The arguments of Creationists and intelligent designers and other opponents of evolution seem to be evolving. Legally and culturally, at least, the creationist argument was shot down decades ago. More recently, that’s been the case for intelligent design theory, too. So now the fight continues, although the language is starting to change again. Now, it’s not about creation. It’s not even about design. It’s about attacking the “strengths and weaknesses” of Darwinian theory. And it might just work.

Starting this summer, the state education board will determine the curriculum for the next decade and decide whether the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution should be taught. The benign-sounding phrase, some argue, is a reasonable effort at balance. But critics say it is a new strategy taking shape across the nation to undermine the teaching of evolution, a way for students to hear religious objections under the heading of scientific discourse.

Already, legislators in a half-dozen states - Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri and South Carolina - have tried to require that classrooms be open to “views about the scientific strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian theory,” according to a petition from the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based strategic center of the intelligent design movement.

What do you think? The evolutionists will say it’s just more creationism in sheep’s clothing, but this line of argument - investigating the veracity of evolutionary theory - might just work. It’s got all the skepticism and love of free inquiry that good science needs. And it has nothing to do with alternative theories, like intelligent design. Oh, I know many of you will protest, and that’s okay. We allow dissent at WMB!

It’s a delicious 70 sunny degrees in Philadelphia, and I just drove past construction workers in short-sleeved shirts. An unremarkable sight, you say, but it struck me as quite remarkable today.

Perhaps we are approaching the Evolution thing all wrong. We keep arguing the case for a Designed, rather than Accidental, universe by adducing esoteric facts of biochemistry, which most of us can’t see firsthand. But here is something not remote from anyone’s experience — the happy intersection of your “sweet spot” physical comfort zone and the total possible range of temperatures in the universe.

A thermostat placed on the surface of the sun would register roughly 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But that’s nothing. Temperatures in the overall universe range from millions of degrees in the hottest stars to absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius). The thermal spectrum that allows for life as we know it is 1 or 2 percent of that. How much smaller again is the slice that makes me suddenly look up from my housework and notice how nice the air feels on my skin.

We don’t need to talk about the fact that our planet could not support life if it were as far from the sun as Jupiter or as close as Venus, nor that carbon molecules need 120 to -20 C. We just have to ponder a calibration — and a love — so sensitive that a five degree rise or lowering of temperature makes the difference between me putting on my sweater or leaving it home.

In this day and age, it can be tough to be a public school science teacher who believes in the Bible and questions evolution. I’m sure that many, so that they can keep their jobs and not be “Expelled,” quietly follow the dictates of their local school districts. John Freshwater, who teaches middle school science in Mount Vernon, Ohio, has had his share of run-ins with his bosses in the 21 years he’s taught in the Mount Vernon school system over his views of evolution versus intelligent design.

Last week, Freshwater agreed to a directive from the school district and his principal that ordered him to take down a poster of the Ten Commandments from his classroom door and posters featuring Bible verses from the walls, and to remove Bibles from a shelf, but he has refused to get rid of his personal Bible he keeps on his classroom desk. “[That Bible is] something he draws personal inspiration from,” R. Kelly Hamilton, one of Freshwater’s attorneys, told The Columbus Dispatch. “It just so happens that it’s a Bible. For some people it’s a personal photograph or a coffee mug.”

The school district, of course, fears that a Bible sitting on a teacher’s desk shows favoritism toward a particular religion and violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. (In its statement, the school district did not address any concerns it had over its denial of the Free Exercise Clause.) And, not surprisingly, the ACLU has weighed in, coming down on the side of the school district.

On Thursday, hundreds of supportive students held a rally at the high school and started a petition drive for the teacher who’s affectionately known as “Fresh H2O.” They also made a statement by bringing their own Bibles to school and plopping them down on their desks.

Barbara Smith, a mother of one of Freshwater’s former students, told the Mount Vernon News, “If he was doing something wrong I could understand it. He’s not doing anything wrong. They have taken everything away out of the schools. … When I was in school, we prayed in the morning. Now, they don’t. That’s what’s wrong with the schools today. The discipline has gotten so out of control. The kids have gotten so out of control. They’ve taken everything [the values] out.”

And, of course, we have things like this happening (or, in this case, almost happening) in schools today.

UPDATE (April 23): Today’s Mount Vernon News reported on an investigation of Freshwater’s conduct. (HT: Erasmus)

The New Scientist, to celebrate the total victory of materialistic ideology, presents their special Evolution Issue, with this feature article: “Evolution: 24 Myths and Misconceptions.” 

Darwin presented compelling evidence for evolution in On the Origin and, since his time, the case has become overwhelming. Countless fossil discoveries allow us to trace the evolution of today’s organisms from earlier forms. DNA sequencing has confirmed beyond any doubt that all living creatures share a common origin. Innumerable examples of evolution in action can be seen all around us, from the pollution-matching pepper moth to fast-changing viruses such as HIV and H5N1 bird flu. Evolution is as firmly established a scientific fact as the roundness of the Earth.

I’m not sure how “the case has become overwhelming” fits with “has confirmed beyond any doubt” and “scientific fact,” but hey, I’m not a scientist.  I don’t understand their complicated reasoning.  For example, when I say, “I’m pretty sure I love you,” I don’t mean “I definitely, beyond any doubt, love you.”  Just one more example of how Materialists say, “The evidence is pretty clear that evolution is true,” and then turn around and say to Non-Materialists: “We are absolutely right, and you are absolutely wrong.”  “Pretty clear” and “absolutely clear” are not the same thing, and that difference belies the real problem with materialism: it has no concept of Truth or Fact.  Here are some of my favorites “myths and misconceptions” from the article:

It doesn’t matter if people do not understand evolution

Creationism provides a coherent alternative to evolution

Evolution must be wrong because the Bible is inerrant

Evolution cannot be disproved so is not science

Evolution is an entirely random process

Read them all here, and the Truth will set you free!

The question of what “is” is notwithstanding, I would have thought all agree that Down Syndrome is not a beneficial genetic development. Nevertheless, YouTube features a little flurry of exchanges questioning that common opinion.

It all begins with a video snippet in which evolutionist Dr. Richard Dawkins appears to be stumped by an interviewer’s request for one “example of a genetic mutation or evolutionary process that can be seen to increase the information on the genome.” The scientist is not able to comply.

A subsequent post comes to Dawkins’ rescue: “Down’s Syndrome!” he says triumphantly, explaining in detail how indeed the resulting human being has a surfeit of chromosomes (hence, genetic information).

I would have thought at this point: Case is closed. No further embarrassment, please.

But no. A posting in response respectfully demurs that though Down Syndrome does indeed answers the interviewer’s question, this development is not customarily regarded as a helpful one.

The Down Syndrome guy, even now, does not consider himself washed up. To my bemusement, he rebuts to his rebutter as follows: “Your idea about mutations weakening us is wrong. Mutations can be harmful or beneficial, depending on the environment. Down’s Syndrome may appear to be detrimental. But who knows, there could be a disease out there that could wipe out all of us but spare people with Down’s Syndrome….it all depends on your environment.”

Enough said now?

Mark Mathis is Associate Producer of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a forthcoming documentary that says the Darwinists of American universities are suppressing scientific inquiry.

World on the Web: What makes Expelled different from other “radical idea” documentaries, like the ones Michael Moore has produced?

Mark Mathis: This film is not told from a conservative worldview, though that accusation will happen. Most of the documentary films that have been well done are driving an agenda that comes from the left side of the political spectrum. Films that do (come from this perspective) are less ambitious, more true to documentary form. Our agenda is that science needs to be free, and that the freedom’s not there. When you come to a Michael Moore or Al Gore film, the message is, “we have the answer; and everyone else, just shut up.” Expelled wants to do the opposite: stop the shutting down of scientific inquiry and return freedom to science.

WoW: Who is the film’s target demographic?

Mathis: Our target is the general public. The public is not aware of the materialist, atheistic agenda that is driven by elitists. We know that within the academic elitist institutions across this country, we are going to persuade almost absolutely no one. They’ve stopped looking at the evidence in an unbiased way.

WoW: And who do you think will be most interested in seeing this?

Mathis: People who care about freedom. People who are sick and tired of elitists dictate to them what truth is, people who believe that when they look at nature, they see reason to pursue scientific inquiry, and people who believe in God will have a strong interest in seeing this film. Having a free society will ultimately show us the truth.

WoW: In the documentary, you draw a connection between Darwinist scientists and the Nazi ideology. Do you think that approach will draw criticism?

Mathis: Should we shy away from the truth? People are uncomfortable that a materialist philosophy can lead to a phenomenon like Nazism. Just because it makes people uncomfortable doesn’t mean we should leave it out. All the more reason we should leave it in. It’s not a guaranteed outcome, and we’re not saying that. But…we know that Adolph Hitler was a staunch Darwinist, and those ideals consciously drove him. It was a consequence. The unfortunate thing in this is that there are far too many people have misappropriated Nazism to their own agenda. It’s “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” syndrome.

WoW: What was the most interesting interview you conducted, and why?

Mathis: The one with (Dr.) Will Provine of Cornell University. What I can’t say about most of the people I interviewed is that Will Provine is something of a model of what we should be seeing in most of the universities today. He believes that Neo-Darwinism is a fact and there is no God, but he allows people who disagree with him to speak in his classes. It’s very healthy for science, and it forces his students, who think like he does, to sharpen their arguments. That’s what science should do.

WoW: Why did Ben Stein seem a good choice to star in this film?

Mathis: Three reasons: one, Ben Stein is an accomplished person on multiple levels; an author of more than 30 books, a lawyer, an economist, an entertainer, a pitchman. He writes for the New York Times, and he’s a commentator for Fox News. Two, we wanted someone with a name in the culture, so when we talked about Expelled, it wasn’t just a documentary film. Three, we wanted to do a film where people weren’t going to see the film for a science lesson. They want to learn something, yes, but they want to be entertained along the way.

Is a belief in evolution compatible with Christianity? Michael Zimmerman, founder of The Clergy Letter Project and Evolution Weekend, says it is.

In 2004, Zimmerman, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Butler University, wrote the Clergy Letter in response to a Wisconsin school board’s passage of several anti-evolution policies. The letter states that many Christian clergy “believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist,” and that “the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests.” Over 11,000 clergy members have endorsed this letter.

Evolution Weekend grew out of the Clergy Letter, providing an opportunity for congregations to “come together and discuss the compatibility of science and religion,” says Zimmerman. Almost 800 congregations from nine different countries will participate in this year’s third annual Evolution Weekend, February 8-10.

Zimmerman told WoW that many clergy members choose to give sermons or hold lunch forums on the topic. Other congregations view “Paradise Lost: The Religious Life of Charles Darwin” or NOVA’s “Judgment Day – Intelligent Design on Trial” and follow with discussion groups. Zimmerman only asks that participating clergy provide a forum for discussion on the compatibility of science and religion.

Evolution Weekend is not without debate. Casey Luskin, Program Officer at the Discovery Institute, finds it “hypocritical for Darwinists to claim (incorrectly) that intelligent design proponents mix religion with science, when in fact it is the Darwinists themselves who are making a big push to promote pro-evolution theological views.”

Luskin told WoW, “If people want to find ways to reconcile evolution with religion, that’s fine. That’s their right and prerogative. For us, this issue is not about religion, but science. And there are many legitimate scientific reasons to challenge Darwinian evolution.” Luskin said that the Discovery Institute opposes teaching both religion and pro-evolution theology in the science classroom because it “encourages science teachers to violate the separation of church and state by injecting religion into the science classroom.”

Last year, Bruce Chapman, president of Discovery Institute called Evolution Sunday the “height of hypocrisy,” but Zimmerman hopes Evolution Weekend will “continue to increase the quality of national and international dialogue on this topic.”

Olivia Judson is at it again, using reason and logic to prove random, pointless, mutation-happy evolution.  This time, she’s saying that a species, even when members of that species are isolated from one another, tends to evolve in the same way.  Her essay focuses on micro-evolution, or alterations within a species, which is the kind of evolution that many non-evolutionists believe in (including me).  For example, put a bunch of deer on an island and leave them there for 1,000 years.  They will probably be and look a little (or a lot) different than their deer friends on the mainland.  This is proven and something a lot of us skeptics can believe in.  But what’s interesting about Judson’s essay is that she’s so proud that evolution repeats itself, so proud that evolution seems to have a pattern.  Even though, by definition, it doesn’t.

Looking around the Earth, it’s striking how often similar traits evolve in similar environments. So: birds living on remote islands typically lose the power of flight. Males in species (be they chimpanzees or yellow dung flies) where females are promiscuous tend to evolve high sperm counts and large testes. Animals that live in caves lose their eyes and their color: whether they live in Rwanda or Romania, they’re a pallid, blind lot, the troglodytes. Mammals that specialize on eating leaves - be they cows or langurs (that’s a monkey) - have evolved foreguts where bacteria break down the leaves, as well as special enzymes to help with digestion. Amazingly, the same phenomena are also seen in the hoatzin, a leaf-eating bird from South America. In short, evolution has a remarkable tendency to repeat itself.

Of course, repetition suggests some kind of design.  Which is to say, when members of the same species are isolated from each other, yet micro-evolve (like the deer) in the same way…well, that seems to say that there’s a purpose and a design behind the evolving.  But that won’t stop Judson from contradicting herself.

The study of morality, once only the province of people who actually believed in it, is now the new new thing in the materialistic universe of science.  This is a good thing (science should study everything it can study, knowing its limitations) and a bad thing (science can only let itself make proclamations about material causes, and so can be counted on to be wrong much of the time).  Anyhow, at least the author of this leviathon piece from the Times magazine understands the difficulty of saying that every moral judgment is a matter of evolution and chemical reaction: “If morality is a mere trick of the brain, some may fear, our very grounds for being moral could be eroded.”

Indeed.  After some interesting thought experiments and facts and non-facts, the author, Steven Pinker, gets down to brass tacks about the origins and purposes and operations of morality.  In the passage below, when he says “the scientific outlook,” he’s talking about the worldview that refuses to consider any non-physical phenomena as actually real.  In other words, love, joy, right, and wrong are chemical reactions and nothing more.  Notice how he dances around the implications of what he’s suggesting, all the while seeming to acknowledge it: 

The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

His answer is not very convincing.  What do we do when we recognize (as materialists, which I am not) that everything is meaningless matter and that morality is nothing but a vapor?  According to Pinker and just about every other materialist since the Enlightenment, we can do nothing but ignore the implications of the horror of the idea we won’t let ourselves not believe.

Seventeen scientific organizations are calling on the scientific community to promote the teaching of evolution in scientific education, basing their call on a survey published in the January 2008 issue of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal.

The survey looked at how 1,000 people viewed evolution, science, the role of scientists and science education. Researchers said they found a majority belief in evolution (either evolution through natural processes or evolution guided by a “supreme being”) and weaker overall support for creationism (the belief that God created living things in their present form).

The survey also found that people preferred to hear about evolution, creationism and intelligent design from scientists (77%), science teachers (76%), and clergy (62%). Some respondents were ambivalent about scientific education in the public schools, but a majority (53%) favored teaching evolution over creationism or intelligent design.

Gerald Weissmann, editor of FASEB Journal, gave Science Daily the bottom line: “The world is round, humans evolved from an extinct species, and Elvis is dead. … This survey is a wake-up call for anyone who supports teaching information based on evidence rather than speculation or hope; people want to hear the truth, and they want to hear it from scientists.”

Michael Keas, professor of history and philosophy of science at Biola University, disagrees that the survey supports evolution-only education. Keas, a contributor to the supplemental textbook Explore Evolution: The Arguments for and Against Neo-Darwinism, told WoW that open scientific inquiry means evaluating the evidence for and against science’s dominant theories. Keas believes that other biology textbooks lack this “inquiry-based” approach, and his book fills a void for textbooks that supply only the evidence in favor of Darwin’s theory.

Scientific organizations call for public education in the fundamentals of science, including the scientific method. Keas agrees, saying the survey actually supports his mission: “The main point of science and literacy and science education is to teach science as it’s best practiced by scientists.”