Good times, good times

[mmcirvin]

It's true: Judge John Jones's opinion in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Intelligent Design education case (PDF) is riveting reading. It starts out a little dry as he reviews the legal precedents, from the Scopes Monkey Trial on; then he goes into specifics, and you can see the indignation gradually working its way into the narrative.

In the middle part, he goes beyond the legal parameters of the case in a noble effort to debunk once and for all the claims of "Intelligent Design theory" to the status of science (you can sense his annoyance at being driven to hear all this testimony; I guess he figured he'd extract some good from it).

Then, the last major section, concerning what actually went down in Dover, Pennsylvania, is a detailed, hilarious and scary description of a school board packed with imbeciles and run amok. The conclusion flatly calls some of the (ex-)board members liars and uses the phrase "breathtaking inanity".

The Discovery Institute's misleading efforts, and countless confused newspaper op-eds, have given many people the impression that the Intelligent Design movement serves as a label for a kind of happy middle ground between creationism and scientific materialism, advocating a harmony between theistic religious belief and good science. I will happily admit that such a harmony can exist, and while it is not my cup of tea, other people are welcome to it. But the middle section of the opinion gives a powerful summary of the evidence that ID is not it, and I hope it gets read.

Comments

[twillis.livejournal.com]

Very happy-making news indeed.

Of course, the big follow-up news in these parts was how the Dover decision doesn't have anything to do with our schoolboard's recent decisions regarding evolution. Blech. Way to harsh my groove, jerks.

Right now I think the strategy here is to see if the board gets voted out next election, before we jump to the legal challenges.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

In Dover, they already all got voted out in the last election, and it was very much on the basis of the Intelligent Design circus: lifelong Republicans switched parties just to run against these bozos. Which really puts the lie to the idea that this is an activist judge trying to legislate against the popular will from the bench. Note also that he makes it absolutely clear that the whole case happened because the ID advocates wanted it to, and is obviously pissed off about that.

The judge, by the way, is a George W. Bush appointee. I am more than happy to give up an opportunity for Bush-bashing to have the definitive legal statement on ID's stupidity come from someone who can't be attacked for it on party-line grounds.

[twillis.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, him being a W appointee was just icing on the cake.


The vibe here is that there is a good chance our board will be voted out, for similar reasons. But Kansas has an odd distribution; almost all of the liberals are here in KCK and Wyandotte County, and other parts of the greater Kansas City area, while the rest of the state is very rural and very conservative. So I don't know if the "vibe" is accurate.

The vibe out in Stacia's neck of the woods could be very different.

[glitter-ninja.livejournal.com]

It's not "odd distribution" so much as deliberate districting so that a few conservatives in western Kansas have as much pull as an entire (liberal) city does. I got confirmation of this when working at Farm Bureau; there's a farmer who owns most of two western counties and he has huge political pull thanks to this districting. He's, of course, a Republican.

Didn't the board get voted out last time? I can't remember. I do remember the Governator of Kansas threatening to disband the board completely, so I am not sure what made the school board change its mind on the revote.

The last time this issue came up I worked in the school district, and even the conservative teachers here in Manhattan thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Many were afraid that non-religious teachers forced to explain religious doctrine in school would be teaching Christianity "wrong" and that it was best left to the professionals in a church. I truly believe this is an issue of the school board (who is more decorative than influential in reality) being bought and doing something that does not reflect what the Kansas people want.

As for the vibe, I think most people just are tired of being embarassed to live here. That Mireki guy at KU didn't help any.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The Mirecki situation is horrible... did the cops ever give any reasonable explanation why they had to confiscate his computer? It certainly started a lot of people speculating that child pornography was going to magically appear on his hard drive.

[glitter-ninja.livejournal.com]

Confiscated his computer? When? I went to Google News to check this out and I didn't find any mention of it, at least back to the 10th. Do you have a link?

Personally, and this might surprise you since I'm sure you're painfully aware of my politics, but I don't care for Mirecki's shenanigans. I don't know whether the religious mythology course was Mirecki's idea or the university's. However, it's been widely reported that the course was conceived specifically because of the Intelligent Design fiasco with the state school board. To me, that sounds like a publicity ploy, that KU or Mirecki or both wanted to show the world that Kansas isn't all stupid. I don't believe that's a state university's job, to be in public relations. No matter what state you're in, an atheist teaching a course deliberately designed to prove Christianity wrong is antagonistic. If it was the other way around at a state university, liberals would be livid.

KU has steadfastly maintained that Mirecki dropped the course on his own and resigned from the religious studies council on his own. A spokeswoman has even said that KU wants the religious mythology course taught. That's not the kind of talk that would silence criticism from the religious right; KU is essentially confirming the university wants I.D. taught as mythology. So I don't know how far the idea that KU is dumping Mirecki because of bad press goes.

Further, I admit I don't believe Mirecki got attacked by rednecks. Yes, these kinds of attacks do happen in Kansas, and far too often. But I have to wonder just how these 30-something rednecks knew what car Mirecki was driving, how they could recognize him on sight, and how they knew his schedule well enough to follow him to a semi-secluded rural highway. And why, after the course was cancelled, they still went to the trouble to beat him up just a little. Rednecks who attack for those kinds of reasons usually kill or put people in a coma. At least, here in Manhattan they do. I've never heard of a half-assed, minor injury redneck attack.

I can't help but get rankled at the kind of stereotype that concludes all Kansans are just like the guys in the pickup at the end of "Easy Rider", which is exactly the image that Mirecki's story conjures up. No matter how this turns out, Kansas once again is America's Punchline. The stupid KU course for publicity's sake, the doofy professor who can't keep his biased mouth shut on the Internets, and either a redneck attack or a fake story for sympathy. It's so frustrating.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hmm, the one reference I've found so far to the seizure of Mirecki's computer is in an interview with Mirecki (http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2005/dec/10/professor_blasts_ku_sheriffs_investigation/?ku_news). It's been repeated in a lot of blog rants insinuating without much evidence that the police were involved in the beating; that was where I heard it.

As for the actual course, while Mirecki does seem to be a smartass, I haven't seen any assertions that he was going to try to prove Christianity wrong, just that he was going to teach creationism as mythology. I'd be livid if he taught a course asserting that evolution is a false mythology, but that's just because that isn't true. I know we're supposed to be tolerant of other beliefs and I try to bend over backward for it to some extent, but in the final analysis, to some extent, I approve of teaching stuff I think is true over stuff I think is false.

On the other hand, a well-done mythology-of-evolution course might actually be good and fascinating. There's a popular iconography and mythology of evolution that pervades our culture and often bears little resemblance to the science. For instance, the image of evolution as a linear march of creatures that progressively transformed themselves from "lower" forms to "higher", each form completely supplanting the previous one, which naturally leads to puzzlement as to why there are still apes and fish; or the cartoon cliche of the caveman with drumstick-shaped club dragging a woman by the hair, etc.

[glitter-ninja.livejournal.com]

I think the course could be very fascinating, and we addressed the religion as mythology angle in both my lit courses and anthropology courses when I was in college. (I kept a huge Xerox of a single-panel Claude Levi-Strauss cartoon from one of these courses, which I always pin up in my work area, just to see co-workers reactions.) I got the impression that Mirecki's class was going to be focused on proving Christianity wrong based on Mirecki's own comments on 'net blogs, about shoving ignorance in people's fat faces. I'd look it up but I got Googled out with the whole Jane Hamsher thing in my journal; I'll try and check into it more thoroughly tomorrow. Maybe I'm being biased because of Mirecki's smartassitude.

The idea of teaching what's true versus what's false shouldn't enter into the equation with religious studies in a state-funded school. Any course which is really just propaganda for a certain religion shouldn't be allowed, what with this whole separation of church and state thing.

I dislike religion immensely. I have, on occasion, gone completely off my chum in anger at Christians and the religious right. I feel evolution and religion can co-exist despite people on both sides believing it's one or the other. But I feel religion is ultimately a philosophy and it's not anyone's place to tell someone that they're wrong because of their philosophy, even if the philosophy flies in the face of scientific evidence. Many philosophers ponder ideas which are intangible and can't be proven true or false. Would you disagree with teaching those ideas in philosophy courses?

People who wonder why there are still monkeys when they "all evolved into humans" crack me up. I can't help it. I'm a bad person.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...People here (http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/the_discovery_institute_squeaks_back/#comments) are trying to guess what the next soft-pedaled version of creationism is going to be called. "Sudden Appearance Theory" is in the lead.

[skapusniak.livejournal.com]

Since I have difficulty understanding precisely what it is the fundie dingbats actually object to about evolution -- this possibly has something to do with the fact that my one religious parent's very lackadaisical and mostly accidental attempts at religious brainwashing involved first the Church of England, then the Quakers, and then finally that part of Catholicism that involves the contemplation of writings of Female Mystics who either got burnt at the stake for blackest Heresy or made into Saints, or both -- I'm really not sure whether I could say whether "Sudden Appearance Theory" is a runner for these guys. I suspect the moniker might not sound obviously god-affirming enough to gain the support of the fundie in the street.

However, having read the whole 139 pages of the decision and as a result reminded myself how Intelligent Design is just such a goddamned boring and unoriginal a piece flimflam that it doesn't even reach the level of mildly interesting crackpottery -- Andrea Chen is surely not amused -- I think they really should come up with something with at least a bit more pizzaz for the next time around.

I quite liked the multiple designer stuff I seem to remember someone came up with and even if you were dead set on monotheism you could then at least bring in your Angels, Demons and Saints into the picture which is always a big plus. If that's no go they surely could do something with handwaving about probability density functions at the end of time sucking reality towards it's ultimate end-state of inevitable Logos. "Great Plughole Theory" or something, with the "Great Plumber" wielding his "Sink Plunger of Rapturing" to suck a Fully Quantisised Spacetime in the relevant directions required by scripture as an entirely optional element that we don't mention before the courts.

Doubtless it'd need a catchier name.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The key thing to remember is the Wedge Strategy document. for this particular purpose it's not about sounding sufficiently god-affirming; it's rather the opposite, since the point is to get something into the public schools that passes First Amendment Establishment Clause legal muster but serves as the thin edge of the wedge, and then serve up the rest of the package in homes, churches, TV, etc. once the kids have been given the signal that science leaves an opening. In proceeding from "creationism" to "creation science" to "intelligent design", they're trying to figure out how secular-sounding the euphemism needs to be before it's OK. In a perfect world, this decision would get into their skulls the idea that the whole class of arguments is futile regardless of what words they use, but I doubt that's going to happen.

It's kind of like the situation in which a crackpot trying to post to sci.physics.research knows that the moderators won't let him talk about his disproof of Einstein based on the heat capacity of peanut butter, so he starts posting more and more vague and circumlocutory versions of his argument that don't mention Einstein, heat capacity or peanut butter but attempt to get ideas across through insinuation. If the moderators are sufficiently on the ball, it won't work in the long run, but if he keeps changing the surface trappings, now and then he might be able to slip something past them when they nod for a moment.



As for what they object to about evolution, I think that while the gut-level hook is that it's somehow degrading to consider yourself related to monkeys and worms, the usual justification is a matter of authority. If you question Genesis 1-2, you're questioning the literal textual authority of the Bible. If you question the literal textual authority of the Bible, then you're questioning the thing that Protestant fundamentalists believe provides all relevant instruction for the good and moral life. It may appear that ID theorists aren't claiming anything close to the literal truth of Genesis 1-2, but that's because that's just the edge of the wedge.

Now, technically, what they call "the literal textual authority of the Bible" actually involves a great deal of third-party exegesis and cherry-picking, often of a highly idiosyncratic nature, especially when they get into eschatology. But the selling point for all this stuff is that it's explaining the true meaning of the Bible, and acceptance of the creation story is a convenient shibboleth for whether you're a follower or not.

[skapusniak.livejournal.com]

Obviously, officially not appearing to be "god-affirming" is the whole point, but I think they're going to have problems garnering support from their base if they get too stealthy about it.

'Creation Science' and 'Intelligent Design' are really rather obvious about what they're saying just from the name. I'd suggest that there is a limit to how thin the thin end of the wedge can be and still retain enough power to move people behind it in support. Strategically for them its just as important for it to be obviously religious enough that your average fundie in the street, and the non-fundie -- who may well not know what Genesis 1-2 even is -- who thinks that the evil liberals must be stopped from taking God out of their schools, who haven't read their s00per s3kr1t plan can to get behind it, as it is for it pass constitutional muster.

Mobilising the masses, but not being able to get past the Establishment cause (just now), is way better than not mobilising anybody and theoretically being constitutional. In the later situation you're not going to have anybody with political power enough to push it into the education system, or anyone scared enough of you to let you get away with it. You're just another crackpot loon who no one listens to because you're a crackpot loon. Whereas if you've got sufficient support behind you Constitutions can be altered or worked around, judges can be replaced with ones who think your way, and your pet Politicians can work out how to set up a situation where you and they can get away with ignoring the constitution and the laws.

So, I don't think something labeled 'Sudden Emergence Theory' is going to cut it. It's just not at all obvious from the name where it's going. It sounds much too much like it might actually be a Godless Heathen scientific theory. A plus from the point of view of theoretically getting past the Establishment Cause, very bad for rallying troops who will push for it to be taught in science class to your banner.

[skapusniak.livejournal.com]

Yeeech. Instead of that mess I wrote there, try the following as the last sentence:

'A plus from the point of view of theoretically getting past the Establishment Clause, but very bad for rallying the troops to your banner who will push for it to be taught in Science Class'.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

I read the whole ruling and it was possibly the most enjoyable thing I read all year, fact or fiction. The most delicious quote from the ruling text:

An Objective Observer Would Know that ID and Teaching
About “Gaps” and “Problems” in Evolutionary Theory are
Creationist, Religious Strategies that Evolved from Earlier
Forms of Creationism

How can you not love the phrase "Evolved from Earlier Forms of Creationism?"