Creationism Makes Its Mark

When their son Zachary came home from science class with a cross burned on his forearm It was not the religion that bothered his parents, but the injury to their child. They sued, and brought science v. creationism back into the courts for another round.

Teacher John Freshwater and the brand on the arm of his student

It was a little over three years ago, on December 20, 2005, that Judge John E. Jones III issued his ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover that intelligent design was not science, but merely repackaged creationism—and that it had no business in biology class.

The hoopla was immediate and enduring. Jones’ decision launched headlines across the globe, not to mention celebrations by the trial’s plaintiffs, their legal team and science experts (who send “Merry Kitzmas” greetings to each other on the anniversary).

For many, the Dover case became a cautionary tale of what can happen when a public school board believes its attempts to insert religion into the classroom can stand up to national attention and legal scrutiny.

But it would be a mistake to think that public school educators of fundamentalist faiths have made peace with science. Attacks on evolutionary education continue to take place out of the national spotlight, in small towns where people are reluctant to challenge the behavior of those clinging to power, and where teachers use their classrooms to proselytize to students away from the disapproving eyes of church-and-state watchdogs. They continue to preach intelligent design, the concept that life’s complexity demands a divine hand, and out-and-out Young Earth Creationism.

X Marks the Spot

Nowhere right now is this more apparent than in the small town of Gambier, Ohio, a place that bears a striking resemblance to the fictional town of Frank Capra’s Bedford Falls.

Here, in late September, just off a wide-spaced street that leads to the green campus of the liberal arts school of Kenyon College, a small-framed woman in dark sunglasses takes a seat at the local restaurant.

She is trying to pass unnoticed. Nervously, she nods to the owner of the establishment. Because she doesn’t know who is on her side and who’s not, Jenifer Dennis keeps her head down.

Only weeks later, Dennis would be forced to out herself publicly. But for now, she is trying to remain anonymous in order to protect her son Zachary from the inevitable recriminations from some who reside in the Mount Vernon School District in conservative south-central Ohio.

Last December she and her husband Steve accused a popular 8th-grade science teacher, John Freshwater, of using an electrostatic device known as a Tesla coil to brand a cross into Zachary’s arm [see image above]. They say the burn, which in photos show an 8-by-4-inch mark on his forearm, raised blisters, kept their son awake that night, and lasted for several weeks.

At first glance, they saw the mark as a religious emblem. But their first concern was less about religion and more about what they considered to be a case of a teacher injuring their son.

Their accusations and their resulting lawsuit against the district have brought them criticism. A sign posted in a yard near their house read, “The student goes. We Support Mr. Freshwater. The Bible stays!”

For all the unusual elements to this story, this part is the strangest. At first, Jenifer and Steve were timid about pursuing legal action against the school district, fearing that they would be perceived as anti-Christian.

They’re not.

“We are religious people,” they said in a statement after they filed suit in June. “But we were offended when Mr. Freshwater burned a cross onto the arm of our child. This was done in science class in December 2007, where an electric shock machine was used to burn our child.”

Changing Stories: An X or a Cross?

The day after the incident, Jenifer and Steve met with the district Superintendent Stephen Short and showed him a photo of her son’s burn. Jenifer recalls that she was told that Freshwater’s use of the device was unacceptable and the district would investigate.

What took place over the next several months is not exactly clear. As is typical in these types of stories, there is much disagreement over who is on the side of truth. But some details have emerged.

The district hired an independent investigator. After a lengthy investigation in which Freshwater, other teachers, students, and administrators were all interviewed, the consultant concluded in a report that Freshwater had been teaching students that evolution is a lie for at least 11 years.

The report also said that Freshwater had witnessed to students, at one point telling them that there couldn’t possibly be a genetic link to homosexuality because the Bible says it is a sin. The report also said that he handed out Bibles to members of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and led them in prayers during school hours. Also, Freshwater said he had given a voluntary extra-credit assignment to students who watched Expelled, a documentary that argues teachers who believe in intelligent design are facing discrimination.

According to the report, Freshwater at first denied the incident. Later he admitted to the experiment, admitting he marked Zachary with an X. However, students interviewed for the investigation all described it as a cross.

The link to the full report is here.

In response to the investigation, Freshwater was told to remove all religious items from his room, including a poster of the Ten Commandments hanging on the wall, stickers with scripture on them, extra Bibles he kept in the back of the classroom, and the Bible that he kept on his desk.

In April, Freshwater, fearing disciplinary action, took his side of the story public. He never mentioned the branding incident. Rather he said it was because of the Bible on his desk.

Because he had refused to remove it, citing religious freedom under the First Amendment, he said he was being persecuted. Students organized a rally for him, bringing their Bibles to school in support. A Web site devoted to Freshwater’s cause is called www.bibleonthedesk.com.

But Dennis said the issue was never about the Bible on the desk. And nowhere in the lawsuit’s initial complaint is it even mentioned.

Rather, she says, it’s because her son was branded.

After Freshwater took his side public, Jenifer said she and her husband were worried Freshwater wouldn’t face disciplinary action. In June, they filed a lawsuit against Freshwater and the district for violating the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause by permitting religion to be taught in class, and for failing to protect their son. Federal law allows such civil liberties cases to be filed anonymously. Freshwater has filed a countersuit, citing defamation of character.

In July, the school board suspended Freshwater without pay based on the investigatory report, saying he had misused the electrical device, taught religion in his science class, and failed to follow district curriculum and rules.

Both sides are now awaiting the outcome of administrative hearing to determine whether he should be permanently fired. The hearings took place this fall and have been continued until January 6.

For now, while he waits for the outcome of the hearings, Freshwater is selling Christmas trees. Last week, he said he believes the district is retaliating against him because he advocated for “critical analysis” of evolution in 2003.

“They’ve marked me as a religious—I don’t know if I want to use this phrase about myself—but as a religious fanatic,” Freshwater said.

Freshwater is careful to say he doesn’t object to all elements of evolutionary theory, but would simply like to raise some questions about it. He said that in the 21 years he has been a teacher, he has been using the Tesla coil on students, even though manufacturer instructions warn that it is not to be used on human skin. He said he has never had one complaint until now.

Freshwater said that there is no way to tell whether the photo presented by the Dennis family that shows the mark of a cross on a forearm was doctored, or whether it was even Zachary’s arm.

When asked if he was accusing the family of lying, Freshwater said, “Don’t put words in my mouth.”

While he admits using the device on Zachary, he said he didn’t know if it left a mark.

Not Always a Rural Issue

Despite the gruesome elements, the story is less unusual than at first appears.

According to a poll published this spring in the Public Library of Science Biology, one in eight US high school teachers presents creationism as a valid alternative to evolution.

The poll, conducted by Michael Berkman, a political scientist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, and his colleagues, also learned that 16 percent of teachers believe in creationism.

While Berkman’s research did not address why so many teachers are creationists, he speculated in an e-mail that biology appeals to even fundamentalist Christians:

In Darwin’s day, most biologists felt that they had a calling to describe God’s works. So people of all faith traditions may be drawn to biology, including those whose faith includes a literal interpretation of Genesis. Clearly, a substantial percentage of them are unwilling to accept the geological, chemical, and genetic evidence for an old earth.

Jason Wiles, a Syracuse University biology professor whose research focuses on teaching issues related to biological evolution, said he frequently runs into creationists training to be educators.

“It’s not only in the South, or in rural areas,” Wiles said.

Wiles recently held a workshop for 30 science teachers in the Syracuse city school system. Three of the teachers were actively interested in promoting intelligent design.

He suspects that the reason that so few cases make it to the public stage is that many parents aren’t always aware of what’s going on in the classroom. Also, children are often unaware that the teacher has crossed a Constitutional line.

“A lot of times students just don’t know what their rights are,” Wiles said.

Resolution Far Off

On that day in September, Jenifer Dennis had come to Gambier to meet one of the plaintiffs in the Dover case. I was giving a speech at Kenyon College that night about Dover’s battle. Cyndi Sneath, one of the parents from Dover, had ridden out with me from Harrisburg.

As they sat down at the table, Sneath and Dennis began to compare notes, sharing common experiences. Dennis plopped a large file on the table that details the case and starts flipping through pages. She asked Sneath if she had initially realized how demanding and time-consuming being a plaintiff in a First Amendment case would be. Sneath told her she honestly had no idea what to expect.

At first, Jenifer Dennis said she couldn’t tell if she was overreacting to her son’s arm. “I was thinking maybe I’m crazy,” she said. “I was thinking maybe it’s something they do? And it’s OK?”

Dennis and her husband are both Catholic. They are NASCAR fans who camp in an RV at races. Yet, they are being labeled as elitist and intolerant of religion. At one school board meeting in July, numerous parents and teachers spoke in defense of Freshwater and criticized the parents. One parent told the board, “As a Christian, I don’t accept the separation of church and state.”

During the district’s administrative hearing process, Freshwater successfully argued that Zachary’s name be released publicly. So the anonymous status in the family’s lawsuit has now become a moot point, and the recriminations that the family feared have begun with calls and letters.

But Dennis said she has also had friends and strangers come up to her and say that they’re glad they came forward. She said Zachary, who turned fifteen on Dec. 17, is handling the pressure.

But unlike in the Kitzmiller case, in which Sneath and 10 other parents sued the Dover school district, Jenifer Dennis still feels alone in her fight.

She is looking forward to a resolution in the case. When she started this battle a year ago, she never envisioned it would still be going on through another Christmas. “I just need some closure,” she said. But her lawsuit will no doubt drag on for much longer. The trial date is not until May 2010.

Tags: creationism, darwin, evolution, intelligent design

Lauri Lebo has been a journalist for twenty years. As part of an investigative reporting team, she helped solve two civil rights-era murders. As the York Daily Record’s education reporter, she covered intelligent design’s First Amendment battle. The winner of numerous state and national awards, she lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

If something is overriding the 2nd law to decrease entropy in living systems, please tell me what that is.

If you understood the Second Law of Thermodynamics well enough to discuss it, you'd know that your question doesn't even make sense. The Second Law doesn't need to be "overridden" for systems (including living systems, among others) to obtain a local decrease in entropy within themselves. Bringing about a local decrease in entropy isn't any kind of "exception" or "special case" of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it's part of the ordinary, regular process.

Simply poring energy at something isn’t enough.

Actually it can be, depending on initial conditions. You claim to have a background in meteorology, so it's surprising that you're not aware that "simply poring [sic] energy at" the oceans will produce ordered systems with locally decreased entropy known as "hurricanes". Of course, as always the local decrease in entropy will be offset by a larger increase in entropy in the system (Earth's atmosphere, oceans, and land areas) as a whole.

In order for entropy to decrease, work needs to be done in and on the system.

Sure, but it's not like having this happen requires extraordinary conditions, or that the manner in which this happens is somehow mysterious, unknown, or supernatural.

If we use the tendency of things to go downhill due to gravity as an analogy for the tendency of things increase in entropy due to the laws of Thermodynamics, the point is that it's not just that the Second Law of thermodynamics allows things to "go uphill" (i.e. go counter to the system-wide tendency towards entropic increase) as long as it's overbalanced elsewhere by other things going downhill -- what really needs to be understood is that processes can be *coupled* (naturally or on purpose) so that when one thing goes downhill, it can make other things go uphill. For example, a heavy weight tied to a lighter weight with a string that goes over a pulley (or even just a smooth "hill" between them) will drive the lighter weight uphill as the heavier weight slides downhill.

In the same way, processes that drive towards increases in entropy can and often are coupled to processes that drive a local decrease in entropy. The production of hurricanes is one example, and at the microscopic level such coupling abounds -- chemical processes very often are coupled in a natural chain of events, due to the nature of the reactants and products, so that one thermodynamically-favored chemical reaction will inevitably drive another which is ordinarily unfavored by thermodynamics (i.e. drive it "uphill" against entropy, resulting in a decreased local entropy).

Gee, it's too bad that biologists have never stopped to examine how the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to the processes in living cells, eh? Oh, wait...

From a standard biology textbook, "Molecular Biology of the Cell (4th edition)", here's a basic primer on thermodynamics as it relates to the cell: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=mboc4.box.256

From the same textbook, here's a broader discussion of the topic: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=mboc4.section.229

Life itself makes heavy use of these kinds of coupled chemical processes to keep cells orderly and functional against the longterm trend of thermal and other random influences to bring disorder the cell.

What is the source of work?

Energy differentials. For most forms of life, the (direct or indirect) source of the energy differential used to drive cellular processes is that big thing in the sky called "The Sun". A few forms of life use chemical energy directly, such as from sulphate/hydrogen metabolism.

Darwins theory in its original form attempts to do so by assuming life springs forth on its own from the elements.

Completely, 100% false. Where are you getting this nonsense?

"Darwins [sic] theory in its original form" was laid out in his 1859 book, "On the Origin of Species", which clearly describes its assumption as to where life sprang from:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

He was unaware of the “intelligent machinery” of DNA, RNA, etc.

DNA and RNA are not "intelligent machinery".

We now know more the Darwin did, yet continue to have scientists try to prove his theory

...and continue to find even more mountains of evidence, along multiple independent cross-confirming lines, which only further confirm the validity of evolutionary biology.

when its is all but disproved,

LOL! Oookay... Give me your three very best "disproofs" of evolutionary biology, and let's see how they hold up to examination. Funny, isn't it, that you say it's "all but disproved", and yet somehow 99%+ of biologists still find it to be convincingly supported by the vast amount of available evidence. What do you know that they don't?

almost entirely as a means of rejecting creationism.

Wow, you haven't bothered to read any actual science journals to see how evolutionary biology is actually being studied and used, have you?

When the theory breaks down, its time to find a better theory, not mislead to continue the politically correct one.

Sure, and if evolutionary biology ever actually breaks down, it'll be time to find a better theory. It hasn't yet, though, and after 150 years of rousing success as a scientific field, it doesn't look as if it's about to fall down anytime soon.

If scientist want to continue to search for the missing fossil links, fine.

...and keep finding them in abundance, especially when they look when/where volutionary theory predicts they ought to be found:

http://www.toarchive.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726451.700-evolution-what-missing-link.html?full=true
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/transitional.html
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/miller.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIijwkaqKzY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJQMq5ZZmv0
http://www.gcssepm.org/special/cuffey_04.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiktaalik
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1615165/spiders_missing_link_discovered/index.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080709144213.htm
http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90783/91322/6349379.html
Etc...

But to not point out the holes in Darwin is disengenous.

What holes might those be? Give me your very best two.

The discoveries of DNA/RNA mechanisms seem more in line with an intelligent design theory.

No they aren't. The pattern of differences in "DNA/RNA mechanisms" clearly show evolutionary origins.

The remaining question is: does one believe that some extraterrestrial life that spring forth all on its own from the early elements could evolve on its own to create “intelligent life” for us here on Earth, or was intelligent life here on Earth created by God? Here is where my faith guides my common sense on this issue.

"Common sense" is usually a very poor guide for making decisions in science, because all too often the reality is counter to what "common sense" might lead one to believe. Quantum physics, for example, are very counterintuitive. So is the reality of phenomena in many other fields of science.

But again, I am an engineer, not an evolutionary theory scientist.

Exactly...

I am assuming you are a fellow(?) believer so I’ll try not to become pointedly sarcastic as I tend to do with atheists who don’t WANT to understand, but I could not disagree more with your comprehension of this aspect of God’s word.

You say: “Chosing by lots was very pagan.”

Are you saying God’s chosen people, His chosen priest tribe (the Levites with the Urim and Thummim) and God Himself were all pagans in the OT?

While pagans did and do use techniques similar to those of God and His chosen people, that does not make a technique globally pagan. Some pagans pray too, is all praying pagan? If so, Christ has some explaining to do Himself.

Does your personal favorite, Paul, somewhere that I’ve somehow missed, claim that Matthias was an impostor or in any way illegitimate? I mean, he wrote an awful lot of the NT and was not shy about criticizing folks, even fellow Christians. But I still don’t see it.

Are Luke (the author of Acts) and Peter (the leader and speaker in Acts 1) and the rest of the apostles and the 120+ other disciples and witnesses of Christ’s life and resurrection who were present all also to be wholly dismissed because they used a technique accepted by God for millenia to fill the vacancy left by Judas?

Is there something evil about everyone in the NT besides Paul because they all:

“prayed, and said, ‘Thou, Lord, Which knowest the hearts of all men, shew whether of these two Thou hast chosen, that he may take part of this ministry and apostlship, from which Judas by transgression fell..’” Acts 1:23-25.

Try not to skip too quickly past that “Thou hast chosen” part.

You say “In Acts ch 1 the Holy Spirit was not “given/installed” yet..”. Yeah, that starts to happen one whole sentance later and Matthias was “filled” with the Holy Spirit too. Was the Holy Spirit also wrong in your seemingly wiser-than-scripture assessment of things by lighting upon Matthias along with the others?

You say “Mattias was chosen by MEN”. Either you are wrong or everybody, including the ‘chosen’ apostles, are wrong in their understanding. No disrespect to you, but I’m putting my money on Peter and the boys (and women) who were present at the time.

Does everybody who was not, at first, a violently effective enemy of Christ until knocked off their high horse and blinded take a back seat to Paul? I don’t get it.

By the way, Christ Himself chose Judas the betrayer. And He also chose Peter the denier. And God Himself chose Aaron who at one point, AFTER BEING CHOSEN, built the golden calf.

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