Is Sarah Palin A Creationist?
Is Sarah Palin A Creationist?
Our guest blogger is Rick Weiss, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Is McCain’s choice for vice president a creationist? The record offers worrisome evidence that the first woman to make it onto a Republican presidential ticket holds to this backward and wholly unscientific view of reality.
As reported in the Anchorage Daily News during her race for the governorship of Alaska, Sarah Palin offered up a classic anti-evolution answer when asked during a televised debate whether creationism should be taught with evolution in the public schools:
“Teach both,” Palin said. “You know, don’t be afraid of information… I am a proponent of teaching both.”
“Teach both” and “teach the debate” have long been the mantras of the religious right and the Intelligent Design crowds, which have struggled over the years as court after court has batted down their efforts to inject unscientific teachings into the nation’s science classes.
The legal record suggests that Palin’s approach is not just ignorant of the facts, but a plain violation of the Constitutional boundary between church and state.
Recall, for example, the December 2005 United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania decision in Kitzmiller vs. the Dover Area School District. At issue was the legality of a 2004 Dover Area School District decision to inform all students that they should “keep an open mind” about evolution and to encourage students to peruse Of Pandas and People, which the school district gamely referred to as “a reference book,” to gain an understanding of a competing view of how life came to be, known as Intelligent Design.
Judge John E. Jones III did not pull his punches. He found that the testimony of school board members who favored the teaching of Intelligent Design in the schools “was marked by selective memories and outright lies under oath.” He labeled intelligent design as “a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory.”
Judge Jones also highlighted the discovery of a secret game plan written by leaders of the Intelligent Design movement that made clear the real goal of these various academic and legal battles. The “Five Year Strategic Plan Summary,” known to fundamentalist insiders as the “Wedge Document,” states that the movement’s goal is to replace science as currently taught and practiced with “theistic and Christian science.” The group’s “governing goals,” according to this document, are to “defeat scientific materialism” and to “replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.”
In an interview after the 2006 debate, Palin, whose father was a public school science teacher according to the Daily News, sought to temper her initial response, saying that the classroom discussion about evolution and creationism “doesn’t have to be part of the curriculum.”
Well, that’s for sure. No less an arbiter of reason than the U.S. Supreme Court itself ruled in the 1980s that creationism has no place in the science curriculum. That goes for Intelligent Design as well. In the Kitzmiller decision, Judge Jones found “Intelligent Design” “the progeny of creationism,” which claims that all life was created by a supernatural force in exactly the form that it exists today.
Religion classes? Okay. Philosophy class? Sure. But the teaching of science becomes a farce when supernaturalism is made part of science class and the huge trove of evidence supporting evolution is belittled as “just another theory.”
Or “theories,” as Palin has oddly put it when talking about evolution:
“My dad did talk a lot about his theories of evolution,” she told the Anchorage newspaper, apparently unaware that there is but one theory of evolution, and it is just as well grounded by evidence as is the (“just a”) theory of gravity.
When the newspaper asked Palin for her personal views on evolution, Palin responded: “I believe we have a creator.” Asked, I suppose, and unanswered. But she is clearly a candidate in sync with her running mate.
John McCain, as you may remember, signed on as the keynote speaker at a Feb. 2007 event at the Discovery Institute, the major lobbying group for Intelligent Design.
In addition to her unscientific views on evolution, Palin has said she does not believe that human activities are contributing to global climate change, a fact of planetary life on which the world’s best scientists have reached complete consensus.
Alas, poor science, we knew her well. Eight years in a dungeon. Can she live four more without the light of day?
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7 Responses to “Is Sarah Palin A Creationist?”
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I find it hard to imagine that anyone who believes the dinosaurs are a hoax could be the leader of this nation. At a time when we need clear leadership on issues ranging from global warming to stem cell research we need someone in the White House who understands science.
August 30th, 2008 at 3:54 amTo those who say “teach both in our public schools“, I say “why stop there? “Why not teach both in Sunday school as well?”
“You know, don’t be afraid of information.”
August 31st, 2008 at 9:33 amIs information so bad. Yes, it is a “theory”-please do your research. While the Russians were far ahead of America in the educational structure of their children our preseident at that time decided to adopt their teaching on evolution in order to improve our military. YES! You know what racist had adopted Darwins THEORY? Hitler, thats where Americans got it from…and did you know that Darwin is also a white supremists. Does anyone know what the definition for science is? systematized knowledge as an object of study (the word study meaning observed!) Has anyone ever observed a money turning into a human? Have you ever seen a human with a gorilla ear? Any pictures of this? Yes christians do believe in dinasaurs. They were present before the flood. They have lungs smaller than humans!!? Why you ask? Because the oxygen content in the earth was greater than now! Why? because there was a HUGE canope of water covering the earth untill the flood. Thats also why men lived longer. Do some research before you believe everything you are taught in this one country in this one earth in this whole big world. Fact is debatable, truth is straight up truth.
September 15th, 2008 at 1:55 amfirst off walkertxrobin, let me start by saying your the exact type of person our country needs to rid itself of. you say do your research?? your gibberish about the definition of science is a joke. Ask why you dont see a monkey turn into a human? are u kidding me? have u not read one sentence about evolution??? WERE TALKING THOUSANDS, HUNDRED THOUSANDS of years. maybe if your mind wasen’t so closed from the brainwashed teachings you’ve been fed in church from a young age, you might be able to educate yourself. your so called called belief is nothing but breeder of ignorance. and if you believed that dinosaurs and humans lived together as the dominant species on earth you might aswell become a construction worker or something in manual labor becuase you obviously don’t have the brainpower for a intellectual life. sorry if i sound harsh but i’m being completely honest….. and you have the audacity to say do your research???? followed by that non-sense about?? O-M-G… no pun intended
September 15th, 2008 at 9:46 pmI heard via a Michael on Larry King Live last night that Gov. Palin “does not believe in evolution and thinks the earth is 6,000 years old!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” MY, the audacity!!!!
(Excuse the sarcasm.)
If we are guaranteed freedom of speech in this country, YOU THINK freedom of thought and reason and opinion might have, and does, come first? I’m so glad my country was founded upon the reasons and virtues listed in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. AND it sounds to me like Sarah Palin would have dared to think, speak, and act outside the same box AND would have been on the Mayflower AND help draft those documents.
I’m, also, THRILLED beyond words to know a candidate running for VP MAY BE a creationist. (Although, I haven’t heard a quote saying that.) I happen to be one myself, and have studied both sides of the argument for a very long time. And actually ANYONE who HAS STUDIED BOTH knows that the evidence for creation is overwhelming and ABSOLUTELY SOLID. And, sorry, but because it IS scientific, I agree that it should receive EQUAL weight in the schools. (Maybe it’s the people who believe in the Theory of Evolution who are AFRAID of information.)
All of the theorIES within evolution are just that. The easiest (shortest) one to argue is to acknowledge/observe that ANY species when left to itself progresses from SPECIFIC to LESS SPECIFIC. That alone is a no-brainer, easy enough for anyone to grasp AND IS INCOMPATIBLE with “THE THEORY”.
I have my masters in a scientific field and my husband is an MD. I know what sound scientific reasoning is. Next time you go to the Dr. be glad that his/her course of action is (1) not based on a THEORY which is (2) based on a FALSE ASSUMPTION (3) SUBSTANTIATED BY CIRCULAR REASONING…. like the Theory of Evolution.
And don’t you dare pooh-pooh creation of the earth or humans until you HAVE studied it. Then if you choose to still believe in the THEORY of Evolution, I will commend you for having even more faith than I do.
In the meantime, YOU GO SARAH PALIN AND OTHERS WHO DARE TO THINK FOR THEMSELVES…………. AND……….. TO LET IT BE KNOWN!
PS, grob760, To think that dinosaurs and humans could not have existed at the same time would be equal to thinking that should tigers or elephants ever be extinct, our descendants would conclude that surely WE never co-existed. Now does your view on that fall under “gibberish”, “brain-washed teachings”, “ignorance”, or lack of “brainpower”? Or, oh! Maybe YOU’RE a “construction worker”. Well, I think it would be another case of faulty human reasoning. But maybe they could even base a NEW theory on it, huh? Like, prove we were obviously as fast as tigers and as big as elephants.
September 20th, 2008 at 9:57 pm@pattychat
September 21st, 2008 at 9:41 pmI would like to know where you learned all that rubbish and which “scientific field” you have a masters degree in. Since the evidence for creationism is “vastly overwhelming”, could you please explain one way in which evolution is flawed?
I eagerly await your response
Alex
two words…carbon dating
September 21st, 2008 at 9:45 pm