Douglas Hayworth on Teaching Evolution in Sunday School

Douglas Hayworth has a guest post over at Steve Martin's site, An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution. It is on teaching evolution in Sunday School. He writes:

The creation, garden, and flood narratives are certainly MORE THAN mere stories, but they are NOT less than that. Just as the four gospels cannot be understood properly (or the differences between them reconciled) unless each author's individual theological purpose (i.e., "story-telling purpose") is appreciated as the primary framework, so, too, the creation narratives cannot be understood without keeping in mind the story-telling context.

This is the same point that Conrad Hyers makes in his book The Meaning of Creation.

Reflections on a Bad Science Teacher

There is a postscript in the Columbus Dispatch on the fired science teacher, John Freshwater, who burned the cross into the arm of a student. A few things are seeing the light of day:

Eighth-graders who were taught by John Freshwater frequently had to be re-taught in high school what they were supposed to have learned in Freshwater's class, according to outside investigators hired by the district.

Nothing like being automatically put behind because you don't have the necessary scientific knowledge or skills to compete. There is also this about the cross-branding:

Freshwater told investigators the marks were X's, not crosses. But all of the students interviewed in the investigation reported being branded with crosses. The investigation report includes a photo of one student's arm with a long vertical line and a short horizontal line running through it.

Okay, so that misses the point: why was he burning x's into the arms of students? He doesn't even lie well. He was defended by one of his friends, who said:

"With the exception of the cross-burning episode. … I believe John Freshwater is teaching the values of the parents in the Mount Vernon school district," he said.

That is sort of like saying "well, with the exception of the child molestation charges, he really is a good guy." If I were the parents of some of these students, I would hold the school board and the school complicit in this fiasco. Some of these kids will be in school longer than 12 years and the ones who do graduate won't know anything about evolution. Incredible.

Clashing Cultures on William Dembski's Post

Clashing Cultures has a post on the Dembski diatribe attacking theistic evolutionists that is smack on the money. He writes:

ID raises interesting (if shopworn) questions about design and information, but its raison d’etre is not design. The IDM is a social and political movement against naturalism (HT: Ted Davis of Messiah College). And Bill Dembski, one of the movement’s most prominent spokespersons, makes it clear that the goal is total war — “culture war” to be exact.

He is correct. Dembski's response to Miller's book was not to say "Hey, look. Here's the science," it was to wage culture war. This is once again where the anchor of the Wedge Document drags them down to the bottom.

William Dembski Takes on Theistic Evolution

Much ballyhoo has been raised about William Dembski's post on his blog Uncommon Descent that rails against theistic evolution. It is time I weighed in. He writes:

Theistic evolutionists hold that Darwinian evolution is God’s way of bringing about the diversity of life on earth. They used to be content to criticize ID on scientific grounds. But that’s no longer enough. They are now charging ID with undermining the very fabric of civilization and even the Christian religion itself.

Dembski's gripe, it seems, is with the new book by Kenneth Miller (who can be a tad caustic—see the appearance on the Colbert Report for an example) called Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul. He argues that those that support Miller's supposition that ID is bad science are willing to sidle up to people like Richard Dawkins against the Christians that support ID. Perhaps, in fact, what is going on is that both Dawkins and we see the same problems with ID. There is a serious lack of operational models and hypothesis testing. This is an unavoidable problem. He continues:

You know, I would be happy to sit down with theistic evolutionists and discuss our differences. I think they are wrong to baptize Darwin’s theory as God’s mode of creation. But I don’t think they are immoral or un-Christian for holding their views. But ID proponents, for wanting ID to have a place at the table as a scientific alternative to Darwinism, are, according to Miller, Collins, Alexander, etc., immoral, undermining Western civilization, and destroying America’s soul. Well, you want this fight, you’ve got it.

Time to pick up Miller's new book. Dang, I have to get through Your Inner Fish first! Miller can be arrogant and condescending and needs to be called on the carpet for that. On the other hand, the whole Dover trial reeked of creationism trying to be ID. Dembski is upset about the attacks on ID? As of yet, no one has explained why Of Pandas and People took such a prominent role in the ID movement when it was clearly a creationist textbook. In that case, it really was a Trojan Horse. If Dembski wants ID to be taken seriously, he has to suggest they completely cut ties with creationism. Until this happens, and until ID has some working scientific models, I can't take it seriously either. Game on!!

"What Can Science Learn from Google?"

Now that is a terrifying question. Chris Anderson, The author of a particularly silly story titled "The End of Theory" in Wired wonders if the standard scientific method is outdated. He writes:

The models we were taught in school about "dominant" and "recessive" genes steering a strictly Mendelian process have turned out to be an even greater simplification of reality than Newton's laws. The discovery of gene-protein interactions and other aspects of epigenetics has challenged the view of DNA as destiny and even introduced evidence that environment can influence inheritable traits, something once considered a genetic impossibility.

And

The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.

Okkkkaaaayyyyyy..... First, I am not sure where he learned his biology. I suspect he has vastly oversimplified what ever notion he was trying to convey in the first quote. Environment always influences heritable traits. That is what natural selection is. You know, the idea Darwin and Wallace came up with 150 years ago. Second, without any coherent models, there is no science. There is only "data deluge." Mr. Anderson's suggestion that we do away with models invokes nothing more than inductive science. That is exactly counter to the example that Neil Shubin gives us about the Tiktaalik discovery: you take the information you have and construct a model that allows for greater discovery. In the 1930s, Louis Leakey went to Africa to find hominid ancestors because that is where the best evidence led him. Guess what he found?

Science Teacher Fired

Before it came to this end, this story made it to Foxnews and CNN, from which this article comes. Here is the salient part:

The Mount Vernon School Board passed a resolution to terminate the employment of John Freshwater, an eighth-grade science teacher for the past 21 years.

Freshwater, according to an independent report, used an electrostatic device to mark a cross on the arm of one of his students, causing pain to the student the night of the incident and leaving a mark that lasted for approximately three weeks.

According to the Ohio Department of Education, the student's family has filed a lawsuit.

Freshwater was also reprimanded several times for refusing to move his Bible from his classroom desk and teaching creationism alongside evolution, according to the 15-page independent report.

Great. Just Great. 1. how this this guy ever get hired to teach biology???? 2. how did this go on for 21 years?? 3. Why was he simply reprimanded and never fired the first time this happened?? This just gives those who argue for more government control of education more ammunition. The thing is, even though he knew what he was supposed to teach, he didn't, and there was no oversight to see that he did.

New Dinosaur Fossil Site

The BLM has found a huge cache of dinosaur bones, trees and fossilized clams has been found. The story notes:

The mix of dinosaurs, trees and other species in the area may help scientists piece together what life was like 145 million years to 150 million years ago, including details about the ancient climate, Foss said.


It is nice to get a large intact collection like this. It fills in more of the puzzle.

Kenneth Miller on the Steven Colbert Report

Kenneth Miller showed up on the Colbert Report on June 16. The episode can be seen here.

Open Letter from the Louisiana Coalition for Science

The Louisiana Coalition for Science has written an open letter to Governor Bobby Jindal about SB 733. They write:

Since you hold a biology degree from Brown University, one of the nation’s most prestigious schools, you certainly appreciate Theodosius Dobzhansky’s famous insight, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” You also surely understand that there is no scientific controversy over the fact of evolution. The current controversy is a political one, manufactured nationally by the Discovery Institute and here in Louisiana by the LA Family Forum, which does not represent the majority of Louisiana’s citizens but would impose its agenda on our entire state, even our children.

This is the crux of the letter. It is the same thing those of us that are familiar with the fossil record have been saying for some time: "Surely you must see that there is nothing to this creation science and ID. Surely, it must be obvious." The problem is that it is not obvious to most people outside the discipline of biology. The additional problem is that this is preyed upon by people who take advantage of this lack of biological knowledge on the part of the general public. Expelled! is a classic example of this.

Scientific American on Expelled!

Scientific American has a web page devoted to the movie Expelled! The site includes a podcast as well as some reviews by different folks, including Michael Shermer and Scientific American Editor in Chief John Rennie.

Amorphia T-Shirts

Now these are funny. Amorphia Apparel has a series of t-shirts devoted to the "Teach the Controversy" line that creationists are using. My favorite is the one of Satan burying the dinosaur and human bones. It reminds me of Henry Morris' idea that the craters on the moon are the result of a war between God's angels and Satan's demons in The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth.

News the Anti-Evolution Crowd Won't Want to Hear

According to a story in New Scientist, research has uncovered a major evolutionary shift in an organism right as it was happening. The research involved 12 populations of E.Coli, a bacterium we have all come to know and love, that have been growing in a lab for 20 years. The story notes:

But sometime around the 31,500th generation, something dramatic happened in just one of the populations – the bacteria suddenly acquired the ability to metabolise citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot use.

Indeed, the inability to use citrate is one of the traits by which bacteriologists distinguish E. coli from other species. The citrate-using mutants increased in population size and diversity.

"It's the most profound change we have seen during the experiment. This was clearly something quite different for them, and it's outside what was normally considered the bounds of E. coli as a species, which makes it especially interesting," says Lenski.

Lenski further determined that the ability to metabolise citrate was the result of one or more earlier mutations that opened up the possibility. The punch line comes in the last paragraph:

Lenski's experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists, notes Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. "The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events," he says. "That's just what creationists say can't happen."

Louisiana "Academic Freedom" Bill Goes to Jindal

The Louisiana SB733 has passed and now goes to Governor Bobby Jindal. According to the story:

Opponents, mostly outside the State Capitol, contend the legislation would inject creationism and other religious themes into public schools.

However, the Senate voted 36-0 without debate to go along with the same version of the proposal that the House passed last week 94-3.

The measure, Senate Bill 733, now goes to Gov. Bobby Jindal, who is expected to sign it.

Part of the problem is that the opposition to this bill comes in the form of the ACLU and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (don't they have an acronym?) both of which are (sometimes rightly) seen as bogymen, opposed to any religious expression. Many people who are tired of activist courts legislating God out of the public sphere will fight this if for no other reason than it represents yet another attempt to remove control over their lives.

Is ID Religion?

Josh Rosenau, over at Thoughts From Kansas, wonders if the Discovery Institute is beginning to consider ID religious. Seems to me that their "cdesign proponentsists" already proves that case.

And If You Thought That Was Bad...

Words cannot describe this cartoon of Jesus riding a dinosaur. It is from the Beginner's Bible Coloring Book, which I have not be able to locate, and am not sure what I would do with if I did. No wonder they think Christians are idiots.

This is Nothing Short of Awful!

A court case is pending in Ohio in which a biology teacher, who refuses to teach evolution in the classroom, branded a cross into the arm of a student. Here is the news item:

COLUMBUS, OHIO (CN) - An eighth-grade science teacher culminated a religious crusade in his classroom by burning a cross into a student's flesh, and the school principal responded to parents' complaints by writing the teacher a letter, but promised not to put it in the teacher's personnel file unless he did it again, the parents claim in Federal Court.

The story also notes:

The John Does claim Freshwater has unconstitutionally taught his religious beliefs in his science classes for more than a decade. They claim that in 2003 Freshwater sought, and was denied permission, to teach "intelligent design," but does it anyway. They claim his classroom is festooned with Biblical posters, that he tells his students that "although he is forced to teach from the textbooks, the teachings are wrong or not proven according to the Bible."


One can only hope there is little to no truth to the story, but I am not betting on it.

New Video Series by Gordon Glover

Gordon Glover over at Beyond the Firmament has come up with a new video series, the first installment, called Seeing Through a Glass Darkly, deals with our limited understanding of both the natural world and God's word. It is excellent.

Doug Hayworth On Science Education in a Home School Environment

Over at An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution, Doug Hayworth has a guest post on teaching children in a homeschool environment. That is what we are doing with our kids now and it will be a challenge in the coming years. He hits the nail on the head here:

In summary, good curricula and resources for teaching middle and high school science at home are scarce to nonexistent. Although there are some good supplementary books and study guides about creation-evolution issues that have been published recently (e.g., Origins by Deb and Loren Haarsma), these are high school level materials and are not integrated topically with an ordinary sequence of science topics. These also do not address some of the other science-theology issues, including those to relating to the practice of medicine. (A good world literature and history-based curriculum that covers the spectrum of Christian responses to medical advances is helpful here. By the way, this is the strength of the Sonlight Curriculum my wife uses for our children.)

That has been my experience as well. Most publishers don't even consider the idea of publishing a curriculum that does not follow the YEC model. Some just do it less blatantly. It is clear that there are quite a few people out there struggling with this question.

Chris Smither on ID

This witty little song, courtesy of Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs site is a cute little summation of the controversy involving ID, creationism and evolution. Give it a listen.

"Hobbits" Descendants of Early Migration?

Well, this would explain a lot. Hindustan Times is reporting of an Australian National University student's work that suggests that the reason the Flores hominids look the way they do is that they are direct descendants of an early migration of late Australopithecus or early Homo habilis out of Africa about 2.5 mya. The story notes:

For her research, Argue compared anatomical structures of the type specimen of H. floresiensis, LB1, with several modern humans, and many ancient hominins such as H. erectus, H. ergaster, H. habilis, and the Dmanisi specimens.

What they found was that H. floresiensis had long arms in proportion to its legs, and is close to the primitive arm-to-leg ratio of the gracile australopithecine, Australopithecus garhi.

"Floresiensis seems to have evolved around the time of A. garhi, given its primitive arm-leg ratio, whereas H. habilis was moving towards the modern human ratio around the same time," said Argue.

"If we're right, it means some hominin must have moved out of Africa about two million years ago, which is half a million years earlier than the Dmanisi hominin, which is supposedly the earliest out of Africa," she added. (ANI)

The initial problem that I have with this model is that, up to this point, we have discovered no fossil evidence outside of Africa of any of these critters, which you would expect if some of them dropped dead on the way over to Indonesia, or the crude stone tools that they may have made. On the other hand, we were saying that all the way up to the discovery of the Dmanisi remains a few years ago.