I have just finished watching a fascinating documentary on SBS, called
Judgment Day, about how a bunch of weird Christian extremists tried to introduce stealth creationism into the science class of Dover High School as an alternative to Charles Darwin's
theory of evolution. This was obviously Dover, Pa, in the US, and not Dover, England.
They called this stealth creationism
Intelligent Design (ID). Actually they didn't originally, they called it creationism, but obviously realised this would not fly in a science class with sharp students, so they rebadged it as ID — and gave it scientific trappings. It was part of a 20 year plan to make science (the gift that gives everyday) subordinate to bible 'teachings' (the gift that gives every day... after you are dead). All this was uncovered in the gruelling court case that followed,
Kitzmiller v. Dover, along with the creationists' original planning document detailing the deception, The Wedge Strategy.
To cut a long story short, Judge John E. Jones III finally ruled that ID was an assault on the the US constitution because it ignored the first amendment, which provides for separation of religion and state. To prove this the prosecution had to establish that ID was originally a creationist theory, and this did this by subpoenaing all the drafts of the ID Trojan text-book,
Of Pandas and People.
Ironically, these drafts established evidence that the intent always was religiously motivated deception, such as the
evolution of the term
creation to
Intelligent Design via search and replace. At least these creationists don't typeset in lead anymore. It was found there were approximately 150 uses of the root word "creation", such as "creationism" and "creationist", were systematically changed to refer to intelligent design. Definitions remained essentially the same, with "intelligent design" substituted for "creation", and "intelligent creator" changed to "intelligent agency." But, unfortunately for the god botherers, the final draft still contains vestigal organs evidencing these deceptions: The term "creationists" was changed to "design proponents", but in one case the beginning and end of the original word "creationists" were accidentally retained, so that "creationists" became
"cdesign proponentsists".
The judge ruled againt them, and the rest is history. The poor bugger received death threats to himself and his family soon after, and now lives under federal protection. Charming, those so called Christians.
Watching the program, I was repeatedly reminded of the contemporary anti-science offence of AGW denial. One of the main claims AGW deniers make about AGW is that it is the new green faith — a religion.