The New Reality of the Scientific Method: Donald Trump Is Always Right

I outlined the scientific method, which is something in which anyone, not just scientists, can participate, in my previous book Scientifically Thinking. But there is a new reality about science, at least in the United States, which has developed since I wrote the book, and which I will now explain.

For many years at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, I taught the Research Methods course for science graduate students, which was pretty much the precursor of my book. I recently found, in some old papers, that I taught a similar course at The King’s College, in my first faculty job. King’s was and is a fundamentalist Christian college. Soon after I left, it also became a fundamentalist Republican college and, today, is probably a fundamentalist Trump college. When I taught the scientific method, I taught it pretty much the standard way, although technology was different back then (no internet). But that was because my department chair, although he was a leading creationist, was open to free scientific inquiry. He believed that open inquiry would lead a person to accept creationism. He did not, unlike almost all other fundamentalists, impose his views on other people.

But here is what research is usually like at fundamentalist institutions. First, instead of reaching a conclusion, you impose one. For example, you will stipulate up front that there can be no evidence that is consistent with evolution. Next, you selectively gather information that agrees with your conclusion. Last, you draw your “conclusion” from the selectively-gathered information. This is the exact opposite of the scientific method.

The result was predictable. The scientific value of creationist research is nil, for two reasons other than the above. First, creationists used this method to defend not only the Bible but their sometimes highly imaginary interpretations of it. Second, their misuse of the scientific method made their work sloppy even when it had nothing to do with evolution. Their habit of mind was that, no matter what they did, they had to be right. I documented these two things in a pair of articles I wrote a long time ago: in 1988 and  in 1989.

Today we must add another dimension. Not just in creationist or fundamentalist camps, but in all publicly-funded research, the researchers must begin with the conclusion: they must begin with whatever belief the Republican party holds upon the question. For example, is global warming happening, and are humans contributing to it? The answer, fundamentalists think, must be no, even though the Bible does not mention it. The answer must be no because the fossil fuel industry says it is no. This, then, is the conclusion they reach. Are vaccines effective? Again, the required answer is no. Has gun violence reached epidemic proportions? The answer again must be no. Science, then, becomes just a propaganda arm of the Republican Party.

It has been this way for a long time, to various degrees, starting mainly with the George W. Bush administration. But now, under Donald Trump, there is yet a new version of science. You begin with the conclusion that Donald Trump is always right. Science has now become a propaganda arm of Donald Trump, and of his chosen spokespeople, such as RFK Jr. who says that vaccination is not necessary. The conclusion is that vaccination is not effective, because Donald Trump, who used to champion vaccination, says so.

For example, even under Republican presidents in the past, the website climate.gov existed. As of 2025, that URL redirects to NOAA where global warming is hidden, although at this point they still admit that today’s atmospheric carbon dioxide level (421 ppm) is comparable to the atmospheric level four million years ago, and much higher than any time during 6000 years of human civilization. But they are not allowed to draw the obvious conclusion that the Earth is getting hotter, only that it happens to be hot right now; certainly they do not blame our use of fossil fuels.

Modern Republicans place Trump in exactly the same position as medieval theologians placed God. Republicans worship Trump. I realize that this is blasphemy, but it is what they are doing, and we might as well say so.

I am glad that I taught and wrote about science before Donald Trump became the sole standard of truth. I am not sure, however, that I am safe. My most recent book, Forgotten Landscapes, provides evidence that Native Americans were civilized and had a significant effect on the North American landscape. This is not the picture of Native Americans that Republicans prefer. They want to claim that Natives were savages and did not deserve to keep the land that was taken from them. Republican opposition did not prevent the publication of my book. But what will happen next?

Why I Hate Fundamentalism and How I Emerged from It

I wish to tell my own personal story about why I hate Christian fundamentalism. My experiences are similar to those of thousands of other people’s, and I want to add mine to the online collection of accounts of religious oppression. Oppression of the mind.

There might be a gene for it. My paternal grandfather was a religious fanatic who spent his time and money on fundamentalist preaching, to the neglect of his family. He left on a preaching tour while his son, my father, lay dying in bed from an infection, from which he recovered. When my grandfather died, he left his biological family $1. His church parasites got the rest and spent it on luxuries.

When I was in junior high and high school, I was a devotee of Garner Ted Armstrong, a slick radio preacher whose every word I considered to be direct from God. I was even ready to, as soon as legally possible or sooner, join his church. His religion was a strange mutation of Identity Christianity, that is, the British and Americans were direct descendants of the patriarch Joseph and, as such, deserved world rulership. Many white-supremacist churches today believe that God wants them to have their guns ready to maintain white oppression, but Armstrong just said the problems of the world are too big for humans to solve, and that Jesus would come back and set things right, with white people ruling the world. I never realized the racist content of his message, since he never said “white” but just “Joseph.”

Part of the power of Armstrong’s influence upon me came from the fact that I first learned about the perils of the world from his radio shows—for example, famine and overpopulation; pollution; the threat of nuclear war. He said he and he alone knew the answer to these problems: God would solve them, not gradually, but in one big apocalyptic event.

Because of my devotion, I was blind to Armstrong’s immorality. One day, when I started to listen to his program—on which I took extensive minuscule notes—his father (Herbert W. Armstrong) was on the radio, giving Bible-centered fundamentalist sermon reruns. I found out later it was because Garner Ted had run off with a woman. Later the world found out that he had been systematically sleeping with girls from one of his Ambassador colleges, as described in In Bed with Garner Ted. Those young women, and his thousands of little donors, paid a much higher price than I did.

 

The reason I left the Armstrongs’s church was that I fell into another fundamentalist cult, the Church of Christ. They actually convinced me that they alone had the correct interpretation of the Bible. They had whole books and sermons about how “The Lord’s Supper” (communion or eucharist) was to feature just one cup, not multiple cups, of grape juice, not wine. The only way I could consider such a trivial point to be important is that they had complete control over my mind. This continued through my undergraduate days. Because I thought that it would be wrong for me to marry any woman who was not a member of our little branch of the Church of Christ (even other Churches of Christ were off-limits to “fellowship”), my social life was truncated into a frustrated loneliness. I drove fifty miles each way each Sunday to attend the one and only correct Church of Christ in my part of the world, ignoring the one right down the highway from me. They controlled my life. I remember how awful I felt when, even when I was in high school, the local preacher had denounced me as a dangerously wrong person when I taught a different interpretation of scripture than he did. I was seriously depressed from it. Gee, thanks, Brother Bob Sanders. One of the congregations to which I was devoted eventually closed, but was taken over by another openly oppressive fundamentalist church, this time Baptist.

Eventually, when I went to graduate school, I found I could not maintain this link. It was an emotionally wrenching experience when I tore away from my roots in that church. But, of course, I promptly fell into a new fundamentalist spiderweb: the creationists. My link with creationism had begun in my undergraduate days. As a biology major, I developed the intricate skill of believing the science that I agreed with and rejecting the rest, not realizing I was being dishonest.

After I began to learn scientific and careful thinking in graduate school, I questioned the creationists. I taught a church class about creation and evolution, which was basically a theistic evolution approach. Two old men, fierce creationists both, arranged to have me put on trial by the church leadership. I was not allowed to speak in my own defense. I found out later it was because the trial was just meant to let the old men blow off steam. But once again, it was an emotionally battering experience. Gee, thanks, Marlyn Clark.

Then I fell into the web of Christian colleges. My first two faculty jobs were at so-called Christian colleges. I was unspeakably inspired to be teaching students about science, not in opposition to but enriched by Christian views. This included environmental issues, about which I believed Christians should care. But, as I learned from these two jobs, a Christian college was just an excuse to pretend to have intellectual honesty. At the first college, The King’s College, factions of the faculty spent most of their time disputing with one another over college politics. Later, after I was gone, they chose a president (Dinesh D’Souza) whose only qualification for his job was that he hated Democrats and could write convincing lies against them. He would (and continues to) just make stuff up. The only thing that got him fired was when he had an extramarital affair. But even this King’s College experience did not disturb my idealism about Christian Higher Education.

The second college was Huntington College. Here, the pervasive assumption was that Christianity consisted of obedience to the Republican Party. This was at the time when Huntington native Dan Quayle was vice president. Since I taught environmental issues, which Dan Quayle considered to be leftist propaganda, I was in a precarious position. When I became the victim of secret political maneuvering, I was extremely upset and depressed for about two years. This time, I wanted to write a book about The Reality of a Christian College, an antidote to the widely read The Idea of a Christian College and to the hypocritical books written by Huntington president Eugene Habecker. I wanted to describe Christian Higher Education as corrupt while pretending to not be. It did not occur to me that nobody, including me, would want to read such a book.

The agony I experienced from these two jobs considerably lessened my ability to enjoy my beautiful daughter as she grew up from ages one to seven. I played the role of responsible father, but I could not experience the full delight of being her father, a delight I have thankfully recovered by enjoying my granddaughter at these ages. What joy I missed the first time around!

After these experiences, which lasted about 23 years, I settled into a calmer, more generalized Christianity. I could finally enjoy religion and life. All of the previous links, from Armstrong to Huntington, were dead to me.

But I eventually realized that even good religion was not worth the effort. For the last sixteen years, I have not been associated with a church. This, plus my rejection of popular entertainment such as cable TV and movies, has left me with an enormous amount of time to think about, write about, and enjoy the world of science. I had to wait until I was almost 50 years old before I could inhale the breath of freedom found in agnosticism. I now know that if there is a God, this God is a spirit of love, rather than a dictator of doctrines. My message to the world, in this blog and in many books, is not to hate religion but to hate its oppressive forms and seek inspiration directly from the natural and scientific world. I still read, and love, the sayings of Jesus, for example, without stressing out about the correct literal interpretation.

Premature Optimism about Science and Religion in America

One of the foremost opponents of all attacks on evolutionary science has been Niles Eldredge, retired from the American Museum of Natural History. One of his many books was The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism (the last phrase was printed backwards on the cover, spine, and title page). When Eldredge wrote this book, he was pretty angry at the creationists.

In recent decades, I’ve stopped getting upset about what the creationists do. You cannot stop them from making false claims, and profiting from the support of millions of people whom they have duped. They are part of the conservative movement which now controls America, and they are not going to step back from the power and money that comes with it. They know they are lying, and it does no good to point out their errors to them, or to the people who willingly believe them.

Instead, what I do is to use creationism as an opportunity to teach science, and to do so by the use of humor. I have now published two articles in Skeptical Inquirer magazine entitled “Creationist Funhouse,” episodes one and two (readable by subscribers only). More are on the way.

Eldredge allowed himself to be optimistic toward the end of his book, which was published in 2000. He wrote, “The tired old creationism debate—mired as it so thoroughly is in the nineteenth century—simply has not prepared us for the kind of positive interaction between science and religion that I see as eminently possible as we enter the new Millennium and grapple with tough environmental issues.” As Eldredge and the rest of us now know only too well, religion and science are further apart than ever, because “religion” now often means unquestioning devotion to Donald Trump, and there is less hope than ever for environmental problems to be solved, once again because of unquestioning devotion to Donald Trump. Eldredge’s millennial optimism was a good try, but reality has proven worse than we could have imagined back in 2000.

This essay also appeared in my science blog.

The One and Only Creationism?

To millions of Americans, there is only one kind of creationism: the Biblical kind that believes everything that Mike Pence believes, including his reverence for Donald Trump.

I have begun publishing a series of articles that explore the humorous side of this kind of creationism. The series is called Creationist Funhouse, because, in order to accommodate their religion to even some of the facts of science, such as the Red Shift, these creationists have to believe that God distorted the laws of nature to make a young universe look old, and a supernaturally created world to look like it evolved. There is no point, I believe, in writing serious refutations of extreme Christian creationism: the creationists will ignore them, and everyone else (even I, who have written many) finds them boring. The first article appeared in the May/June issue of Skeptical Inquirer, and the second in the July/August issue. A few more will follow.

But this is not a problem if you consider a more general kind of creationism. That is, a creationism that does not need to accommodate a strictly literal reading of the Bible. One group of creation myths comes from Native Americans. This was brought to my attention by Scott Hunter, of Phoenix, Arizona, who emailed me about my first SI article. I have edited some of his comments here and post them with his permission:

“The students may have only heard the Jewish version unless they are Native American. I too grew up moderate Christian and knew no other creations until I began studying religions, plural.

“I have several books on Native American tribes, and they detail the extensive creation myths of the tribes. There may have been hundreds. Oklahoma tribes may have several creation myths. Indian creations are as bona fide as the Judeo-Christian myths.  I belong to most national non-believing groups plus NCSE. I continually remind others to never argue or debate Creation vs Evolution. If they do, they are playing in the Christian ballpark.  If others wish to debate or argue creation with you, I suggest that you refuse unless they agree to include the other creations existing. This gives the god fellows wobbly knees and they desist. They prefer to propagandize their own peculiar version of the creation stories.  

“The secular groups are gaining strength and time to take the wind out of that Creation fantasy. These innocent little kids have that myth almost tattooed into their brain once they enter Sunday school. Even as adults we are almost bombarded with this myth. It seems to pop up out of anywhere.

“Jewish tribal leaders not only created their own god, created their creation, but created their scriptures and laws. These tribes were minuscule and dominated by a succession of large controlling empires through most their history. There may have been dozens of other creation myths in the lands surrounding their tribal areas. Although brutally subjugated by both Christians and Muslims, Jews today would be just another nondescript nation alongside Lebanon, if the Christian faith had not picked up their scriptural stories.”

As a member of the Cherokee tribe, I can appreciate many of Scott’s comments. Most Cherokees have been Christians, more or less, since about 1800. I am not aware if any original Cherokee religion remains in circulation in the tribe. If it does, it is probably kept secret. I talked with a member of the United Keetowah Band of Cherokees recently, who does not wish to be identified. He told me two things: first, some original Cherokee creation myths; second, that the main tribal government does not want him talking to me about them.

I should have known this a long time before I finally learned it. Back in 1976, when I was an extreme creationist, our little band of creationists sponsored a debate between the two leading creationist propagandists of the day (Duane Gish and Henry Morris) vs. two scientists at the University of California at Santa Barbara (Aharon Gibor and Preston Cloud). To everyone’s astonishment, ours not the least, the debate sold out, filling the main hall at the university.

One point that Aharon Gibor made was, which version of creationism are we supposed to consider? He was not only a plant cell biologist, but an expert on Jewish theology. Indeed, he later took a faculty position in religion at the same university. He said that there was a Polynesian tribe that believed the universe was inside of a giant, invisible coconut shell. Should we believe them, or believe Gibor’s Jewish predecessors, or someone else, in choosing a “creation model”? I was addled by creationism at the time, and chose to ignore his question. But, as you can see, I remember it.

When creationists present themselves as the only alternative to atheism, they are just trying to get publicity.

A New Creationism

For many decades, creationists have defended the special creation of humans uniquely in the image of God and that animals, while also specially created, are not in the image of God. Recent creationists have considered “human” to be the same as what scientists call Homo sapiens.

This has not always been the case. The “polygenists” of the nineteenth century believed that white people were the descendants of Adam and Eve, but that dark people, while also specially created, were one or more species of animal. As you can imagine, this view was very popular in the United States, mostly but not only in the South.

It has been many years since creationists considered dark people to be animals. But it looks like they are going to have to do so again. The most fundamentalist Christians believe every word that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth. Many of them even believe that God put Trump in the White House. And Donald Trump has had a couple of things to say about the boundaries of the human species.

• In January of this year, Trump said that Haitians and Africans were from “shithole countries”. While this does not necessarily mean that Trump has kicked them out of Homo sapiens, it certainly means that he has placed them at an inferior level. Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson would be proud.
• In May of this year, Trump said that undocumented immigrants (nearly all Hispanic) were not humans, but animals. This was an exact quote.

It appears that creationists either have to distance themselves from Donald Trump or else redefine the human species along the lines that He has drawn.

What's Wrong with the South?

It’s depressing to live in the South. Sure, there are pockets of economic and societal vibrancy, such as parts of Tulsa, such as Ft. Worth or Houston or Atlanta. But for the most part the South is a quagmire of stagnant depression. The only outlet for this depression is occasional anger, which they recently exhibited by pushing Donald Trump into the White House. He preached a Gospel of Anger, and the south whooped and hollered and passed around the beer. The only other time I have seen southerners inspired to excitement was when they drive around with huge Confederate flags flying from the beds of expensive trucks, before parking them beside their shacks.

For many of them, driving around in big trucks even without flags is a source of excitement, especially if the truck payments are more expensive than their rent. The trucks give them a feeling of power many of them have in no other way.

The South used to have a sense of purpose. The Confederacy was inspired mainly by one idea:

the right of states to have slavery. When Southerners lost the Civil War, they never got anything to replace their passion for slavery.

It is not just poverty, although much of the poverty comes from the inability of southerners to care about working reliably. It is depression.

I saw examples of depression as I walked across town yesterday.

First, I saw garbage piled up in their yards. Not everybody’s, but approximately every third or fourth house in Durant, Oklahoma, where I live. There is nothing about being poor that requires all this garbage. The garbage is a message to the rest of the public that they hate other people almost as much as they hate themselves.

(Image from City of Durant website)

Second, they let their dogs run loose and attack other people. One man sat on his porch and watched his dogs run an entire block to attack me. Fortunately, the dog repellant spray worked. There is nothing about being poor that requires people to let their dogs run loose and attack people. It is just a message to the rest of us that they hate us almost as much as they hate themselves.

Third, what do they do with the little bit of money that they get, either from poorly-paid and irregular work, or from public assistance? A woman sat out on her front porch and talked loudly into her cell phone, not caring who would hear. She said they would have lots of money saved up if her husband didn’t go out to bars all the time. He could just get drunk at home and save some money. So not only do white trash men hate themselves, they foist this hatred on their wives too. (Maybe if I’d listened longer I would have heard her talking about their lousy sex life. But I figured I’d better keep walking.)

They have nothing to live for but God and the Confederacy. But to them God is not the source of love but the idol around which they rally, a war god they believe will vanquish all the white liberals and descendants of ex-slaves whom they do not like.

How can this ever change? The inertia is too great.

This is the Bible belt where most people are creationists. I saw an advertisement for a movie, “The Truth about Dinosaurs,” in Bristow as I drove through on Sunday. It is, I can only assume, a darkumentary about how evolutionary scientists are all liars and are damning our souls by making us believe dinosaurs lived more than 4000 years ago. Whom are they trying to convince? Most people in the South already believe the Earth is only 6000 years old, and dinosaur fossils resulted from a flood 4000 years ago. The creationists already rule everything in Oklahoma. What are they trying to accomplish? They just want to proclaim that they are God’s truly chosen people who are the only ones who know the truth. They want to hate the non-creationists, most of whom live outside of the South.

Dogs that bite other people, trucks that run over other people: this is the only glimmer of enjoyment that many southerners have.

Oh, and having lots of kids. Not taking care of them, spending time with them to show them how to care about their neighbors. The mothers may do this, but the fathers are too busy driving their trucks around. One man parked his truck in my yard, so I had it towed away. He threatened me with violence, and said he needed his truck because he had five kids. His kids were not an expression of love but an excuse for aggression.

Bogged down in depression, acutely aware that slavery will never come back, and told by their preachers that they are God’s chosen people, Southerners will never change. Red state confederates sit around and live off of welfare provided by blue state tax dollars. And they are just fine with it.

Dinosaur Trackways on the Blank Slate of the Mind

I have posted this essay on my science blog as well, but I include a final paragraph on this blog that was not on the science blog.

The last couple of days, I have had the privilege of working, again, with Glen Kuban down in the bed of the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas (Dinosaur Valley State Park). Usually we work alone, or with a couple of other people, but this time there was a little crowd. A BBC film crew brought their cameras and even a photographic drone to get video footage of the dinosaur trackways, which I have written about numerous times previously in this blog, for example here). They also came to interview Glen, who has worked on these tracks (and knows each footprint by name) for 37 years, and he will not get some worldwide recognition for the work he has done. Congratulations, Glen! You deserve it.

Watch for the BBC video when it comes out. It will be called Rediscovering T Rex. The trackways in the park are not T. rex, but there are very few verified footprints of T. rex. But in the Paluxy river bed you can see long trackways of Acrocanthosaurus, which was similar to T. rex in many ways. The BBC does not yet have an American distributor for this video, so far only Canada and France, but I’ll bet that within a year or so you can find the video on Amazon or your local library.

I have posted a YouTube video of Glen and the film crew, if you want to experience what it was like to be there.

We were at the trackway site that was made infamous in the 1970s-era creationist movie Footprints in Stone, where creationists claimed that human footprints overlapped dinosaur footprints, thus proving, they claimed, that the entire evolutionary timetable of Earth history was wrong. The evidence of human footprints in 110-million-year-old mud (now limestone) was skimpy and some of it faked. Most creationists, even those who have not publicly disavowed the “manprints of the Paluxy,” pretty much ignore them. The son of the producer of the creationist movie, when he discovered that his father had misled his viewers about these footprints, destroyed all remaining copies of the movie. There was no discussion of this uniquely American controversy with the BBC crew, even though they knew about it, because it is such a dead issue even among creationists; certainly European viewers would wonder why anyone took so much as two breaths to talk about the supposed man-prints.

But there are still passionate creationists, mostly in the Glen Rose vicinity, who believe that the supposed man-tracks are real and that they prove that not only are all evolutionary scientists wrong, but even most creationists. They are a crazy little cult. They still have a museum right near the state park, although it appears to be on the skids and is now only open two days a week. I have posted essays in this blog about the Mantrack cult in the past (for example here). The state park personnel who were with Glen, me, and the BBC crew told me that this little cult has so effectively spread the hoax that lots of visitors still ask them how to find the man-tracks. It gets pretty intense sometimes, and rather than to create a confrontation, the park personnel sometimes have to simply walk away or busy themselves with some other park visitor.

We sort of expected that some members of this cult would come and try to disrupt the BBC filming. This did not happen, however, perhaps because there were a half dozen park employees on the scene. This track site is hard to find but the cult members, some of whom own adjacent land, can get there. They act as if they also own the river bed, and have in the past tried to keep Glen from studying the tracks. Actually, the river bed belongs to the state of Texas.

But one of the cult members came by, claiming that he was taking photographs for the City of Glen Rose. I very much doubt that the city government actually sent him, however. They might have posted some of his photos in the past, but he was acting in no official capacity. Of course, this man, whose name I forgot, and just as well, started going through his little speech about how belief in the man-tracks took less faith than belief in what he called “strict evolution.” Glen had told me beforehand almost verbatim what this little speech would be. It is as if the cult members are programmed to give their little speeches, and they will not respond to anything you say. They act as if they are brainwashed.

But that was not actually the precipitating event. The man started by saying that a cold front was coming through this weekend, and that it would only be about 92 degrees instead of the normal 97 degrees. This, he claimed, disproved the entire science of global warming. As I am one of the climate scientists that Donald Trump hates and Emmanuel Macron loves, I had to point out that this was an invalid conclusion. Global warming does not mean that temperatures never decrease; it means that they increase more, and more often, than they decrease. Well, this was all the cue he needed to self-identify as a right-wing extremist (or words to that effect; I did not yet so label him) and launch into his speech.

This man went on to comment on the fact that paleontologists have stopped using the genus name Paluxysaurus and started using Sauroposeidon instead. This shows, said the man, that scientists are wrong about this and, why not, everything else also. But changing names of organisms reflects the ongoing process of coming to better understand the evolutionary history of the organisms. And, of course, science advances because scientists make mistakes and then learn from them, something that religious cults almost by definition cannot do. Cults believe themselves to be directly inspired by God, and to admit one mistake totally undermines their reason for being.

I wish to make two points from this. First, the religious fundamentalists are now attacking all of science and education on two fronts. Formerly, they focused all their attention on evolution. Now, they also consider climate scientists to be servants of Satan. This is why scientific and educational organizations, all the way from national and international organizations such as the AAAS and NCSE to local ones such as the Oklahoma Academy of Science and Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education, of both of which organizations I am a past president, disseminate as much information about climate science as about evolutionary science.

The second point explains the title of this essay. The lumpy limestone of Dinosaur Valley State Park has proven to be one of the most creative blank slates upon which a religious cult can write its own version of the history of the universe. The dinosaur footprints are real enough. The supposed man-tracks are incomplete dinosaur footprints. On some of these prints, the dinosaur toes have eroded away. On others, the creationists have deliberately ignored the dinosaur toe prints. Early creationists film footage and notes show clearly that they knew the dinosaur toe marks were present. In a few infamous instances, creationists have even carved human toes on the dinosaur prints, or carved entire fake human footprints in the limestone. Rather than getting insights from the evidence in the limestone, they have used the limestone as a blank notebook on which to write their own version of reality, a version not even shared by most creationists.

It is unclear whether these cult members are dangerous. Of the hundreds of videos I have posted on my Darwin Youtube channel, the only ones on which rabidly angry comments have been posted were those in which I showed Glen Kuban at work in the Paluxy riverbed. A couple of times I have wondered whether to report these creationists to the FBI, but their comments were just short of personal threat. Of course, there were atheist comments also, which insulted the creationists. The creationist comments did not threaten the atheist commentators, Glen, or myself with any violence; they merely hoped that God would rain down fire and brimstone from the sky to destroy us and our children, that’s all. The blank pages of limestone on which this cult writes its version of reality includes at least the hope that everyone who disagrees with them will be destroyed.

I must now add that I have had many of the same experiences as many of the readers of this blog. We have been driven away from doctrinal religions because of fundamentalists and the rabidly violent things that they believe. Is this fair? Should I reject Christianity because of fundamentalists who believe that God wants them to have their guns ready to use against the rest of us? Of course there are members of every religion who esteem the pathway of peace. There are lots of churches, and mosques, that proclaim peace and love. Should they be held guilty for what their bloodthirsty co-religionists do and say? No, but here is the problem. There is nothing within the structure of religion itself, particularly not the doctrinal ones such as Christianity or Islam, that prevents hatred and violence. I consider peaceful Christians and Muslims to be enablers of the violent ones because they believe that their scriptures are, in fact, the sword of the Lord. I have the greatest esteem for Jesus of Nazareth, even while I totally reject Christianity. Christianity is a system of violence and oppression that has falsely taken the name of Jesus as justification for its destructive evils.

Maybe There Will Be a Mass Exodus

In an earlier essay, I speculated that, despite Trump’s attack on science education and research, insisting that both education and research should be focused entirely on his loudly-stated beliefs rather than on any data from the real world, there would probably be no mass exodus of scientists out of the United States into (for example) China (see my science blog entry). But events of recent weeks have caused me to rethink this.

Trump announced the appointment of his chair of a task force that will recommend reforms for higher education. That man is Jerry Falwell, Jr. Yes, the president of Liberty University, and the son of its late former president, Jerry Falwell. Jerry Falwell Jr. has said that he will redesign higher education so that it is focused on the Bible, and will bring higher education “back to some form of sanity.” And what this undoubtedly means is that, in order for students to receive loans to attend colleges and universities, they will have to attend colleges and universities that promote the utter and absolute truth of Creationism. Science education will quickly collapse, and therefore science educators will quickly leave the United States (this is my plan) or else find some other kind of job (I have not ruled out the possibility of being a science-education supermarket produce stocker, leading customers on economic botany tours in the produce section). If the entire function of science education is to indoctrinate college students in creationism, then scientific research will quickly collapse in the United States. Other countries, more welcoming to science, will benefit immensely from the inevitable brain drain.

What could possibly go wrong?

The creationists do not really want to see God, Jesus, or the Bible exalted in science education. They do not want the Bible to be taught. They want their interpretation of the Bible to be taught. Creationists consider themselves personally inerrant, incapable of error, when they open a Bible and start talking. There have been many interpretations of Genesis 1, for example, and the history of these interpretations goes back hundreds of years. But creationists consider all these other interpretations of the Bible to be wrong. The creationists, and they alone, are chosen by God to tell people what to believe about the Bible. Jerry Falwell Jr. thinks that we should all bow down and revere Him, Falwell, as the single approved explicator of God’s truth.

I don’t have a problem with Jesus. I don’t have a problem with the Bible, which may be inspired by God or may be an historical record of people trying to understand God. I have a problem with creationist Republicans elevating themselves to Godlike status and pushing God out of the way. This is the “form of sanity” that Falwell intends to impose on all scientists, educators, and students.

Yes, I am accusing creationists of blasphemy.

I don’t have a problem with Jesus. I don’t have a problem with the Bible, which may be inspired by God or may be an historical record of people trying to understand God. I have a problem with creationist Republicans elevating themselves to Godlike status and pushing God out of the way. This is the “form of sanity” that Falwell intends to impose on all scientists, educators, and students.

I teach about evolution, biodiversity, and global warming. Will I soon be considered an enemy of the state? History is full of scientists who have been crushed by religious power, from Galileo to Vavilov. Meanwhile, J’ose lire la Bible moi-même.

The Dark Ages, Coming to a Campus near You

On Halloween, a preacher came to our campus (Southeastern Oklahoma State University) and started yelling about how much God hated women (he said that all women on our campus were sluts), how much God hated Muslims (his shirt read “Allah is Satan,” even though Allah is the translation of the same word the Old Testament uses for God), and how black people should just accept their inferior lot and let white people rule them, all in the name of God.

I borrowed these photos from the Facebook posting by Amy Elizabeth Kennedy.

He had permission to come and speak outdoors by the clock tower (well, what passes for one on our campus; a clock on a pole) but he got that permission by lying to the university staff about what he was going to do. He said he was coming to share the Gospel, but of course there was no Gospel whatsoever in anything that he said.

He accomplished his purposes. He wanted to make people angry. He succeeded in making all of the students who heard him upset (not one student took his side, not even our redneck Trump-supporting students). Some of these upset students simply went away. But when the preacher started verbally attacking black students, one black student started to get physically rowdy (wouldn’t you?) while several other black students held him back. The situation got so tense that police had to escort the preacher off campus. His visit was, to him, successful. He wanted to show us how much, according to him, God hates us, and he succeeded in doing that. He wanted an angry response, and he got it. Now he can go back to his donors and say, “See, what did I tell you? I told you Satan would attack me.” (I have heard fundamentalist Christians say that the hostility of the world is proof that you are doing God’s will. By that definition, Hitler was doing God’s will.)

And he left behind him an impotent and confused discussion about how to prevent such incidents in the future. Everyone seems to be saying that we cannot restrict any form of free speech on campus. This is ridiculous. We already restrict speech that would, for example, recruit terrorists or encourage murder. Speech is not unlimited and never has been. I believe that anyone speaking on campus should be sponsored by a class or by a recognized student organization. If we let just anybody come and speak, no matter how hateful their words, how can we be sure they don’t have guns also? And maybe, for all we know, this preacher did.

The story had a different ending on All Saints Day at East Central University. East Central knew this preacher was coming. When he arrived, he proceeded to exercise his first amendment rights, only to discover that the marching band, at exactly the same time and place, was exercising theirs. Guess who won!

I do not know the name of this preacher’s “ministry,” but whatever it is, he should rename it “Make Jesus Look like an Asshole Ministry.” Because this is what he succeeded in doing. Say all you will about how most Christians are not like him. But such a large number of self-identified Christians are hate-filled racists, though few of them are so vocal about it, that I wonder whether this preacher might represent the norm of American conservative Christianity. I suspect that, in fact, this man reflects what American Christianity is like. Good Christians who preach peace and love may, in fact, be a minority in this country, at least among fundamentalists. All you have to do is see the breathtakingly large number of fundamentalist Christian organizations that endorse Donald Trump, whose entire message is how much he hates anyone who fails to revere him; Donald Trump, whose slogan should be, Make America Hate Again.

The impression I took away from this incident is not that Jesus is an asshole—this incident had nothing to do with Jesus—but that on the whole, at least in America, religion is a negative force and I hope we get rid of it as much and as soon as possible. When you consider what America is like, and the Bible Belt states more than the others, you can get an idea of the fruits of religion. Poverty, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, and violent crime are rampant in the most Christian parts of America. In order to find a society in which people are, by and large, nice to one another, you have to look at countries such as France. When I visited, as a family member not just a tourist, I was astonished at how well people treated their neighbors and fellow citizens and visitors. The sooner we can become more like France, and leave Christianity behind, we will be a better society. A society that, in fact, more closely resembles Jesus. We need a secular society if we are to survive as a free country.

I am sure it has not escaped the attention of anyone that fundamentalist religion is pushing—perhaps significantly—toward the establishment of a religious dictatorship. Remember, they have guns and they believe God has given them permission to use them however they want.

I am particularly angry that I spent so much of my life suckered into religion. I lost decades of my life to having my brain warped by creationism and fundamentalism. Though I left doctrinal Christianity behind over a decade ago, it took an incident such as this to allow me to see how ugly and despicable my erstwhile religious views were.

Creationism is not about science. It has one purpose only: to support a hatred version of religion and get it established in a powerful position so that they can control the thoughts and lives of the rest of us. Arguing science with a creationist? Don’t bother. They don’t even know what’s in the Bible, much less about science.

I also published this essay on my science blog.

Why Do Some Creationists Hate God’s Creation?

I know I have written about this topic previously, but I have a new story to relate to you about it.

There is a certain state senator in Oklahoma, whose name some of you know but which I will not here publish, who is infamous for being an extreme creationist. (He represents me in the state senate.) Every year he introduces legislation that supposedly protects the rights of creationist students, rights that are already protected. He insists on a top-down, big-government solution to a nonexistent problem, something you would not expect from a Republican. He gets little support even from fellow Republicans.

But it appears that he has open disdain for God’s creation, if that is what nature is.

One of our best undergraduate students presented a poster at the state capitol during a research symposium. State representatives and senators were free to roam around and see the exciting scientific research being done by undergraduates in Oklahoma. Our student’s poster was about stream reclamation and the reduction of water pollution. She won a prize for the quality of her work.

The state senator referred to above was one of the ones who went around looking at the posters. He asked the student whether her research was directly related to human health. She indicated that it was indirectly related to human health, through the promotion of environmental quality. The senator derisively wondered who would possibly fund scientific research that was not directly related to human health. The student indicated that it was sponsored, in part, by a federal grant. The senator responded that wasting money was typical of the federal government.

This senator openly sneered at one of the best undergrad students at the university in his own district. And he did so by openly stating that anything having to do with the natural world was not worth studying. He was openly dismissive of both science education and God’s creation.

This is not always the way Republicans behave. Our local state representative, also a Republican, visited with the student and was respectful of the quality of the work.

I suspect that, for this senator, creationism is merely a political tool. When he campaigns, he can say that he is defending God against the evil worshippers of Satan, which apparently includes many or most of his fellow Republicans who do not support his extremism. This senator apparently thinks that God was stupid for having created anything in the world other than humans and those things that humans directly use. God created many species that we not only do not use but do not even know; what kind of stupid God would have created all these species without asking this senator’s permission first? Or, more likely, this senator doesn’t really believe in God at all and just uses God as a political tool.

I could respect environmentalist creationists. I’m still waiting to find one.

Creationists Take Genesis, but not Jesus, Literally

Most creationists are protestants and fundamentalists. Some are Catholics, but the last few decades and the last few popes have not been very good for the remaining Catholic creationists. Creationists, as most of you understand, are (primarily) Christians who insist on a “literal” reading of the entire Bible.

Well, not quite. When it comes to The Last Supper that Jesus shared with his disciples before his crucifixion, protestant creationists hastily abandon their literalism. According to the Bible, Jesus broke the (unleavened Passover) bread and said, “This is my body.” You will find this in Luke 22 and in Matthew 26 as direct gospel accounts and it is repeated by the Apostle Paul in First Corinthians 11. Later, he took “the fruit of the vine” which everyone except teetotalers recognize as wine and said, “This is my blood.” (I suppose it could be juice from some other vine. In one novel manuscript, I describe a desert church that used gourd juice.)

Jesus does not say “This represents my body” or his blood. It says that it is. He then says, do this in remembrance of me. But nevertheless the bread is his body and the wine is his blood. Only Catholics, during the communion service they call the Eucharist, take this statement literally. According to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, the wafer actually becomes the same “substance” as Christ’s body, and the wine the same substance as Christ’s blood. The bread is still gluten and starch, and the wine is still resveratrol and ethanol and anthocyanin and sucrose, but the inner “substance” is transformed into Christ’s body and blood. (I wonder what Catholic physicists have to say about transubstantiation.) Protestant and fundy creationists, during what they usually call the Lord’s Supper, alter the plain meaning of scripture and twist it to mean that the bread and grape juice are just meant to make us think about Jesus’ body and blood. They throw literalism out the window where, one would think, it matters most.

“Well, of course,” they could say, “Jesus didn’t actually mean his actual body, because He was sitting right there holding the bread which was molecularly distinct from his body. And He couldn’t have actually meant his actual blood which was still inside of his arteries and veins.” But if this is so, it makes Jesus seem pretty stupid. If it was so blinking obvious that the bread was not actually his body, why would he say that it was? Was he lying, or was he stupid? (Or was he speaking symbolically? No, creationists will not permit Jesus to do this.)

I first encountered this contradiction when I read a book about 25 years ago (which I might not have read were I not asked to review it) of letters exchanged between a literalist creationist and a scientist who was also a Catholic. Personally, I have no interest in this argument, but it does show that creationists are no more faithful to the Bible than other religious people.

And yet creationists present themselves to the rest of us as practically the owners of the Bible. They imply that if you don’t agree with them that the Earth is young, then you need not bother believing in Jesus. But, they think, it is just fine to believe in Jesus without believing that the communion bread is his body and the communion wine is his blood.

Creationism and the Ten Commandments

Christian fundamentalists are fixated upon the Ten Commandments. That’s pretty much all there is, as far as they are concerned, at least this is what it looks like to outsiders. Get those commandments etched in marble and put up at the courthouse or the capitol building, and we’re all set, we are a godly people.

And creationists say that the Ten Commandments depend upon young-earth creationism. Without creationism, there is no basis for the Ten Commandments. They may have a point there. In Exodus 20, it says that because God created the heavens and the earth in six days and rested on the seventh, humans should work six days and rest on the seventh. (Fundamentalists note: the seventh day is Saturday, not Sunday. But we’ll let that pass.) So without a six day creation, the Ten Commandments are invalid.

Well, there is no way around that argument. And since young-earth creationism is clearly incorrect (I refer you to my Encyclopedia of Evolution for 350,000 words of proof), then the Ten Commandments are out the window.

Lest you think this is bad news, think again. Trashing the Ten Commandments does not mean that we are all going to start jumping on each other and having wild sex and murdering one another like animals. (Actually nonhuman animals don’t do this; only humans do.) And this is because, even if the Ten Commandments as a list of commandments are invalid, the principles behind them are not. It is the principles that count, according to someone whose wisdom I trust a bit more than that of creationists. I refer to Jesus.

Back up a bit, to the Roman era Jewish theologians. One of them was asked, “Could you summarize the law of God while standing on one foot?” His answer was, “Don’t do to anybody else what you would not want them to do to you.”

The Golden Rule.

Jesus said it too. His summary was to love God (which is the point of the first commandments) and to love your neighbor (which is the point of the last commandments). It is sort of intuitive to humans who evolved as an at least partly altruistic species. It shows up in most religions and philosophies.

So let the creationists have their Ten Commandments. I will pay attention more to the Golden Rule.

A Survey of Religious Belief and Knowledge at a University in Oklahoma

I teach many general biology classes, for students in all different majors, as well as biology students in my botany and evolution classes, at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant. For years, I have known that my students had religious beliefs that covered the whole range from agnosticism to fundamentalist Christianity, and scientific perceptions ranging from evolution-only to young-earth-creationism. Since we are in the middle of the Bible Belt, I assumed most of them were creationists. But I never asked them.

Until now.

A couple of weeks ago I administered a survey (with institutional approval) of religious knowledge and beliefs. The survey was voluntary and anonymous. The religion under consideration was Christianity, because it is the most common religion in rural Oklahoma. I wanted to know how many of the students accepted evolutionary science and how many believed the Bible to be a, or the, holy book. And if they did believe the Bible to be holy, just how much did they know about it? Most of the questions I asked had something to do with biology: the age of the Earth and Noah’s flood (evolution), Old Testament dietary laws (nutrition), the Sabbath of the Fields (ecology), slavery (the genetics of race relations), and violent miscarriage (relating to the question of when human life begins). I will now report the results from the 49 respondents in my general biology classes.

The first thing that I discovered is that student beliefs were more evenly spread than I had anticipated; they were not overwhelmingly young-earth creationist.

Belief General Biology Fall 2014	Number	Percent	Belief in literal six-day creation	Belief that Noah’s Flood covered the whole Earth
Evolution produced the diversity of life.	6	12%	0%	0%
God allowed or used evolution to produce the diversity of life.	14	29%	44%	67%
God supernaturally created diversity over a long period of time.	13	27%	60%	100%
God supernaturally created diversity over a short and recent period of time.	10	20%	100%	89%
Declined to state	6	12%	50%	100%

There were 20 students of 49 who accepted some form of evolution, and 23 who did not. As it turns out, the “declined to state” category answered most questions in a creationist fashion, so it might be safest to assume 20 students of 49 (41%) being open to evolution in some form, and 29 students of 49 (59%) rejecting evolution. Belief in a literal six days of creation and a Flood that covered the whole Earth were higher in the creationist categories, but, perhaps surprisingly, not completely pegged to 100%; Noah’s Flood seemed more popular than the six-day creation.

Seventy-nine percent of the respondents who said that God allowed evolution to occur believed that the Bible was a or the holy book; in the creationist and declined-to-state categories it was 100%. The following information is based only on the students who identified the Bible as holy.

Of these students, only 15 percent had actually read the Bible. The others had read parts of it, or relied on their preachers to quote passages to them. That is, 85 percent of the people of faith relied on their preachers to edit the Bible for them: to either conveniently ignore certain passages, or to actually give them misinformation about what the Bible said.

General Topic General Biology Fall 2014	Specific belief	Percentage answering “yes”
Evolution, Earth history	Genesis 1 contains the account of Adam and Eve.	65%
	God raised up new mountains after the Flood.	80%
	God created new life forms after the Flood.	24%
	God put the fossils in order during the Flood.	21%
Health and diet	The Law of Moses says eating shellfish is an abomination.	34%
Ecology	The world will end soon.	62%
	The Law of Moses says that agricultural land should lie fallow (uncultivated) every seventh year.	79%
Social and racial	The Law of Moses says debts should be forgiven every fifty years and land should go back to its original owners.	26%
	Children born into slavery remained slaves even if their parents were freed.	25%
	Israelites could own other Israelites as slaves.	40%
	The Law of Moses says, “The slave is his money.”	27%
	Injuring a slave, who dies later, is not a punishable offense.	50%
	The Law of Moses says that there should be no resident aliens in Israel.	42%
Life before birth	The Law of Moses considers that injuring a woman so as to cause a miscarriage is manslaughter or murder.	59%

First, consider the beliefs about evolution and Earth history. Among the difficulties of creationist explanations are: first, there are two creation accounts in Genesis, not just one; second, why do you have fossil deposits high up in mountains; third, how could animal genetic diversity come from just two of each kind in the ark; fourth, why do the fossils show an evolutionary order. These are things that creationist pastors may wish that people would not ask. How convenient it would be if churchgoers would ignore the differences between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, or to think that God solved these problems by putting the fossils in order, raising up mountains, and creating new genetic diversity. Large percentages of believers the respondents did in fact believe these things, even though they are not in the Bible. They just made these things up. No wonder so few religious students notice that the facts of science contradict a literalistic view of the Bible; they do not know what a literalistic view of the Bible is.

Next, consider beliefs about Old Testament dietary laws. Only 34 percent knew that Leviticus 11 condemns eating shellfish as an abomination. It is very common for conservative preachers to quote the Old Testament to say that homosexuality is an abomination. But they almost never say that the Old Testament uses the same word to refer to eating shrimp.

Perhaps the most disturbing finding is that 62 percent of the respondents believed that the world is going to end soon. This one result is enough to make me almost stop worrying about evolution education and focus on environmental education. If you believe that the world is going to end soon, then at least subconsciously you are going to be unconvinced that it is important to prevent global warming or to protect endangered species or to recycle or to conserve energy or anything else. Go ahead and make a mess of the world, since God is going to destroy it very soon anyway. Of course, politicians who say to not worry about the Earth will NOT say to not worry about terrorists or deficit spending. It’s just the Earth you can ignore.

Most of the respondents (79 percent) knew about what is popularly called the Sabbath of the Fields, which is a primitive form of soil conservation commanded in the Book of Exodus. Most of them know that the Law of Moses addresses stewardship and conservation of the land. But only 26 percent knew about the year of jubilee, in which debts are forgiven and land goes back to its original owners every fifty years. Such a law would be the death-knell of capitalism. It sounds like socialism, and that is probably why preachers almost never talk about it.

Most respondents had a very unclear idea about what the Old Testament said about slavery. They thought that Biblical slavery was benign and more closely resembled an employer-employee relationship than actual ownership of a person. But the Old Testament clearly indicates that a child slave remains a slave even if the parent is given freedom and that it says “the slave is his money” (Exodus 21:21). If an owner kills a slave outright, it is manslaughter, but if the owner injures a slave and he or she dies a few days later, it is not a punishable offense, according to the Law of Moses. Most Bible believers appear to be unaware of this.

The Law of Moses says that resident aliens in the land of Israel should receive the same rights as the Israelites; one law for both. Almost half of the respondents were unaware of this. When conservative preachers rail against “illegal aliens,” they conveniently ignore this part of the Bible.

Finally, you hear conservative preachers all the time saying that, according to the Bible, abortion is murder. Therefore, if someone injures a woman so that she has a miscarriage, then the death of the fetus constitutes at least manslaughter. But the Law of Moses does not say this. Exodus 21 says, "And if men strive together, and hurt a pregnant woman, so that her child comes out, and yet no harm follows; the one who hit her shall surely be fined, according as the woman's husband shall impose on him; and he shall pay a fine as the judges determine. But if any harm follows, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth." It is unclear whether “harm” refers to the fetus or to the mother. While his passage does not actually sanction abortion, it does possibly indicate that the death of the fetus is not manslaughter. Over half of the respondents are unaware of this.

The conclusion I take away from this is that people who are most strongly convinced that the Bible has religious authority over science and daily life are unaware of what the bible actually says about these matters. This undoubtedly comes from people getting their Bible knowledge from preachers who twist what the Bible actually says and then assume (correctly) that their followers will not bother to look at the Bible themselves.

I also gave this survey to my evolution class (consisting mostly of upper division biological science majors). I only had fourteen respondents, which is not enough of a sample size to justify closer analysis except for these overall results. First, the most common belief in this class was theistic evolution (43 percent of respondents). The next most common belief was that evolution produced diversity (29 percent). Only three of the students (21 percent) were young-earth creationists, and only one was an old-earth creationist. This course is an elective, which most creationist students avoid. Second, acceptance of evolutionary science does not require rejection of the Bible. Of these respondents, 71 percent accepted some form of evolution, and 79 percent believed the Bible was a, or the, holy book. To them, these views are not mutually exclusive.

For me, there were three conclusions from this survey, of which the first two were surprising:

First, young-earth creationism was not the most common belief even in the Bible belt of Oklahoma.
Second, over half of the respondents thought the world was going to end soon.
Third, most Bible believers do not realize that the Bible does not support their beliefs.

I will continue administering this survey and eventually I hope that I will have a large sample size. In my approximately ten remaining professional years, I might get close to a thousand respondents.