[NYTr] Blasphemous Science: When Creationists Attack!

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Oct 19, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/brauchli10182007.html

Blasphemous Science:

When Creationists Attack!

By CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI

    "The idea of a sun millions of miles in diameter and 91 million
miles away is silly. The sun is only 32 miles across and not more than
3,000 miles from the earth. . . . God made the sun to light the earth,
and therefore must have placed it close to the task it was designed to
do."

 -Wilbur Glenn Voliva, 1870-1942 (Head of the Christian Catholic
Apostolic Church in Zion, Illinois and leader of the Flat Earth Society)

It seems only fair. From Europe we have received Bach, Mozart and
Beethoven, to name but a few and to Europe we are now exporting the
learning of the illustrious members of today's equivalent of
yesterday's Flat Earth Society. News of the exportation of their
beliefs comes at an inopportune time coinciding, as it does, with news
that one of its leading exponents and the head of one of the
institutions of lower education associated with it, has just been
charged with bilking the institution of millions of dollars in the
furtherance of the Lord's work.

According to a suit filed by three former professors of Oral Roberts,
University, Richard Roberts, the offspring of its founder, spent
lavishly from the institution's coffers in order to remodel his
Dwelling Place and repeatedly took private trips on a university plane
and engaged in assorted other activities that ill become one occupying
as exalted a position as he. But this is not about him and anyway,
those are simply allegations in a civil suit that may or may not be
proven when the trial occurs. This is about exportation.

On October 4, 2007, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of
Europe, mustering more courage than many school boards in the United
States, condemned efforts to teach creationism in European schools by a
vote of 48 to 25. Adopting recommendations of a report prepared by Guy
Lengagne, a senior French member of the Assembly, the Assembly decried
the advocates of creationism saying they were seeking to "impose
religious dogma" and were promoting "a radical return to the past". In
a bit of chauvinism the Assembly pointed out that the notions of
creationism were "an almost exclusively American phenomenon". The
Assembly said that denying pupils knowledge of evolution was "totally
against children's educational interests" and that creationists support
a "radical return to the past which could prove particularly harmful in
the long term for all our societies."

In Poland, Deputy Minister of Education, Miroslaw Orzechowski, a member
of the ultra-conservative league of Polish Families dispensed with the
notion of evolution by calling it a "lie". In Serbia Liliana Colic was
"forced to resign after ordering schools to stop teaching the Darwinian
theory of evolution if creationist ideas were not also part of the
school curricula". Russia, too, has families making similar demands.
Nonetheless, Europe still has a way to go if it hopes to catch down
with the United States.

No one in Europe has yet suggested, as the educational leaders of Cobb
County, Georgia, did some years ago, that books describing evolution
have stickers placed in them advising students to carefully evaluate
its tenets before placing much stock in them. (A federal court ordered
the stickers removed.) Nor have there been reports that movies have
been withdrawn in Europe because they suggested evolution took place as
happened in Imax theaters in the South where, among others, the movie
"Cosmic Voyage" was removed from the screen.

The description of the movie, nominated for an academy award in 1997,
says it "explores some of the greatest scientific theories, many of
which have never before been visualized on film." Through some
oversight it failed to include depictions of God creating the world in
7 days and was, accordingly, not shown in parts of the South.

"Volcanoes of the Deep Sea" that the National Science Foundation and
Rutgers University had a role in producing was not shown in the Fort
Worth Museum of Science and History after an audience that was given a
preview of the film pronounced it "blasphemous". The film suggested
that life might have begun in the undersea vents in an undersea
volcano. Among the viewers' responses were: "I really hate it when the
theory of evolution is presented as fact" and "I don't agree with their
presentation of human existence."

Some movie producers have expressed the fear that if sufficient numbers
of theaters turn down movies that treat evolution as fact, future
production of such movies will be inhibited. That would please those
who don't believe in evolution. If evolution is not presented as fact
it may eventually go away. It's hard to argue with them. They are
living proof that not all living things have evolved. They've not.

[Christopher Brauchli is a laywer in Boulder, Colorado. He can be
reached at: Brauchli.56 at post.harvard.edu ]