The news today is full of reports that George W. Bush is quietly suggesting that our public schools teach some sort of creationism alongside evolution. Journalists from big cities love writing about creationism and the hayseeds who believe in it because it reinforces their sense of superiority for having chosen to live in a $1 million two-bedroom apartment choked by smog and surrounded by gridlock. One problem with these reports is that if one actually travels to small towns and rural areas across North America it is almost impossible to find people who espouse creationism. On the contrary these areas are in my experience much more likely than cities to contain people who want to bend your ear about local geology, fossils, etc. If you survey people coming out of a church and ask them “did God create the Earth” they might indeed say “yes” but then if you ask them how old those mountains in the distance are very few indeed would say “5000 years”.
It is unclear why the President of the U.S. saying something about education is news. Public schools are run at the state or local level, though with an increasing level of federal interference. And in any case the students don’t seem to believe or remember much of what the teachers say. A kid who is unfortunate enough to be stuck in public school for 12+ years has more serious problems than a teacher blathering on about “intelligent design” for a few hours out of those 12+ years.
[Darwin was actually grossly wrong about the speed at which evolution occurs. The Beak of the Finch is an excellent book about year-to-year natural selection and evolution among finches in the Galapagos. The book also covers more rapid evolution in populations of guppies in aquariums with varying quantities of predators (guppies in a more dangerous environment evolve to be plainer in coloration; guppies in a safe environment evolve to be more attractive to the opposite sex) and, most terrifying, yet more rapid evolution of drug resistance in viruses.]
Well praise the almighty Spaghetti monster.
He will finally get the attention he deserves!
http://www.venganza.org/
Question: if the true creationist believers are as few as you say, then why is Bush saying this at all? Usually, when republicans speak up on these kind of social issues (abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage) is because they are “wedge issues” that can divide the electorate, but if the only creationists are 4 or 5 loons, as you claim, it makes no sense. So why did he say this?
Hey Everyone, let’s play find Phil G.’s gross generalizations passing as insight and/or analysis. Here are my three entries from this posting:
Journalists from big cities love writing about creationism and the hayseeds who believe in it because it reinforces their sense of superiority for having chosen to live in a $1 million two-bedroom apartment choked by smog and surrounded by gridlock.
And in any case the students don’t seem to believe or remember much of what the teachers say.
One problem with these reports is that if one actually travels to small towns and rural areas across North America it is almost impossible to find people who espouse creationism.
With respect to the last one, CBS news in a poll in November of 2004, and they didn’t seem to find it difficult to find people who believed in creationism. In fact they found that 55% of Americans believed in creationism rejecting evolution entirely. Now perhaps Phil is trying to be slick, referring primarily to Bush and American schools but then transitioning to North America in the above quote. But do you really think including all the evolution-believing Canadians and Mexicans would make it almost impossible to find people who espouse creationism?
I think Bush has the right opinion for the wrong reason. To me, evolution and ID are not opposing theories. Science tells us *how* (what we can see and touch and deduce). Faith tells us *why* (what we can’t see, what we hope for [Hebrews 11]). As a Christian, I have absolutely no problem with modern science. It is asymptotic–I don’t think we have everything 100% correct–but I don’t find that it conflicts with my faith or my understanding of the Bible. I think Bush has the right opinion for the wrong reason. I disagree with teaching “short-day” creationism as a “competing theory”–it’s junk science based solely on religious belief. However, I would like to see schools teach children how various religious belief systems sometimes differ with science’s viewpoint, and other times are reconciled with it (e.g., Catholicism and Helioentric Theory), and that they should not throw out either their personal faith *or* what they learn of science just because one appears on the surface to disagree with the other.
The President says stuff like this because he’s a troll. Seriously. He desperately needs to avoid talking about anything important, so he throws out some approving statements about “creation science”, knowing that a certain subset of his enemies will respond by foaming at the mouth, flailing around in a berzerk rage, and casually insulting the Americans who believe in some form of divine creation… who are, incidentally, the ones who are most likely to have voted for George W. Bush.
Judging from the comments here it looks like Bush’s plan is working. Get a grip, people! Don’t feed the Troll in Chief!
As for how Philip and the polls can both be right… take it from a veteran Catholic: there’s a big disconnect between (a) what people profess to believe, (b) what they actually believe, (c) what they say they do, and (d) what they actually do. In fact, people can quite effortlessly believe different things in church than they do at work on in school!
Eric – I really doubt 55% of Americans believe in creationism over Darwin. No way, maybe 5.5%. I think Bush panders to these groups to get them to continue to cast votes for the Repub party. The more liberal in that party must get annoyed by all of this. I think what Phil should be writing about is why the NRA is one of the few groups that actually stands up for their constitutional rights. I’m not a gun owner nor a member of the NRA, but I admire their fight to keep the consitution unchanged. Most other freedoms granted in the constitution have been destroyed by 911, the Patriot act (what a great name for a bill that eliminates peoples rights), “war” on drugs, etc.
I actually think you’re being a little unfair to the journalists from the big cities. It could well be so that writing about creationism reinforces their sense of superiority, but it probably has nothing to do with city vs. rual. I bet it’s the contrast between valuing education and the discovery of truths on the one hand and valuing willful ignorance and faith in spite of contrary evidence on the other hand that matters.
It’s kind of odd that you should attack that side of that particular divide, given your posts about the negative potrayals of engineers, mathematicians, etc, which I wholeheartedly agree with.
Eric: Where are these 55% hiding? I’ve been to all 50 states in the U.S. and talked to people from all walks of life and I can’t find them. Even if we posit that it is the folks with lower IQs who believe in creationism it doesn’t ring true. Rank the people you know by intelligence. Consider only the bottom 1/3rd. Do 55% of them believe in creationism?
I go on tours of caves and canyons and other natural features with dozens of middle class folks from all over North America who pile out of their pickup trucks, SUVs, and motorhomes, often wearing clothing or jewelry indicating a Christian affiliation of some sort. In every case the tour guide refers to the ancient age of the features we’re seeing. Not once has a tour guide noted “oh and by the way some folks thing God created this all just to look like it was really old.” Not once have I heard a listener on the tour say to their children (and there are always children) “Remember that this is only a theory.”
Polls are kind of tricky. If you ask folks whether the government should train teenagers to use guns to kill people I’m sure that more than 55% would say “no”. If you ask whether we need a military draft to improve national security and prevent another 9/11 the numbers approving would be very different.
PurpleStater, you are really stretching if you think you can reconcile the data with Phil’s statement that it is almost impossible to find people who espouse creationism. Talk about faith!
Johnny, poll after poll shows that a significant number, if not a majority, of Americans believe in creationism and reject evolution entirely. This data is relatively stable across polls and over time. And let me note that this is a different group than those who believe that human evolution evolution took place but was somehow guided by a supreme being.
2005 A Harris Poll finds that 54 percent of [Americans] do not think that humans developed from an earlier species, a figure which stood at 46 percent in 1994, according to Harris.
November 2004 Gallup poll finds that forty-five percent of Americans agree that God created man in his present form about 10,000 years ago.
Johnny, PurpleStater, and Phil can use their personal experience (which I suspect doesn’t involve an inherent effort to address sampling issues as a reputable poll would) or their intuition all they want. But I’ll go with scientific methods.
Somehow I messed up the link for the Gallup poll on my latest post. Here it is:
November 2004 Gallup poll finds that forty-five percent of Americans agree that God created man in his present form about 10,000 years ago.
Sorry!
Philip needs to start hanging out with some evangelical Christians. They are one of the fastest growing religious groups in the US and are growing in (political and economic) influence as well.
I also wanted to point out that many people simple choose not to discuss their beliefs in public because they don’t want to get harassed by people that know the difference between science and fiction. I have a friend who is an Orthodox Jew and he won’t even talk about who he voted for apparently because we have much different opinions on politics. He also believes that evolution is “just a theory,” something that bothers me to no end.
Do you know any Orthodox Jews, Philip? Ask them what they think.
I will bait the bear, Grant, and point out that yes, evolution is, gasp, a theory.
Tell me, which version of evolutionary theory do you subscribe to – the Stephen Jay Gould branch of rapid change followed by long periods of equilibrium (punctuated equilibrium); or the notion advanced by Dawkins et al known as phyletic gradualism ?
You cannot choose both – so which is it? And if you view your choice as correct, how is it that you cannot brand the others as believers in something incorrect? After all … you don’t want to get harassed by those fools that don’t know the difference between science and fiction.
Intelligent Design is considered by many to be the controlling force behind the Universe. Not many people believe that a God has set out to fool scientists about the history of Earth (these people are more aptly named “Biblical Literalists” or something). But many people do believe that all the things we observe are just part of a grand plan, including evolution. They believe that life evolves, but it is guided. They seize upon complex things like eyeballs and other apparent “evolutionary leaps” to prove their case. But they don’t disbelieve scientific observations.
I grew up in one of these small towns in the Deep South where church (Baptist, of course) and football (high school, of course) were the only social outlets of note.
What these polls by big-city folks fail to take into account is that going to church is an inherently social activity for most people. Praising the Lord is a means to an end, namely, being sociable.
I’m surprised that the pollsters only got a 55% evangelical rating provided they asked their questions in public. In private that rate would have plummeted to under 10%.
No religion in history has ever had a mass following, but fear of what the neighbors think truly works miracles.
Grant: I do have friends who are Orthodox Jews. One of them is an atheist and thinks that the idea of God as conceived by humans is ridiculous. He doesn’t want to upset his family, however, and let them think that he gave up his belief in God in order to evade the complex rules. So he follows all the rules of the community, notably concerning Kosher food and the Sabbath. And he is therefore accepted by the community. Leviticus doesn’t say that you have to take Genesis literally. It says that you can’t do certainly things from Friday night to Saturday late afternoon. It says that you can’t eat certain foods. So there is nothing inconsistent about an Orthodox Jew working in evolutionary biology or believing that the Earth is billions of years old.
Let me comment on another statement – “It is unclear why the President of the U.S. saying something about education is news. Public schools are run at the state or local level, though with an increasing level of federal interference.”
The federal government has been doing more than influencing K-12 education for a long time. “New math” was a military/intelligence initiative, starting with something called the “Southern Maryland Mathematics Study Group”, SMMSG. I used to get the memimographed material from them in my high school math class. They though computer use would be pervasive in the near future, wanted to prepare for this new age. So half the kids in the US are learing octal and base 2, along with set theory and Venn diagrams…and maybe missing trigonometry. This managed to make learning difficult and disconnected from real life for a large fraction of of high schoolers.
Later efforts turned out better, such as the BSSC biology courses and PSSC Physics, but I think these were dumbed down by many schools districts a few years later…
Then later there was “New New Math” which tended to really dumb the curiculum down.
By the way, the UK is using some new approaches to teaching math that result in girls having math knowledge equal to boys.
>GWB as Trolling for controversy – that’s a useful prespective. A similar move was Congress “investigating” steriods in major sports so they did not have to vote on Social Security.
“A kid who is unfortunate enough to be stuck in public school for 12+ years has more serious problems than a teacher blathering on about “intelligent design” for a few hours out of those 12+ years.
A BIIG AY-MEN!”
Sounds like someone’s starting to copy the complete fiasco that has turned the British state school education into something worse than a bad joke. Not content with changing the national curriculum so many times as to make teachers unable to do their job properly, the British government is now admitting that its A-Level system pass grade (pretty much an equivalent of the SAT standard, in terms of university assessment) is being realigned each year in order to make more students pass their exams. Already we are seeing the product of such enterprise in 18 year olds who are arriving at universities here with basic mathematics problems and problems with their own language.
As for GW suggesting creationism, we have a system here where private individuals get to invest small sums (
PatrickG: The point of repeating the phrase “just a theory” was to highlight one of the simple responses that people use when the topic of evolution is brought up. Evolution is a scientific theory that is backed by significant empirical evidence. It is not some random idea that somebody pulled out of thin air (that would be better described as a hypothesis). The average person does not understand this distinction, which is why so many people are confused about the status of evolution in the scientific community (only 35% of people surveyed by Gallup answered in the affirmative when asked “do you think that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is a scientific theory that has been well-supported by evidence”).
With respect Phil, the idea that your friend is both an Orthodox Jew and an atheist is a bit of an oxymoron. God’s law as laid out in the Torah as well as His promises to the Jews are foundational to Judaism. You can’t have one without the other. In the same way, I could not call myself a Christian just because I go to church and follow the Bible to the letter. If I don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, I’m not a Christian – plain and simple. But that’s neither here nor there.
I will agree that there’s nothing inconsistent about an Orthodox Jew or a devout Christian believing that the earth is billions of years old. I have many Christian friends who believe (in part) in evolution, but they still believe in Intelligent Design behind it all. For me, how it all happened is very much of a side issue. When I am judged by God one day, I don’t think he’ll be concerned about my thoughts on creationism vs. evolution, but rather whether I believed in faith that His son Jesus came and died for me.
I’m an Orthodox Jew. And, no, I don’t believe the world is an . I was planned. It had to be.
Just because science tells me that the world evolved, I don’t have to trust it. German science said that Jews were a lower people – Can a use that excuse?
We have to realize that scientists have an agenda. They, understandably, want to break the moral chains that a God implies. They would rather not believe in God – even if they have to use contorted theories. As proof, many of the greatest pre-Darwin scientists did not believe in God. What was their excuse? How could they explain human uality, for example, without resorting to God? The steps neccesary to produce offspring are numerous. The male is attracted to the female and vice versa. The man produces sperm, the woman eggs. ETC. ETC. ETC. Yet pre-Darwin scientists listened to their s rather than to their minds. No matter how irational, they didn’t believe that some God was directing the attraction between the male and female. It was all an .
Now scientists have an “excuse.” Survivial of the fittest. But even this is childish. The universe is not old enough for all these phenomina to evolve. Proffeser Flew, who used to be a prominent Atheist, has now, due to a book by an Orthodox Jew, realized that God is real. That Jew’s thesis was this: The chance of all these phenomina evolving is less than the number one divided by the number of seconds that have elapsed since the Big-Bang. Flew is not an idiot. He was the poster-boy for atheists; now he believes in God.
This should get you scared. Because if there is a one percent chance that God is alive, then, basically, you are doomed. Alan Dershawitz said that, based on a cost-benefit analysis, one should serve God: The most you’ll be giving up is this lame world; while attaining even a small chance for everlasting pleasure.
If you have ever bought a lottery ticket, you understand this equation. Give up a dollar now, for a chance to have a million dollars. Give up today’s meaningless pleasure for even a small chance there is a next world.
Islam teaches that in the next world believers will have virgins (or raisins). To be honest, I”d rather have a wife today and I’ll give up those virgins. But Judaism teaches of a much greater reward. All the pleasures of this world – from the day Adam was born until the day Messia comes – that includes all the wonderful meals eaten, the 16 hours of ic pleasure the average life provides, the wonderful vacations you”ve had – all wraped into one second. One second of the eternal will be greater than that. A cost – benefit analysis.
You don’t have to believe 100% that God is alive for you to prepare for the next world. Just as you don’t have to believe 100% that your lottery ticket is going to win in order for you to buy a ticket. Only a miniscule chance is enough for you to buy.
Don’t you think the chance that God – and therefore an afterlife – has a better chance of being true than the chances of you winning the lottery? So who is irational the one who believes in God or the Harvard geniouses who mock the religious?
Some words were cut out, at least on my screen: I don’t believe the world is an .
The following words are deleted form my text, maybe you can read them, but I have a Cyber control so I can’t read them the following words, typer backwords: tnedicca, stsul, cimsagro, ytilauxes