Palin and Creationism, again

I'm sorry to write yet again on this subject. But before moving on, I'll comment on a relevant and enthusiastic post about Sarah Palin, entitled "A star is born", by the Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips on her Spectator blog. And before doing that, I'll say a word about the author herself.

I know, like and respect Melanie. She has shown a good deal of courage in expounding her views on, among other things, the threat of radical Islam - an issue of immense importance on which she is essentially right, and about which she has been writing for a long time. I'm very much in disagreement, however, with her view that "if liberal values and democracy are to be defended, their Christian roots have to be vigorously defended, upheld and reasserted". On the contrary, one of the most vital principles of liberalism is the secularist insistence, codified in Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom of 1786, that there be no religious test for public office.

Christianity has proved compatible with literally any ideology, even in recent history: consider the racist justifications for apartheid offered by the Dutch Reformed Church; the Social Gospel preached by the Baptist reformer Walter Rauschenbusch; or the strong Tory pro-appeasement sentiments of Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1930s. I'm not concerned in public affairs with people's beliefs about first and last things, but only with whether they accept the implict social contract on which a free society depends. Moderate religion, whether or not you find its doctrines credible, accommodates itself to secular education and secular government, and is thereby a matter of private conscience.

And here we come to the issue of Melanie's post. Melanie believes that Sarah Palin is the victim of a smear campaign to suggest that she is a biblical Creationist. For my part, I'm not convinced - because the relevant data are not in the public realm, as far as I can see - that Governor Palin, whatever her faith, has made her accommodation with the secular principles that are integral to American goverment. The reason I'm not convinced is that she is on record, in public debate for an elected post, as stating that Creationism should be taught alongside evolutionary biology. This is not disputed by Melanie.

I've said nothing about whether Ms Palin is herself a Creationist; I don't know whether she is or not. But if she believes that religious dogma belongs in science education - possibly for a non-religious principle, such as not offending the sensibilities of believers - then her position is illiberal and must be opposed. To raise this question is not a smear, as Melanie believes. It's an important issue of public policy. And because Melanie has certainly and demonstrably misunderstood both the science and the pseudoscience in question, I hope she will reconsider her views.

Let's deal with these in turn. Melanie first mischaracterises Creationism. She says: "Creationism is very specifically the belief that the world was literally created in six days."

What Melanie identifies as "very specifically" the case is in fact not true at all. You'll have to forgive me for going through the looking-glass here, and introducing some very bizarre notions indeed.

The belief that God created the world in six days of 24 hours is a very recent variant of Creationism. It is known as Young-Earth Creationism, precisely to distinguish it from those variants that accept minimal known facts of geological science, which estimates the age of the Earth at around 4.55 billion years. There are, however, durable forms of Creationism that accept that the Earth is of great antiquity, and are consequently known as Old-Earth Creationism. The two most prominent of these are known as the day-age theory and the gap theory. Both take literally the Genesis account of Creation. The day-age theory, however, believes that the "days" of the account correspond not to periods of 24 hours, but to geological ages. The gap theory maintains that there is a gap, corresponding to a geological age, between verse 1 of the Genesis account and verse 2, after which God created the world as Scripture says.

Almost all US Creationists held one of these two positions till quite recently, when Young-Earth Creationism suddenly became more vocal. A century ago, almost the only Creationists to be Young-Earthers were the Seventh-Day Adventists of Ellen White - obviously not an orthodox Christian denomination. The populist attorney William Jennings Bryan, the prosecutor in the famous Scopes "Monkey" trial of 1925, was a believer in the day-age theory. And he was, Melanie, certainly a Creationist. (There is an institution in Tennessee called Bryan College, named for William Jennings Bryan. Its banner reads "Christ Above All", and it has a Center for Origins Research, "the world leader in creationist biology research". It doesn't take much to be world leader in that field.)

I would refer Melanie to two works by the historian Ronald Numbers, who is in effect the definitive chronicler of American Creationism. These are The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism, 1992, and Darwinism Comes to America, 1998, which provide a scrupulously fair account of the phenomenon. I hope she will acknowledge that she has misunderstood what Creationism means. (Incidentally, before Darwin published his Origin of Species, the term "creationism" was in use but it meant the doctrine that each soul was specially created - as opposed to traducianism, which held that souls were inherited from one's parents. Darwin then adopted the term "creationists" to refer to those who rejected his findings of descent with modification.)

More serious, Melanie has also misunderstood "Intelligent Design" - both what it is and what it says. She says:

"Then there is the further confusion – fomented in large measure by the astoundingly ignorant assertions made by lawyers and judges in the various US court cases over the teaching of creationism in American schools – that creationism is the same thing as Intelligent Design. It is not. Intelligent Design simply holds that life could not have originated spontaneously, but must have been at source the product of some kind of purposeful force. It does not deny evolution, rather the claim that evolution somehow spontaneously created itself. It is a view held by growing numbers of scientists, several of great distinction, and arises out of the very complexity of life that science has uncovered."

The judges are not being ignorant. They are assessing the evidence disinterestedly and coming to the correct and inevitable conclusion that ID is indeed a form of Creationism. Melanie appears to have misunderstood the content of both evolutionary biology (which is science) and ID (which is not). Evolution is not a theory of the origin of life. The origin of life is an important area of study, on which our knowledge is limited (which is - it ought to be unnecessary to add - not the same thing as a question to which the only answer is supernatural intervention). Evolution is about change in the frequency of genes within a population; I have no idea what Melanie means by "the claim that evolution somehow spontaneously created itself", and I hope she will point to a source for it.

Intelligent Design is indeed a variant of Creationism, and it does deny evolution. Its proponents maintain that some features of life are too complex ("irreducibly complex") to have been the product of natural selection and thus must have been the work of some intelligent designer. If there are, as Melanie tells us, "growing numbers of scientists, some of great distinction" (and I'm suspicious of that obsequious honorific) who accept ID, then why do they not publish their work in the scientific journals? As the biologist Jerry Coyne noted in an article in The New Republic three years ago:

"Its adherents have published only one refereed paper supporting ID in a scientific journal: a review of ID by Stephen C. Meyer, the director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, which appeared in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. This paper merely rehashes ID arguments for why natural selection and evolution cannot explain the diversity of life and then asserts that intelligent design is the only alternative. It distorts the evolutionary literature it purports to review, and it neither advances new scientific arguments nor suggests any way that ID better explains patterns in nature. Not surprisingly, the Council of the Biological Society of Washington later disowned the paper because it did 'not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings.'"

Intelligent Design hasn't arisen because of some crisis in evolutionary biology. It's arisen as a strategy to introduce religious dogma into science education under the dishonest guise of teaching a "controversy" that, as far as science is concerned, does not exist. That's a fundamental assault on liberal values and the constitutional principles of the world's leading democracy. It's completely reasonable to ask where Sarah Palin stands on the issue.

UPDATE: A reader has posted this comment: "Oliver, calling William Jennings Bryan a 'populist attorney' is certainly one way of describing him. You also could have used the phrases congressman, Secretary of State and three-time presidential nominee."

That's a fair point. The reason I didn't go into Bryan's background in public service is that his name lives on primarily in relation to the Scopes trial. But in fact - though I'm not sure if this is the point my reader was implying - Bryan's politics are relevant to his campaign against evolution and worth mentioning.

Bryan was a populist: he railed against big business and the banks, and he received the nomination of the Populist Party for his presidential candidature in 1896. In his concluding speech at the Scopes trial, there is a revealing passage where he refers to the "effort of an insolent minority to force irreligion upon the children under the guise of teaching science. What right has a little irresponsible oligarchy  of self-styled 'intellectuals' to demand control of the schools of the United States....?"

This is sheer populism, in counterposing the people to elitism. It is, of course, pernicious in imagining that the content of education should be a matter of majority opinion, but it is an important current in American politics. You can discern it to this day in the political appeal of Ross Perot or Pat Buchanan.

A slightly earlier example of a similar phenomenon in American politics is the curious figure of Ignatius Donnelly. Donnelly was a Republican Congressman from Minnesota in the 1860s, a strong populist, and a prominent advocate of not one but three distinctive preposterous notions. These were the theories of Atlantis; of Ragnarok (a notion that the Earth was hit by a comet that wiped out an advanced prehistoric civilisation); and of Francis Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare, as revealed in a cryptogram contained in the plays. All of these theories were, of course, worthless, and were written in the most florid and prolix of prose. But the appeal behind all of them was, again, mistrust of elites. There is room for a biography of this peerless crank; the only work I know on the man is a chapter in a fine book by Martin Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, first published in 1952.

Comments

[Eddy Elfenbein]

Oliver, calling William Jennings Bryan a "populist attorney" is certainly one way of describing him. You also could have used the phrases congressman, Secretary of State and three-time presidential nominee.

[Tony Francis]

Oliver, I think you are flogging a dead horse. It is permissible to ask Sarah Palin what her religious views may be. Belief, or lack thereof, is a perfectly legitimate thing to consider when choosing whom to vote for. If Palin were to be elected Vice President, or end up as President, she would have little or no power to influence what is taught in science classes. That is a role left to the local and state school boards. Various attempts to insert religion into science class have been unsuccessful. There is a lot of talk about it. But the talk has little basis in reality. Creationism or ID are not taught in US science classes. To be honest, evolution as a process occurring in nature plays a fairly small role in the whole subject of biology. It plays virtually no role in the study of medicine. (Don't write to me about antibiotic resistant bacteria. If that is evolution, it is not natural selection. It is a process affected by an intelligence artificially manipulating nature: humans.)
A similar hysteria is seen over the US Supreme Court. It is frequently stated that given the opportunity, they would overturn Roe v. Wade and make abortions illegal. Yet there is no evidence that this assertion is true. Five of the nine Justices are Roman Catholics, and have been since 2005. Yet there has been no attempt to make abortion illegal. There is no evidence that any such attempts are in the offing. Women are perfectly free to have an abortion at nine months, right up to the time the child is ready to deliver. We don't have a religious test for office in the US. But on the other hand there is no proscription against a certain religious belief, either. That is the liberal, secular society. I am a vocal advocate of it.

[Bill Nance]

Mr. Kamm:
As always, it is a pleasure to read your column.

As an American and as a former member of Governor Palin's denomination, I can assure you that the teachings of the Assemblies of God (a pentecostal sect) are unabashedly creationist. I have heard songs sung by church choirs such as "Can't make a monkey outta me," along with entire sermons on the necessity of all "good" Christians accepting the Genesis account of creation as literal truth.

ID is not science. It is the proverbial camel's nose under the tent. A sly attempt to inject sectarian religion into government affairs. So far our courts have protected us against the worst of this nonsense. But the growing influence of these Theocrats makes that protection ever more precarious.

The sad fact is that a once fairly obscure variant of Calvinism, confined to the deep south and rural midwest, and laughed at by virtually everyone else, has gradually inserted itself into the mainstream and virtually taken control of the Republican party.

Make no mistake. There is not one iota of difference between the leaders of this movement and the Ayatollahs of Iran. The only difference is that we still have at least some shred of the principle of separation of Church and State left to us; a principle we regularly hear denounced in churches like the one Governor Palin attends and TV outlets such as Fox News.

These Theocrats regularly argue that this wall of separation, as Jefferson called it, is merely a legal fiction (lie) that our country was founded as a Christian nation (lie) and that there is a conspiracy of "liberal media" and "secular humanists" out to get them.(another lie)

They use the tactic of the "Big Lie" so effectively they make Goebbels and Co. look like rank amateurs in comparison.

Were it in their power,I have little doubt the United States would look very much like Iran, only a Protestant version with 5000 nuclear warheads.

If this prospect does not terrify anyone not in the clutches of these fanatics, I question their sanity.

The very notion of defending one variety of religious fanaticism in the name of combating a different flavor is simply baffling to me

As someone who has lived in Europe and regularly visits the UK as well as the Continent, I understand how difficult it can be to grasp the power and depth of this movement.

But we in America have no history of "official" religion to warn us of it's dangers. Such a threat seems distant and unrelated to us, even as it threatens.

This is the danger of this movement. This is the danger of its ideology slowly but continually gaining political power.

It's bad enough we have to deal with so many Americans who think a scientific theory is indistinguishable from a half-arsed opinion. We need no assistance from Ms. Phillips.

Keep up the good fight!

[JOHN CHUCKMAN, TORONTO]

William Jennings Bryan is most famous in American history for his "Cross of Gold" speech, not for the Scopes Trial. This speech established his national reputation as an orator. It is just the kind of event high-school history books are fond of highlighting because of its catchy slogan-like title. Other chapters in the same typical text would be "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too," "Fifty-four Forty or Fight," and "Rememberthe Maine!"

Bryan was effectively speaking in favor of inflation which favored his constituency, although the term monetary inflation was not commonly used then.

Populism of his type - which has roots back to Andrew Jackson in his almost insane battles with the Bank of the United States - and even to Thomas Jefferson, a man whose appeals to small-holders and newcomers to America often read not unlike cultish words from someone like Pol Pot.

[JOHN CHUCKMAN, TORONTO]

Bill Nance, your post highlights perfectly the dangerous ignorance of Creationists.

"It's bad enough we have to deal with so many Americans who think a scientific theory is indistinguishable from a half-arsed opinion."

A scientific theory is NOT an opinion, half-arsed or otherwise.

It is an hypothesis, carefully thought out to reflect all past sound observations (data), open to, and inviting, continued testing and even contradiction with future observations (data).

Science, both at the macro-level of paleontology, and at the micro-level of cell technology, has done nothing but confirm the theory. Geology too has confirmed the theory's assumptions.

Although they are subject to being thrown out, and they have been, theories are never proved. They are under continuous testing and, if required, revision to the realities of new data. It was only in the 19th century and before that scientific theories were called "laws." That is no longer the case in what has emerged from physics as a stochastic universe.

Understanding that, evolution has been a remarkably resilient theory. During its time, entire intellectual frameworks have risen and fallen in physics and human psychology and economics.

Now, the genuine stupidity of Creationism is calling it a viable theory. What possible tests or data collection could hope to disprove Creationism or even lead to series adjustments in its statements? None, ever.

Creationism is not a theory, it is a belief, based on superstition and ancient traditions, and nothing more. You are certainly free, in a free society, to embrace it, but people like me are also free to make judgments about your attitudes and abilities if you do.

With a dozen nuclear carrier taskforces on the seas, I think it is mighty dangerous to have people with close-to delusional beliefs in positions of power. Moreover, embrace of this belief says something about flexible thinking and ability to adjust to new realities.

Creationism is a belief that goes back several thousand years, at least, and it has suffered no contradictions from testing because it cannot be tested.

Imagine going to a doctor whose knowledge reflected only and exactly what was contained in superstitious writings from 2,500 to 3,500 years ago. I believe it fair to say, if you saw a certificate framed on his office wall indicating just that qualification, you would run screaming from the office.

And just so, Creationism.

[Gabriel]

"These Theocrats regularly argue that this wall of separation, as Jefferson called it, is merely a legal fiction (lie) that our country was founded as a Christian nation (lie) and that there is a conspiracy of "liberal media" and "secular humanists" out to get them.(another lie)"

Jefferson was trying to create his "wall of separation" in Virginia, not the U.S. as a whole and, as it happens, he failed because at the time the State had an established church. Even Jefferson approved of laws passed for more or less explicitly religous motives at the state level, i.e. against various forms of promiscuity.

"Congress shall make no law" means that Congress shall make no law not whatever it has been transmuted to in your head.
**

Mr Kamm, if I find any proposition absurd and contemptible it is that there is an interventionist and providential deity who cares for makind so much that he actually became incarnated in human form, but had no role in how mankind came to be in the firstplace.

I have come across many religious people who think they believe in evolution - and this is often a very important part of their self-image - but they invariably turn out on closer insepction to believe in "planned" or "guided" evolution, concepts that I'm sure you agree have no place in scientific discourse.

I agree that ID should not be taught in biology class (unless some evidence does emerge to support it, which is at least possible I suppose), but I simply don't buy the claim that belief in evolution is some sort of decency litmus test.

Even more so I don't see it as a an educational one. I doubt very much that most people who "believe" in evolution have any understanding of it beyond a GCSE level. Knowledge of Ovid, not a Darwin (let alone a paragraph on Darwin written for 16 year olds) is what makes someone educated.

[Anthony]

It is also worth noting that Melanie Phillips also has extremely strange ideas about MMR vaccine, and science in general.

Her views on Islamism have gone beyond a sober reflection on a real phenomena to paranoid hysteria. Her analysis of fields I have more expertise in, leave me judging that her views on Islamism are equally suspect.

[andrew holden]

ID has been hijacked by creationists BUT not all IDers are creationists. Some don't believe that the designer was a divine being - preferring alien intelligence instead!

Anyway for the basic premise see:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/01/28/do2803.xml

Apparent design in the natural world needs explaining and although natural selection works for some instances, maybe many, it certainly can't be shown to work for all.

As for the definition of creationist - well all varieties allow some sort of direct intervention of a divine being apart from natural process. More liberal believers allow that God works through natural process but that his hand is discerned by faith underlying the whole business. As with many things, however, there is perhaps more of a spectrum of opinions between extremes with six-day literal creationists at one end, liberal deists at the other and a variety of intermediate positions including gap and special creation advocates inbetween.

[Tim Hedges]

This seems like an attempt to define ID in your own way and then knock it down. If ID is just a form of creationism, what do you call yourself if you feel the gaps in the fossil record suggest some guiding hand to evolution? I think that's what most people understand by ID.

[David Duff]

"some crisis in evolutionary biology"

The implication of your remark appears to be that all is, dare I say, 'happy-clappy' in the world of evolutionary biology. I should warn you, Oliver, that that is far from the reality. The only thing they can all agree on is that Theists generally, and Christians particularly, should be burned at the stake - well, not quite that but you know what I mean. After that, I suspect that 'Archbishop' Dawkins would be minded to dig up the body of Stephen Gould and drive a stake through his heart, and Gould, perhaps surprised to find himself in an after-life, is, I would guess, intent on haunting Dawkins to an early grave! Honestly, Oliver, the current crop of evolutionary biologists can barely agree on the time of day. Almost none of them know anything about higher mathematics without the rigour of which evolution is barely above the level of a series of good-ish guesses.

Even so, I am minded to comply with your liberal, er, 'diktat' that creationism (of any sort) should be confined to the Religious Studies class, if you would recognise that Darwin's original theory is shot full of holes (as the old boy himself suspected it would be) and none of his latter-day neophytes can agree on the *real* evolutionary theory. However, their fervour in support of this or that neo-version borders on the religious!

"There is a considerable gap in the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged with the current conception of biology." [M.P.Schutzenberger, 1967, Algorithms and the Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution]

I don't even know what an algorithm is but I get the very strong sense from Schutzenberger and other mathematicians that in biology the sums just don't add up.

[Snorri Godhi]

I detect a pattern here: writing about Bordon Brown, Oliver quickly brushes aside independence for the Bank of England; writing about Ken Livingstone, he quickly brushes aside the congestion charge; writing about Gov. Palin, he quickly turns the discussion to the views of Melanie Phillips and Tim Pawlenty. One would think that practical achievements are irrelevant to assessing a political career.

Let me put a straight question: Oliver, is there anything that can conceivably change your opinion of Sarah Palin, other than what she said or says?

Nice choice of art, though.

[melk]

As a scientist who has been living in the USA for nearly 40 years, I can attest that there is no threat more commonly cited by my fellow Americans than that posed by the beliefs of "right-wing evangelical Christians." I'm not a Christian and certainly not a creationist and I stll don't understand why anyone gets so exercised over this issue. The America that I first encountered in 1967 continues to ensure that these beliefs remain inconsequential.

[Michael B]

As the wag might say, there is much to say on the subject ...

Ronald Numbers is cited favorably and rightly so, but Numbers himself presents a still more problematic view than is reflected in Mr. Kamm's post. For example, take note of this excerpt from a likewise favorable review of Numbers' "The Creationists,"

http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5104

"... Numbers notes that creationists embody some of the widespread resentment toward America’s self-appointed knowledge elites. As such, they are part of a natural reaction to the intellectual imperialism so regularly practiced by a number of scholars at the nation’s best-known universities. A world in which a physicist like Cornell’s Carl Sagan becomes a guru concerning All Things, or a paleontologist like Harvard’s Stephen Jay Gould presumes to define the theoretical limits of “science,” is a world primed for an ancient languages expert like Whitcomb and an engineer like Morris to offer their own counter-pontifications about How The World Is.

"... Creationism is, at root, religion. It has become politics because of the overweening metaphysical pretensions of elitist pundits exploiting the prestige of science.

Precisely so. And that observation reflects one of the flip-sides of the coin that is not being addressed in the least.

To imagine that science qua science is the only subject of concern, the only subject invoked, is to be very imaginative indeed.

[Ruthy]

Sarah has them running scared as predicted by Freiman. www.gafreiman.com

[Simon Melville]

Oliver, Ignatius Donnelly also has a chapter in John Michell's "Eccentric Lives, Peculiar Notions".

Martin Gardner's "Fads and Fallacies" is a good skeptical read, but if you like to rejoice in batty ideas (as opposed to Gardner's still highly commendable job of poo-pooing) then I can also recommend Chris Mikul's "Bizarrism" and Donna Kossy's "Kooks".

[Marshall]

This is "much ado about nothing". First of all, I fail to see why people who don't identify religously with those who do believe in ID/creationism get so exercised about it. If someone else believes in it, how does it possibly hurt you? Secondly, the U.S. is a huge country, with a huge poplulation and is a polyglot of difference religions, ethnicities, and cutural identies. We have always had sizeable minority opinions about what we should do, teach, etc, through out our history. Some of those have been downright dangerous ideas, but the great equalizer of a democracy, a federal system, a seperation of powers between the branches of government, etc.,etc., has in general protected us from the nuttiest ideas over the years. Sure, we might elect a bad senator, or president, governor, what have you, but we always have other methods of reigning in those who might go to far. Third, the tradition of seperation of church and state, is not merely a tradition in this country it is actually established in the 1rst Amendement to the Constiution. It's been around almost as long as the country itself. One thing we Americans are serious about is freedom of religion. No one has the right to force their religious views on you, and you have no right to force those on others. Which means we tend not to pay much attention to the religion of another person, instead we are much more interested whether or not they can do their respective jobs, are they good parents, pay their bills on time, keep the yard clean, etc. (and yes, we of course had our moments of intolerance with various religions mainstream and not, but those are the exceptions and not the rule). If you doubt religious tolerance in this country come to my city Toledo, Ohio. A rather Roman Catholic town, that also has a sizeable eastern orthodox presence, not to mention a simply huge Mosque outiside of town, with a cooresponding Muslim population. But, alas, I digress from my final point. Is there really harm in teaching that there is an alternative point of view? That some people, even if its based upon religion, and not modern science believe otherwise? Can't we do that without necessarily denigrating those with such beliefs. Further, if a person has such beliefs based upon religious basis do we automatically assume them not to be competent to handle public office.? Faith is a matter of just that faith, it isn't logical, and it is not subject to being distillied into a scientific pattern. Which of couse why it is faith, instead of something more concrete than proof. But do we automatically have to claim that anyone who identifies themselves as a Christian is automatically non qualified for public office, or perhaps any job or raising a child perhaps, just because they believe in God? Perhaps, merely believing that Jesus was the son of God, was cucified, resurrected, and assended into heaven in and of it self should disqualify a person from being allowed to vote, or perhaps even own a home. God (ooops, shouldn't use that word) that person probably doesn't have the I.Q. to feed themselves. Lets not forget the Jews, who also believe in God, and and are stil waiting for the Messiah to come. How about those Muslims, surely they can't be trusted if they maintain their faiith. What about those nutty Hindus, reinacarnation, the wheel of life, preposterous, through the lot of them out!

Ok, enough with the hyperbole, but I trust you get my point. A little faith never hurt anyone. I'm not a particularly religous person myself, I tend to attend Church when I have to such as weddings, funerals, etc. Nothing against it, just not for me. I find the ID/Creationism debate to be laughable, evolution may not be a perfect theory, (as all theories are subject to future revision) but it has an awful lot of well reasoned science behind it. But, I am opened minded enough to understand that other may not agree with me. Does beign open minded really hurt anyone? Further, since when is teaching a bit about ID actually going to hurt someone. I was tought about it in a public school, in the 7th grade (not sure of the British equivilent, but I would have been 12-13 years old) and I don't think it harmed me. So there is another theory out there, so what? They told us about it, didn't place any judgment on it, and let us decide. I decided that evolution made more sense. I trust you agree that being exposed to such ID/Creationism didn't turn me into a gibbering idiot.

Ok, sorry for the rant, but this is a topic that gets me a bit exercised. I abhor intolerance based upon religion, andy find intolerance based against religion to be equally foul.

[Tony Francis]

Dear Oliver: It would appear that Trinity United Church of Christ, which was most recently Barack Obama's church (and one he had attended for 20 years) is deeply involved in the theology of Creationism. If we are to believe Chris Hitchins, they even sell Creationist books on their website.
http://www.slate.com/id/2181460
The Trinity website is located in the body of Mr. Hithins' Slate article.

So here is the score: Sarah Palin attends a church which promotes Creationism. Barack Obama attended a church which promoted Creationism. It is true he recently dropped his membership, but it wasn't because he had a revelation about Creationism. Rather, the revelation was the effect Rev. (Goddam America) Wright was having on his candidacy. You can determine if his leaving was cynical. We don't really know where McCain stands on Creationism. Joe Biden is a pro-abortion Roman Catholic-enough said concerning his understanding of his religion. So why are you picking on poor Sarah? What about Barack? Is it important to know whether he is a Creationist? Or did he spend twenty years in that church, and not really know what they were preaching? Anyway, it appears we will get a Creationist, no matter who wins the election.

[Marcus Philip]

Obama is not a creationist nor does he believe in the teaching of I.D.:

http://religionblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/04/obama-lets-teach-science-in-sc.html

http://obama.senate.gov/news/060118-obama_townhall/

Governor Palin advocates the teaching of intelligent design alongside evolution. The key word here is 'teaching' - as though creationism/Intelligent Design were credible alternates theories that warranted serious discussion.

http://community.adn.com/adn/node/102978

Marshall - I appreciated your post and agree with your final line. However the central issue is not whether it people should be able to hold certain views (this is none of our business) but whether I.D./creationism has any legitimate place in the science classroom.

[Marcus Philip]

Melanie Philips’ enthusiasm for conspiracy theories – from MMR vaccines to creationism to global warming – and her tendency to slander those with whom she disagrees ("Jews For Genocide") is very troubling. Her key note is paranoia and her pronouncements on a range of topics – from gay marriage to drug law - border on the apocalyptic. Further, her own gleeful participation in the smearing of Obama marks her as a hypocrite.

There are a large number of exceptional writers and thinkers who explore the dangers posed by Islamism, such as Hitchens, Cohen, Bawer, Berman etc, who do not indulge in paranoia, conspiracy theories and hyperbole as Ms Philips is wont to do. However persuasive Ms Philips may be on this topic her treatment of other issues makes it difficult to take her seriously.

[GregK]

I'm very impressed that somebody writing for a mainstream media outlet actually knows something about religion. That's shocking.

However, the claim that intelligent design must be a form of creationism is simply false. There are any number of possible secular versions of intelligent design. The designer could be an alien or a time-traveling human.

It may be that certain American manifestations of intelligent design are closely tied to creationism, but that's a different question.

[Tony Francis]

Dear Marcus Philip: If Barack Obama does not believe in Creationism, why did he attend a church for twenty years which teaches it as part of its basic theology?

[John Thacker]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080903/ap_on_el_pr/cvn_palin_creationism

She does not appear to have supported such a thing as governor, according to the Associated Press. She was, however, quoted as saying in the Anchorage Daily News "I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum."

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/sliming_palin.html

Many of the stories about Sarah Palin are as ridiculous as many of the rumors about Sen. Obama.

[Art Webster]

It is always amusing to read the comments of people who consider themselves Liberals. Their minds seem to be at least as closed as those they criticize. By their reasoning no religious person should be President because a religious person believes that there is a God. A fact that cannot be scientifically proven.

The test should not be whether Palin believes in creationism or ID. The test should be whether she intends to impose those views on the rest of us. The record seems to indicate that as governor she made no attempt to do so.

I am a Catholic. I believe that God created the universe and all things in it, including mankind. I do not believe that we are nothing more than a chain reaction of amino acids. However, I recognize that that is not science and under no circumstances should it be taught in biology class. Am I unfit for public office?

[iain rae]

Thomas Jefferson would turn in his grave if he thought a moose hunting creationist would be the leader of the free world.

[Stephan]

It's important to know that it takes just as much faith to believe in "the big bang" as it does to believe in God. Evolution is a theory based on ideas that have not been proven scientifically. There are many errors in the theory which are clearly pointed out if researched properly and thoroughly. Palin's beliefs are important to Americans who want to know if they share or oppose beliefs with the VP candidate.