So far, 12 local boards (including Polk, Taylor and Holmes Counties) have passed resolutions that state education authorities revise the standards to include evolution as only one explanation of how life began and developed on Earth. Taylor County’s board actually resolved, “the district is opposed to teaching evolution as a fact.”

All of these challenges are doomed to fail, given the clear results from the Kitzmiller v. Dover court case, which basically sank the Intelligent Design ship in the Dover, Penn., schools. After weeks of expert testimony, the judge hearing the case definitively found that ID was a religion and not science, and thus it had no place in the Dover schools’ science classes.

Clearly, none of the Florida school board members voting for these anti-evolution standards have any clue about the significance of Kitzmiller v. Dover, much less what the words “scientific theory” mean. Science standards by definition cannot include creationism or ID instruction, since neither is scientific by any stretch of the imagination. Who knows what the school boards there expect to happen — the entire state challenging legal precedent and common sense?

Meanwhile, the Answers in Genesis folks, the people who brought the Creation Museum to the Commonwealth of Kentucky, have started a new on-line, peer-reviewed journal of creation “science,” Answers Research Journal. Apparently, they are trying to fool the public into thinking creationism is scientific by putting a coat of academic shellac on it.

Can creationists get any dumber?

Luce’s message, which is tinged heavily with his brand of fundamentalism, is that popular culture is corrupting our youth. He pounds into his young congregants the need to reject all the commercialism, sex, drugs and whatnot rife in secular culture.

He woos impressionable pre-teens and teens with the usual fundie blend of showbiz and pulpit-pounding demagoguery. While telling them to reject pop culture, he uses (Christian) rock music, pyrotechnics, and variety of merchandise to convert his BattleCry event audiences to the Teen Mania way.

Watching adults sway in some kind of hypnotic rapture during a fundie church service is one thing. Seeing kids as young as 10 with their eyes closed and arms upraised, entranced by Luce’s brand of religion by the hundreds is alarming.

Pop culture is evil, kids. It’s poisoning your minds, removing all that is good from your souls. Instead, empty your minds of all free will and follow me instead. That’s the Luce message.

An army of Christian youth robots.

Christiane Amanpour was the CNN correspondent doing the story, part of her series, “God’s Warriors.” A Christian Iranian by birth, Amanpour was clearly drawing parallels between Luce’s Christian militancy and the Islamist extremists she covered in another segment. She questioned Luce point blank about his requirement that students at his Honor Academy follow very strict dress and behavior codes, asking him how those restrictions were any different from conservative Muslims requiring women be veiled. Luce did not provide a substantive answer.

Granted, Luce’s ministry has helped some kids pull themselves out of some pretty nasty circumstances. Some have absentee mothers and fathers, have done drugs, are sexually promiscuous, and are generally just messed up.

But judging from the BattleCry event Amanpour covered, the vast majority of the kids attending Luce’s bombastic arena events are normal middle- to upper-class kids with no clear direction or purpose in life. In other words, normal adolescents.

If you believe the Luce/Teen Mania party line, the majority of young people are sexually active, druggie pop-culture automatons that need to be Saved from a dissipated future. To do it, they just need to subscribe to the Teen Mania belief system.

We believe the Bible to be the inspired, only infallible, authoritative Word of God. We believe that there is one God eternally existent in three persons: The Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We believe in the deity of Christ, in His virgin birth, in His sinless life, in His miracles, in His vicarious and atoning death through His shed blood, in His bodily resurrection, and in His personal return in power and glory. We believe in the resurrection of the saved to eternal life, and the everlasting punishment of those who have rejected God’s forgiveness in His Son. We strive to contribute to achieve greater unity in all that we do within the Body of Christ.

These kids are the footsoldiers in a battle, Luce says. There is a crisis: “A stealthy enemy has infiltrated our country and is preying upon the hearts and minds of 33 million American teens. Corporations, media conglomerates, and purveyors of popular culture have spent billions to seduce and enslave our youth. So far, the enemy is winning. But there is plenty we can do. We need to take action. We need to answer the Battle Cry.”

If you are of a certain age, you’ve heard something like this crap before. Rock music, comic books, MTV, Beavis and Butthead, cable TV — they’ve all been targets of reactionary campaigns to “protect” our children from corruption and evil.

Yet, the republic still stands. I’ve spent half my life teaching young people. A tiny, tiny minority mess up their lives with drugs, booze and promiscuity. The vast majority survive adolescence to become respectable, useful adults. Luce’s crisis is as non-existent as Bill O’Reilly’s “war on Christmas.”

Luce, whose compensation in 2006 as head of Teen Mania was about $148,000 (from its IRS Form 990), has clearly found a hook. All Christianist preachers have to have a shtick, or they get lost in the crowd. Luce’s ploy is to blame “pop culture” for kids’ troubles and scare the bejesus out of kids and their parents into donating millions of dollars to his ministry.

His religion is the usual doctrinaire, black-and-white theology of fundamentalism. Homosexuality is a sin. Rock-and-roll music is evil. Girls should dress modestly. Premarital sex is dangerous. Muslims are bad people. Non-believers are bad people. Christians should only hang out with Christians. Heaven and Hell are real places. The Bible is inerrant.

And the kids at these events are absolutely entranced by the whole multimedia show. I won’t go so far as to say they are being brainwashed, but some in the CNN segment looked as out-of-their-wits as Deadheads at a smoke-enveloped concert. In that state of mind, a kid could accept anything as right and true.

Talk2action has a report on Teen Mania. Rolling Stone also covered it some time ago. Visit Luce’s sites, then the anti-Luce sites and draw your own conclusions. Me, I think he’s nuts.

It begins:

There is a great educational injustice being inflicted upon thousands of children in this country, a large percentage of whom come from the Kentucky, Ohio and, Indiana areas. The source of this injustice is a sophisticated Christian ministry that uses the hook of dinosaurs, the guarantee of an afterlife, and the horrors of hell to convince children and their families to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible.

It gets better after that. Willmot basically slams down creationism and pins it to the floor. It’s worth reading.

Willmot taught science at St. Francis School in Goshen, Kentucky, a K-8 school that sends a lot of kids to St. Francis High School. He now lives and writes in England.

Needless to say, the fundies among the C-J’s readers were none too pleased. Comments ranged from suggesting Willmot was intolerant to predicting he would burn in Hell for questioning a literal interpretation of Genesis.

We have a long way to go. Religious intolerance and closemindedness is alive and well in mid-America.

The Golden Compass is yet another fantasy movie epic based on literary epics, like The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Chronicles of Narnia series. [We might also throw in Harry Potter as another example, though HP is an entirely different kind of story.]

Written by an avowed atheist, British author Phillip Pullman, the Golden Compass is like anti-Narnia. Rather than supporting the idea of defending an all-powerful authority against rival forces, Pullman’s trilogy depicts its young heroes as bringing the reign of the authority to an end.

Some Christians who see the anti-Christ lurking behind every tree have already declared The Golden Compass anti-Christian and are encouraging parents to keep their kids out of the theatres, lest their tender minds be subverted by the Evil One.

The Harry Potter books and movies, after all, have created an entire generation of Satanists and wiccans. The Golden Compass might now create an entire generation of doubters or agnostics. It’s the end of civilization as we now it!

C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series began as a fantasy epic for young readers, but Christian allegory worked its way into the books. Many Christians adore the books, since they offer a more obviously religious alternative to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and other fantasy epics.

Strangely, there were no groups protesting the Christian messages inherent in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when it premiered in 2005. So why is it okay to supposedly indoctrinate youngsters with Christian allegory and not with agnostic allegory? Might it be because it would encourage them to think too much?

According to one theologian, Pullman’s trilogy is actually quite theistic, and educational for believers and non-believers alike. The god figure in The Golden Compass is a false god, using fear and intimidation to rule over the land. If there are any parallels to modern religion, well, you can draw your own conclusions there. Pullman wants his readers to think about religion, belief and faith, not just blindly accept them.

Christian conservatives are nowhere near that insightful, however. Deep thought is not a hallmark of the species.

In the end, all the religious fuss about The Golden Compass will amount to little. Movie goers will still go see it. It will eventually end up on DVD and cable TV, and children of all ages and religions will see it and probably enjoy it.

If watching it makes some viewers consider the validity of their faiths, so much the better. Most will probably not get past the entertainment aspect. Christendom will be safe.

=============

The Golden Compass Trilogy

Watson had told a London Times reporter that people of African descent are not as intelligent as those of European descent. The resulting furor led to Watson cancelling many of his scheduled book-tour engagements, including one here in Louisville this week.

While later stating that there was no scientific evidence linking race with intelligence, Watson has neither apologized for his remark nor recanted it, suggesting that he might at some level believe he is correct.

The CSH Labs, which for decades have pioneered research in genetics and produced several Nobel prize winners, relieved Watson of his duties as chancellor soon after the Times published the interview, but stopped short of dismissing him. Bruce Stillman, the president of the Labs, told The New York Times today that the decision to step down formally was entirely Watson’s. One wonders.

Watson had been associated with the Labs since 1968, and was president from 1994 to 2003. As chancellor. he also served on the Labs’ board of directors.

In 1962, he and Francis Crick shared a Nobel Prize in Biology for describing the double-helix structure of DNA. Some scientists since then have contended that Rosalind Franklin, a co-worker, should have shared the award with the two men.

In a prepared statement, Watson said he was “overdue” to surrender his leadership positions at the Labs.

[Incidentally, the Labs are just a few miles away from my high school in Cold Spring Harbor, an old whaling port on the North Shore. One of my classmates was the son of another CSHL Nobel Prize winner. Another was eBay CEO Margaret Whitman, but that's a different story ...]

The allegation that race and intelligence are connected somehow is an old one, dating back to the early days of slavery. That Watson would lend any credence to the idea is appalling, since as a scientist he should know better.

There is a correlation between IQ test scores and race, but IQ tests have long been identified as racially biased anyway. So any correlation cannot possibly suggest a racial causation for low intelligence. At best, IQ scores could measure a cultural (or environmental) basis for IQ test performance.

Or in other words intelligence is not the same as IQ scores.

Watson is not the first scientist to suggest that race and intelligence are connected genetically. At the risk of sounding like Grandpa reminiscing about the old days, when I was in high school, I met another Nobel Prize winner, William Shockley, with the same axe to grind.

Shockley was not a biologist, but an electrical engineer. His 1956 prize was in physics, which he shared with Bell Labs co-workers John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor in 1947.

[There is considerable evidence that Bardeen and Brattain did the bulk of the research and development on that project. Shockley as their nominal supervisor made himself an active participant afterwards, thereby enabling to share in the award. Needless to say, this did not endear him to Bardeen and Brattain. See the book Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age, by Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, for details.]

Biographers of Shockley describe the man as brilliant but arrogant, extremely confident in the validity of his conclusions regardless of evidence to the contrary. After meeting and interviewing him for my high school paper, I can vouch for the accuracy of that portrayal. It was clear that Shockley, having made up his mind on something, would never consider any other opinion as worth his consideration.

At some point in his career, having run out of suitable projects in electronics and solid state physics, Shockley turned his keen mind to the subject of eugenics. Based on his armchair research into the (largely repudiated) work of Arthur Jensen and Cyril Burt, Shockley popularized the notion that IQ tests proved that one’s race determined one’s intelligence.

In particular, Shockley insisted that blacks were intrinsically less intelligent than whites. (That IQ test scores would similarly indicate that Asians were intrinsically more inteliigent than whites never seemed to enter into the discussion. I guess it’s easier to criticize those below you than you admit someone is above you.)

So now Watson, a real geneticist in his sunset years, is spouting the same kind of claptrap as Shockley did in his retirement years — Shockley was in his mid-60s when I met him in 1973. And meeting with the same kind of moral outrage at his remarks.

It’s deja vu all over again.

The concept that people of different races have different abilities or intelligence is an old one, dating back to the days of colonialism, if not before. The “white man’s burden,” as Rudyard Kipling satirically noted, was to bring up the other races to the level of civilization of the white man (i.e., the British Empire).

Suggesting that black Africans were inherently inferior to whites made it easier for many Europeans to stomach the inhuman institution of slavery, and later, for white Americans to accept the prevailing notion that emancipated slaves could not possibly learn enough to vote, attend college or hold down professional jobs. Thus, it took another 100 or so years for the children and grandchildren of former slaves to gain the civil rights that we now largely take for granted.

IQ tests were one of the tools that supported the notion that whites were superior in intellect to blacks and other ethnic groups. Developed toward the end of the 19th century as a predictor of academic success, IQ tests quickly became a political and social tool to pigeonhole students and later adults according to their performance on the test.

Students with low IQ scores, for example, were directed toward the trades and away from college preparatory classes. Students with high scores, conversely, were expected to be “college material” and treated as such.

Immigration authorities during the early part of the 20th century used IQ tests (written in English) to determine whether new arrivals to our shores should be allowed to settle here. Oddly enough, those who were deemed unworthy (at the time, Eastern Europeans with little English skills) also scored poorly in the tests and were thus conveniently turned away.

Those predisposed toward believing whites were inherently smarter than blacks seized upon IQ tests as proof their beliefs were right after all, since generally speaking, there was a noticeable difference in the average IQ score of whites and blacks.

Their error, which Shockley and Watson seem to repeat, is to believe that genetics, and by extension race, is the only influence on IQ test scores. A further error is to assume that IQ scores and intelligence are one and the same thing.

Environment, upbringing, enculturation, language fluency, prior education, even having had enough sleep before the test, among other factors, all determine one’s ability to perform on these tests (including the SAT, I might add). And as designers of IQ tests will admit the tests only measure one aspect of a person’s intelligence, and certainly do not measure — or determine — a person’s relative worth to society.

If Watson truly believes what he said last week, I can only pity the man. Perhaps old age is diminishing his intellect, or at least his common sense. More worrisome is the fodder that his off-the-cuff remark provides white racists. Nutjobs just love to have their whacko ideas seemingly validated by well-respected experts, after all.

I am sorry that Watson essentially lost his job by saying something stupid and racist. He shares that distinction with broadcaster Don Imus, of “nappy headed ‘ho’” fame. (One wonders what a conversation between those two guys would be like … ) But people in the public eye need to be a little more circumspect in what they say to the press. Experts like Watson should stick to the scientific evidence, not their own free association blatherings.

It’s time to bury the myth that race determines intelligence. It just ain’t so.

Ms Browne’s track record is awful, yet she manages to bamboozle people into believing she is somehow gifted. A close look at her failures should convince anyone she is a fraud. Lancaster does a pretty good job of documenting her work. James “The Amazing” Randi also tracks Browne’s predictions and readings.

She is so bad that it is doubtful she will ever appear again on George Noory’s radio show, Coast to Coast AM. During a live broadcast in January 2006, while the nation anxiously awaited news of West Virginia miners trapped underground, Browne said she knew they were all alive.

As it turned out, all but one was dead, and that news came out while Browne was on the air. It was obvious she blew it, on a show with millions of worldwide listeners.

Why criticize Browne? She is a multi-millionaire who has made her fortune off the gullible and the desperate. (John Edward of TV fame is another example.) As Lancaster and Randi put it, if she’s a real psychic, she needs to put up or shut up.

[UPDATE (11/4/08): Lancaster has suffered a stroke. While he was in hospital, his domain name registration lapsed and a domain squatter snapped up his domain. The anti-Sylvia Browne site now has a new location: http://stopsylvia.com/. If you linked to the old site, please change your links. It will help Lancaster's site stay high up in the Google search results.]

Snelling, who holds a doctorate in geology science from the University of Sydney in Australia, used to work for Ken Ham, the AiG head, in the Land Down Under. Snelling has focused on disproving the commonly accepted idea among most geologists that the Earth’s crust has been formed and shaped over millions of years. Like most Young Earth Creationists, he contends that the earth is no older than 6,000 years, and that features like the Grand Canyon were formed by the Great Flood.

Snelling’s work rests on his theory that radioactive dating methods, by which geologists estimate the age of rock, are based on a false assumption: that the rate at which radioisotopes decay has been constant throughout history.

Modern science assumes that all radioisotopes of a certain type are created equal. That is, a sample of carbon-14 from the US is identical to one from Borneo, or a sample of uranium-238 from Earth is the same as one from the Moon. Their nuclear structures, and the laws of quantum mechanics, determine their decay rates and thus their half-lives.

Most geologists also assume that the elements today are identical to those in the past. That is, a sample of U-238 now should behave the same as one from deep inside the Earth (or anywhere else in the universe for that matter). This assumption (and it’s a pretty good one) enables geologists to “date” rocks and the sediments surrounding those rocks. Knowing the age of the sediments enables archaeologists to date fossils and human artifacts.

So, we are pretty sure that the Earth and Moon are about 4.6 billion years old, and that the dinosaurs were pretty much wiped out about 65 million years ago. Meteorites and comet samples have also been dated to be 4 to 5 billion years old.

Corroborating this radioactive evidence is the time it takes for rivers (for example) to cut through the rocky layers of the Earth. We don’t typically see a river cutting through several hundred meters of crust within a person’s lifetime. Tsunamis are exponentially more forceful than river currents, but even they do not cut deep channels in the crust.

Yet Snelling contends that the Grand Canyon is evidence for the Great Flood.

His logic goes something like this. It’s typical of most Young Earthers.

1. A literal interpretation of the Bible places the Creation no more than 6,000 years ago.
2. Radioisotope dating, however, indicates that the Earth’s rock are billions of years old.
3. So, there must be a problem with the dating methods.
4. The early (pre-Flood) Earth was substantially different physically than the Earth of today. Radioactive elements must have decayed at a much faster rate then than they do now, throwing off our estimates of geological ages.
5. Let’s figure out how that could happen, so we arrive at the predetermined Creation date of approximately 4004 BC.

So, class, where is the logical fallacy? And while we’re at it, is this a model for the scientific method, or something much different?

There is so much wrong with the Young Earth Creationism model that it’s hard to know where to begin. Geologists can do a much better job than I picking apart Snelling’s arguments. I can tackle the physics aspects, though.

For one, YEC assumes, against all logic and evidence, that the laws of physics have changed substantially over time. Thus, Snelling argues that ancient radioisotopes did not act the same as modern samples. YEC cosmologists similarly argue that the speed of light and the value of the Universal Gravitational Constant have changed over time. Otherwise, they would not be able to reconcile observational evidence with a 6,000-year-old universe.

[Scriptural aside: Genesis mentions that God before the Flood allowed humans to live much longer lives than after. YEC types figure that God also doctored the laws of physics at the same time. There is of course no way to test this hypothesis, since Noah failed to write a physics textbook while waiting for dry land to appear.]

If the physical constants were changing over time, we would have noticed by now. The speed of light has been well known since the late 1600s, and the gravitational constant since the early 1700s. Neither has changed markedly since then. Decay rates and half-lives are been studied only since the late 1800s, but again they seem to be consistent over those two centuries.

If the Earth were in fact only 6,000 years old, that timespan of 200 to 400 years would be a sizeable proportion of the Earth’s age. We could assume, then, that the physical constants have not changed at all during those 6,000 years.

But, wait! That means the Earth and the universe cannot be a few thousand years old, since the laws of physics suggest their ages should be measured in billions of years. Therefore, our initial assumption must be wrong. Oops!

The truly faithful YEC believer of course cannot reject the initial assumption, since that would undermine his or her faith in the literal inerrancy of Scripture. So they whip out the “it was different before the Flood” trump card to wave away the uncomfortable evidence.

Snelling, however, does a great job arguing his case. To a non-geologist, his arguments, interpretation of data, and conclusions would seem pretty convincing. Mainstream geologists are not impressed, however, saying his work is sloppy, or at the least unscientific.

And there’s the question of those sediments. If you visit the Grand Canyon, you can’t miss seeing those layers of rock. If you can assume (without having a theological embolism) that the Earth is really frakking old, then it’s easy to accept the Colorado River slowly cut its way down through those rocks. Big holes like that don’t happen in 40 days’ time.

If you assume, however, that the Great Flood carved out the Canyon in a month and a half, how do you reconcile that purported event with the non-geologic effects of tsunamis, which are certainly mini-Floods? Huge ocean waves do not create canyons.

There was only one Flood, as “recorded” in the Bible. Presumably it should have created only one sedimentary layer, not many. The YEC types have a hand-waving argument to explain this contradiction (goddidit), but it’s not convincing.

Mars has sediments, too. So for those sediments to have been laid down, God must have created a Great Flood simultaneously on Earth and Mars, which would imply there were Martians and they were sinful, too. The Flood was a punishment, after all. Why punish a dead world? So, did Adam and Eve populate Mars, too, or did the Creator make a separate pair of progenitors for Mars? The theological implications are staggering.

The problem with creationism is that it is NOT science. It starts with a preconceived notion, and tries to fit the evidence to the notion. Aristotle did this centuries ago, and came up with staggeringly wrong conclusions, too. Science allows the evidence to support or disprove the hypothesis. It does not try to jimmy the evidence to stubbornly hold on to a wrong idea.

So to say the honorable Dr. Snelling is a scientist is pretty charitable. He is not. He and other YEC types are trying to force the laws of the universe to fit their paradigm.