a war on science

Okay, time for talk of another war.
But first, check out this video.

If you don't wish to sit through a 50 minute video I can attempt to recap it. It's the story of the Dover trial, an attempt by the fundamentalist Christians to force their concept of intelligent design on the local school district.

Just to attempt to be thorough, I should attempt to explain the concept of intelligent design. Basically, it's a clear attempt to begin taking over the scientific world, to start denying the theory of evolution. It's creationism in disguise. To me it's clear that if these people were to get intelligent design accepted into the classroom then creationism would be the next step.

I did not follow the Dover trial as closely as I should have, given the critical importance of it. This video gave me much needed background on it.

I had always assumed that these attempts to force creationism into classrooms was a wacky, doomed to fail effort by some poor misguided individuals. Watch the movie and you'll find out that there's a massive organization at work with a terrifyingly subtle plan.
Basically, it goes like this. They claim that they have a legitimate scientific theory. They demand the right to debate the mainstream scientific community with it.
That's where the insidious subtleness begins. They have to know that their arguments are fundamentally flawed. The people working to do this appear to be scientifically educated, if they're as educated as they claim they have to be aware of the flaws in their reasoning.
But that's not the point. All it took was for them to get the scientific community to come out and point out the flaws. And then they had what they wanted. Now they could claim that there WAS a scientific debate. The very fact that scientists had engaged them was enough, they got to claim legitimacy.
It's a publicity scam, not a scientific conflict. They just wanted to get the nation to hear that they had entered into a debate with the scientific community. "Teach the debate" has become the war cry of the creationists.
All of the attacks on evolution have failed. Scientifically speaking, there is no debate. It's clear that these people do not possess a functional scientific concept, they're merely desperately trying to find obscure loopholes that allow them to claim that evolution is disproved.

At it's heart this dispute has nothing to do with science. Even the most dedicated fundamentalist is happy to use any number of results of scientific progress. They do not deny that the world is round, or that it orbits around the sun. If they're diagnosed by a scientific doctor as having some sort of disease which, if left untreated, would prove fatal they're certainly not hesitant to use the medicine that science has created.
It is an attempt to seize power by undermining the very concept of logic and reason. They are working to bring us back to the intellectual level we had sunk to during the dark ages. They want to be the ones who tell us all what to think and what to do. They want people to be confused and frightened by the world around them so that they turn to the church to find answers.
It is about control.

The best example of the sort of logic they're attempting to promote is a short quote by a girl who had been brought up immersed in this irrationality. It was a brief quote aired on the radio, she had been asked what scientific evidence she had for creationism. Her immediate (which I suspect means it was a ritualized phrase) response was "the creator is in my heart". To her that was proof. Belief has become a form of evidence.

This is, to me, of immediate relevance because of the Bush presidency. I've already put forward the fairly simple logical statement that the war on terror has benefited terrorists and hurt our country. Logic would suggest that maybe we should stop it then. But nonetheless the right wingers demand that we must continue or else things might get worse. It's completely illogical. Our actions have made things far worse, but if we were to stop then things might REALLY get bad. Yeah, and the Pope could suddenly convert to Buddhism. Bush and his supporters are desperate to continue the conflict in Iraq until the next administration takes over, then they can dump the problems on them and, at the same time, blame it on them.

To think that that degree of illogic can exist at the highest levels of our government without an immediate outcry tells me that we've already lost a great deal of the ability to think rationally. I think it's worth noting that those arguments always use an element of fear as well, there's always the threat that if we don't do just what they want to do that the terrorists might strike back. Kind of like how the church uses the threat of Hell to attempt to frighten people into doing what they wish. Osama bin Laden has become our own official devil who will deliver punishment if we don't do what we're told.

I can only hope that despite that, the backlash from the Bush presidency will still carry a rational successor to office who can begin undoing the damage that's been done.


For a sampling of other examples of creationist attacks on science I have a few more links to offer.
This one is a page that lists a number of attacks on evolution and refutes them all.
This is a collection of content from a usenet group, talk.origins, that deals with discussion about, well, the origins of things. - Human beings, life on Earth, the Earth itself, the Solar System, and the Universe. It is a treasure trove of counter creationist arguments that point out the flaws in the various tricks the creationists attempt to use to argue their point.

And if you want an example of the methods the creationists use to attack evolution, if you, like I used to be, find it impossible to think of creationists as subtle and clever, here's an example. You can find some of this man's arguments refuted in the talk origins site.
The basic technique used by people like this is to be cute and folksy, exuding charisma, and to bombard the audience with random information which they know little about. Without specific knowledge in the fields covered it's difficult to understand how you're being lied to, besides which these sorts of lectures are aimed at people who already believe in creationism.
If you really want a laugh, continue watching towards the end where he'll present pictures that are supposed to show fossilized human footprints next to dinosaur fossils, and other things like that. Of course he doesn't give any sort of verifiable source for this kind of information, he just happens to have pictures which should change our understanding of the history of the world tucked away in his own private museum.