Hildegarde

So, here’s the thing.

I actually tried to check out that story before I posted it yesterday–the one on Creationists in Oklahoma responding to the airing of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos.

I checked it out on Snopes.com, which had nothing on it.  And I found the same story a couple of other places. 

In the end, though, I bought it for the reason most of us buy hoaxes–because it sounded completely plausible to me, and because I’d been expecting something like it since the show first began to air.

On the other hand, I really should have known better.

Unlike a lot of the other people on the net who have the vapors over Creationism, I’ve read a lot of actual Creationist material. 

And what should have made it screamingly obvious that this story was false was—the spelling.

So let me backtrack a bit here and see if I can work this out.

1) The most important factor in my falling for it was the fact that I was expecting something like it, and the something like it had not been showing up.

Let me start by saying that I like the new Cosmos series quite a bit, even though it’s pitched to a child’s intellectual and instructional level, which sometimes makes me a little nuts.

But the series is both clear and engaging, and its quirks–some of the emphases (see Giordano Bruno, who gets LONG stretches in episode 2) are a little off-kilter.  But by and large, a good introduction to the history of science, at least so far.

It is also uncompromisingly secular, and uncompromisingly critical of the role of religion in retarding the progress of science over the centuries.

It is not, however, inaccurate about the role of religion in the progress of science–it acknowledges the places where the Church actually aided the progress of science and it manages to at least mention the fact that Galileo’s problems were largely the result of his political activities rather than his science.

In spite of all that, I have been suspecting, for some time, that there would be complaints.

This isn’t a New Atheist diatribe, but it is, as I said, steadfastly secular.  It doesn’t pull its punches on things like evolution and the age of the universe.  It doesn’t say that everybody’s “way of knowing” is just as good as anybody else’s.  In fact, it’s quite clear on the idea that some “ways of knowing” are a LOT better than others.

So I was, as I said, expecting some blowback, and when I saw this thing, my brain went:  ah, finally.

But I still should have known better, because there’s a big giveaway here that anybody who has ever read Creationist literature should pick up right away.

Which gets me to

2) I know people who really are like this.  I have them in my family.  They roam the landscape like addled lemmings just asking to be an example of evolution in action.

BUT–

What these people are not is part of the organized Creationist movement.

Anybody who has spent any time reading Creationist literature, or who has gone to Ken Ham’s Creationist Museum, or has even looked into the writing of people in the Christian school and homeschool movements will notice one thing right away.

These people spell better than the rest of us, and their grammar tends to also be much more strictly correct.

That’s because the curricula for Christian schools and homeschools put a lot of emphasis on basics like grammar, punctuation and spelling. 

Even when the ideas are migraine-inducing, the presentation tends to be very good indeed. 

If Creationists actually spoke and wrote as the people in that article did, they’d have no credibility beyond their very small circle. 

Instead, these people do have credibility with a lot of their fellow citizens who don’t actually know much about science, but see there is a controversy and try to be fair to both sides. 

In fact, to the extent that Creationism has had any success at all in this country, it is due not to true Bible believing Christians who want their point of view represented in public schools, but on the non believers around them who read their material, see that it’s well put together, and decide that the fair thing to do is to represent all sides instead of just one.

And yes, of course, I know that this is not the kind of case where the “fairness” approach makes any sense, but we are never going to get out from under the fact that the fairness approach is deeply and probably ineradicably American. 

And in spite of cases like this, where it shouldn’t really apply, that’s not a bad trait for a people to have.

3) My falling for this reminds me of something I’ve brought up on this blog before–the tendency of major news outlets and university administrations to fall for fake “hate crimes.”

If you take some time and look around on the web, you’ll find that there have been a remarkable number of these things over time, starting with the Brawley case and coming right on down to just about now, with students caught red-handed spraying racist grafitti on their own dorm room doors and sending themselves racist or rapist e mails.

The one that’s stuck with me over the years had to do with a university professor in, I think, Wisconsin, who faked a redneck pick-up truck stalking incident in the days after he’d published an anti-religious letter to the editor in the local paper.

I don’t know what these poeple think is going on, but my first advice to any of them would be to note that the police are a lot smarter than hoaxers ever think they are.

But the bottom line is that we all think we know how the world works, and we’re all subject to confirmation bias in all its myriad forms. 

That’s why we all find ourselves believing things we want to be true.

4) I was asked, in e mail, whether, when I said I wanted local communities to make their own decisions about the curriula in their local schools, I’d include local communities like the one invented in this article.

And my answer, as always, is yes.

Self government does not promise that people will always make the wise choice, or the best choice, or even the choice most in line with reality.

It only says that self government is the great moral obligation we owe to our fellow men and women.

I’ve got to go work out things with student papers.