people.” As a result, he said, politicians don’t want to touch it. “Everybody discovers the wisdom of federalism here very quickly,” he said. “Leave it at the state or the local level.”

But let’s hear from the Creationist ideologues themselves. In its newsletter, the Creation Social Science and Humanities Society states, “We will endeavor to show that the only true and sure foundation of man’s knowledge of himself [psychology] -- of his relationship with other men [sociology] -- of his communications and creativity [literature and fine arts] -- of his institutions of social order [administration of justice, economics, political science] -- of his activities and their descriptions [history] -- is the creation of man in God’s image as infallibly revealed in the Bible. All other attempts to account for man are in vain and doomed to failure.”

Today’s Creationist ideologues feed on America’s body politic. Public school classrooms are their launching pads for seizing power. Progress in Soviet science was hampered for decades by zealous Communist ideologues gaining influence and power in the areas of science and technology, and eventually the USSR couldn’t compete with American know-how. Now, the Soviet Union is gone.

Avoiding a similar fate in America will require widespread recognition that the non-scientific, indeed anti-scientific, Creationist ideology is equally dangerous to America’s scientific and technological health. It is self-evident that whatever threatens America’s science and technology also menaces our nation’s economic well being and, by extension, our national security.

That last sentence is particularly interesting. If we are falling behind on scientific education because of the infiltration of religious ideology into our classrooms, our fate will be the same as that of the Soviets. But these people believe that they have a 'mandate', and are siezing power left and right, and school board by school board, they are destroying our future.

Sunfell