Thoughts in a Haystack

Well, it looks like my fellow lawyers have joined the Evil Atheist Conspiracy and signed up with Satan (no wisecracks!).

Ben Stein's upcoming feature fantasy, Expelled, is trotting out some of its "stars," the brave Darwin doubters who have been hunted down and their academic careers crushed. In a report on the “Expelled Road Show Tour” currently underway and scheduled to hit 40 college campuses across the country by the film’s February 2008 release date, the Christian Post has a short profile of Caroline Crocker, who supposedly lost her job at George Mason University for questioning Darwinism. She denies teaching creationism at GMU:

Rather, she contends that she taught only one lecture on the evidence for and against evolution and did not even mention creationism.

“What I really wanted to do was in an intellectually honest manner give the evidence for evolution, but also the question about evolution – the scientific critiques – that’s all I did,” Crocker said.

It almost rips your heart out doesn't it? But then the niggling doubts set in:

She has not been able to find a lawyer to represent her against George Mason since her first lawyer dropped her case.

A lawyer drops a case ... against an institution with deep pockets? There's only one reason I know for that ... there ain't no case!

And, sure enough, a little digging turns up this story from the Washington Post from back in February 2006. At that time, Crocker had moved on to Northern Virginia Community College where, according to the story, she was teaching the same class as she had at GMU. And, instead of innocently raising doubts about the evidence for evolution, she was practicing all the worst of creationist calumny: misstatements to the effect that the Miller/Urey experiment is supposed to be evidence of evolution, the lies about the peppered moth experiments, accusations of evolutionary theory leading to Nazism and the claim that it is only taught in support of the philosophy of naturalism. She apparently went a tad further than the mild portrayal she is trying to sell now:

[T]his highly trained biologist wanted students to know what she herself deeply believed: that the scientific establishment was perpetrating fraud, hunting down critics of evolution to ruin them and disguising an atheistic view of life in the garb of science. ...

"I believe in creationism, I believe in intelligent design," she declared to the class. Humans have souls, which make them different from other animals, she told me later. To believe in evolution meant that "after you are dead, you are done." ...

The moment of honesty in equating ID with creationism soon passed, however. Perhaps her claim during the Expelled dog and pony show most at variance with her attitude in 2006 was her allegation that she only wanted to give both the evidence for evolution and the scientific critiques. Besides the fact that her critiques were hardly scientific, the intent to be fair was otherwise sorely lacking back then:

Before the class, Crocker had told me that she was going to teach "the strengths and weaknesses of evolution." Afterward, I asked her whether she was going to discuss the evidence for evolution in another class. She said no.

"There really is not a lot of evidence for evolution," Crocker said. Besides, she added, she saw her role as trying to balance the "ad nauseum" pro-evolution accounts that students had long been force-fed.

Once again we see that the people who are supposedly out to save us from soulless naturalism are willing to tell any lie, misrepresent any position, cheat in any manner they feel they can get away with, in service of their agenda. I would take the morality of any other member of the animal kingdom over these hypocrites without a second's hesitation. It's not the beasts of the field I'm ashamed to be related to.

And they are delusional to boot:

Among themselves, these advocates believe the wheel has turned full circle: If Galileo and Copernicus were the scientific rebels who were once punished by the dogma and authority of the church, these advocates now believe that they are being punished by the dogma and authority of science.

As Stephen Jay Gould of fond memory famously said:

A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right.

Boy, have they got a long way to go!
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