Creation

I saw Creation last night, and really loved it. There is love and madness and science and phosphorescent sea life and an orangutan. Also, Paul Bettany. It's no action thriller, but it is very thoughtful, beautifully shot, and almost satisfying. Almost, because some moments of it makes me despair of humanity: Hooker, Darwin's close friend, pleads with him to write the Origin. It's a battle, he says, in a war we can win within our lifetimes.

Ouch. One hundred and fifty one years later, and where are we?

• We've got a burgeoning Young Earth Creationist movement on our hands. 
• The last post has details, but the numbers on scientific literacy in the United States (specifically with regard to evolution) are pretty ugly.
• The Creation Museum offers your impressionable children a chance to ride a dinosaur, just like Adam and Eve did a few thousand years ago. You can also explore a beautiful model of Noah's Ark! 
• According to Wiki, the otherwise respectable (I think?) Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave $1 million in 2000 and pledged $9.35 million over 10 years in 2003 to the goons at the Discovery Institute.  
• School boards all over the country are caving to the creationist wedge strategy: first introduce intelligent design into the curriculum, then worm in a little more, then a little more, then a little more, until students who report that the Earth was created in six days six thousand years ago are allowed to graduate. 

But there are those who are fighting back. Hope and vindication after the jump.

In a modern-day Monkey Trial (Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District in 2005) a federal court ruled that the policy of the school board of Dover, Pennsylvania, in requiring schools to "teach the controversy", violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. An excerpt from judge John E. Jones III's  decision:

• For the reasons that follow, we conclude that the religious nature of ID [intelligent design] would be readily apparent to an objective observer, adult or child. (page 24)

• A significant aspect of the IDM [intelligent design movement] is that despite Defendants' protestations to the contrary, it describes ID as a religious argument. In that vein, the writings of leading ID proponents reveal that the designer postulated by their argument is the God of Christianity. (page 26)

• The evidence at trial demonstrates that ID is nothing less than the progeny of creationism. (page 31)

• The overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory. (page 43)

• Throughout the trial and in various submissions to the Court, Defendants vigorously argue that the reading of the statement is not ‘teaching’ ID but instead is merely ‘making students aware of it.’ In fact, one consistency among the Dover School Board members' testimony, which was marked by selective memories and outright lies under oath, as will be discussed in more detail below, is that they did not think they needed to be knowledgeable about ID because it was not being taught to the students. We disagree. (footnote 7 on page 46)

• After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. (page 64)

• [T]he one textbook [Pandas] to which the Dover ID Policy directs students contains outdated concepts and flawed science, as recognized by even the defense experts in this case. (pages 86–87)

• ID's backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the IDM is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID. (page 89)

• Accordingly, we find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom, in violation of the Establishment Clause. (page 132)

And from his conclusion:

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy. With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.

Score one for the good guys!