Creation vs evolution in England state school

Fundamentalist Christians who do not believe in evolution have taken control of a state-funded secondary school in England.

In a development which will astonish many British parents, creationist teachers at the city technology college in Gateshead are undermining the scientific teaching of biology in favour of persuading pupils of the literal truth of the Bible.

Emmanuel College - set up by the Tories - is designated a beacon school by the Labour government and its backers are sponsoring a city academy to be built in nearby Middlesbrough.

City technology colleges are technically independent schools but charge no fees because they are funded by the government as well as the private sector. City academies are similar although local education authorities have to agree to their creation.

The school is hosting a creationist conference this weekend and senior staff have given a series of lectures at the college urging teachers to promote biblical fundamentalism and giving tips on techniques to make pupils doubt the theory of evolution.

The creationist lobby has become increasingly notorious in the US, but until recently it has been relatively weak in Europe. The Anglican and Catholic hierarchies have accepted evolution as a fact, with the Pope saying it was "more than just a hypothesis."

Under the national curriculum, schools must teach evolution but are not banned from teaching creationism as well. That leaves Emmanuel's teachers free to present evolution merely as a "theory" no different from the idea that the world was made in six days.

Nigel McQuoid, the school's head, told us it was "fascist" to say that schools should not consider creationist theories.

Mr McQuoid and his predecessor John Burn wrote in an article in 1997: "To teach children that they are nothing more than developed mutations who evolved from something akin to a monkey and that death is the end of everything is hardly going to engender within them a sense of purpose, self-worth and self-respect."

Emmanuel is a non-denominational Christian school which achieves consistently outstanding academic results and received a glowing Ofsted report last year.

Sponsorship It was built with £2m of sponsorship from Sir Peter Vardy, the multimillionaire entrepreneur behind the Reg Vardy car dealerships, who remains chairman of the college's board of directors.

Another of Emmanuel's directors is Baroness Cox, the Conservative peer who in 1988 sponsored amendments to the education reform bill stating that religious education in state schools should be "in the main Christian". Sir Peter, an evangelical Christian, has donated a further £2m via his charitable Vardy Foundation to build a city academy in nearby Middlesbrough, due to open in 2003, and has offered to fund five more. Mr McQuoid and Mr Burn, the Vardy Foundation's chief education adviser, are helping to set it up, as no head has yet been appointed.

Mr Burn is one of the founders of the Newcastle-based Christian Institute, set up in 1991 to promote fundamentalist Christian beliefs. It now boasts 12 full-time employees, 10,000 supporters and according to its accounts it earned £500,000 last year, all in donations.

Other founding members of the institute include the Rev David Holloway, vicar at Jesmond parish church in Newcastle and the Rev George Curry, who presides at two churches in the inner city area of Elswick and chairs the council of the Church Society, the leading evangelist body in the Church of England. Both men are traditionalists and outspoken opponents of the ordination of women.

Mr Holloway is also a founder member of Reform, an evangelical pressure group within the Church of England, and in the 1980s proposed that bishops should face a "heresy test".

The Christian Institute has no formal links to the school, but senior members of staff have published papers on education on the organisation's website.

In a lecture co-authored by Mr Burn and Mr McQuoid, they observe: "Clearly schools are required to teach evolutionary theory. We agree that they should teach evolution as a theory and faith position... Clearly also schools should teach the creation theory as literally depicted in Genesis. Ultimately, both creation and evolution are faith positions."

Mr McQuoid stresses that the school teaches alternatives to the Christian faith, discussing other religions and even atheism, and says that he wants his pupils to learn to make up their own minds.

He said: "A group of folk have contacted the press saying it's not legitimate to have a school consider the scientific case for creation. I think that's fascist.

"The evolution/creation debate is all about to what extent the scientific evidence is there to support or undermine the other view... I don't think [evolution] is as proven as the world being round."

But in lectures several of his staff members have urged teachers to "show the superiority" of creationist theories. In a lecture given at the college last year, to an adult audience, the vice-principal, Gary Wiecek, commented: "As Christian teachers it is essential that we are able to counter the anti-creationist position... It must be our duty as Christian teachers to counter these false doctrines with well-founded insights."

In another talk, Paul Yeulett, senior assessment co-ordinator and maths teacher, says that evolutionists have "a faith which is blind and vain by comparison with the faith of the Christian... A Christian teacher of biology will not (or should not) regard the theory of evolution as axiomatic, but will oppose it while teaching it alongside creation."

The star speaker at today's conference at Emmanuel is Ken Ham, president of the Answers in Genesis international ministry, whose lectures include Evolution: The Anti-God Religion of Death.

Mr McQuoid said the school had hired itself to Answers in Genesis as a venue; the conference was not a school event.

Sir Peter, who was knighted last year, left school at 16 with one O-level, but transformed his father's business from a single outlet to a network of 80 dealerships around the country. But he chooses to draw an annual salary of £120,000 and distribute the entire annual dividend from his private shareholding to educational and children's causes via the Vardy Foundation. He said: "All we are saying is that it's up to children to make their own minds up. I haven't had any complaints... The parents are happy, the students and teachers are happy; we have them standing in queues waiting to get in."

A spokeswoman for the Department for Education and Skills said: "What schools need to do is teach the national curriculum in an impartial way. Personal doctrines should not override anything that should be taught in the curriculum."

A spokesman for Middlesbrough council said: "On the evidence we have, the situation [at Emmanuel] is that evolution is taught there and children are made aware - as we anticipate them being [in Middlesbrough] - of alternative theories

Fundamentalist Christians who do not believe in evolution have taken control of a state-funded secondary school in England.

BULLY!!!!! Maybe there's hope for England after all.

The big lie which is being promulgated by the evos is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion.

That's BS. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be Rastifari and Voodoo. The debate would be between the evolutionists, and the voodoo doctors: Dick Dawkins vs Jr. Doc Duvalier.

The real dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.

Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...

To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

God hates IDIOTS, too!

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:

Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.

But it gets even stupider.

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) That sort of logic is less limiting than the ordinary logic which used to be taught in American schools. For instance, I could claim that the fact that the fact that nobody has ever seen me with Tina Turner was all the evidence anybody could want that I was sleeping with her.....
2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:

The don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:

ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!

Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?

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God hates IDIOTS, too!

The don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

Some useful references:

Major Scientific Problems with Evolution

Evol-U-Sham dot Com

The All-Time, Ultimate Evolution Quote

Social Darwinism, Naziism, Communism, Darwinism Roots etc.

Creation and Intelligent Design Links

Catastrophism

Intelligent Versions of Biogenesis etc.

Talk.origins/Sci.Bio.Evolution Realities