At Crosswalk.com, a good example of intellectual dishonesty
This past February the Ohio State Board of Education voted 11-4 to remove all language that was critical of evolution from its state’s science curriculum. Previously, Ohio’s public school science guidelines said that students should be free to “describe how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory.” The decision by the State Board of Education effectively eliminates that freedom. This means that science teachers and students are no longer authorized to discuss scientific evidence that questions the claims of Darwin’s theory.
No, no, no. The Ohio State School Board’s decision did not “eliminate freedom.” The previous policy is what eliminated freedom, by eliminating the freedom of local schools and science teachers to determine what should and should not be taught in their classrooms. It eliminated freedom by attempting to mandate that schools introduce creationism intelligent design critical analysis into the curriculum. It eliminated freedom through ham-handed attempts to get discredited religiosity into science classrooms.
Yes, discredited. It is simply not true, as Mr. Craven claims, that “Darwinism remains as much if not more of a philosophical idea as does Intelligent Design in terms of being testable scientific fact.” The intelligent design curriculum used in Ohio drew most heavily from creationist tracts, which have absolutely no basis in scientific analysis. Unlike Intelligent Design, macroevolution and the theory of common origins are both testable and falsifiable.
The worldwide scientific research community from over the past 140 years has discovered that no known hypothesis other than universal common descent can account scientifically for the unity, diversity, and patterns of terrestrial life. This hypothesis has been verified and corroborated so extensively that it is currently accepted as fact by the overwhelming majority of professional researchers in the biological and geological sciences (AAAS 1990; NAS 2003; NCSE 2003; Working Group 2001). No alternate explanations compete scientifically with common descent, primarily for four main reasons: (1) so many of the predictions of common descent have been confirmed from independent areas of science, (2) no significant contradictory evidence has yet been found, (3) competing possibilities have been contradicted by enormous amounts of scientific data, and (4) many other explanations are untestable, though they may be trivially consistent with biological data.
Further, although Craven clearly views the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District decision as the product of an ACLU/AU cabal, Judge Jones came to the same conclusion after considering the state of scientific evidence for macroevolution and intelligent design:
We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980’s; and (3) ID’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community.
Craven’s attack on the Ohio decision to eliminate ID’s back-door entry into the curriculum starts with a false premise (Ohio has eliminated freedom), mischaracterizes the scientific evidence for macroevolution, and proceeds to blatantly incorrect conclusions (that teachers are forbidden from teaching anything not specifically mentioned in the core curriculum). Weaknesses in the scientific support for macroevolution and non-Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms have long been part of the scientific curriculum. The now-rejected Ohio policy was never about a critical analysis of the scientific evidence for natural selection, common origins and macroevolution. It was about introducing unsupported falsehoods based on religion into science classes.
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