So this past Sunday, August 26, 2007, I sat down after my wife and children headed off to their church and decided to watch what had been on television on some random cable channel that morning when the family was watching. It looked like a nature program, talking about life in the oceans. I was watching half-heartedly, computer in my lap while I was typing up another entry, when I heard a word that made my ears perk up and my heart sink:
“Darwinism.”
Now, for those not in the know, this is a special word. It’s special because only one group of people tend to use it: Creationist Christians*, and generally only in one sense. It is a pejorative, carrying with it implications of ignorance, idolatry, and cultism. In this case, they placed the blame for the massacres of the modern age — including the Holocaust — squarely at the feet of these “Darwinists”.
So I paid a bit closer attention. I mean, apparently I’m part of an elite league of mass-murderers. I should probably take notes for the day when I finally grow up and carry out my own personal genocide.
Hot on the heels of the D-word, a few moments later I heard another interviewee use the “E-word”: “Evolutionists”. Yep, like “Darwinists”, this word carries negative connotations, and implies blind devotion to an ideal without regard for consequences. It is also a word almost exclusively used as a pejorative by Creationists. These evil evolutionists are defined by what they believe rather than the color of their skin, I guess.
The film did a good job of making people think those Evolutionists and Darwinists are really, really bad people. I mean, I couldn’t be one of those awful people. I hadn’t shot down a child’s hopes for an education that day. Nor had I shoved a Molotov cocktail down the windpipe of a resident Creationist and lit it on fire. In fact, I didn’t even get my ritual textbook-censoring finished that morning. I hadn’t forced Jesus out of my child’s elementary school with my own Cat-o-nine-tails, or beaten mention of the word “God” out of the vocabulary of a public school teacher.
I guess that makes me remiss in fulfilling my duties as a faithful member of the “Darwinism” church. I didn’t park a twenty-ton rock inscribed with Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit in the main hall of my local courthouse. I haven’t fulfilled my quota of burned Bibles today, nor have I paid my bribes to my local police officers to pull people over for having fish with IXOYE on their bumpers.
There is another word used for people who think Darwin’s ground-breaking work was good science, but, of course, flawed. These people may have their own personal beliefs about God, but they think that these beliefs have no place in a public school science class. They acknowledge when they are proven wrong, but generally aren’t swayed on their opinion about facts by PR campaigns and evangelical television specials.
The word for these people?
“Scientists.”
What does it take for someone to be a scientist? Rigorous dedication to thorough research and supportable conclusions in published papers comes to mind. Every child learns the Scientific Method in school. According to Wikipedia, the “Scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena and acquiring new knowledge.” This is key: it’s a method of investigation and acquiring new knowledge.
If it can’t be used as a method of investigation for acquiring new empirical knowledge, it’s not science. End of line. If you aren’t willing to — or can’t — be proven wrong, what you are promoting isn’t science.
But not to the people I saw on television. They seemed convinced there was a radical conspiracy to outlaw Intelligent Design (ID) from public schools. They pushed the view that the “secularists,” “Darwinists,” and “Evolutionists” are in positions of power, forcing evolution on unsuspecting children and denying ID proponents their rights.
The video tried to cast Creationism as the victim of a massive government ploy to rob children of their Christian heritage. They kept insisting that schools need to teach “both sides” of the issue. This phrase was repeated over and over again, like a mantra of righteous indignation. “Both sides,” with the word “sides” emphasized sometimes, and the word “both” emphasized in others.
Big clue for the makers of this video: there is no “both sides”. There is good science. There is disputed science. And there is bad science. There is a range of gray across the whole spectrum. “Both sides” sounds as if these Creationsts want fact taught together with fiction, melded into a whimsical whole fraught with pseudo-science, superstition, and a small dose of truth to keep the naysayers in line.
If you wanted to cover all sides of the issue — since there are far more creation myths than just the Christian one — then do so. Somewhere other than Science class, because at that point it’s not science anymore. If Intelligent Design is “science”, it is very bad science. The hypotheses are untestable and unprovable from the evidence. It’s not a method of investigation or acquiring new knowledge. It is an intellectual dead-end, a giving-up on hope for answers in favor of farcical well-wishing.
Now, I’m absolutely in favor of educating children on the issues. Let’s hear about the intelligent design vs. evolution “debate” — decidedly one-sided, since there is little debate in the scientific community about whether evolution happened, just how it happened — in classrooms. Let’s teach that there are two opposing positions in the US political arena, and a far different situation abroad. Let’s get children involved in debating one another about some of these questions, with a focus on having them learn to support their arguments regardless of whether they personally agree with the position or not.
Let’s talk about that in debate class. Or politics class. Or perhaps American History. Science class is for instruction in facts, not an unsupportable hypothesis like “my god did it.”
Evolution is no mere hypothesis. It’s a theory, tested and repeatedly proven for over a hundred years. What form exact changes take is hotly contested, and there are worlds of research available in the field to understand how these changes happen. Debate about specifics in the scientific community is a sign of a healthy community. You’ll see these in abundance. It does not indicate that there is any dispute about the basic fact of evolution underlying so many useful, life-saving science advances.
The Luddites who produced this video are no better than flat-earthers, trying to carry humanity back to a more primitive, violent age by blaming the Holocaust on evolution. They are doing a disservice to their country, their God, and their fellow citizens by advocating hate for science, and I will oppose this type of anti-facts disinformation campaign whenever I see it.
(Side note: I’d like to buy a copy of their video so that I can write a fuller critique, since I only saw part of it. However, on their page they say to make a donation of “any amount” to get the video. While I’m not opposed to exchanging money for goods, I am opposed to making a “donation” to a cause which I vehemently oppose. Should I just donate a dollar and cost them money to send me the video?)
( *Creationists don’t like to be called Dominionists or Christianists for similar reasons.)
