Are things getting bleaker in Kentucky?

Listening to the radio this morning I learned that the Governor-Elect of Kentucky is a Tea-partying Conservative Matt Blevin.  What that will eventually mean, I have no idea.  He's already on record supporting that discriminatory Kim Davis and proclaimed a number of issues dear to Conservative hearts.  The Courier-Journal reported that groups like The the Family Foundation of Kentucky is thrilled.  Martin Cothran, their senior policy advisor is quoted as saying:

“It’s going to be a big change in policy in this state, I think … to have the governor’s office in the hands of somebody who really wants to make some conservative change is heartening.”

“We’ve elected a governor who has expressed strong support for religious freedom, who is also in favor of charter schools. So we are hopeful some of the policy statements he made during the campaign are realized.”

However since the Legislature is controlled by Democrats, strategist Danny Briscoe predicts:

“Every bill that comes up, every critical issue that comes up, Republicans will say ‘how is it going to affect our chances in November,’ and the Democrats will say the same thing, which I think means we probably won’t get a lot done,” 

I wonder how long it will be before kennie ham posts about it and how it will impact his Ark Park?  Are things bleaker for the people of Kentucky?  I hope not, I really do!

Here a Victim, There a Victim, Wouldn't you like to be a Victim too?

One of the popular, and yet deplorable, tactics in use today is 'Victimization'.  It works very simply, you paint yourself up as a victim and then do your best to reap the rewards of your victimhood.  Frequently the rewards are a more positive public opinion or a gathering a like minds to pat you on the back and commiserate your victimhood.  Why I find this deplorable is that it's often used by people who are not the victim in the least.

I'll use two cases in point, the first is the Discovery Institute.

In the case of the DI, they like to complain that they are being discriminated against by the rest of the scientific community.  First I do have to question whether or not they are actually part of the scientific community.  I have made my feelings quite clear that I place them squarely within the religious community, very near other conservative Christian Groups.  But be that as it may, do they have difficulty finding acceptance within the scientific community?  They certainly do!  However, are they the victims of discrimination?  No they are not!.

There are standards within the scientific community that the DI refuses to measure up to.  These standards revolve around the methodology used to perform scientific work.  Refusing to perform to those standards doesn't make you a victim of discrimination, it does make your whines and complaint exactly what they are, whines and complaints.  The scientific community has been resistant to any number of pseudo-scientific ideas, and justifiable so.  I don't see any Astrologers whining about discrimination, do you?  The DI claim some very specific examples like:

• Richard Sternberg
• Caroline Crocker
• Michael Egnor
• Robert J. Marks II
• Guillermo Gonzalez

The story they spin doesn't seem to be well-related to the reality of what happened, as you can tell if you follow the links for each one.  Anyone see any actual discrimination?  No, what you see is people disagreeing, people failing in their responsibilities, or people trying to associate an organization with a private concern.  Claiming discrimination when you are not the victim of discrimination is a tactic and nothing more.  Actual victims of discrimination find themselves fighting to even be recognized because of the flood of phony claims of discrimination.

OK, enough about the DI for a moment.  My other example is going to annoy some folks.  Conservative Christians are using the very same method for the very same reasons.  In this country we have been engaged in a long debate over LGBT rights, currently the right of gay people to get married.  One of the interesting analogies involves people refusing service to gay couples over religious reasons.  Just today on the radio I heard that a civil servant in Kentucky was refusing the give out marriage licenses to gay couples because of her religious beliefs.  I don't know if she has been fired, but she already has a lawyer and the lawyer is already crying 'Religious Discrimination'.  My question is this, is she a victim of religious discrimination if she is required to provide services to gay couples?  An analogy I have also been hearing lately goes like this:

"Should a Jewish baker be expected to bake a cake for a Nazi ceremony"

While it sounds simple enough, I think the conservative Christians are missing the point, or at least reversing the issue.  Should the gay community be compared to the Nazi's or should Conservative Christians be the Nazis in this little example?  I bet that comment pisses some folks off, but what I hope instead is it makes them think about it. 

When you look at the relationship of the Jews to the Nazi's who were the criminals and who were the actual victims?  When you ask a Jewish baker to provide a service, you are asking the victim to provide a service to their oppressor.  Is that the case of the religious public servant providing a service to a gay couple?

Look at the treatment of gays by Conservative Christians?  Look at the physical attacks, the claims of how evil and dangerous gays are, and how many time gays are accused of being child molesters.  How about 'conversion therapies' aimed at 'fixing' gay people.  Who is the actual victim and who is the oppressor here?  Do gays have a history of discriminating against Christians or is it the other way around.  And it's not history, it's current!  The discrimination goes on, especially when a public servant refuses service on the basis of her religious beliefs.  The clerk is the one doing the discriminating, gay couples are on the receiving end.


Conservative Christians like to claim there is an attack on Christianity in this country.  When their behavior is designed to refuse the same rights and privileges they take for granted to another group of US citizens, then they are right, it is an attack.  But it is one brought about by their own behavior and one they well deserve to lose.  It's not discrimination and they [Conservative Christians] aren't a victim!

In each case the real victims are the ones being painted in the negative light, yet it is the ones doing the painting who are claiming the mantle of 'Victim'.  Please give it some thought the next time you hear someone from the DI claiming that real scientists don't take them seriously, or someone who refuses to obey the law, particularly a public servant, who refuses to do their job because of their personal beliefs.  Identify who the real victim is, and it's not always the one claiming to be the victim!

Teaching People to Mistrust Science

What a surprise, the Discovery Institute (DI), through one of their favorite mouthpieces little casey luskin, doesn't like how Intelligent Design (ID) is represented.  Except for their own publications, have they approved of anyone else's explanation of ID?  I don't recall any!  But this time I think it's a smokescreen whine, covering up a more serious issue, encouraging the mistrust of science.

The latest is a post by casey over on ENV is "The Danger of Capitulating to "Settled Science": Cambridge University Press Book Misrepresents ID".

First off, why does the article have to start with a blurb about a professor at a religious college that resigned over theological views on human origins?  After all, the DI keeps trying to claim there is nothing religious about ID.  Does anyone actually believe that?

So this article supposedly centers on a review by the departing professor on a book by Benjamin C. Jantzen, An Introduction to Design Arguments (Cambridge University Press). The majority of the article from little casey is the normal whines and complaints about how no one in the world seems to understand ID, except for those less-than-stalwart Fellows, and Senior Fellows, at the DI.  That' a problem for another post, I found two other themes I wanted to address.

The first is one I have commented on before, how the DI loves to complain if any biologist doesn't provide an complete end-to-end explanation of a potential evolutionary path from one structure to the next.  If not, they tend to immediately dismiss anything said, regardless of how compelling the concept.  Yet when they offer their own concepts and philosophies, they offer no corresponding level of completeness.  In fact when you ask for it, they seem to have any number of rationalizations why they don't really have a clue.  This is an example of raising the goal posts for everyone else, yet they don't even bother kicking the ball while claiming a score.  In other words biology must be absolute or it should be rejected, but the DI is allowed the treat supposition as absolute and demand time at the science classroom lectern.  Doesn't much wash for me!

The other theme is one I haven't examined before, and the more critical one. Little casey quoted Jantzen:

"The ID camp does a disservice to the predominantly conservative Christian community to which it appeals by conditioning that community to mistrust science. Its arguments depend on accepted, settled science getting things wrong. "

Here casey gets incredibly defensive, his defense is claiming that they [the DI] are not teaching people to mistrust science, but to think for themselves.  Sorry casey, that doesn't fly!  Here are a compile of examples (italicized comments are mine):

• Demanding 100 certainty from science for anything any scientists writes.  How can you possibly tell me that something like that doesn't leave a negative impression about science!
• Evolution is just a theory.  Let's drag all scientific theories down to the level of just being an idea, this way ID can be claimed to be equal to actual scientific theories.
• Teach strengths and weaknesses.  It's not about teaching weaknesses, it's about convincing people there are weaknesses, real or perceived.
• Teach all aspects because of academic freedom.  Yet actual academic freedom has nothing to do with teaching religion as if it were science.
• Equate real science with religion.  Darwinism, anyone?  It's not an 'ism', it's real and it works!  How often do they try and identify evolution as a religion?  Too many to count.
• Mis-quote and quote-mine real science and scientists.  Darwin and the eye, for example, Stephen J. Gould as well.
• Mis-characterize issues like Piltdown Man as bad science.  Even though scientists are the ones who uncovered the problems and never bought into it to begin with.
• Question science, scientists, science methodology without any actual complaints, just innuendo and mis-characterizations of science.  Kirk Durston's recent posts (here, here, and here)

Sure, this has nothing to do with people mistrusting science.  Nothing they have done could possibly have a negative impact on people's perception of science . . . yea right!.  Their tactics are more to bring down science instead of building up their own ideas.  Think about most everything you read from the DI, are they doing the work supporting their own ideas or are they spending more time tearing down science and science education?  It certainly seems to latter to me.

So, it looks like while they claim otherwise, what they are actually doing is trying to handicap science.  But for a moment let's look at their rationalization, teaching people to think for themselves.

While this sounds like a laudable idea, how real is it?  Do we teach people to treat their own diseases, build their own rocket ships, or even their own cars?  No!  We have experts to do these things and we accept the fact we are not all doctors, rocket scientists, or even car designers.  Yet the DI wants everyone to be able to pick and choose which science they want to accept?  Really?  Why would that be the case?  I think when your ideas cannot stand the light of science, sell rather than do any science.  Tell people you are only thinking of them, and then do your best to have real science, you know the stuff that actually works, shoved aside.  I have often called the DI a marketing organization but I am starting to re-think that.

I think the DI is more of a religious ministry.  Think about it, since when does a religious ministry really want you to think for yourself?  It's just another tactic!  Think about more open religious ministries and their message.  While they give voice to freedom of religion, what they are usually saying is 'my religious freedom, not yours'.  Isn't that what the DI is doing, their ideas rather than real science!

Yes, they claim not to be a religious organization, but isn't that wearing quite thin?  Here are some of their Wedge Strategy 5-year goals, those under the heading of Spiritual & cultural renewal:

• Mainline renewal movements begin to appropriate insights from design theory, and to repudiate theologies influenced by materialism
• Major Christian denomination(s) defend(s) traditional doctrine of creation & repudiate(s)
• Darwinism Seminaries increasingly recognize & repudiate naturalistic presuppositions
• Positive uptake in public opinion polls on issues such as sexuality, abortion and belief in God

How much of this sounds more like a religious ministry than an organization dedicated to science?   Read the whole wedge strategy and you get the impression science is nothing but a tactic, an afterthought.  And, again from the document itself, biology is only the first area to be addressed, other scientific disciplines, social sciences, and humanities are also in the target list.  I think the DI needs to change their tax status to a religious ministry.  At least is would be more honest!

If you believe in evolution, should you worry about climate change?

A somewhat interesting point from Jeff Van Fleet in an opinion piece posted in the Daily Interlake.com site,  "If you believe in evolution, then don’t worry about climate change".

If you don't want the long answer, the short one is "Yes, you should be worried, all of us should be worried!"  The rest of this is an expanded note to what I posted on their site.

His closing paragraph confused me quite a lot:

"Evolutionary theory demands both environmental changes and species extinction. The conservation movement is contradictory to both the theory of evolution and modern science. An evolutionist who supports conservation is like being an atheist who supports their local church. It isn’t logical and it does not make any sense."

Evolutionary theory doesn't demand anything.  As changes occur, they will be explained by evolutionary theory, not driven by the theory.  Do proponents of Atomic Theory want a nuclear blast in their neighborhood?  Wouldn't that be logical?

Proponents of evolution want people to understand the process but they do not push that the process be forced along some path.  Failing to support conservation means that preventable changes will more than likely occur.  But does than mean evolution proponents are unaffected bystanders or worse ones who wishes for environmental changes, potentially on a massive scale, just to help win a cultural debate?  Sure, let's see how many 'evolutionist' would vote for mass extinction of the human race?  That's what Jeff seems to be saying.  It's illogical if that's not what they want to see happen?  Ummm, no, it would be illogical for a member of the human race to wish for extinction.

Winning the current debate over evolution doesn't validate it as a scientific theory, it's already been validated time and time again.  It is a scientific theory and winning or losing the cultural debate won't change that.  What it will change is the ability of teachers to teach real science, of students to learn more of the reality of the world around them.  It may very well impact the funding of future research within the field, a field I remind you that has directly impacted food production, medicine, and the environment for a very long time.  These are things being impacted by the debate today, not the validity of the theory, but the teaching of it and the use of it.

As someone who understands climate change, as he claimed, I would expect him not to treat it as some sort of esoteric idea.  Look at the loss potential of the debate over climate change.  We could very well be driving the extinction of the human race.  It really wouldn't take all that much, especially if the carbon-dioxide level keeps rising.  Will humans evolve to handle the new levels, or will we go the same way as 99% of all species that have existed on Earth and go extinct?  If we keep debating, the issue may well become moot as we pass a point where any action on our part will not impact the outcome.  Science might explain the results, but it's not something any evolution proponent would wish to occur.  Of course on the Creationist-side, you could just pray for your particular deity to stop the rise in CO2 level, because prayer has been such a reliable tool in the past, right? 

Let's see, if I were a member of the last group of humans on Earth would I prefer they were Creationists who meekly accept what must be the will of a capricious deity for human extinction, or be scientists who will fight tooth and nail for every last breath?  I know which group I would prefer.  Jeff here seems to think evolution proponents would be the ones rolling over and being dead.  Somehow I think he's a bit off there.

Evolution proponents are also concerned about climate change because the same sort of pseudo-scientific arguments that have been used against biology are now being used against the climate and often by the same groups.  That's another reason to be concerned!  If these groups win the debate, not only will any future activity to change the outcome be more challenging, but what's next on their personal agenda?  In Texas they've been trying to re-write the history books and make it sound like Christianity was the goal in the formation of the USA.  Imagine what such groups would do with a carte blanc license!  Evolution and climate change would just be the start!  I think Jeff need to think through his science a little more.  It's sounding more like he's forming opinions based on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, not science.

Someone once told me that in about 60,000,000 years the Earth will be a frozen ball of pretty much nothing important, and anything we do today won't make much of a difference in the long run.  Yea, there's a mantra to hang on your wall!   Sorry, words like that might be an interesting intellectual exercise, but pretty lousy ones to live by.  I prefer to be evolving as fast as I can!

Response to 'That's Deception, not Concern' post

I got a couple of emails about how disingenuous I am for accusing the Discovery Institute (DI) of doing something everyone does when they use words to make a point.

I do agree everyone uses words to better their own position, that is a recognized tactic.  But the DI seems to be much less honest about it.  Did they ever mention their religious objective to euthanasia?  Wouldn't that have helped a reader grasp why they were making the argument?  In the past did they ever mention that their pet idea, Intelligent Design, isn't a scientific theory?  Did they forget to tell lawmakers and voters that the 'academic freedom' laws they helped write and get passed in Louisiana has nothing at all to do with academic freedom?  How often have we heard how ID is not Creationism, yet the religious underpinnings are clear for all to see?  That what I mean about being more dishonest about it.  I've seen many articles where a individual or group's motivation is included in most diatribes.  Most groups are proud of their positions and aren't afraid to tie into that motivation.  Do you ever see the DI being so open and honest?  I don't think so.

The problem is more that this indicates a pattern of behavior, not just playing lawyer-word games.  Here are a few others I've mentioned in the past:

• Remember how the DI misrepresented the organizational affiliations on the 'Dissent from Darwin' petition? (here) 
• Now about how the DI forget to mention that the reason most of the 'scientists' who signed their petition didn't sign for scientific reasons? (here)
• One of their authors, Stephen C. Meyer, identified two reviewers of one of his books as not being ID proponents, when nothing could have been further from the truth. (here, the part near the end about Philip Skell and Norman Nevin)
• How about the behavior of the DI before during and after the Dover trial?  You can check out Panda's Thumb for the good information, or read Lauri Lebo's 'Devil in Dover' -- but let me remind you of a couple of things: When the Conservative judge was announced, the DI pretty much said it was over and they won, yet after the trial they claimed the judge was an activist judge and tried to spin the ruling that was devastatingly against them.  Don't forget the three of their senior fellows bowed out of testifying.   They also claimed not to have given any help or advice on one hand and on another claimed to have advised Dover's school board not to pursue it . . . of course these comments differ sharply from what the Dover School Board members said during testimony.
• My all time favorite will always be the bibliography given to the Ohio School Board trying to convince them of evolution's imminent demise (here).  After their shenanigans, they did add a disclaimer to the bibliography, but it doesn't change how they represented it in Ohio.

This list can get pretty long, but I hope you get the idea.  In my opinion, the Discovery Institute cannot be trusted to represent themselves in an open manner.  They fail to follow a standard methodology expected of all scientists, yet they demand a place at the lectern in science class for teaching their religion.  They do this using tactics that, again in my opinion, are reprehensible.

What's wrong with being 'Right'?

Over the past few years of blogging and commenting on the political anti-evolution sentiments I've come across a great many people who seem to think a number of . . . well erroneous things about this country. One of the most common is how this country is based on Christianity, and how that seems to rationalize some pretty bizarre behavior. Here is a quote I would like folks like kennie ham and others who are currently supporting the Christian Right. To folks who listen to right-wing pundits like Bill O'Rielly and Rush Limbaugh, or think Ann Coulter has anything useful to say. Right-wing conservative pandering politicians should pay attention as well.

"The national government will maintain and defend the foundations on which the power of our nation rests. It will offer strong protection to Christianity as the very basis of our collective morality.

Today Christians stand at the head of our country. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theatre, and in the press - in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during recent years."

They are the words of Adolf Hitler from the address he gave after coming to power in Germany (from "My New Order, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, 1922-1939", Vol. 1, pp. 871-872, Oxford University Press, London, 1942).

Does the source of the quote surprise you? Now you can try and rationalize this away all you want. But my real target for this post are those people who keep trying to tie Darwin to Hitler and Nazi eugenics. The next time that stupid little thought occurs to you, come back and re-read this one and remember just what Hitler was all about! You cannot justify tying a scientific concept for your own political purposes, remember you need to more than just make an unsupported claim. When you fail, like David Klinghoffer, Ben Stein, and Kennie Ham, you cast more doubt on your own belief systems because of your transparent attack.