Faith v. Integrity

I doubt Thales, when divvying up the world into opposites—fire/water, earth/sky, day/night, hidden/obvious, etc/atc.—ever considered the opposite of faith. Thales looked to nature for data, to reason for answers. When looking to nature I doubt faith ever crossed his mind: Nature doesn’t ask to be believed in, it asks to be explained. Everything he saw, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted created an opportunity for learning, and in the mind of a rational man everything requires study. Understanding requires study and the integrity to acknowledge truth.

While I’m sure Thales had his doubts about the gods, twenty-six centuries ago questioning them publicly was not a healthy choice. Then, like today, it wasn’t the gods who punished the non-believer…it’s the believers right here on Earth who make sure the wrath of their gods is felt. Across the globe, presently, it is still not safe for the rational to speak their minds. In the Muslim world they risk death or imprisonment. In the United States, vocal opponents of irrationalism risk unemployment, ostracism, ridicule, and abuse.

For three years such abuse took place in Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2005, where the area school board had been hijacked by a few Christian zealots determined to turn the clocks in Dover back to a day before science, a day before the Bill of Rights, when teachers led their classes in Christian prayers and bible readings. Their leader, Board Curriculum Chairman William Buckingham, was raised believing in a literal interpretation of the Bible, including its first book, the Book of Genesis. Apparently, he thought everybody else’s kids should be educated so well. “This country wasn’t founded on Muslim beliefs or evolution,” Buckingham told Dover parents. “This country was founded on Christianity and our students should be taught as such.”

Problem was, public prayer and bible reading and teaching creationism in public schools is illegal. Bill Buckingham had a problem. How does a man of faith manage to solve a problem of this sort? What would Jesus do?

At the trial, Bill’s victims—his fellow board members!—testified that they had been cornered and questioned, asked if they were Born Again, ridiculed and called un-Christian if they answered incorrectly or refused to answer, bullied into voting for the anti-science, biology curriculum Buckingham and his friends at the Bible Science Association [BSA] and the Foundation for Thought and Ethics [FTE] endorsed. On at least one occasion, a board member was compelled to resign. Dover High School science teachers testified that they were forced to accept an irrational, anti-science textbook to supplement their biology curriculum. The teachers were required to accept the text, Of Pandas and People, or lose funding for the text they had ordered, Biology. Conscientious science teachers actually had to walk out of their classrooms, leaving their students to board stooges appointed to read an anti-science message at the onset of the unit on the origins of life.

In addition to his utter lack of integrity when dealing with co-workers and constituency, Apostle Bill demonstrated a complete incompetence regarding the facts, not only of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, but of the “alternative theory” he championed, Intelligent Design. Here’s Bill answering questions at the trial:

QUESTION: I'm just trying to understand so we can have a working understanding here of what intelligent design is if we can. Do you have an understanding in very simple terms of what intelligent design stands for? What does it teach?

ANSWER: Other than what I've expressed that scientists, a lot of scientists, don't ask me the names, I can't tell you where it came from, a lot of scientists believe that back through time something, molecules, amoeba, whatever, evolved into the complexities of life we have now.

Q: That's the theory of intelligent design?

A: You asked me my understanding of it. I'm not a scientist. I can't go into details and debate it with you."

Q: Do you remember giving that testimony?

A. Yes.

Q. And at least as of that date, January the 3rd, that's all that you understood about what the theory of intelligent design is, isn't that correct?

A. Plus the fact that I felt that life was too complex to have randomly happened without a design of some sort.

[Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District Trial transcript: Day 16 (October 27), AM Session, Part 1]

Buckingham’s Board failed their mandate as educators to equip the next generation with the necessary tools for survival. They demonstrated contempt for humanity, ignoring man’s best efforts to understand himself and his place in time They failed their duty as elected officials to represent the views [or even the best interests] of their constituency. They extorted, bullied, lied and distorted, and then, under oath, denied it all. And like the Theory of Intelligent Design, these apostles failed even to name the designer they had in mind on the day they embarked on their ridiculous crusade.

It would be laughable if so many people hadn’t been hurt.

I remember awaiting the decision of United States District Judge John E. Jones III. I knew what the verdict should be, but I honestly wasn’t sure what the court would do. I remembered the Supreme Court’s failure to address the “God” in the pledge issue, granted a trivial matter compared to Dover. I was afraid the court would make some sort of compromise with these lunatics in the name of tradition or American values. While reading the testimony of Buckingham and others, I came to the conclusion that these people—like the goddamned Taliban—don’t compromise. They don’t soften their message. They don’t study. They’re not interested in anything man has accomplished in the last millennium. As far as they’re concerned, history stopped two thousand years ago with Jesus, the Bible is the only book, and the complete store of knowledge was handed down to man by God. They believe their nonsense. They are people of faith. They disparage every effort made by man to uncover the truth calling him the Devil and damning him to Hell. They blind their eyes to the truth he discovers. They cover their ears. They have no stomach for the truth when it unsettles their little minds. They haven’t the integrity to acknowledge truth.

United States District Judge John E. Jones thought better…thank goodness.