Red State Rabble

We know we've been pounding this pulpit pretty hard lately, but we can't help noting that others have begun to notice that intelligent design "theory" is already the old, new thing, and creationism is staging a come back.

Here's a guest post from John E. Simmons, the collection manager at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum that looks at the developing creationist strategy:

Having followed the creation/evolution debate now for more than 25 years, particularly the publications of the Institute for Creation Research, I would like to risk making a prediction: the current push for intelligent design is soon going to diminish in importance as a political tool, and in its place will rise an all-new "scientific creationism."

This prediction is based on two factors.

1. The ID leadership, in trying to make ID sound more scientific, has made it too atheistic for the fundamentalist Christians who are behind the anti-evolution push in public schools.
2. As revealed in this month's ICR publications (as well as other published sources), the creationists are busy re-defining both evolution and species.

Now, I know what you're thinking--evolution and species are both scientific terms, how can they be re-defined? Simple--by giving the words new definitions for purposes of public policy, such as for what is taught in public schools, or what research is funded by government agencies.

ACTS & FACTS 34(8): The feature story is a report on the ICR trip to the Galapagos Islands to see "where Darwin went wrong." Of more importance is the President's Column, in which John Morris reports on a group of scientists meeting at ICR in June for "strategizing for the upcoming research initiative in genomics." Using published data on the human genome, the group plans to demonstrate "the certainty that man and animals have no common ancestor. A second goal is to establish the limits of the created 'kind,' delineating the limits of biological adaptation." How will they do this? The answer is in J. Morris' secondcolumn, in Back to Genesis...

BACK TO GENESIS #200: John Morris addresses the question, "How could Noah and his family care for the many animals on board the ark?" He reveals the new creationist definitions of species and evolution in this section: "Noah was told to take two of each 'kind' of animal on board, probably represented by today's 'families' or even 'genera' rather than species. For instance, the dog 'kind' includes many species--wolf, domestic dog, dingo, coyote, etc."

So Noah would need only to have taken, say, a pair of wolves on board the ark. After the flood, thewolves would, by the miracle of micro-evolution, become coyotes anddingos and dogs, the biodiversity we see today. But these many representatives of the dog kind would be just variations of the same kind (=the same species), all related only to the dog kind, and without any other vertebrate ancestor.

Thus we have a new definition of species (kind), and a new definition of evolution (micro-evolution is not evolution, it is variation; one kind giving rise to another kind would be evolution, if it ever occurred).

The other article is by Henry M. Morris, "Evolution--impossible to embarrass its believers." This is vintage Henry Morris, concluding that a recent discovery of a well-preserved fossil T. rex means it could not have been in the ground more than a few thousand years; that the failure of geophysicists "to find the so-called Mohorovocic Discontinuity" disproves the evolutionary history of the earth, and so forth, before going on to rant about what flawed human beings evolutionists are.

IMPACT #386: "Polonium radiohalos: the model for their formation tested and verified" claims that because "uranium (238U) and polonium (Po) radiohalos [are] frequently found in granitic rocks [they] had to have formed simultaneously. This implies that hundreds of millions of years of radioactive decay (at today's rates) had to have occurred in a matterof a few days!"

These ICR publications are available at www.icr.org