The creationists' last stand

It’s never their last stand. Creationists adapt their strategies to whatever obstacles are put in front of them. Some arguments don’t resonate well with the public, so they change them. Those arguments that don’t do well die off and those that do tend to thrive for a while until scientists find a counterargument that the general population understands. Of course, adapting these strategies require an intelligence behind them. A Prime Mover if you will. And that Prime Mover is…

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Is this actually an issue anywhere but the Bible Belt? I’ve never met anyone who wants to either remove evolution from classrooms or put God into classrooms, and I’ve honestly only ever heard of folks like that either online (mostly on the FSM webpage), or in high school science class. I don’t really feel worried…

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Heh heh.

(Only a little related.)

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Yes. I’m not sure if there’s a real definition of “Bible Belt,” but you can find these folks in all 50 states. They probably don’t have much clout in Hawaii, but I’m sure they’re there.

Trivia: Christian fundamentalism was invented at Princeton University.

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Only if Kansas is part of the Bible Belt. The descent of what I’d always considered staid, Germanic Midwesterners into racist, fundamentalist loonball batshittery has been, for me, one of the most frightening developments of the 21st century.

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Do you think there are enough of them anywhere else to actually upset the status quo though?

love that turn of phrase

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National curricula like Common Core, adopted now by all but five states (among them Texas) have created far larger potential markets.

I hadn’t thought about Common Core as breaking the rule-of-Texas in textbooks, but it is a nice side effect. (Or perhaps it is intentional, but not quite part of the sales pitch.)

I wish I could find the original source, but I distinctly remember one of the architects of Kansas’s descent saying that it wasn’t necessary to win big elections, or even to win a majority of voters, because it was possible to create change simply by targeting small campaigns–like those for school board seats–that most voters didn’t pay attention to.

I’m sure it seemed like a sound strategy at the time, but no matter how small the office people pay attention when when you start pushing racist, fundamentalist loonball batshittery.

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My guess would be that James Dobsen <sp?> was the likely source of that strategy – his Focus on the Family/Family Research Council seemed to be one of the primary political advocates at the time.

It may depend on region; but at least in the liberal-elitist northeast (We were Real America before Real America was even American…), the loonball batshittery suddenly starts to draw a lot of flack when people are reminded that, if adopted, it will get their children laughed out of the admissions offices of everywhere except Podunk State University…

Merely being illiberal assholes, they might be able to get away with that; but being illiberal assholes who are at war with anything resembling vague competence, that’s a problem that’s a great deal harder to paper over.

(And it’s arguably a broader one for theocratic wingnuts generally: the more forcefully they try to wall themselves off from wicked secular culture, and the harder they crack down on even incremental dissidents, the shallower their talent pool and supply of cultural capital become. This isn’t counter-reformation Europe, where you didn’t have to like the Catholics to admit that they had some serious cultural clout , or the Protestants to admit that they had an ample supply of hardcore principled reformers and theologians. There are still plenty of sharp people who also happen to be religious; but if a cultural good or institution is prefixed by ‘christian’, that’s now a very, very, bad sign in terms of production values, much less content. And ‘creationist’ or ‘YEC’ means dimmer lights still.)

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I believe that was actually a strategy invented by Falwell and his Moral Majority.

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I rather suspect the strategy of trying to force all to be questioned is actually a good thing. If schools taught students to question more and memorize whichever version of ‘facts’ less, we’d be producing more of the minds we should be, anyway. And, it will likely work against them in the end, since they don’t believe in questioning, but in simple belief. Once you let a brain start questioning? It won’t stop.

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Is this actually an issue anywhere but the Bible Belt?

Yes. Texas is an early-adopter in the annual cycle of textbook review, and many other states follow their lead. Publishers seem to accept the need for lowest-common-denominator in the adoption process so the whole mess becomes an exercise in “gabage-in, garbage-out,” regardless of subject.

Since true education is not mere recapitulation of “facts,” but of learning how to think – that is meet, define, solve a problem or situation, or create something that didn’t previously exist – binding ourselves willfully to crap textbooks and standardized testing sends us rushing forward into the past.

Good for the robber barons in the short run, I suppose.

@AliceWeir that is a good point.

That radical fundamentalists what their views printed in text books is neither surprising nor all that concerning. That our school system has come to the point where we have political battles over what our children are forced to memorize (whether it comes from scientists or theologians) is ridiculous.

The ‘Science’ community losses these flights because they are trying to fight indoctrination with indoctrination. Forcing children to accept Creation theory doesn’t serve to advance a child’s understanding of science… But neither does forcing them to except Darwinism. Science isn’t a collection of facts and theories – it is learning to ask questions, make observations and draw conclusions.

If our school children graduated highschool with scientific skills and the ability to question and search for answers it wouldn’t matter what origin story they believed. This is easily seen in that people from all faiths and creeds have contributed to science. We don’t need airheads quoting Darwin anymore than we need airheads quoting Falwell.

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Yep! I might not have seen it quite that way but for a science teacher I had (in the Bible Belt) who was also a preacher. He loved his religion AND his science, and he was up front about it. For him, it was all about having a mind-blowing experience discovering the universe he believed was created by his God. No controversy - just believe as you choose, experiment as you see fit, maybe they’re connected.
Regardless of who came up with it or why, I’m just fine with a school telling kids there are many different ideas about it all. I barely remember anything that teacher taught that year - so much gets repeated over and over. But I remember his TREATMENT of science perfectly! His eyes lit up as he spoke! Dude was happy we were there! He didn’t teach me ‘stuff’. Instead, he taught me why science is so cool and left me excited about all its possibilities. I wonder more about what we lose by artificially separating Science and Philosophy than I do about addressing both. (Tesla, anyone?)

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Pro tip: Nobody quotes Darwin, outside of History and Philosophy of Science (a totally different subject) or as generic frontispiece boilerplate (he has some reasonably poetic lines that aren’t nearly wrong enough to be a problem, so he makes for good titles 'n chapter headers fodder). His role is pretty much entirely historical background material at this point (some of his fieldwork may still be valid, if dated). Really, almost any biology before contemporary genetics is getting close to stamp collecting with a side of vivisection.

There are a great many things wrong with homogenized contemporary science curricula; but the amount of time spent memorizing Master Darwin’s Unaltered Truths (zero) is not one of them.

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Thanks for the “pro tip” about the last line in my post. You missed pointing out that the time spent memorizing Dr. Falwell is also not the problem with creationist science curricula. Clearly this statement was just a literary device to juxtapose the worthlessness of just regurgitating other people’s thoughts/works. I also think that the point of the post is pretty clear – that you don’t teach science by indoctrinating students.

When responding to a post, I think you would do better to respond to the content of the post itself rather than providing “pro tips” about why one or more detail in an illustrative statement are incorrect.

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