Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy Blog is mad as hell and he's not gonna' take it any more:

"[The creationists] may have fired the first shot, but we have plenty of ammo on our side as well. And we also have many, many scientists willing to accept this call to arms.

I'm one of them. Over the course of time, you'll be seeing more rebuttals - no, debunking - of creationist claims here. I've had enough, and this threat is real. They want to turn our classrooms in a theocratically-controlled anti-science breeding ground, and I'm not going to sit by and watch it happen. "

What has made Plait so outraged? Apparantly it's this post from the Discovery Institute's blog, Evolution News and Views, which discusses the recent debacle over the showing of The Privileged Planet at the Smithsonian.

I'll get back to that later, but first, let's take a look at Plait's beliefs about science education. He thinks that there's a real threat of a classroom being turned into "a theocratically-controlled anti-science breeding ground". Now, I'm sure that there are some people out there who have this desire (although probably not as many as Plait thinks), but I don't see any evidence that it'll ever become a reality. For starters, there's the First Amendment, which pretty much makes turning the US into a theocracy impossible. Does Plait think there's a real threat of the First Amendment becoming abolished?

Okay, back to the film. Unfortunately, it seems as if Plait is deeply confused as to what it's about, as he apparently thinks it's an attack on the Big Bang theory. In the beginning of his post, he links to an YEC argument for a young universe, and later, he writes:

"Evolution rankles them because it contradicts the Bible which says God made man in his own image and describes specifically how God did it. But cosmology, the study of the Universe as a whole, is even worse for them, since it clearly contradicts the very first passages of that Bible. If you take the Bible literally, then you have to reject everything we understand about science, and vice-versa."

However, as anyone who knows just a little bit about The Privileged Planet is aware, the film is about the fine-tuning of the cosmological constants, not an attack on the Big Bang. As David Heddle points out, far from being some new development, physicists without connections to the Discovery Institute have been saying this for years. It's also a popular argument among theistic evolutionists, including ID-critic Kenneth Miller. This makes it even more ironic when Plait tries convincing non-fundamentalist Christians that "these creationists are not on your side":

"If you are a Christian, and not a fundamentalist literal-Bible Christian, then you should be aware that these creationists are not on your side. To them, you are just as wrong as Muslims, Jews, and atheists. They may paint scientists as evil atheists who want to steer your children from The One True Way, but remember that this is their "True Way", and probably not yours."

These people might be more willing to believe Plait, had he not just tried lumping them in with young-earth creationists.

(Hat tip to Pharyngula, who has a knack for finding posts like this.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 14th, 2005 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Intelligent Design, The Debate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. The trackback link is: http://telicthoughts.com/bad-arguments/trackback/