

Monday, October 3, 2011

Good Science, Bad Science and Ugly Evolution

Lawrence Lerner is a skeptic and a retired professor of condensed matter physics. His recent report, supposedly on US State science teaching, has grabbed news headlines for its grades of all 50 state curricula. One would think that an assessment of ‘good science’ and ‘bad science’ would assess real science like physics, chemistry, experimental biology, etc., on how effectively their important concepts were learnt by the student. But no, these ‘science teaching’ grades are based solely on how favourably each state deals with biological evolution in the curriculum guide.
Ten states scored ‘A’, meaning (in Lerner’s opinion) ‘Treatment of evolution is very good or excellent’; the grades drop as evolution is treated less dogmatically, while one state (Kansas) received an ‘F-’ for allegedly ‘removing all references to biological evolution’. As documented below, Lerner’s report contains much in the way of rhetoric and logical fallacies and little of real science of the type that put men on the moon, cures diseases, etc.

Definitions as slippery as eels

It is vitally important that words should be used accurately and consistently. Without this, any discussion is meaningless, so this must be addressed before anything else. And this is a major failing with Lerner’s paper — he never defines ‘evolution’ and he doesn’t use the term consistently.
The theory that Lerner and other materialists are really promoting, and which creationists oppose, is the idea that particles turned into people over time, without any need for an intelligent designer. This ‘General Theory of Evolution’ (GTE) was defined by the evolutionist Kerkut as ‘the theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form.’

However, many evolutionary propagandists are guilty of the deceitful practice of equivocation, that is, switching the meaning of a single word (evolution) part-way through an argument. A common tactic is simply to produce examples of change over time, call this ‘evolution’, then imply that the GTE is thereby proven or even essential, and Creation disproven. For example, Lerner writes:
What does Lerner write? I'm not telling. You'll have to read the rest of "Who’s really pushing ‘bad science’?" here.

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