This Week in Superstition

I was reading in the local paper about a fellow named Rocky Twyman who claims that his “Pay at the Pump” program is responsible for our recently lowered gas prices. He claims that if everybody prayed, we could get gas down to $2 a gallon again. I took an economics class in college and this is a principle of economics I’m completely unfamiliar with. I thought that supply and demand drove prices – I didn’t realize prayer did! Time to revise those economic textbooks!

Fortunately, I haven’t seen any kooks praying at the pumps here in Fort Wayne, not yet, though I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re out there. After all, we have kooks that drive around putting curses on local businesses they don’t want here, and putting up “wards” at the four quarters of the city to keep out undesirables (it didn’t keep me out!).

You can read about this madness here.

On the plus side, I read that in California “A federal judge says the University of California can deny course credit to applicants from Christian high schools whose textbooks declare the Bible infallible and reject evolution.” I was pretty excited by this. It’s not unreasonable and it’s not anti-Christian. But it does protect the integrity of our higher educational system:

Rejecting claims of religious discrimination and stifling of free expression, U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles said UC’s review committees cited legitimate reasons for rejecting the texts – not because they contained religious viewpoints, but because they omitted important topics in science and history and failed to teach critical thinking.

I couldn’t agree more. Apparently Christians are upset because the University has rejected proposed Christian-biased classes with textbooks that claim “‘the Bible is the unerring source for analysis of historical events’ and evaluates historical figures based on their religious motivations’” and “another rejected text, “Biology for Christian Schools,” declares on the first page that “if (scientific) conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong.”

In that context, I was reading a very interesting piece in the New York Times called Optimism in Evolution by Olivia Judson. This was a very good, insightful piece. She offers several valid reasons for why evolution should be taught in schools but it was the last one that really caught my eye:

The third reason to teach evolution is more philosophical. It concerns the development of an attitude toward evidence. In his book, “The Republican War on Science,” the journalist Chris Mooney argues persuasively that a contempt for scientific evidence — or indeed, evidence of any kind — has permeated the Bush administration’s policies, from climate change to sex education, from drilling for oil to the war in Iraq. A dismissal of evolution is an integral part of this general attitude.

It cannot be denied that over the past eight years, we have seen science devalued and faith and ideology raised up in its place. It’s Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” under another name. Because they feel it’s right, it’s right, evidence be damned. Facts become meaningless in the face of ideology and religious/doctrinal necessity. It doesn’t matter that we can see evolution taking place (it’s not always slow) and that Darwin has been proven right with regard to species competing to see who survives, and that those who adapt best and fastest are the winners. None of that matters if it contradicts the Bible. It’s incredible if you think about it…about how people can see the evidence for themselves but live in denial of it, but they do.

Finally, as Olivia Judson says at the end of her piece, “But for me, the most important thing about studying evolution is something less tangible. It’s that the endeavor contains a profound optimism. It means that when we encounter something in nature that is complicated or mysterious, such as the flagellum of a bacteria or the light made by a firefly, we don’t have to shrug our shoulders in bewilderment.”