Larry Klayman: Federal Judges Are Human

Kangaroo Court

Our federal legal system has become the focus of the latest political battle and Larry Klayman has now weighed in, explaining that the federal judiciary is “politicized, frequently intellectually dishonest and in some quarters even totally corrupt.” Klayman adds that federal judges “frequently take the bench after confirmation without any training in how to be a judge.” What Klayman could have added is that such problems are not confined to the backwaters of the judiciary.

Consider Judge John Jones—exalted as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year—who unbelievably revealed that he wanted to see the movie Inherit the Wind a second time in preparation for the famous 2005 Dover case, over which he presided, because, after all, the film puts the origins debate into its proper “historical context.”

That is shocking.

Jones had been so indoctrinated by the Warfare Thesis that he actually believed the evolutionary propaganda to be historically accurate. What an incredible misconception.

Jones later reminisced about the trial, explaining that “I understood the general theme. I’d seen Inherit the Wind.”

If ever there was an example of judicial bias and a predetermined verdict, this is it.

Inherit the Wind: Evolution is an Illusion

It’s Where They Wanted To Go

In the original Star Trek pilot entitled “The Cage,” the Enterprise receives a distress signal from a long lost exploration vessel. The signal was transmitted 20 years ago, and the Enterprise responds hoping to find survivors. The landing party arrives at the planet’s surface and, indeed, they find elderly crew members who have carved out a living for themselves on the distant planet. It is a futuristic version of “The Swiss Family Robinson,” but there’s just one problem: It is all an illusion.

The planet has an advanced civilization living underground. They produced an illusion that was exactly what Captain Pike wanted to see. The elderly crew, happily and resourcefully making a life for themselves was exactly what everyone was hoping for (click now on video).

It is the same with evolution’s poster child, Inherit the Wind. Whereas Arthur Miller was worried critics would think he was skewing history for a mere partisan purpose with his brilliant play, The Crucible, [1] Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee had no such compunction in writing their blatantly false, two-dimensional cartoon version of the 1925 Monkey Trial.

When Miller travelled to Salem he uncovered something profound. The Witch Trial records were eerily parallel to the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1940s. His task was not to contrive a silly fiction, but to reveal a dangerous, and all too real, stain within humanity. False accusations, smears, character assassination, black-balling, secret lists, group-think, and cowardice. It was all there.

Unlike The Crucible, Inherit the Wind fails to uncover in Dayton, Tennessee, an underlying theme or connection to McCarthyism. So Lawrence and Lee did something Miller never did—they constructed a false illusion.

John Scopes becomes a humble and tireless science teacher hauled off to jail by an angry mob of fundamentalists, led by a vitriolic Reverend Jeremiah Brown, for trying to enlighten his science students. In fear for his life he contacts journalist Henry Louis Mencken for help in securing a lawyer. The townspeople march in protest, singing hymns, and the William Jennings Bryan character—a loudmouth glutton—is slayed by the Clarence Darrow protagonist. None of this ever happened.

This is the mythological Warfare Thesis set to script. Inherit the Wind is an enduring and durable tale not because it uncovers an important truth but because it plays to humanity’s weakest tendencies. The script presents a false reality. It is a mythical tale using the 1925 Monkey Trial to gain an aura of realism.

As NT Wright said of Darwin, the reason why Inherit the Wind gets the mileage that it does is because that is where people wanted to go.

As with “The Cage,” the illusion is what people want to believe. Just as the alien civilization produced an illusion that was precisely what Captain Pike would want to see, Inherit the Wind is precisely the Warfare Thesis illusion that evolutionists want to see. Flyover country is full of dangerous, anti-intellectual, fundamentalists who need to be set straight by the likes of Spencer Tracy.

Inherit the Wind, and the broader Warfare Thesis myth, have fueled precisely what Miller helped to expose. Inherit the Wind claims to oppose the dangerous, anti-intellectual, fundamentalism, but, in fact, it reinforced it. Instead of labelling people as communists, they are now labelled as anti-science. Otherwise the scene remains complete with the usual false accusations, character smears, black-balling, secret lists, group-think, and cowardice. It’s all still there.

Evolutionists are the dangerous, anti-intellectual, fundamentalists. The American Bar Association absurdly rates Inherit the Wind as one of the top legal movies of all time.

And the ABA is not simply a lone nut. Legal expert Andrew Cohen not only gave high praise to Inherit the Wind, but ridiculously called it “one of the great trial movies of all time.”

Judge John Jones—exalted as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year—unbelievably revealed that he actually wanted to see Inherit the Wind a second time in preparation for the 2005 Dover case, over which he presided, because, after all, the film puts the origins debate into its proper “historical context.”

Proper historical context? You’ve got to be kidding.

What a classic mistrial. Jones had been so indoctrinated by the Warfare Thesis that he actually believed the evolutionary propaganda to be historically accurate. If the perfect crime is the one that is never discovered, the perfect propaganda is the one that is never understood. Jones later reminisced about the trial, unbelievably explaining that “I understood the general theme. I’d seen Inherit the Wind.”  Jones was not educated, he was brainwashed.

It’s where they wanted to go.

1. Arthur Miller, “Why I Wrote ‘The Crucible’,” The New Yorker, Oct 21, 1996.

Federal Court Rejects Law Limiting Abortion

We only whisper it

On Friday judges in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an Idaho law banning abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The judges argued that the law is unconstitutional because it “categorically bans some abortions before viability.”

Unfortunately abortion is one of the many horrifying fruits of evolutionary thought and this ruling demonstrates how such thought continues to influence American jurisprudence. How, for example, can a law that bans murder be unconstitutional?

The evolutionary justification—that murder is constitutional when the victim is not “viable”—is not true nor is it ethical. With evolution the engine of progress is death, and evolutionary thinking has spawned such horrors as eugenics and abortion. It became fashionable to see the weak, the sick, and the non viable as not worthy of the same rights everyone else enjoys, even the very right to life. In short, it is OK to kill them (see here, here, here, here, here, and here).

As Nietzsche put it, it is the weak “who most undermine life among human beings.” Today we celebrate the murder of the most weak of all—the unborn, for they are a threat to our well-being. As Roe v. Wade lawyer Ron Weddington explained to the newly elected President Bill Clinton, “You can start immediately to eliminate [with inexpensive abortifacients] the barely educated, unhealthy, and poor segment of our country.” For Weddington it makes sense to murder such babies but, he explained, “we only whisper it.”

This is evolutionary logic at work. The problem here is the Constitution nowhere tells us that one’s rights are contingent on one’s viability. The right to life does not fade with strength, health, wealth or any other status. It would be difficult to imagine a greater perversion of ethics. It is precisely the weak, the powerless and, yes, the non "viable" who need special protections.

The problem is not with our judges. They work hard and do their best to make our system work. The problem is with evolutionary thought.

Evolutionary Thought in Action: There is No Law

The Storyteller is in Control

In evolutionary thought there is no law. Consider for example the string of cosmological theories that emerged in the eighteenth century. Bernoulli, Buffon, Kant and Laplace presented various, and mostly contradictory, ideas for the origins of the solar system. The common thread was that in all cases the idea was presented as true, and the idea relied on so many contingencies rather than on the necessary consequences of natural law. Newton’s laws of physics dictated the flight of a cannon ball, but these theories of cosmological evolution were driven by unique, happenstance events amongst the heavenly bodies. And after Laplace the march of uncooperative astronomical observations made for even more contingencies. It was not the application of natural law but of ingenious narratives that told the story. By the twentieth century the competing theories resembled something like cosmic pinball games, with all manner of just-so collisions and events leading to the eventual formation of our solar system. Similarly, the new theories of biological evolution, begun in earnest by Charles Darwin, were also driven by what evolutionists believed were reasonable and good explanations rather than what little the unforgiving laws of science could render. This dismissal of natural law in favor of common sense narrative is important because, given the immense influence of evolutionary thought, it has gone far beyond the mere scientific world.

Evolution has introduced into science the art of story-telling where the story tellers, rather than the rules of science, are in control. Evolution is a narrative, not an appeal to scientific principles and laws. Evolutionary events are “unique, unrepeatable, and irreversible” in the words of famous evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky. Or as Harvard’s Ernst Mayr wrote, “Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques” for explaining evolutionary events and processes.

Evolution’s rejection of law seems to have translated to, more generally, a loss of principle. Evolutionists, for example, think nothing of tarnishing the good name of all who disagree with them. After all, they are a threat to science and the truth. No matter how accomplished, skeptics can expect discrimination. Blackballing, secret lists and delegitimization are all used to deny academic and professional benefits enjoyed by evolutionists.

Given the immense influence of evolutionary thought, it may not be surprising that this rejection of law goes beyond scientific squabbles. After all, evolution is the most influential theory in areas outside of science, in the history of science. Evolutionary science, whether cosmological or biological, resists the constraints of law, and for centuries we have likewise resisted the laws and principles of the land when inconvenient.

This week presidential hopeful Rick Perry gave an excellent example of this pervasive mode of thought. Commenting favorably on the on-going unlawful surveillance associated with controversial legislation, Perry explained that the law needs to be compromised:

we’ve been a country that always balanced our civil liberties against protecting our citizens. And that’s what this debate is about. But I will always, I will always err on the side of defending our citizens’ safety, but again being very mindful that our civil liberties don’t need to be trampled on. And if there are agencies or people that are abusing that, they need to be held accountable, and use every bit of the power of this country to punish anyone who is using the Patriot Act in a way that is not appropriate. And when I talk about appropriate, we all, I think, understand what I’m talking about here.

Perry, who if elected presumably would take an oath to uphold the law, explains that lawfully protected freedoms must be “balanced” with protections and that he will always make the law subservient to his common sense concerns. For Perry citizens are not guaranteed legal protections and that is appropriate because, after all, we all understand “what I’m talking about here.” Well at least we know that unlawful surveillance isn’t what he is talking about. As with evolution, the narrative trumps the law.

The fact that a presidential candidate would promote this ends-justifies-the-means view illustrates how pervasive it is. For centuries lawfully protected rights and freedoms have been “balanced” for those whom such protections didn’t seem appropriate. With evolutionary thought there is no law.

Workshop on Scientific Imperialism

An Abundance of Material

Don’t miss the Workshop on Scientific Imperialism in Helsinki next April where attendees will consider whether “conventions and procedures of one discipline or field are imposed on other fields, or more weakly when a scientific discipline seeks to explain phenomena that are traditionally considered proper of another discipline’s domain.” Keynote Speaker Stephen Downes will ask  “Is the Appeal to Evolution in Explanations of Human Behavior a Case of Scientific Imperialism?”

The answer is “yes,” but human behavior is only the beginning of a long list. Evolution is by far the most influential theory in the history of science and its influence spreads not only to other areas of science, but well outside of science as well.

One of evolution’s early moves outside of science was in historiography where Darwin’s friend and champion Thomas Huxley began the construction of the history of thought from an evolutionary perspective. Evolutionary theory was motivated and mandated by religious premises, but Huxley reversed the roles and cast evolution as objective, truth-seeking science and the opposition as misguided religious believers. Thus, in this Warfare Thesis, science was opposed by religion, rather than informed and constrained by religion.

An important tool that was instrumental in spreading the Warfare Thesis far beyond evolutionary studies and into the broader culture was the play and movie Inherit the Wind. The Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee script was all that Huxley could have dreamt of, casting the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial as a conflict between the rational evolutionists and the irrational faithful.

Inherit the Wind is fictional propaganda that evolutionists continue to use to this day and remains widely influential. As Judge John Jones astonishingly explained, he wanted to see Inherit the Wind a second time in preparation for the 2005 Dover case, over which he presided, because the film puts the origins debate into its proper “historical context.” Jones later reminisced about the trial, explaining that “I understood the general theme. I’d seen Inherit the Wind.” The federal judge’s over-the-top naiveté was a manifestation of evolution’s anti-intellectualism.

Another important early evolutionary spinoff was eugenics “science” and abortion. Nietzsche proclaimed that it was the sick, the oppressed, the broken and the weak, rather than evil men, who were the greatest threat to humanity. And Margaret Sanger promoted her racism and sexual immorality in what would become the abortion movement. The American eugenics movement and both World War I and later the horrors of the German Nazis were all influenced by evolution’s pseudo science.

More recently the abortion movement has grown and eugenics continues to be advocated. Lawlessness and immorality escalated with the legalization of abortion in the Roe v. Wade decision and its inherent racism. As Roe v. Wade lawyer Ron Weddington explained to the newly elected President Bill Clinton, “You can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy, and poor segment of our country,” with inexpensive abortifacients. Weddington explained that he was not advocating mass extinction of these unfortunate people because “Crime, drugs and disease are already doing that. The problem is that their numbers are not only replaced but increased by the birth of millions of babies to people who can’t afford to have babies. There, I’ve said it. It’s what we all know is true, but we only whisper it, because as liberals who believe in individual rights, we view any program which might treat the disadvantaged differently as discriminatory, mean-spirited and … well … so Republican.”

Likewise Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described Roe v. Wade as intended to control population growth, “particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” And you know what that means. And restrictions on abortion simply exacerbate the problem because “the impact of all these restrictions is on poor women,” and “It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people.”

It is little wonder that University of Texas evolutionist Eric Pianka receives standing ovations and awards for his advocacy of the elimination of 90% of the human population.

Eugenics, abortion and population control are, unfortunately, by no means the end of evolution’s deconstructionism. Evolution does away with law, common sense and morality. Scientific laws, as evolutionists explain, are not appropriate when explaining the creation of the world. For despite appearances and the hard scientific evidence, the world must have arisen spontaneously. It is a narrative of sheer absurdity. But we control it, and one consequence is moral relativism. Morality is seen as the result of evolutionary history. Right and wrong are determined by the haphazard configurations of molecules in our head.

Yes, there is plenty of material for Workshop on Scientific Imperialism in Helsinki next April.

Climate Justice: It’s Only Getting Stronger

The Warfare Thesis in Action

James Lawrence Powell holds a Ph.D. in Geochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, taught Geology at Oberlin College for over 20 years, served as Acting President of Oberlin, President of Franklin and Marshall College, President of Reed College, President of the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, and President and Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. President Reagan and later, President George H. W. Bush, appointed Powell to the National Science Board, where he served for 12 years. He is the author of eleven books and currently serves as Executive Director of the National Physical Science Consortium. James Lawrence Powell also believes in AGW (anthropogenic, or man-made, global warming).

Powell has created what some are calling the one chart that proves AGW. It is a pie chart comparing scientific papers about “global warming,” “global climate change,” or “climate change.” Powell has reviewed these papers and found that only a couple dozen of them, out of almost 14,000, reject AGW. So what can we conclude, Powell asks.

According to Powell, these papers demonstrate that there is a mountain of scientific evidence in favor of AGW and no convincing evidence against it. That those who deny anthropogenic global warming have no alternative theory to explain the observed rise in atmospheric CO2 and global temperature. And that these two facts together mean that the so-called debate over global warming is an illusion, a hoax conjured up by a handful of apostate scientists and a misguided and sometimes colluding media, aided and abetted by funding from fossil fuel companies and right wing foundations.

An over-the-top caricature? No, I’m quoting from Powell’s site. For Powell it is all about the Warfare Thesis, with the truth-seeking scientists in their unstained clean white lab coats on the one side, and the unwashed, unruly superstitious mob fueled by sinister forces on the other side:

On the one side, we have a mountain of scientific evidence, on the other, ideology and arm-waving. On that basis, we are endangering our grandchildren’s future and pushing humanity toward the destruction of civilization.

I have no idea what Powell’s motives are, but given his background it would be surprising if Powell actually believed any of this. Perhaps so, but anyone vaguely familiar with the world of science knows that counting papers is not the way to scientific realism and truth. There are so many obvious, well known problems with Powell’s logic here it is difficult to know where to begin.

First, notice that Powell did not actually say that the 14,000 papers proved or demonstrated AGW. That’s because they don’t. Powell is an inside player and he knows not to make such a mistake.

In science, research programs tend to work within paradigms. Scientists are not forever questioning theories as the textbooks like to say; rather, they explore the details of the paradigm they are working within, whether or not they are true or make sense of the data. That’s a generalization, but in many fields it is often true.

If you look for papers with keywords such as “global warming,” “global climate change,” and “climate change,” as did Powell, then you’re going to find papers that are exploring AGW not questioning it.

That’s the way science works, and Powell of course knows this.

Imagine 50 years ago searching through papers about neo Darwinism and the New Synthesis and wondering whether the papers will be for or against evolution. That would be silly. The ratio would be at least as skewed as Powell’s pie chart.

But of course today we know that neo Darwinism is false. Mutations are not neutral, and the adaptation we observe is not slow and caused by the selection of blind variation. And even evolutionists agree that there must be some other mechanism to account for large-scale evolutionary change.

This is by no means an isolated example. The history of science is full of examples of paradigms gone wrong, masses of scientists who go along to get along, and non scientific influences. Social pressures, political pressures, funding pressures, career and prestige pressures—they are part of the job.

And no less so in the field of climatology where heavy-handed AGW zealots have engaged in political maneuvering, peer review manipulation, blackballing, and so forth.

Meanwhile AGW has not fared well on the science. To the point that serious thinkers are voicing concerns. The science is just not that simple.

But it never was about the science. As usual, this is not about the facts, it is about the narrative. Powell had that part right, and it is only getting stronger. Academics are calling for the incarceration of AGW skeptics, and powerful politicians, only a little less enraged, want malpractice suits. NASA scientist James Hansen told Congress that oil company CEOs “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.” You can see more examples here, here.

It really doesn’t matter whether the Earth is cooling, warming, or maintaining an equilibrium, any scenario can be cast into the narrative of the good guys versus the bad guys. That narrative was nowhere more obvious than in yesterday’s Climate March in New York City where Leonardo DiCaprio refused to answer questions about his yacht and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. accused industrialists who do not agree with AGW of treason and said they should be imprisoned as war criminals. Likeminded politicians are “contempable human beings,” though the son of the late great Attorney General lamented that they could not be prosecuted.

What we are seeing are classic defamation tactics. Evolution’s Warfare Thesis has lit all kinds of fires and emotions are running high. With evolution there is no law, just narrative. Today it focuses on climate, but it could jump to any number of issues.

So is AGW true? I have no idea. But neither does Powell, Kennedy and the rest. And we’re not going to figure it out with vigilante justice fueled by pseudo science.

Here’s Something Orwell Didn’t Predict

Health Warnings for Anyone Who Disagrees With AGW

According to a report from The Times earlier this year, policy makers in Britain are attempting to enforce AGW (anthropogenic, or man-made, global warming) by mandating politicians who are skeptical to “shut up” about it and the BBC to give less airtime to anyone who points out its many scientific problems. One mechanism that was recommended was to have appearances by such trouble-makers accompanied by health warnings. How about stickers in textbooks?

Here is the Latest Example of Evolution Undermining Law

A Falsification of Evolution Becomes a Legal Premise

Evolution is not merely a scientific mistake. It is not a theory gone wrong, started by a guy in 1859. Evolutionary thinking was alive and well when Charles Darwin codified it in the emerging life sciences, for it had been developed and promoted by theologians and philosophers since the seventeenth century. If you understand that history, then today’s world makes much more sense. It is often said that evolution is the most influential scientific theory, but that is because evolution isn’t just a scientific theory, it is a broader world view. So with the dominance of evolution comes a wide array of influences, in government and in society, and across the political spectrum. Another example of this came last week when the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled that laws in Indiana and Wisconsin, defining marriage to be between a man and a woman, are unconstitutional.

While it is no secret that evolutionary premises now inform opinions across the political spectrum, this decision (written by a Reagan appointee) made those premises explicit as it cites evolutionary research and is based on the assumption that evolution is true. Its point is that homosexuality is a result of evolution so therefore gay marriage should be a legal right.

Should we point out that evolution is scientifically flawed? Or should we point out that homosexuality, the usual mental gymnastics of evolutionists notwithstanding, makes no sense under evolution? Remember that part about reproductive success?

It is all reminiscent of Judge John Jones—exalted as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year—hilariously revealing that he actually wanted to see Inherit the Wind a second time in preparation for the 2005 Dover case, over which he presided, because, after all, the film puts the origins debate into its proper “historical context.”

Proper historical context? You’ve got to be kidding.

What a classic mistrial. Jones had been so indoctrinated by the Warfare Thesis that he actually believed the evolutionary propaganda to be historically accurate. If the perfect crime is the one that is never discovered, the perfect propaganda is the one that is never understood. Jones later reminisced about the trial, unbelievably explaining that “I understood the general theme. I’d seen Inherit the Wind.”  Jones was not educated, he was brainwashed.

And unfortunately Jones is not simply a lone nut. Legal expert Andrew Cohen not only gave high praise to Inherit the Wind, but absurdly called it “one of the great trial movies of all time.” The movie is a fictional construct, based on the fictional Warfare Thesis erected by evolutionists, and long since discredited by historians. Are they showing it in law schools these days?

So the Seventh Circuit’s explicit premise of evolution is not surprising. It is simply a confirmation that dangerous ignorance pervades the highest levels of power.

About That Law Banning Creationism

Just One Problem

As regular readers of this blog know, evolutionists use the label “creationist” not just for those with a particular interpretation of Genesis. That is their term for anyone who doesn’t accept the fact of evolution. It doesn’t matter what your particular position is, you’re a creationist, period. So it was no surprise that Britain’s new ban on “creationism” is actually a ban on “any doctrine or theory which holds that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth.”

This is all a bit awkward though because it means that the ideas of one Alfred Russell Wallace, the, err, co-founder of evolution—whose memory is preserved with a statue at the Natural History Museum in London—are now officially banned because Wallace was, according to the evolutionist’s own terminology, a creationist.

Meanwhile in Britain: Creationism is Banned

And by Creationism, We Mean Anything That is Not Evolution

As Hegel would have put it, evolution is the antithesis of creationism. Evolution is based on the failure of creationism. Evolutionists have no idea how the world could have spontaneously arisen, but they know it must have, because for them creationism is so obviously false. Read any defense of evolution, including Darwin’s book and works before Darwin, and you will see it is all about the failure design and creation ideas. There is no positive scientific evidence that structures so complex we still cannot figure them out, let alone construct them, spontaneously arise all by themselves. Yet that is precisely what evolution insists must be true. Not because the science says so, but because the religion says so. The constant refrain from evolutionists is that creationism is false. And while the word conjures up anti intellectual fundamentalism—imagery that evolutionists have contrived and promoted with their Warfare Thesis imagery—what evolutionists actually mean is anything that is not evolution. Read any criticism of evolutionary Intelligent Design, for instance, and you will see the “C” word liberally applied. It is not ID, it is IDC. Evolutionists make their religious underwriting abundantly clear because they have to. That is their core thesis.

All of this was again made clear this week when Britain banned creationism from their schools. And if you read the fine print, what they mean by creationism is anything that is not evolution:

“Creationism,” for the purposes of clauses 2.43 and 2.44 of the funding agreement and clause 23E above, is any doctrine or theory which holds that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth and therefore rejects the scientific theory of evolution.

Of course evolution is, from a scientific perspective, not a good theory. So evolutionists need to manipulate people’s thinking. They misrepresent the science, use strawmen ideas as their foil, blackball dissenters and use government controls.

But of course none of this will ever work. They can take your money, abuse science and control the laws. But they can’t change the truth.

Evolution Professor Praises Andrew Dickson White’s Whig History

Self-Destructing

The winners, as they say, get to write the history, and nowhere is this more obvious than with evolution. Evolution has long since won the battle of who gets to tell our creation story, and so evolution also gets to tell the history of that battle. And tell it they do. The problem is that, as with the science, evolutionists misrepresent the history as well.

Two classic examples are (i) Andrew Dickson White’s nineteenth century mythical tome, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom and (ii) Jerome Lawrence’s and Robert Lee’s cartoon rendition of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, Inherit the Wind. The latter is slightly complicated by the fact that Lawrence and Lee made no attempt to represent accurately the events in Dayton, Tennessee in the summer of 1925, but rather liberally adapted the story to fit their purpose of criticizing McCarthyism and its witch hunts. But that only makes matters worse for evolutionists, for they have no excuse for coopting the screenplay as an important and insightful historical reference point in the twentieth century origins debate. Indeed, if you compare the history with the script, you can see Lawrence and Lee altered the former in order to sanitize and exalt the evolutionists while slandering their opponents.

Likewise evolutionists have no excuse for adopting White’s contrived Warfare Thesis based on his silly misrepresentations of the history of thought.

The fact that evolutionists do enlist both Inherit the Wind and White’s Warfare Thesis is just another sign of the anti intellectualism at the heart of evolution. Notable examples in recent years include Judge John Jones of Dover fame hilariously revealing that he actually wanted to see Inherit the Wind a second time in preparation for the Dover case because, after all, the film puts the origins debate into its proper “historical context” (Jones later unbelievably explained that “I understood the general theme. I’d seen Inherit the Wind”), and legal expert Andrew Cohen not only giving high praise to Inherit the Wind, but absurdly calling it “one of the great trial movies of all time.”

Now arch evolutionist Jerry Coyne joins in with his laughable approbation of White’s Warfare Thesis, revealing that he is reading through White’s “famous 840-page anti-accommodationist book.”

Famous?

If White’s book is famous for anything it is for the immediate debunking of its mythical content. No historian takes it seriously. Or perhaps it is famous for serving as a keystone of evolution’s false history.

Evolutionists are making public spectacles of themselves with their blatant misrepresentations of both science and history. They insist it is a fact that the biological world arose spontaneously and they insist that skepticism of their “fact” comes from parochial, anti-intellectualism. This is like a bad dream.

DOMA and Evolution’s Dangerous Cocktail

A Witch’s Brew

Evolution is, if anything, a negative theory. We don’t know how life started in a warm little pond or anywhere else for that matter. We don’t know how fish evolved, or how they transformed into amphibia, reptiles, birds, mammals and all the rest. In short, beyond vague speculation, we don’t know how the species arose. But we do know how they did not arise. The species were not created or designed in any sort of intentional sense. You can see right off that this is a peculiar scientific theory. It arrives at an unlikely conclusion without much of an explanation or justification except that the alternative must be false. But that’s not all. Along with this non empirical, rationalistic, formulation comes two important corollaries: certainty and self-righteousness. It is a dangerous mix in a scientific theory and this week it emerged in American jurisprudence as well.

Evolutionists are certain that evolution is a fact. For if creation and design are false, then one way or another, the species must have evolved. Evolution, they say, is beyond all reasonable doubt. Evolutionists like to compare their theory with gravity, the roundness of the Earth and heliocentrism.

Given this level of certainty, it is not surprising that evolutionists do not suffer dissent gladly. In fact for evolutionists, those who disagree are typically viewed as undermining science and up to no good. This leads to value judgments and the assigning of motives of those who are skeptical of evolution.

So it is not surprising that evolutionists have no compunction about blackballing dissent. Evolution is good and right, and anyone who disagrees has nefarious motives. Here is how one philosopher described this dynamic (speaking of rationalism in general):

The typical rationalist will believe that theories that meet the demands of the universal criterion are true or approximately true or probably true … The distinction between science and non-science is straight-forward for the rationalist. Only those theories that are such that they can be clearly assessed in terms of the universal criterion and which survive the test are scientific … The typical rationalist will take it as self-evident that a high value is to be placed on knowledge developed in accordance with the universal criterion. This will be especially so if the process is understood as leading towards truth. Truth, rationality, and hence science, are seen as intrinsically good. [A. F. Chalmers, What is this thing called science? 2d ed., (Indianapolis, IN.: Hackett Publishing Company, 1982) 102.]

What is dangerous here is the tendency to identify ones theory, not merely as an explanation of the natural world and as explaining certain evidences, but with righteousness. And so those who doubt that the world spontaneously arose, by chance and on its own, are routinely subject to everything from innuendo and silent discrimination to ridicule and blackballing.

All this for an allegation which is patently false. Evolution may be true, but skeptics are certainly not surreptitiously attempting to undermine science. It would be laughable except evolutionists have ruined so many careers and misdirected so many textbooks and students. And like the Witch Trials, once blame has been assigned there is no acceptable defense except to admit to the imagined wrong-doing and accept the sentence.

Such high moralizing, unfortunately, is not limited to the life sciences. Its familiar pattern is too common in today’s cultural disputes and this week it appeared in the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act.

The ruling was, in part, a response to pro traditional marriage propositions that were passed in California. The first one was declared unconstitutional by a judge, so the second (Proposition 8) made the necessary change to the state constitution. It too was overruled, this time by a gay judge in San Francisco.

In his decision the judge accused Californians who had voted for the proposition of bigotry. With the motives of millions of voters determined the judge was confident of his decision. Gay marriage was good and Proposition 8 supporters were bad.

In science there is an old saying, initiated by physicist Wolfgang Pauli, for theories that are not merely incorrect, but make no sense. Such theories are said to be “not even wrong.” The judge’s overturning of Proposition 8 was a legal ruling that was not even wrong. What was amazing was that the judge was oblivious to his own erroneous moralizing.

This week that bizarre opinion not only went uncorrected, but was reinforced when the Supreme Court doubled-down on such high moralizing, this time in its decision on DOMA. Not only did the high court strike down DOMA, it determined that those who disagree with them are out to “disparage,” “injure,” “degrade,” “demean,” and “humiliate” our fellow human beings and citizens who are homosexual.

This ruling was not from a lone judge in a lower court but from five of the top judges in the land with a small army of clerks on their staffs. It is astonishing they could produce a judgment so irrational and false. Again, gay marriage was good and DOMA supporters were bad. It would be difficult to imagine a better example of out of touch elites pronouncing judgments from on high.

The status and definition of marriage is no doubt a complex legal issue. But this is not about technical legal details. Evolution’s negative theorizing and moralizing has set a pattern that now seems to be prevalent. What is frightening is that these prosecutors actually believe their charges. Whether we are talking about a scientist or a judge, whatever the color of the robe, they are certain and they are self-righteous.

There is One Thing Inherit the Wind Got Right (And it’s the Most Important Part)

The film and play Inherit the Wind, in the hands of evolutionists, is a propaganda tool. They misrepresent the Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee script to promote their mandate that everything came from nothing. For the play uses the famous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial as a vehicle for commenting on the anti-communist hysteria of the 1940s McCarthy era. Therefore Lawrence and Lee made no attempt to represent accurately the events in Dayton, Tennessee in the summer of 1925, but rather liberally adapted the story to fit their purpose of criticizing McCarthyism and its witch hunts. If you compare the history with the script, you can see Lawrence and Lee altered the former in order to sanitize and exalt the evolutionists while slandering their opponents. But interestingly, amidst all the rewrites, there is one aspect of the story that the script renders faithfully. It is interesting because it is the real power behind evolution and yet it is what McCarthyism lacked. The result is that in Inherit the Wind, and by extension in our cultural memes that lie in its wake, Lawrence and Lee borrow from evolution to strengthen their attack on McCarthyism even at the cost of historical accuracy, and evolutionists borrow from McCarthyism to strengthen their attack on evolution skeptics, again at the cost of accuracy. Truth, as usual, is the casuality. And what is this one aspect that the script surprisingly renders faithfully? Again no surprise here, it is religion.

What the play did get right is that the Monkey Trial was actually a referendum on the creationism and the Bible. Technically John Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution, but all of that was merely logistical. The reason why the Monkey Trial is important to evolution, and the enduring message from Dayton, was that the Bible and its creationism were found to be passe. In the minds of evolutionists this was established in the showdown at Dayton when the two famous lawyers squared off. Clarence Darrow called William Jennings Bryan to the stand as a Bible expert and grilled him on its foolishness.

The exchange was entirely religious. Can we really believe the story of Jonah? Surely god would never do such a thing. And doesn’t the Bible state that the Sun goes around the Earth and that the world is only a few thousand years old? What about the Flood and did Bryan really believe the story of the temptation of Eve by the serpent?

Darrow’s sophism was right out of evolutionary thought and Bryan would have none of it. He handled Darrow with ease but more importantly, Bryan understood the bigger picture. Bryan was a great man and he could see through the evolutionary shenanigans. Evolution was not about science, it was all about religion as Bryan reveals in this telling exchange:

Mr. Stewart again objected to the examination of Mr. Bryan. MR. DARROW--He is a hostile witness.
JUDGE RAULSTON--I am going to let Mr. Bryan control.
MR. BRYAN--I want him to have all the latitude that he wants, for I am going to have some latitude when he gets through.
MR. DARROW--You can have latitude and longitude. [Laughter]
JUDGE
RAULSTON--Order....
MR. BRYAN--These gentlemen have not had much chance. They did not come here to try this case. They came here to try revealed religion. I am here to defend it, and they can ask me any questions they please.
JUDGE RAULSTON--All right. [ Applause ]
MR. DARROW--Great applause from the bleachers!
MR. BRYAN--From those whom you call "yokels."
MR. DARROW--I have never called them yokels.
MR. BRYAN--That is, the ignorance of Tennessee, the bigotry.
MR. DARROW--You mean who are applauding?
MR. BRYAN--Those are the people whom you insult.
MR. DARROW--You insult every man of science and learning in the world because he does not believe in your fool religion.

Yes Lawrence and Lee altered this famous debate. As we saw the script would have the student believe Darrow destroyed Bryan and left him a pathetic figure, babbling incoherently to himself. And of course they omitted Bryan’s cogent observations, such as the one above.

But what Lawrence and Lee did accurately capture is the power behind evolution. As Bryan understood, it is a religious inquisition. Darrow’s cross examination was thoroughly drenched in Enlightenment theology. As Lutherans and Anglicans had been arguing for centuries, God would not use miracles. As with today’s atheists, Darrow’s attack was based on metaphysics which atheism cannot support.

And so we are left with the tremendous irony of Inherit the Wind. The script is for the most part a whitewashed version of history except for where it counts. The whitewashing falsely sanitizes evolution, but the real problem with evolution—that it is a religious theory—comes through loud and clear. Why? Because evolutionists are drunk with their religion. The religion is baked in and evolutionists are oblivious to it. They think their premises are obvious and unquestionable.

As Alfred North Whitehead once observed, we often take our most crucial assumptions to be obvious and in no need of justification. These underlying assumptions are unspoken and undefended because, as Whitehead put it, “Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them.”

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Here’s An Example of the Ultimate Evolutionary Blowback

After the 2005 Dover trial, Judge John Jones recalled that he “was taken to school” by the evolutionists. It was, Jones recalled, “the equivalent of a degree in this area.” Unfortunately what evolutionists such as Ken Miller “taught” Jones was a series of scientific misrepresentations which you can read about here, here and here. But these were not the only misrepresentations that made their way into American jurisprudence in the Dover trial. For the judge did not enter into his new training as a complete novice. As Jones later explained, “I understood the general theme. I’d seen Inherit the Wind.” It would be like a judge explaining that he already understood the general theme of tornado damage because he’s seen The Wizard of Oz. This level of profound ignorance, in such a position of power, is disturbing to say the least. The key question is: How could this happen? How could our educational system fail so badly? What is the source of such anti intellectualism? The answer, once again, is evolution.

Inherit the Wind is a fictionalized account of the famous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee wrote the play to illustrate the threat to intellectual freedom posed by the anti-communist hysteria of the 1940s McCarthy era. Parallels to that anti-communist movement, and McCarthy himself, are obvious in the script. And since that dark period in our government’s history is universally and clearly understood to be wrong and evil, Inherit the Wind is itself equally banal and two-dimensional. The script is practically comical in its simplistic, cardboard rendition of the events in Dayton, Tennessee the summer of 1925. The evolutionists are equated with those struggling heroically to defeat the equivalent of McCarthyism and their opponents are equated, well, with McCarthy and his movement.

What a windfall for evolutionists. Their dogmatic, religiously-driven movement was now cast as the clear and obvious protagonist and their detractors had become the antagonists. And all of this was presented in the starkest of terms. The message was clear: evolution embodied everything that was good, and their opponents embodied everything that was bad.

There was only one problem. All of this was intended as an attack on McCarthyism. The story not only was a fictionalization of the Monkey Trial, it also presented a picture of evolutionary thought with little correspondence to reality.

So why did Judge Jones think that he “understood the general theme” because he had “seen Inherit the Wind”? The answer is that for decades evolutionists have heavily promoted Inherit the Wind and used it as a vehicle to advance their movement. From public education curriculums to international venues, Inherit the Wind is presented as an important and realistic telling of evolutionary thought and its nefarious opposition.

That is simply a misrepresentation. John Scopes was not a humble and tireless science teacher, and he was not hauled off to jail by an angry mob of fundamentalists as the script depicts. Nor was he assaulted, burned in effigy and threatened by a lynch mob. In fact, John Scopes never even went to jail. Nor did he, in fear for his life, contact journalist Henry Mencken for help in securing a lawyer.

And what about that narrow-minded, fire-breathing Reverend Jeremiah Brown and his angry mob of fundamentalists? And the uneducated crowds singing hymns at every corner? Those were also fictions. In fact it was John Scopes who would later write that “I have often said that there is more intolerance in higher education than in all the mountains of Tennessee.”

The entire event was cleverly orchestrated by the ACLU which had advertised for a willing teacher to test Tennessee law. The ad caught the attention of local boosters in Dayton, Tennessee who saw it as an opportunity to rejuvenate their decaying small town. They recruited Scopes, a football coach and math teacher to take on the role as the defendant. Once the trial began, Scopes’ legal defense was the dream team of 1925, with nationally recognized legal expertise backing up Clarence Darrow, one of the greatest criminal defense lawyers in American history.

In fact Dayton, Tennessee was already using an evolutionary textbook. The textbook, Civic Biology, taught the usual evolutionary concepts of racism and eugenics. The text explained that some people were genetically advanced while others were degenerate, a problem which could be thwarted with forced sterilization. That was a practice that evolutionists had widely implemented in the U.S. at that time.

But wasn’t the lead prosecution attorney, William Jennings Bryan, the famed statesman and politician who hadn’t practiced law in decades, an ignorant, scientifically illiterate, bigoted fundamentalist as depicted in the script?

No, Bryan was an assistant prosecutor and had little involvement in the trial. His main reason for participating, to deliver the final summation, was cleverly obviated by the defense with a legal maneuver that denied any closing arguments.

And Bryan was not a fundamentalist and certainly not bigoted. He had a good understanding of evolution and was  concerned with the undefendable claim of evolution as fact. He was particularly concerned with evolution’s degraded view of people. The left-leaning, pacifist was concerned with evolution’s racism, eugenics, social Darwinism and economic laissez faire implications. Bryan was far more articulate and thoughtful than the silly and absurd caricature presented in Inherit the Wind.

But didn’t Darrow destroy Bryan on the stand, revealing his literalism and fideism, forcing him to claim special revelation and reducing him to an incoherent babble?

Again this is a complete fiction. No such exchange took place. In fact the movie’s trial scenes are mostly fictitious, with only limited correspondence to the real trial.

But didn’t Bryan pathetically attempt to deliver a speech after the trial adjourned with his agitated shouts going unheeded as the crowd turned away?

Again, while this is reminiscent of Joseph McCarthy’s pathetic demise, it is another fiction. Nothing like it occurred during or after the trial.

The list goes on and on. While Inherit the Wind was intended as a vehicle to expose McCarthyism, the evolutionist’s promotion and use of the play and movie is a lie. From the setting and context to the trial itself, Inherit the Wind is a lopsided misrepresentation of the events in Dayton and evolutionary thought in general. And now, in the hands of Judge John Jones, that lie has propagated into American jurisprudence.

It reminds me of Robert Altman’s movie The Player in which the Hollywood culture sees everything as another story and plot-line. Movies and real life imperceptibly blend together. We’re in trouble when our entertainment culture becomes our reality. As a reader requests, please, nobody show Jones the “Bigfoot” episodes of the Six Million Dollar man lest he think a missing link has been found.

Why the Coppedge Trial Matters

Over at Evolution News and Views David Klinghoffer writes:

David Coppedge's case against his former employer, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, goes to trial in Los Angeles on Wednesday. This will open yet another window on the culture of free-speech suppression that exists across academic and para-academic institutions. Read more

I’m surprised this is going to court. Even with their strong legal team, and with the courts generally (not always, but generally) biased in their favor, it is difficult to imagine the evolutionists not being exposed in this case. Time will tell.

Does Huntsman believe in evolution?

Once again politicians are discussing evolution, this time at the Republican presidential debate Wednesday night held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Los Angeles exurb Simi Valley. The comments, made by moderate Jon Huntsman, former Utah Governor and US Ambassador to the PRC, seemed to be more about politics than science, but perhaps not. Here is what Huntsman had to say:

Listen, when you make comments that fly in the face of what 98 out of 100 climate scientists have said, when you call into question the science of evolution, all I’m saying is that in order for the Republican party to win, we can’t run from science, … And by making comments that basically don’t reflect the reality of the situation, we turn people off.

Huntsman is a politician, and speaking here qua politician his comments make some sense. Huntsman is merely pointing out that, in his view, Republicans need to acknowledge and respect the leading scientific opinions. Otherwise they risk losing votes. In other words, it seems he is talking about political strategy, not scientific realism.

There is of course the philosophical and ethical question that politicians always face. Should politicians “sell out” for votes? How many lies and absurdities should one tolerate to gain office?

But beyond this, one wonders if Huntsman’s remarks go beyond political gamesmanship. When the Palo Alto High dropout speaks of “the science of evolution” it almost sounds as though he is speaking as an evolutionary realist who believes evolution is true, or approximately true.

Adding to this speculation, Huntsman speaks of “the reality of the situation.” Does he mean the political reality of the situation, or the scientific reality of the situation?

Unfortunately Huntsman has never had the question put directly to him: Does he believe evolution is a fact?

Paying homage to evolution for political reasons, as low as that may seem, is an understandable political strategy. Believing in the absurd religious theory that the world spontaneously arose, is quite another.

The World Through Evolutionary Eyes: Theological Naturalism, Hypocrisy and Response to Comments on the CSC Case

The theoretical core of evolutionary thought is naturalism. Evolutionists dogmatically insist that the world must have arisen strictly via 100% naturalistic processes. This extreme position is in the minority, but it dominates academia today and is now taken as a given by elites and opinion makers. Not surprisingly this extreme position on naturalism has fueled atheism. If creation arises on its own, then what need is there for a creator? But ironically naturalism arose not from atheism, but from the exact opposite: theism. In fact it is the underlying religious ideas that give evolutionists their strong convictions. This is why evolutionary thought and the Enlightenment arose from the highly religious culture of 17th century western Europe, and it is why religious people do most of the evolutionary apologetics, even today. From the Roman Catholic Ken Miller to the protestant Francis Collins, religious people are insistent that evolution must be a fact. Atheists such as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers help out on the fringes, but even their arguments are religious. They have been fooled by religion. When it comes to evolution, there is no difference between the theist and atheist. Hence when we speak of the naturalism that drives evolutionists, we are speaking of theological naturalism. Here is how I described theological naturalism in my book Science’s Blind Spot:

There were many religious influences within science in centuries past. In fact, theological concerns often guided and constrained scientific ideas and thought. A variety of such concerns were raised by different thinkers at different times. This makes them both easy to see but not necessarily easy to trace out. These ideas were prevalent but complex—there was no single religious tradition, no single theological concern, no leading thinker or even school of thought, at the interface between religion and science. What was the motivation for these religious ideas, how were they related, and importantly exactly what influence did these religious ideas have on science?

The answers to such questions are not simple but, on the other hand, they are not beyond our reach. There are strong connections between religion and science and recurring themes are obvious. Theological premises do not merely suggest possibilities or stimulate thinking—they are at times crucial in framing scientific thought. This book traces out these connections and their effects.

We begin in Chapter Two with a survey of several common religious influences in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Most of them fall into four distinct categories: greater God theology, religious rationalism and deism, the problem of evil, and theological opposition to miracles. These categories are overarching. None of them represent a single tradition or concern, but rather a family of similar concerns. And these categories do not capture the totality of religious thought impinging on science. Other concerns that we will see in later chapters include the warning against anthropomorphizing God, the God of the gaps warning, and the intellectual necessity.

This history and framework gives helpful structure to the religion-science interface. As we shall see, these different theological traditions would circumscribe scientific activity by defining what types of solutions were, and were not, acceptable. Indeed, these theological mandates are common in the scientific literature.

There are, as it were, theological ground rules imposed on science. And although these theological concerns are varied, they all funnel toward a similar consequence. Put simply, the theological ground rules are that scientific explanations must be purely naturalistic. The term "naturalism" can take on different meanings when used by historians and philosophers of science. Here it is used to refer to this restriction of science to naturalistic explanations for religious reasons. We use a new term, theological naturalism, to clarify this and avoid ambiguity.

This term theological naturalism reminds us that the assumption of naturalism in science is neither a result of atheistic influence nor an empirically-based scientific finding. It is a consequence of metaphysical reasoning, and the implications for science are profound. Theological naturalism provides science with well defined universal criteria to which it conforms. Instead of merely following the data where ever it may lead, science has a framework already in place. The answer, to a certain extent, is already in place. This is a move toward rationalism and away from empiricism. The result is that science has a powerful philosophy of science but, as we explore in Chapter Three, it does not come without cost. Theological naturalism brings with it a blind spot.

A fascinating aspect of theological naturalism is that, on the one hand, it is obvious, but it can also be very subtle. Here is an example of how obvious theological naturalism can be:

Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution—paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce. No one understood this better than Darwin. Ernst Mayr has shown how Darwin, in defending evolution, consistently turned to organic parts and geographic distributions that make the least sense.—Stephen Jay Gould

This is a powerful argument that resonates with many. So powerful, in fact, that it seems to be in no need of defending. Is it not obvious and undeniable that “odd arrangements and funny solutions” disprove design? Is it not obvious that identical mutations in sister species must have arisen in a common ancestor? Is it not obvious that death and destruction in the biological world would have be part of an all-good divine plan?

The metaphysics seems so compelling and obvious that it goes overlooked. Evolutionists are convinced they are doing “just science.” And so the obvious theological naturalism becomes subtle. Darwin’s book on evolution was one long religious argument. Over and over he made religious claims about how the creator would never have created this creation. Evolution was the only answer.

But Darwin never felt the need to explain, justify or defend any of his religious claims. They were bare assertions, presented as simple and undeniable truths. And, importantly, his readers felt the same way. Even sophisticated challengers, such as Princeton’s Charles Hodge, weren’t quite able to pinpoint the message.

So evolutionists make their metaphysical claims casually, with no hesitation or concern. In the next breath they insist they are all about science. Here is an example from a leading textbook:

However, there are some homologies that do look positively disadvantageous. One of the cranial nerves goes from the brain to the larynx via a tube near the heart. In fish this is a direct route. But the same nerve in all species follows the same route, and in the giraffe it results in an absurd detour down and up the neck, so that the giraffe has to grow maybe 3-5 meters more nerve than it would with a direct connection. The “recurrent laryngeal nerve,” as it is called, is surely inefficient. It is easy to explain such an efficiency if giraffes have evolved in small stages from a fish-like ancestor; but why giraffes should have such a nerve if they originated independently … well, we can leave that to others to try to explain. …

In the scientific version of the theory which we are concerned with here, supernatural events do not take place … [Mark Ridley, Evolution, Blackwell, p. 50, 57, 1993]

Notice how easily the textbook slips into metaphysics. A scientific text, discussing scientific evidence, suddenly is doing metaphysics without warning or justification, as though it all is obviously true.

This is typical. Evolutionists insist evolution is a fact, and they arrive at this lofty conclusion via metaphysical proofs. As Alfred North Whitehead once advised, do not question someone on what he feels he needs to defend, but rather on what he takes for granted. The popular version goes like this: It isn’t what a man doesn’t know that scares me, but what he knows for sure.

The corollary to evolution’s theological naturalism is that those who do not adhere to their religious claims are, in fact, the religious ones. After all, such skeptics are allowing that god might have designed this obviously undesigned world. Isn’t that an obvious religious belief? So while evolutionists assert religious claims, those who are make no such claims are, according to evolutionists, religious. For the evolutionists, such fundamentalism is obviously not scientific and must be censored. This is the Alice-in-Wonderland world of evolution.

The CSC case

And so it is not surprising that evolutionists brand any skepticism, such as in the Darwin’s Dilemma film, as “religious.” The specter of its showing at the California Science Center’s IMAX theater prompted USC professor Hilary Schor to be “less troubled by the freedom of speech issues than why my tax dollars which support the California ‘Science’ Center are being spent on hosting religious propaganda.”

So where exactly is the “religious propaganda” in the Darwin’s Dilemma film? Of course there is none. Here is how one commenter here described the film:

I watched the documentary online and found it very scholarly and well presented. The narrator was very professional and I actually found the lack of creationism refreshing, because if in fact it was there, it would have been tough to mask. Most creationism films spend more time attacking Evolutionists than dealing with the science and of course most Evolutionist propaganda films do likewise.

I think the fact that it WAS well written and presented from the standpoint of asking logical skeptical scientific methodical questions instead of religiously accepting religious story telling is what actually infuriates the Darwin crowd. It's not a matter of allowing intelligent people to honestly ask for real world factual proofs [minus the massive amounts of story invention] as it is a matter of being skeptical and actually asking questions in the first place and not accepting through blind faith that the self-promoting geniuses have it right. As history has shown through the ages around the Earth, religious Ecclesiastical Hierarchies hate being questioned.

In fact there are no religious claims in the movie, those are in evolutionary thought. There are no metaphysical mandates or theological dictates. Again, those are in evolutionary thought. Evolutionists openly and consistently make religious claims and then blame it on the skeptics who are looking at the evidence. It is the height of hypocrisy.

But meanwhile an evolutionist accused me of misrepresenting the CSC case:

Let's look at what the press release actually said

"The debate over Darwin will come to California on October 25th, when the Smithsonian Institution's west coast affiliate premieres Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record, a new intelligent design film which challenges Darwinian evolution."

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/intelligent-design-documentary-to-premiere-at-smithsonian-affiliated-california-science-center-63527687.html

By 'Smithsonian Institution's west coast affiliate' the AFA obviously meant the CSC. But the CSC wasn't premiering the film, the AFA was. The CSC and Smithsonian had nothing to do with the film save renting building space.

That's the sort of blatant dishonesty we've come to expect from the IDiots and the professional liars at the DI. You want to defend the wording of the press release CH?

As is typical, the evolutionist manipulates the evidence. He quotes from the first paragraph of the press release and cries foul. But only two sentences later the press release explicitly states who is sponsoring and hosting the event:

The screening is sponsored and hosted by the American Freedom Alliance.

The evolutionist uses a selective reading of the press release and then jumps to the usual ridicule and false accusations.

This is how evolutionists treat those who are not theological naturalists. This is how they treat those who do not, as they do, insist on religious truths that all must follow. This is how they treat those who are interested in the evidence, rather than dogma.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

The CSC Case and Evolution: More Than Just Bad Science

When Darwin’s Dilemma, a film that examines evolution in light of the scientific evidence, was booked at the California Science Center’s IMAX theater two years ago, evolutionists from around the country were furious. They made sure the booking was cancelled. So while the CSC censored the film, their censorship was by no means an independent action. The CSC was at the tip of the spear, but evolutionists near and far drove that spear home. And those evolutionists were by no means limited to life scientists. For evolutionary thought is about much more than merely the origin of species. Consider, for example, Hilary Schor, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies and Law at the University of Southern California.

Schor is co-director of the Center for Law, History, and Culture at USC, sponsored in part by the Gould School of Law. When not studying feminist theory and gender studies, Schor’s research interests include “law and literature.”

Schor’s view of the law, however, seems to be rather selective. Regarding the CSC case, as she explained, she was “less troubled by the freedom of speech issues than why my tax dollars which support the California ‘Science’ Center are being spent on hosting religious propaganda.”

Schor characterizes Darwin’s Dilemma as “religious propaganda.” And why would that be? The film, which is shot on location in southern China, the Canadian Rockies, and Great Britain, explores the Cambrian Explosion and how the rapid appearance of so many species compares with the theory of evolution. The film includes interviews of both evolutionists (Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge University and James Valentine of the University of California at Berkeley) and skeptics.

So where exactly is the “religious propaganda”? Of course there is none. There are no religious claims in the movie, those are in evolutionary thought. There are no metaphysical mandates or theological dictates. Again, those are in evolutionary thought. It is curious how evolutionists openly and consistently make religious claims and then blame it on the skeptics who are looking at the evidence. It is the height of hypocrisy.

The result is Schor is not too concerned about trampling on freedom of speech rights. As always, the law is only as good as the people behind it. When the elite single out particular groups as not deserving of protection under the law, then the law is not universal. It protects only the preferred groups.

So evolution misrepresents science, biases education, manipulates justice and tramples on constitutional rights. What’s next?

Religion drives science, and it matters.

More CSC Coverups

As we have seen evolutionists at the California Science Center, in response to the booking of a film that questions evolution, censored the film. To hide this violation of the public trust they constructed a cover-up: The evolutionists said they cancelled the event because of a press release. This lie was in stark contrast to internal emails. One CSC Vice President wrote that the main problem was that the event was sponsored by “an anti-Darwin/creationist group.” And as the CSC Vice President of Communications explained, the CSC Chief Executive Officer instructed his staff to find a false pretense:

Jeff just called and is wondering if they violated an agreement -- like was this supposed to be a private screening or did they say it was a public screening? If they misrepresented the event, then we can cancel them.

Next the evolutionists lied about the press release, claiming it implied the CSC was a sponsor of the event. But the press release said no such thing. In fact it explicitly stated that “The screening is sponsored and hosted by the American Freedom Alliance.”

Next the evolutionists raised the stakes with an even more bold lie. They said there was, in fact, no censorship. After all, were they not originally willing to book the event? Again, internal emails exposed the lie. The booking was accepted only because there was a lack of vigilance. As one CSC Vice President wrote:

This screening event was booked through the Events Dept., and they were unaware of the nature of the groups involved. It has come to Jeff’s attention and he is “working on it.”

Similarly, another evolutionist from the nearby Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County concluded:

Apparently the IMAX was booking events without CSC knowing about all of them, and when they found out they immediately cancelled the event.

Of course there was censorship.

The next evolution lie was about the court case. This was one case where the evolutionists could not fool the judge and lie their way through a trial. They had to settle so they lied about the settlement, saying they were right all along and that the sponsor and the Discovery Institute had not “learned their lesson.”

In fact it was the evolutionists who have not learned their lesson, for this trail of lies was by no means an isolated event. From blatantly misrepresenting science to censorship, blackballing dissenters, ruining careers and misleading judges, lying and flaunting the law is a way of life for evolutionists. It is ironic that Inherit the Wind, a play targeting precisely such misdeeds, is exploited by evolutionists as their poster child.

In this particular case, the evolutionists at CSC had been lying all along. For instance, before the above litany of lies, the evolutionists attempted to manipulate justice by using a phony shell organization. Unlike the publicly-funded CSC, the shell organization, dubbed the CSC Foundation, was private and so escaped public accountability.

In other words, so they can leech off the public the evolutionists funnel the funding through the CSC while their misdeeds are funneled through “the Foundation.”

Without public funding evolution would die a quick death. They must have your tax dollars. But evolution also relies on manipulation. These two are at odds with each other. Taking public funds and perpetrating untruths don’t mix well. So in order for evolutionists to have both their funding and their lies they need a shell game.

Consider, for example, one Christina M. Sion. Ms. Sion is a CSC employee. In fact, not only is Sion a CSC employee, she is a Vice President. That is according to the CSC’s own promotional material, such as this press release, which states:

“We were absolutely thrilled to win the Best Non Profit Event Concept category with our Star Wars themed Discovery Ball. We especially felt so privileged to be in such good company. The events that were showcased this year were nothing less than stellar and it reinforced how sincerely delighted we are to be part of the events industry in LA,” said the California Science Center Vice President of Event Services, Chris Sion. 

And this is also what her email signature shows:

Next consider one Shell Amega. Like Sion, Amega is a CSC employee. In fact, Amega is the CSC Vice President of Communications. At least according to her email signature:

Amega’s status as a CSC employee is also confirmed on any number of web pages, such as this press release, which lists Amega is a CSC press contact.

But when it came time for the evolutionists to give an account of their actions, suddenly Sion and Amega were identified as employees not of the public CSC, but of the private CSC Foundation. And as such, the evolutionists claimed their records were private, not public. How convenient. So evolutionists take the public monies, but they are not accountable.

It was yet another lie the evolutionists used to try to avoid the light of day. It was one lie after another as the evolutionists manipulated justice and violated the public trust. These lies pale in comparison to the lies evolutionists tell everyday about science, but they are lies nonetheless. Oh, what a web we weave.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Why the CSC Case is Important

Two years ago a group booked the California Science Center’s IMAX theater, in downtown Los Angeles, for a screening of Darwin’s Dilemma, a film that questions evolutionary theory. Furious evolutionists quickly censored the showing and canceled the event.

After being sued for censorship the CSC constructed a cover-up lie. The evolution lie was that there was no censorship. Instead, as the lie contended, the CSC cancelled the event because of a press release. This lie was in stark contrast to internal emails. One CSC Vice President wrote that the main problem was that the event was sponsored by “an anti-Darwin/creationist group.” And as the CSC Vice President of Communications explained, the CSC Chief Executive Officer instructed his staff to find a false pretense:

Jeff just called and is wondering if they violated an agreement -- like was this supposed to be a private screening or did they say it was a public screening? If they misrepresented the event, then we can cancel them.

So first the evolutionists censored the event, and then they lied, in order to cover-up their censorship. Next the evolutionists lied about the press release, claiming it implied the CSC was a sponsor of the event. But the press release said no such thing. In fact it explicitly stated that “The screening is sponsored and hosted by the American Freedom Alliance.”

Next the evolutionists lied to cover-up their cover-ups. This evolution lie was that there was no censorship because, after all, they originally were willing to book the event. Again, internal emails shine a light on the lie. They reveal that the booking was accepted only because there was a lack of vigilance. As one CSC Vice President wrote:

This screening event was booked through the Events Dept., and they were unaware of the nature of the groups involved. It has come to Jeff’s attention and he is “working on it.”

Similarly, another evolutionist from the nearby Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County concluded:

Apparently the IMAX was booking events without CSC knowing about all of them, and when they found out they immediately cancelled the event.

The next evolution lie was about the court case. This was one case where the evolutionists could not fool the judge and lie their way through a trial, so they had to settle. So they lied about the settlement, saying they were right all along and that the sponsor and the Discovery Institute have not “learned their lesson.” So after a long trail of lies the CSC casts judgment on the sponsor, saying they have not “learned their lesson.” Oh, what a web we weave.

Not your garden variety theory

But is this anything more than the sordid tale of a rogue department gone wrong? Were not the usual lines of authority broken and was not this department operating independently of the greater evolution movement? Surely there is plausible deniability and we cannot equate their many lies with evolution itself. Right?

Wrong. Unfortunately, the CSC case is typical. This is evolution in action. The only difference in this case is the evolutionists were found out. To understand why CSC is representative and not a loose cannon, one first must understand evolution itself.

Evolution is not your typical scientific theory that makes predictions for evaluation against empirical findings. If that were the case it would have been dropped long ago as evolution is, if anything, a contra indicator. Practically all of evolution’s fundamental expectations are in the red. Whatever it says, go with the opposite.

Far from an innocent scientific theory, evolution is a metaphysical commitment. For if evolution is wrong then the specter of teleology is raised. Final causes are back in the fight and perhaps design is detectable. All kinds of unthinkables must now be thought and unquestionable truths must now be questioned. For evolutionists that is unacceptable, no matter what the evidence.

So evolution is not common descent, or gradualism, or selection acting on random biological variation, or a dozen other spin offs. In Lakatosian terms, those are all auxiliary hypotheses making up the protective belt that surrounds and shields the theoretical core. And what is that core? Evolution, at its core, is naturalism.

It is not atheism, as often is charged. Nor is it bad science as is equally as often charged. Would that those were evolution, for the problem would be far simpler. But those are both merely consequences. At its core evolution is a metaphysical commitment to naturalism—it must be true.

It is no surprise that evolutionists are so insistent that their idea is a fact. The fact of evolution is at its very core. Evolution was not declared to be a fact after boat loads of evidence endlessly corroborated a theoretically sound idea. That is a fiction. It never happened. Not only is evolution at odds with the data, the declaration of its certainty was at the very beginning.

We can go back to the formalization of neo Darwinism in the twentieth century, or back to Darwin himself, or to Kant, or Hume, or Leibniz, or we can go farther back in antiquity to Lucretius and the Epicureans. Wherever your resting place, you will find metaphysical certainty amidst empirical confusion.

The consequence of all this is, yes, lies. The science is misrepresented to fit the mandate. The philosophy of science is misrepresented to arrive at the predetermined truth. The education and law are twisted and force fit to support the fiction, judges are misled, photographs are altered, data are misinterpreted, and at the National Center for Science “Education,” dissenters are blackballed. All of this to promote the dogma that the world and everything we see must have arisen spontaneously, by itself. For it must have, there is no other option.

Religion drives science, and it matters.