I urge readers to understand that the Bush position has a lot of public support and isn't, public opinion-wise, fringe lunacy.

This is what always gets me. When I went away to college a couple of years ago, I had no idea that people other than extreme religious zealots were anti-evolution. Imagine my surprise when a not insignificant number of people at this progressive liberal arts school would say things like "evolution's only a theory" and "there's no evidence for it".

This lack of understanding makes teaching the real science of evolution in schools even more important. The consequences of "balancing" the curriculum with ID or creationism would be terrible.

but but but, it appears that it does not include lots of Republican bloggers, many who appear to be a bit upset with their commander in chief on this

I think that might be the most important point.  I have been on many blogs that there is a mix of liberals and conservatives posting.  Most of the conservatives are more dismayed over this ID debate then the liberals.  I tend to be very vocal about it, having a background in the sciences.  I think the ID debate will be put to rest by a coalition of secular people from the right and left...I won't denegrate the supporters of ID but there theory is not based on science observation.

Probably not too fruitful for the left to harp on the evolution statement too hard? It may just be a condescending bone thrown to the godly American masses, masses that probably include George Bush

Nope. I'm condescending. See below.

But you're kidding, right? Not too much emphasis on that "science" stuff? Really?

Beg to differ.  The Global War on Rationality needs to be resisted on all fronts as and when.  That said, atheists who enlist science against core faith are as unscientific as IDers.  Science is by rigorous self-definition tentative, incomplete, necessarily susceptible to disproof and incapable of saying anything about the supernatural (which is why ID is not science and should never enter the science classrom other than an illustrative example of what is not science).  Step 1 in the Global War an Irrationality is to not extrapolate unscientifically from true science.  Rational Christians need to speak up as above and to add that faith needs no scientific validation - it existed before science got going.  They need to point out that faith that seeks scientific validation is puny faith indeed.

I really don't know what the right strategy for dealing with public ignorance on this issue is.  I suppose the statistics show that the ignore-them-so-nobody-will-think-there's-real-controversy approach is not going to work.  

Since no one has mentioned it yet, let me note that the comment about the "dirty girl scout incident" succeeded in causing me to imagine untoward events, until I clicked the link and discovered it was a drink.  

While I am in league with cscs's comments about people living with dinosaurs (though I was a HUGE fan of "Land of the Lost" and lived in childhood fear of sleezaks), I also recognize, as a Tennessean, this debate isn't going away any time soon, and we'd better be prepared to fight and fight smart.

The frame for this discussion was set eighty years ago this summer when Clarence Darrow (Yankee, atheist, socialist) cross examined William Jennings Bryan (the Great Commoner) on the courthouse lawn in Dayton.  It was seen then as the smart guys versus the faithful, and the framework for the debate hasn't changed.  Many--though blessedly not all--Christians remain convinced that science is a threat to faith.

When the Southern Baptist Convention was coming apart in the 1980s, the key issue in the debate was "biblical inerrancy."  In those days, I was a reporter interested in Baptist politics, and I had occasion to interview a preacher from Wichita Falls, TX, named Morris Chapman, when he was on the verge of becoming the SBC President (a seat he held for two years).  When our conversation turned to the Bible, Chapman said something I have remembered ever since: "The Bible is not multiple choice.  It is either all true or none of it is."

Let the simple power of that sink in:  It is either all true, or none of it is.  You can run for office on that kind of talk.

Now, that's the one-time leader of the largest non-Catholic denomination in the country (there's an interesting, though arcane, debate whether Southern Baptists are actually Protestant).  There are some 14 million Southern Baptists.  And that's just the beginning of the church hit parade, for there are many other denominations and non-affiliated churchgoers who believe likewise in that little shibboleth.

We cannot win elections, not in the red states, anyway, with candidates who say, "You morons, read a book."  We have to have candidates who can resonate with those who are concerned that science amounts to an attack on their faith.  They may resonate by the force of rhetoric.  They may resonate by their own life's evidence of an honest effort to reconcile the fossil record and the creation stories of Genesis.  That's not a religious test for a candidate.  It is to say that one has to be able to speak to these two broad streams of American society, and to be able to bring them together.

For the Darrows among us, brilliance may carry the day.  The rest of us have to make do with our own stories and struggles, which if chosen well enough in our candidates, may well do.

You mean there's a lot of people who think the whole "dinosaurs living millions of years ago" thing is untrue?

My favorite Creationist explanation of dinosaur fossils was that the fossils were planted by Satan trying to trick mankind.  Heard that one when I worked at Dinosaur State Park (CT) in the early 80's...

I really don't know what the right strategy for dealing with public ignorance on this issue is.

One way not to deal with it is by confusing the public even more by teaching nonscience like ID as if it were real science . . .

Biblical inerrancy is some challenge.  To disprove even the young earth hypothesis is to deny God's very existence.  Any scientifically literate mainstream Christian becomes an atheist.  As for the real atheists ...

However, scientific inerrancy does permit a scientist to say 'The way we operate makes us incapable of saying anything about God and anything we say about nature is incomplete and open to disproof - otherwise it wouldn't science which only works because of these self-imposed limitations and can't work without them.  Evolutionary theory obeys these limitations but ID does not.  If ID is correct about the role of God (He who IDers deny thrice and calls 'a designer') ID is still not science and the best text book sticker we can offer would be "The scientific method declares itself incapable of saying anything either way about God - just a modest but growing amount about nature".'

Then I would consider making science class optional in all public schools with religious and vocational class alternatives.  Look past spotlit biology and Bible-contradiction appears throughout science - in physics, geology, cosmology, paleontology, zoology, you name it. To the inerrant, science truly is all or nothing.  Let it be so, because the scientific method is equally all or nothing.
Faith doen't need science and science can't systematically handle faith (for all that Einstein and others have felt Him useful).

Actually because of these two other challenges (i.e., to physics and geology), I'm hopeful that over time even this substantial minority will become statistical noise. A theory of quantum gravity, along with the fact that we have experimental evidence for the Big Bang a la cosmic microwave background radiation, will go a long way toward resolving the debate among us scientists and then trickle down to everyone else (the scientific enterprise is, unfortunately, very much a supply-side affair). Also now that physicists like myself have been lured into describing living matter in terms of purely physical variables, hopefully we will one day have a purely physical picture of the dynamics of cells and put paid to the notion that 'life' is some mysterious magic that we humans cannot fathom.




Actually another awful effect of this pseudo-debate over evolution is that it is forcing the scientific community to become somewhat doctrinaire about the subject - which is terrible news for scientific progress. Evolution is no doubt the cornerstone of modern biology, but it has risen to the level of what Robert Laughlin wisely calls an 'anti-theory' - our understanding of evolution is so qualitative that it doesn't allow us to make predictions about what will happen in experiments in a fully rational manner, and often whenever someone cannot physically explain why a particular biological fact is the way it is s/he simply mutters "evolution" and settles the debate at that, thereby slowing the progress in our understanding the physical nature of living matter. That to me is the greatest threat of this pseudo-debate.

this pseudo-debate over evolution is that it is forcing the scientific community to become somewhat doctrinaire about the subject

Good observation--there are certainly big "gaps" in the current understanding of evolution, but pointing out those gaps gives ammunition to those who want to attack evolution for religious reasons. This has prompted many scientists to downplay those gaps--which doesn't help their credibility or do much to advance science. This is just one more unfortunate consequence of the Right's irresponsible push to politicize science.

[S]ome 'people of faith' are going to feel disrespected if we say their faith-based convictions do not rise to the level of science and in fact do not even merit being discussed alongside the scientific views.

I would not put it that way -- or not without immediately adding that neither does science "rise to the level" of "their faith-based convictions."  We are talking here about two very different activities or modalities of human thought, ones that need not be (though in practice often are) in competition.  I think this is AlanDownunder's point (and also Kant's, who dedicated his philosophical life to putting an end to the mischief).

It is a case like that of the separation of church and state:  The liberal presentment is that both "sides" benefit far more from the disentanglement of their claims than either gains by perpetuating that entanglement.  Yes, religion makes for bad (or fake) science; but equally, science makes for bad (or fake) religion.  It is an ill-advised marriage, that can end in nothing but acrimonious divorce.

Nature, as someone said, obediently answers to all our conceptions.  There is no more reason to weigh the scientific method down with religious dogma, than there is to weigh religious faith down with questions of scientific (or for that matter philosophical) proof.  These are crops that flourish best when each is sown in its own field.

A theory of quantum gravity, along with the fact that we have experimental evidence for the Big Bang a la cosmic microwave background radiation, will go a long way toward resolving the debate among us scientists and then trickle down to everyone else

Sure, maybe after the theory of classical gravity has trickled down, and a majority of Americans understands that bodies accelerate at the same rate under gravity regardless of mass, and that shuttle astronauts are weightless not because they're significantly farther from the earth's center than anyone else, but because they're in free fall and don't experience a normal force.

And after the majority of Americans develops a sound intuition about statistics, and understands, say that a uniform random sample of 1000 is equally good whether it's taken from  20000 or 1 million, and that the "law of averages" does not mean that your lottery number is more likely to come up tomorrow because it hasn't come up in the last year.

Heck, it'll be a step in the right direction once most Americans understand that a million, a billion, and a trillion are really drastically different quantities.

 Then all it'll take is for enough Americans to hold onto their scientific curiosity past the age of 9 or so, and we'll be all set for this "trickle down" process to begin.

 I can't wait!

I am not sure I believe that so many people believe dinosaurs and people co-existed but it is clean that a lot of people have no idea what a scientific theory is.  Obiviously many people think it is a guess.  It will be interesting to see what happens if life is found to have existed on Mars.

Additionally what is almost as serious a problem is that most Americans don't seem to understand that Gensis has to very different creation stories.  That the Bible was not originally written in English but Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.  Thus there is no such thing as a literal meaning to the bible.

I do hope you are right about the numbers are creationism are inflated.

One of the problems in this debate is that it has been left to scientists and interested by-standers.  Where are people of faith who oppose the fundamentalist view of the Bible? Where are the theologians like the late Paul Tillich who said that faith required a leap of courage?

I know that it is considered a bad thing, but why is being an elitist, educated, open minded and thoughtful as well as tolerant, a bad thing?

I would be surprised if “hard” Creationism is supported by nearly half the people. Most of these people answering ”Yes” to creationist querries are probably just expressing a vague notion that God had something to do with the whole business not claiming to believe that the Earth is only 6000 years old. 

There's a gallup poll that distinguishes between creationism, "theistic evolution", and "naturalisitic evolution."

It wouldn't surprise me if theistic evolution were popular--basically that evolution is real, but God added something extra to make people. This is compatible with mainstream churches inclined to body/soul dualism. More surprising to me is that a plurality of 44% believes "God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years."

This is of course compatible with "vague" creationism. If you asked people to work out all the implications of their claimed belief, including the age of the earth and what all those dinosaur bones imply, only the truly gungho would exhibit much interest.

Scientists (not restricted to biologists) are unusual in accepting naturalistic evolution with a majority of 55%, and only 5% believing in creationism. I am less optimistic than some that this can "trickle down." Given the prevalence of many scientific fallacies (see my earlier comments) it seems hopeless for a majority to come to this view with a full understanding.

Now conceivably what could happen is that people just generally accept that evolution is a scientific fact without really grasping how it is possible. Such people will still fall prey to fallacious arguments about the likelihood of some complex structure appearing suddenly "by pure chance" (which no biologist claims) and will be vulnerable to appeals to human pride and a reluctance to group themselves with animals. I just think that as long as there is a vested religious interest in combatting evolution, it will be a lot more difficult to relegate to the set of accepted if poorly understood truths such as earth's orbiting the sun.

"Marshall, Will, and Holly on a routine expedition..."

LOTL was one of those shows that intrigued me as a kid for the same reason I now consider it a cheat. The whole business with the pylons and the one smart sleestak suggested that there were coherent underpinnings to the story that would eventually be revealed. In reality, it was just some dumb-*ss screenwriters who knew nothing about sentient dinosaurs let alone extradimensional portals making up a kiddie show as they went along, with their weekly whims serving as a rorschach test to unfortunate test subjects trying to infer a backstory that wasn't there.

Granted, at that level it's not a bad analogy to trying to infer a coherent ideology from the Bush White House.

It's not just evolution they're after either. The most extreme are also are challenging geology (age of earth, plate tectonics) and physics (cosmology, big bang theory).

This is a VERY important point Purple!!  They are attacking most all of the theories regarding the development of the earth/universe because those theories and laws are in complete conflict with the story of how the world was created as told by the King James Bible.  I agree, the geology and astrophysics are being attacked also.  It does go so much deeper then just evolution, it is an attack on science in general...

The simple way to deal with this is to say:

God created man and evolution is how he did it.

This ignores and confuses a great deal but it does stake out a position that is easy to understand and convey. 

I don't think it's right to pussyfoot around the issue, but neither is it a smart idea to characterize the creationists in an ignorant way, as you are doing here. The current debate involves not creationism as the term is usually understood, but what is called "intelligent design theory." The ID theorists do not refer to Noah's Ark or God or anything else in the Bible. They are a mixed bag, but in that bag are quite a few who DO believe that mankind evolved from other species. An example is Michael Behe, who wrote the book Darwin's Black Box.

I'm generalizing a little bit, but ID theory argues that there are some phenomena that can't be explained by the dominant scientific paradigms, and that therefore doubt must be cast on "neo-Darwinist" theory. Some other agent must be involved, an "intelligent designer." A few years back there were some publicly staged debates between ID theorists and evolutionists, and the IDers often did better than they should have, not because they were right, but because the evolutionary theorists didn't know how to argue against them.

It's one thing to ridicule a guy like Behe, who holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry. It's quite something else to point out the holes in his quite sophisticated argument. If science educators are truly on the side of "reason" they should do the latter rather than the former.

<i>Where are the theologians like the late Paul Tillich who said that faith required a leap of courage?<i/i>

Somewhere lower in GOP priorities than megachurch entrepreneurs with big mailing lists.

You don't know what you're talking about.

"some phenomena that can't be explained by the dominant scientific paradigms"

And.......? Any evidence to back that up? Or do you always make catagorical statements and expect everyone to believe you? 

 Do remember one thing though, we're talking about natural selection here.

Evolution: "Descent with modification is sufficent of itself to explain the origin of species."

And no, you don't get to make up your own strawman just to knock it down.