Missing Links
August 3rd, 2007 at 3:19 pm
You may have evolved from a monkey, but Rick Perry sure didn’t! Our enlightened Guv - global warming denier, former Aggie Yell Leader, and Ted Nugent fan - has been on the record for years as a believer in “Intelligent Design,” the hottest new version of Creationism. When Perry was running for re-election last year a spokesman said that while the Governor was in favor of teaching ID in Texas classrooms “much as the theory of evolution is now taught,” he was not pushing for a statewide curriculum change.
But Perry has found a proxy to carry out his anti-evolution monkey business. In this case it’s Don McLeroy, the Gov’s paleocon pick, announced July 17, for Chairman of the State Board of Education, the 15-member organization that oversees the state’s curriculum. McLeroy, a dentist and Republican from Bryan, is a member of the SBOE’s religious right faction, which has feuded repeatedly with moderate Republicans and Democrats.
An elected member of the SBOE since 1998, McLeroy has cast votes to weaken the teaching of evolution in biology textbooks, approve abstinence-only health textbooks, and ban an environmental science textbook that spent too much time discussing global warming and endangered species, according to the Texas Freedom Network.
Now as chairman, McLeroy will oversee the first overhaul of science curriculum standards in Texas since 2003. Get ready to redo the Scopes Trial, folks.
Mainstream media coverage of McLeroy’s appointment has been both dull and timid, failing to examine what he actually believes. Understanding how his faith informs his politics is important because while this guy may be an amiable small-town dentist, he’s also in a position to decide what thousands and thousands of Texas schoolchildren will be taught. (Not only that, but due to the sheer size of the state, Texas - along with Florida and California - largely determines what textbooks the rest of the country uses.)
McLeroy is a self-avowed Christian fundamentalist who believes that the Bible is literal and inerrant. True Christians, he believes, are involved in a pitched battle with a competiting worldview that is based on “naturalism.”
“That’s the enemy - it’s naturalism,” he said in a 2005 sermon on Intelligent Design to his church, Grace Bible, in College Station. The Intelligent Design movement, McLeroy tells the congregation, is aimed not primarily at neo-Darwinism or the chemical origins of life, but “metaphysical naturalism, materialism, or just plain old naturalism, the idea that nature is all there is.”
McLeroy borrows his concept of naturalism from a constellation of anti-modern and anti-science thinkers, including Phillip Johnson, the godfather of the ID movement, Francis Schaeffer, who encouraged conservative Christians to get politically involved in the 70s and 80s, and J. Gresham Machen, a fundamentalist Presbyterian who tried to purge liberalism from the church in the 1920s. McLeroy told his church that Machen is one of his “favorite” thinkers.
Of Machen’s fight against naturalism around the time of the Scopes Trial, Paul Conkin in When All the Gods Trembled : Darwinism, Scopes, and American Intellectuals writes: “The all-important question was whether Christianity could survive in a scientific age…because of a philosophy that had accompanied the new science, or what Machen called ‘naturalism.’ Religious liberals were infected with such naturalism even when they verbally seemed opposed to it.”
And there you have it: evolution=naturalism=liberalism. That neat syllogism expresses the enemy for McLeroy. And clearly McLeroy is still at the barricades seventy years later, fighting back against the forces of modernity.
The Intelligent Design movement, McLeroy told his church, is a “big tent” and represents the best hope for undermining evolution and naturalism. “Why is Intelligent Design the big tent? Because we’re all lined up against the fact that naturalism, that nature is all there is. Whether you’re a progressive creationist, recent creationist, young earth, old earth, it’s all in the tent of Intelligent Design.”
McLeroy counsels fellow travelers to publicly battle evolution on the merits. “We must know our subject – facts and evidence are crucial,” he said in his sermon. But he acknowledges that this strategy has proven an utter failure.
“They [skeptics] totally, totally misread what we have to say. We can assert empirical evidence, and all they hear us expressing is subjective bias. We can say there is scientific evidence for design, they say ‘oh there goes that religious right on another power grab’.”
McLeroy expressed frustratation over the defeat of the state board’s conservative faction in 2003 over “Teaching the Controversy,” putting ID in Texas’ biology textbooks. “All the arguments made by all the Intelligent Design group, all the creationists, ID people, I can guarantee the other side heard exactly nothing, they did not hear one single fact, they were not swayed by one argument. It was just amazing. I mean, my fellow board members… they were not impressed by any of this… It was only the four really conservative, orthodox Christians on the board [who] were willing to stand up to the textbooks and say they don’t present the weaknesses of evolution.”
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:30 pm
Why are the beliefs in Christianity, ID, Conservatism, etc… held up to such ridicule?
Why is Darwinism amd evolution the only things that a large segment of people feel that believing in makes them APPEAR more intelligent?
August 7th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
There is not any concept in science called “Darwinism”. This is an attempt to portray evolution as a religion instead of science.It would be similar to asking someone if they believed in gravity. The faulty reasoning, logic, and mis-use of science by creationist proponents was thoroughly documented in Kitzmiller -vs Dover Board of Education. Christianity is not being attacked. Scientists are responding to false statements in what amounts to a war on science. Do you really expect to produce scientifically literate citizens that can compete on a global level, by trying to persuade people that biology, geology, astronomy, chemistry, and physics really is a bunch of non-sense? Look at those areas of science, pick and choose what you want to “believe”.
August 7th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
[…] Today the Texas Freedom Network released a statement excoriating Don McLeroy, Gov. Perry’s recent pick for chairman of the State Board of Education, for his comments on religion and Intelligent Design in a 2005 sermon to his church in College Station. The Observer uncovered and discussed the sermon in a recent blog post. […]
August 7th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
Next time a religeist brings up the subject point out that the Bible itself proves that Adam was not the first
man because, when he got out of the Garden there were
people living other than his family. No argument against Gof creating Adam but apparently Adam was to be the
prototype of good people and overcome those already existing
August 7th, 2007 at 6:34 pm
I thank Forrest Wilder for finding this recording of Don McLeroy’s sermon at Grace Bible Church. I have known and interacted with Don McLeroy for five years, so nothing in the sermon surprises me. I well know his views regarding evolution and intelligent design. Don is a very nice guy who listens to people and treats everyone fairly, including opponents like myself, but he certainly has a blind spot in his understanding of science. The sermon puts his aberrant views in clear focus, something which has not previously been the case.
Don fails to see that science is a powerful product of philosophy that uses naturalism only in a methodological capacity, not in an ontological, ideological, or normative way as, for example, Christianity uses supernaturalism. Science does not claim that naturalism is ultimately true as Christianity claims is the case for supernaturalism. So he (mis)judges science and its conclusions, such as evolution, from his own experience and understanding of his religion. From this incorrect understanding, he has constantly pushed for inclusion of unscientific “weaknesses” and bogus misinformation about evolution in textbooks. He will certainly keep trying to do this.
McLeroy’s statement that, “All the arguments made by all the Intelligent Design group, all the creationists, ID people, I can guarantee the other side heard exactly nothing, they did not hear one single fact, they were not swayed by one argument. It was just amazing. I mean, my fellow board members… they were not impressed by any of this….” I was at all the hearings in 2003. All the “arguments” made by the ID creationists were specious, misleading, logically fallacious, and misrepresented the true scientific understanding of evolution and the evidence for it. Any rational or informed person who heard the arguments would not have been impressed or swayed, and rightfully so, since the arguments were valueless. Eleven State Board members voted to accept the books; four members–the “the four really conservative, orthodox Christians on the board”–voted against them. We can use this as evidence to distrust Don McLeroy’s judgment about scientific issues.
Now, there are at least seven “really conservative, orthodox Christians on the board.” These seven are public creationists who are antagonistic to evolution. Science education in Texas will be under attack by this Board, and citizens have every reason to be concerned about the accurate and reliable education of their children in this state’s public schools. I urge readers to become more involved in state education issues.
Steven Schafersman, President
Texas Citizens for Science
November 16th, 2007 at 9:46 am
[…] another pique of anti-evolution fervor from the creationists on the board, led by new chairman Don McLeroy, a fundamentalist Christian and Republican who has boldly declared that he does not share “a […]