Christine O'Donnell: Trouble For Science Education In Delaware?

New York News and Features has an article on Christine O'Donnell, the woman who surprisingly upset GOP favorite Mike Castle to win the primary in Delaware. In what has become tiringly predictable, the author writes:

In a discussion moderated by anchor Miles O'Brien, O'Donnell squared off against Michael McKinney, a University of Tennessee professor of evolutionary biology. Not only was O'Donnell in favor of teaching creationism alongside evolution, but she wasn't even sure evolution was real. According to a transcript, via Nexis:

CHRISTINE O'DONNELL, Concerned Women for America: Well, as the senator from Tennessee mentioned, evolution is a theory and it's exactly that. There is not enough evidence, consistent evidence to make it as fact, and I say that because for theory to become a fact, it needs to consistently have the same results after it goes through a series of tests. The tests that they put — that they use to support evolution do not have consistent results. Now too many people are blindly accepting evolution as fact. But when you get down to the hard evidence, it's merely a theory. But creation —

Great Googlymoogly! Yet another person in elected office for whom science education has completely failed. Where do people learn this nonsense? O'Donnell, all at once, doesn't seem to know the difference between theory and hypothesis or between conclusion and fact. Theories don't ever become facts in this sense. They become very high probabilities. It isn't a fact that when I drop something it will land on the floor but the probability of it doing so is so great that we consider it a certainty. Where does she get the idea that these "tests" of evolution don't have consistent results? Not from any science textbook, that's for sure. To get an idea of where it does come from, we get to this:

CHRISTINE O'DONNELL: Well, creationism, in essence, is believing that the world began as the Bible in Genesis says, that God created the Earth in six days, six 24-hour periods. And there is just as much, if not more, evidence supporting that.

This is a woman who's only exposure to biological and geological sciences has been the ICR and AIG. No wonder she doesn't know the difference between theory and hypothesis. She also states that scientists use carbon dating to prove something was "millions of years old." Uh, no. They don't. Radiocarbon dating can stretch back 60-70 thousand years at the outside.

This lack of basic knowledge is truly troubling for someone who, as an elected official will have an influence on the education policies for the state of Delaware. Now this interview was conducted in 1996 and it is possible these views have changed since then. I applaud her conservatism as it applies to fiscal responsibility but it is hard to support this kind of ignorant Christian folk science.

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Albert Mohler on the Age of the Earth

A bit back, Albert Mohler posted a talk on the BioLogos site titled Why Does the Universe Look So Old? In it, he writes:

Well, we have limited options. Number one: Maybe the universe looks so old because it is so old. Option number two: Maybe the universe looks very old, but it is not actually so old as it looks. There could be perhaps a third option or any number of derivatives in which you simply say, “We can’t answer the question.” Or there would be some who would say, “The question isn’t important.” Now I’m going to suggest to you this morning that the question is extremely important and that it is one for which we must be ready to give an answer.

I can think of a large number of Christians who would disagree with this answer. There are many "day-agers" out there for which this is not an issue. In fact, this is only is a problem with the modern evangelical movement. He continues:

Coming at the midpoint of the 19^th century, we need to be reminded that Darwin was not the first evolutionist. We need to be reminded that Darwin did not embark upon the Beagle having no preconceptions of what exactly he was looking for or having no theory of how life emerged in all of its diversity, fecundity, and specialization. Darwin left on his expedition to prove the theory of evolution.

Mohler presents no evidence to back this up. In fact, Darwin was aware of the evolutionary suppositions of both John Ray and Jean Baptiste Lamarck but was still committed to fixity of species when he went on board the Beagle. He wasn't committed to anything other than observation of the natural world. Mohler is wrong here. Continuing:

The inference and consensus of the church, through all of these centuries, that the earth and the universe, the cosmos as a whole, is very young, talking about a limitation of only several thousand years by the time you take the book of Genesis and especially its first eleven chapters, and you look at the creation account and you look at the genealogy and you add it all together you’re looking at no more than several thousand years. We’re talking about a disagreement that is not slight. The difference between several thousand years and 13.5 billion years is no small matter and I would argue it comes with huge theological consequences.

Not mentioned here is also that the church had the consensus that the earth was flat, and in the center of the universe, two positions that we now know to be completely false. By removing the age of the earth question from this context, he makes the early church writers out to be more educated than they, in fact, were.Even secular science had little understanding of the physical world until the last three hundred years. That tells us more about the state of science than the state of theology.

The crux of the article is that the current debate in science is being defined by intellectual "elites," both scientific and theological who have lost sight of what is actually in the Bible. He writes:

As we work backwards in terms of evangelical options, the idea that Genesis is merely literary has to be rejected out of hand as in direct contradiction to our understanding of the Bible as the inerrant and infallible word of God. That option, for any credible and faithful evangelical Christian, must be taken off the table.

Here, he is using inerrant sensu stricto, meaning that it must be read word for word to be understood and that if we do not do that, we have ventured into apostasy. This is a very flat, monochromatic view of scripture. It allows for nothing of the beauty and poetry of the language or how it is similar to the narratives around the Near East and how it differed from them. It also, in my mind, critically and fatally fails to account for the considerable differences between the creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2. In the first account, the plants and animals are created before humans. In the second, humans are created first, then plants and animals. How are we to account for these differences, if we read the text literally?

Moher believes that if we accept modern science, when we look at the universe we don't see what is really there. We see what we want to (I am reminded of the dwarves in C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle). It never occurs to Dr. Mohler that he might also be seeing what he wants to see in the scriptures.

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