Thanks to the Indiana Law Blog for the pointer to an editorial by the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette on intelligent design. Like myself and Sneer.org, the Gazette makes the connection between this kind of debasement of our scientific education and Indiana’s lackluster technology development.
Indiana can’t afford to have its academic standards compromised by unscientific views. A profile released this week at the Indiana Technology Summit shows the state fell behind or was stagnant on 14 of 23 measures of progress in creating a technology-based economy. Adopting science standards that include instruction in intelligent design – ideas rejected by mainstream scientists – would seal the state’s backwater reputation.
Keep in mind, fear of a backwater reputation is one of the rationales commonly put forward by proponents of Daylight Saving Time for Indiana. Certainly putting Intelligent Design into our science classes would be stronger evidence that Indiana is principally composed of rubes than whether or not we choose to fiddle with our clocks twice a year.
The Journal Gazette editorial is also skeptical of Carl Baugh, the man Representative Bosma is consulting with about Intelligent Design.
House Speaker Brian Bosma apparently is on board with Border’s plan, having met last month with Carl Baugh, host of Trinity Broadcasting Network’s “Creationism in the 21st Century.†The Rev. Frederick Boyd, whose Indianapolis church hosted Baugh’s visit, told the Star that Bosma was already pursuing intelligent design legislation, but wanted Baugh’s ideas on how to create it.
An example of those ideas are found at the Web site for the Creation Evidence Museum, which Baugh founded in Glen Rose, Texas. “Among museums, this entity makes a unique contribution, demonstrating that man and dinosaur lived contemporaneously,†the Web site boasts.
Unique, indeed. Sixty-three million years elapsed between the time dinosaurs walked the Earth and man appeared, in spite of what Baugh and Flintstones fans might suggest. It’s troubling to learn the speaker is leaning on such a source for advice on Indiana’s academic standards, or that he is meddling in the state’s academic standards in any fashion. That’s best left to the State Board of Education, which has wisely approved standards based on teaching evolution.
The concern over Baugh echoed the thoughts of Ed Brayton at InTheAgora.com. Mr. Brayton says about Mr. Baugh:
Folks, if you want to show that ID is not old fashioned creation science under a new name, you gotta stay away from folks like Carl Baugh. Carl Baugh is a young earth, global flood, humans lived with dinosaurs creationist. He’s also a complete fraud, still pushing the Paluxy “manprints” more than a decade after even his fellow creationists at the Institute for Creation Research and Answers in Genesis admitted they weren’t human footprints and urged their followers not to use them as evidence any longer (and more than three decades after they were debunked by Walter Lammerts, founder of the Creation Research Society, who recognized that the Paluxy prints, if they were genuine, created just as much of a problem for creationism as for evolution because, as he put it, “On the basis of a worldwide flood what were people doing walking around yet after so much sediment deposited?”).
Taking down words also heaps an appropriate amount of scorn on the idea of teaching “Intelligent Design” alongside evolution in our science classes.
This is just more divisive crap that does not a thing to address the real concerns of Hoosiers. Howard Dean said that Republicans like to use God, gays, and guns to distract and divide. This is evidence that at least some Indiana Republicans like to operate in that fashion. I’m happy that Governor Daniels is at least noncomittal on this issue. He takes the line that the legislature probably shouldn’t micromanage schools. I’m certainly agreeable to that policy, but would be happier if the Governor would simply say that it is wrong to attempt to put non-science into science classes.
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