« Creationism
November 5, 2007
Animatronic Humans, Dinos Cohabitating: A Recipe for Success at Creationism Museum
USA Today reports that the $27 million Creation Museum, which Answers in Genesis opened last May in Petersburg, Kentucky, is exceeding its attendance expectations:
Halfway into its first year, it is on the verge of surpassing its projected year-long attendance goal of 250,000. Officials now expect nearly 400,000 people to pass through the doors by year's end.
"It's been a surprise," said spokeswoman Melany Ethridge, who attributed it to the dramatic exhibits and ongoing media interest from Europe and elsewhere.
While much of that attendance is likely comprised of Christian schools and church groups showing support for young-Earth creationism, the museum has also benefited from wide publicity. In May, Answers in Genesis distributed an elaborate press kit, including a “video news release.” VNRs are pre-produced news segments, complete with fake reporters, that many cash-strapped local TV stations will air with little or no editing or attribution.
Also included in the press kit was this sample science video, a recreation of the deluge:
You can hear screams in the background, but we are hopeful that no scientists were actually harmed in the making of that exhibit.
Posted by Ezra at 6:15 PM | Permalink
September 28, 2007
Creationist Film Crew Not 'Honest' in Landing Interviews
As we noted earlier this month, Ben Stein—of Richard Nixon and “Ferris Bueller” fame—is starring in an anti-evolution documentary called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” While the movie isn’t set to be released until February, scientists are already accusing its producers of dishonesty—and not for claiming that “Intelligent Design” creationism is a valid scientific theory. As various outlets are reporting, several scientists well known for refuting anti-evolution activists say the producers for the film hid their agenda, portraying the project innocently as “Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion” (still listed on the web site of the supposed production company).
From the New York Times:
If he had known the film’s premise, Dr. Dawkins said in an e-mail message, he would never have appeared in it. “At no time was I given the slightest clue that these people were a creationist front,” he said.
Eugenie C. Scott, a physical anthropologist who heads the National Center for Science Education, said she agreed to be filmed after receiving what she described as a deceptive invitation.
“I have certainly been taped by people and appeared in productions where people’s views are different than mine, and that’s fine,” Dr. Scott said, adding that she would have appeared in the film anyway. “I just expect people to be honest with me, and they weren’t.” …
Walt Ruloff, a producer and partner in Premise Media [producer of “Expelled”], also denied that there was any deception. Mr. Ruloff said in a telephone interview that Rampant Films [which approached the scientists as producers of “Crossroads”] was a Premise subsidiary, and that the movie’s title was changed on the advice of marketing experts, something he said was routine in filmmaking. …
Another scientist who was, P. Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, said the film’s producers had misrepresented its purpose, but said he would have agreed to an interview anyway. But, he said in a posting on The Panda’s Thumb Web site, he would have made a “more aggressive” attack on the claims of the movie.
As for Stein, who rails in the movie against the scientific establishment’s supposed unsavory suppression of creationism, he claims innocence, adding that if he had his druthers, the movie would be called “From Darwin to Hitler”—an homage, perhaps, to the late televangelist D. James Kennedy.
Posted by Ezra at 5:49 PM | Permalink
September 24, 2007
Federal Funds Earmarked for Far-Right Group to 'Combat Evolution'
Over the weekend, the New Orleans Times-Picayune revealed that a federal spending bill contains a substantial sum of money budgeted for the Louisiana Family Forum, apparently for the purpose of combating the teaching of evolution and global warming in public schools. The earmark, inserted by Republican Sen. David Vitter, provides $100,000 to the group for the purpose of “develop[ing] a plan to promote better science education,” but as the newspaper points out, LFF has been a leading advocate of creationism in the state:
The group's stated mission is to "persuasively present biblical principles in the centers of influence on issues affecting the family through research, communication and networking." Until recently, its Web site contained a "battle plan to combat evolution," which called the theory a "dangerous" concept that "has no place in the classroom." The document was removed after a reporter's inquiry. …
In 2002, the Louisiana Family Forum unsuccessfully sought to persuade the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to insert a five-paragraph disclaimer in all of its science texts challenging the natural science view that life came about by accident and has evolved through the process of natural selection.
The group notched a victory last year when the Ouachita School Board adopted a policy that, without mentioning the Bible or creationism, gave teachers leeway to introduce other views besides those contained in traditional science texts.
LFF, a “family policy council” affiliated with Focus on the Family, was founded in 1999 by Tony Perkins, before he became president of the Family Research Council and gained national prominence.
Vitter defended the earmark as an “important program” that “helps supplement and support educators and school systems that would like to offer all of the explanations in the study of controversial science topics such as global warming and the life sciences.”
The money in the earmark will pay for a report suggesting "improvements" in science education in Louisiana, the development and distribution of educational materials and an evaluation of the effectiveness of the Ouachita Parish School Board's 2006 policy that opened the door to biblically inspired teachings in science classes.
Vitter made news this summer when phone records from the “D.C. Madam” showed him to be a customer of a prostitution ring while he served in Congress. While Rev. Gene Mills, director of Louisiana Family Forum, said the $100,000 earmark is “a bit of a surprise,” it’s hard not to notice that Mills has been one of the few voices coming to Vitter's defense. In this interview, which LFF posted online two weeks, ago, Mills claimed that comparisons with this summer’s other Republican senator involved in a sex scandal—Idaho’s Larry Craig, who was caught in a bathroom solicitation sting—were a matter of the media doing “what it can to smear any of the family values guys.”
Posted by Ezra at 5:31 PM | Permalink
September 7, 2007
Anyone? Anyone? Hitler?
Ben Stein, the Nixon speechwriter immortalized by his acting role as a boring schoolteacher in the 1986 movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” is returning to movie academia in a documentary about “Intelligent Design” creationism. “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” sets out to expose what Stein calls “widespread suppression and entrenched discrimination that is spreading in our institutions, laboratories and most importantly, in our classrooms” in the form of the general rejection of ID—an outgrowth of creation science based on the premise that life is so complex it must have been created by God directly rather than through an evolutionary process—as a valid scientific theory.
“Expelled” paints ID advocates as the “rebels” of a “new scientific movement” doing battle against atheists and a world without morality. Like an earlier video produced by the late D. James Kennedy, “Expelled” attempts to link Darwin’s theory of evolution with Hitler and Nazi Germany; the film will feature shots of concentration camps to make that point.
While “Expelled” isn’t likely to advance acceptance of “scientific” study of the supernatural or move ID from the scholarly fringe, it will probably find a welcome audience among anti-evolution activists who look to ID as a back-door way to put creationism back in schools. The marketer who helped make “The Passion of the Christ” a blockbuster by promoting directly through churches is hoping to work the same magic on “Expelled,” so the film’s makers can hope for a constituency reenergized to engage the political debate, if not the scientific debate. That, after all, is the point of ID.
Posted by Ezra at 4:40 PM | Permalink
July 23, 2007
Evolution Teachers Threatened at Colorado University
In his latest column, Chuck Norris launches into a familiar gripe of the Right, warning parents that college campuses today into hotbeds of “liberal bias” and “indoctrination.” One example employed by the Right is the recent failure of an Iowa State professor to be granted tenure, supposedly due to his advocacy of “Intelligent Design” creationism. (That’s leaving aside a more obvious explanation: Perhaps if he spent more time on astronomy than creationism, he would have been able to bring in more outside grant money.)
It seems at least one creationist is fighting back – and apparently threatening to use Chuck Norris methods.
An anti-evolution activist who has been targeting biology professors at the University of Colorado at Boulder is implicated in distributing threatening letters two weeks ago, calling teachers of evolution “child molesters” and “terrorists” and repeating the line “every true Christian should be ready and willing to take up arms to kill the enemies of Christian society”:
Last weekend more than a dozen envelopes bearing the image of skull and crossbones and containing letters threatening the lives of CU-Boulder evolutionary biology professors were slipped under the doors of CU-Boulder buildings. …
“EBIO (evolutionary biology) professors are terrorists against America and … intellectual and spiritual child abusers of their young and impressionable students … the EBIO department not only blasphemes God, who is invisible, but it blasphemes His Only Begotten Son and our Messiah, Jesus Christ, which is more unforgivable … for all these reason all God-fearing and Truth-loving persons must say, They must go!”
The evolution blog Panda’s Thumb has more information, including excerpts from the letters.
Posted by Ezra at 5:33 PM | Permalink
June 6, 2007
Moderators, Huckabee Miss Point: Whether Creationism Taught in Public School
In last night’s Republican presidential debate, moderators returned to the subject of evolution, pressing former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee:
Huckabee gave an elegant answer to the inept question -- “I’m not planning on writing the curriculum for an eight-grade science book. I’m asking for the opportunity to be president of the United States,” he said. The idea that the president won't set science curriculum seems to echo the conservative view of federal versus state policymaking authority, but in practice the president may have a role doing just that.
In the midst of a heightened period of debate two years ago over teaching “Intelligent Design” creationism in public school science class, culminating in a federal judge repudiating the Dover, Pennsylvania school board, President Bush spoke out in favor of injecting creationism into curriculum, helping to legitimize ID proponents’ case. “With the president endorsing it, at the very least it makes Americans who have that position more respectable, for lack of a better phrase,” said Gary Bauer.
And the president’s role may even extend beyond shaping the terms of debate to setting actual policy. During congressional debate over Bush’s signature No Child Left Behind education plan, among the provisions considered was the so-called Santorum Amendment, containing language designed to make ID an integral part of science standards across the country. Although the amendment was rejected, confusion around the legislation caused many ID supporters (including Santorum) to imply that it was law. At the very least, this shows that a future president could potential be in position to implement an anti-evolution policy for public schools.
As we noted after the last debate, Huckabee expressed support for teaching creationism when governor of Arkansas. Last night, while Huckabee seemed to state that the theory of evolution is incompatible with belief in God, he correctly noted that his personal belief (much less his understanding of science) does not necessarily bear on public policy. But the policy question of whether creationism belongs in public school science class, on the other hand, is very relevant to the job.
(Via Ross Douthat.)
Posted by Ezra at 5:44 PM | Permalink
May 24, 2007
Creationism Museum Set to Open Monday
No plans for Memorial Day? The Creation Museum, a $27 million production of Answers in Genesis, is finally opening in northern Kentucky. From the New York Times:
The entrance gates here are topped with metallic Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be like any other natural history museum, luring families with the promise of immense fossils and dinosaur adventures.
But step a little farther into the entrance hall, and you come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall, thoroughly at home in the natural world. Dinosaurs cavort nearby, their animatronic mechanisms turning them into alluring companions, their gaping mouths seeming not threatening, but almost welcoming, as an Apatosaurus munches on leaves a few yards away. …
[The scene] serves as a vivid introduction to the sheer weirdness and daring of this museum created by the Answers in Genesis ministry that combines displays of extraordinary nautilus shell fossils and biblical tableaus, celebrations of natural wonders and allusions to human sin. Evolution gets its continual comeuppance, while biblical revelations are treated as gospel.
Last year, Answers in Genesis complained that a museum tour of “Lucy,” the remains of a 3-million-year-old human ancestor, was “anti-creationist hype.” The group’s own museum will also feature fossils, but presented as cohabitants of the world of Noah and passengers on his ark.
Oddly enough, the American Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., is opening its own new exhibit on Saturday. But the museum maintains that the subjects of the “Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns, and Mermaids” exhibit “are found only in folktales and other stories.”
Posted by Ezra at 6:11 PM | Permalink
May 17, 2007
Anti-Evolution Billboards in Oregon, Georgia Demonstrate Man, Monkey Look Different
Group promotes teaching creationism in public school.
Posted by Ezra at 11:59 PM | Permalink
May 8, 2007
GOP Candidates Wrestle with Creationism
Last Thursday, the American Enterprise Institute hosted a debate on “Darwinism and Conservatism” in which Discovery Institute fellows John West and George Gilder sought to persuade conservatives that the scientific theory of evolution is incompatible with their political ideology, no doubt by attempting to link evolution to eugenics and abortion. That same night, the idea was tested in a more practical theater: the Republican presidential debate. John McCain was asked whether he believes in evolution – his answer, after a pause, was yes. Then the co-moderater asked for a show of hands:
Tom Tancredo, Sam Brownback, and Mike Huckabee all indicated they did not believe in evolution. (According to Janet Folger, Duncan Hunter later said the same.) But more important than whether a candidate believes in or even understands evolution is whether he would make efforts to counter evolution a part of public education policy. Indeed, John McCain – who reached out to the creationist Discovery Institute recently – has apparently said he supported teaching “Intelligent Design” creationism in science class alongside evolution (although he backed down a little bit).
Huckabee elaborated on his answer in the presidential debate, saying “he has no problem with teaching evolution as a theory in the public schools and he doesn't expect schools to teach creationism” as the AP reported. He added, “I wouldn't want them teaching creationism as if it's the only thing that they should teach.” More specifically, as governor of Arkansas he responded to concerns that students weren’t learning about evolution by advocating the teaching of creationism:
I think that the state ought to give students exposure to all points of view. And I would hope that that would be all points of view and not only evolution. I think that they also should be given exposure to the theories not only of evolution but to the basis of those who believe in creationism …
As for whether evolution is compatible with conservatism: at least one far-right activist says No. Watching the debate, Faith2Action’s Janet Folger whittled down the field of contenders based on their positions on abortion, stem cell research, national ID cards, and evolution:
When McCain was asked about evolution, he said: "I believe in evolution. But, I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon and see it at sunset, that the hand of God is there also." McCain didn't want to look so "foolish" as to suggest that God could have actually pulled off a creation such as the Grand Canyon, but wanted to throw Him a bone with His "hand" in the sunset. Mighty nice of him. …
Liberal moderator Chris Matthews [sic – Politico reporter Jim VandeHei], in a "surely no one actually believes the first verse of the Bible" tone, asked, "I'm curious. Is there anybody on the stage that does not believe in evolution?" While the news reported three, after a round of calls, the forth [sic], Duncan Hunter (not Ron Paul), was among those who stood for Creation:
· Brownback
· Tancredo
· Huckabee
· HunterHow about this? Let's have a debate with the men still standing.
Posted by Ezra at 5:53 PM | Permalink
May 1, 2007
Discovery Institute's West at FRC: Eugenics a 'Corollary' of Evolution
Creationist “scholar” also points to abortion.
Posted by Ezra at 11:59 PM | Permalink
Older Creationism posts: