Terri Leo Enlists Steven Weinberg

PZ Myers at Pharynluga launches a philippic against Terri Leo, who sits on the Board of Education in Texas. Leo has come to international attention over her efforts to have the theory of evolution “balanced” by creationist criticisms of the theory in school textbooks. However, that’s only part of her agenda:

She’s been working like a maniac to gut textbooks; she’s even tried to get publishers to add little “facts”, like “Opinions vary on why homosexuals, lesbians and bisexuals as a group are more prone to self-destructive behaviors like depression, illegal drug use, and suicide.” She’s a perfect example of anti-science, anti-intellectual, intolerant bigotry, and yet there she is, on the state board of education. That’s like hearing that Richard Dawkins has been elected by the College of Cardinals to the papacy, or that the new head of the NIH is Bluto Blutarski. She just doesn’t belong there.

Unsurprisingly, Leo is a senior figure in the very disturbing Republican Party of Texas. Her position on evolution teaching was laid out in a statement included in the minutes of a State Board of Education meeting held last November:

The State Board of Education has been evaluating whether current biology textbooks meet state standards for accuracy in their presentation of Darwin’s theory of evolution.  Numerous Texas scientists, educators, and students have asked that the SBOE insist the biology textbooks comply with the state law by correcting well-known factual errors and by presenting both the scientific strengths and the scientific weaknesses to Darwinian theory; which is spelled out in TEKS (3)(A).  This reasonable request, which is merely asking that the law be met, has elicited a torrent of personal abuse and misinformation by those lobbying to teach Darwin’s theory uncritically.  All I’m asking is that the students learn all the scientific evidence they need to assess Darwinian theory, not just the evidence that happens to support it.  Much peer reviewed scientific literature has been documented to the existence of many problems with current evolutionary theory and with the textbooks’ presentation of that theory.

The law of the land also supports this approach, as does our national education policy.  In 1986, the Supreme Court ruled in Edwards vs. Aguillar, the controlling legal authority on how to teach origin questions, that state legislatures could require and state boards could require teaching scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories.  Last year in the conference report of the No Child Left Behind, Congress expressed its support for greater openness in science instruction, citing biological evolution as the key example.  Teaching both the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian theory not only interests students, it teaches them to weigh evidence, a skill needed in scientific reasoning.  As Charles Darwin said himself in Origin of the Species, a fair result can only be obtained by balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.

The most eminent scientist to testify on behalf of the textbooks was Professor Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize Laureate in physics from The University of Texas.  In response to questioning from the board, he made it clear that in supporting evolution, he didn’t have anything to say about the origin of life.  He further elaborated “that it may be on any given planet the chance that the conditions would be right for life to start up and that life will actually get started as extremely low.”  However, textbooks under consideration do not adequately reflect his clear, specific, and highly qualified testimony.  Tell students the truth; give them all the scientific evidence.

There are three major publishers in the high school biology market.  Two of them, Holt and Glencoe, I believe do conform to Texas law and our high standards. These standards were clearly spelled out to publishers in the Proclamation 2001, in the Question and Answer, in the SBOE Operating Rules, and in the board’s documented intent in developing TEKS (3)(A).  Prentice Hall has made no attempt to fulfill this requirement.  Therefore, I cannot support Prentice Hall’s biology book, as well as any other book that has disregarded TEKS (3)(A), our own state standard.  I believe these books cannot be placed on the conforming list of adoptions.  Thank you Madam Chair.

Leo’s appropriation of Weinberg is rather odd. Here’s what Weinberg actually said in context:

As I understand it, many who want to put alternative theories into our textbooks argue that, although that may be true, we don’t know that that’s all that happens, that there is not some intelligent design that also assists the process of evolution. But that’s the wrong question. We can never know that there isn’t something beyond our theories. And that’s not just true with regard to evolution. That’s true with regard to everything…What we have to do is keep comparing what we observe with our theories and keep verifying that the theories work, trying to explain more and more. That’s what’s happened with evolution and it continues to be successful. There is not one thing that is known to be inexplicable through evolution by natural selection, which is not the same as saying that everything has been explained, because it never will be. The same applies to the weather or the solar system or what have you…

You’re not doing your job if you let a question like the validity of evolution through natural selection go to the students, anymore than a judge is doing his job or her job if he or she allows the question of witchcraft to go to the jury. And why this particular issue of evolution? Why not the round Earth or Newton’s theory or Copernicus’ [theory], the Earth goes around the sun? Well, I think it’s rather disingenuous to say that this is simply because there’s a real scientific conflict here, because there is no more of a scientific conflict than with those issues.

As for Leo’s “aha!” moment, in which she enlists Weinberg for her cause:

Then you raise an entirely different point, which is the point about the origin of life. I didn’t have anything to say about the origin of life. I don’t believe that anyone knows what is the probability, given certain environment, that life will arise. It is not something that we know really how to calculate.

Leo rightly quotes Weinberg for saying that the probability of life arising may be low. But just as she ignores his distinction between the issue of initial origins and the process of evolution, so she fails to tell her audience that Weinberg qualified his statement rather radically:

If you have that many planets, then there’s a good chance that life will form on one of them. And the people on that planet will look around and say, “Gee, aren’t we lucky?”

Board member Mavis B. Knight tried to counter Leo’s assertions by asking for an article by Alan D Gishlick attacking the creationist book Icons of Evolution to be included on the record.

More background on Leo is provided by the San Antonio Current, in an article from last year:

During her 2002 campaign, Leo was endorsed by the far-right Concerned Women of America, which describes itself as being built on “prayer and action,” and working to “bring Biblical principles into all levels of public policy.” She also earned the seal of approval from Rick Scarborough, co-founder of Vision America, whose mission is “to promote Biblical values back into every aspect of our public arena.”

According to Leo’s campaign contribution filings (she was one of only five members to file on-line), she accepted contributions from fellow board members Geraldine Miller and David Bradley — $4,000 and $3,000, respectively.

Leo also received $500 from Robert Schoolfield, a far-right Austinite who ran for the board, but lost in the primary to Cynthia Thornton. The Texas Observer called him “the Christian Right’s anointed candidate” and during his campaign, Schoolfield spoke out against homosexuality and supported school vouchers.

But Schoolfield’s campaign unraveled after he became entangled in a controversy over his campaign contributions to a Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice, who upheld that state’s voucher laws. The Wisconsin elections board ruled that Schoolfield and others’ out-of-state contributions were illegal. Dogged by controversy, Schoolfield lost his bid for the board, but found his voice in Terri Leo.

LaHaye: Tyndale House “stunning and disappointing”

Tyndale House has announced plans to publish a novel by Hank Hanegraaff presenting the shocking view that the Book of Revelation is actually about first-century Christianity rather than current events in the twenty-first century. This has provoked a delicious quote from Left Behind author Tim LaHaye, who also publishes with Tyndale:

They are going to take the money we made for them and promote this nonsense

And LaHaye knows a thing or two about promoting nonsense. Explains the Dallas News:

The Last Disciple, the first of at least three books planned, depicts the Roman emperor, Nero, as “the beast.” In the book, Christians in Rome and Jerusalem are suffering through the Tribulation. Nero is trying to find the Apostle John’s letter (the Book of Revelation) and destroy it. To survive, the early Christians must decipher a mysterious code. (The code for Nero’s name is the number 666, regarded by many as the mark of the Antichrist.)

Sound farfetched?

Maybe. But scholars of eschatology, the branch of theology dealing with the end of the world, note that biblical references to the end times are almost always ambiguous, highly symbolic and subject to widely varying interpretations.

“Farfetched”? In actual fact, the “nonsense” LaHaye objects to has been the standard scholarly understanding of the text for decades, if not even longer. The Nero = 666 interpretation is even included in the notes of the New Jerusalem Bible. Hanegraaff’s position, however, is not based on higher-critical Biblical scholarship. For example, although his approach also places the prophecies in the Book of Daniel as having been fulfilled in the ancient world rather than being still to come, he clings to the fundamentalist claim that the text was written before those events (and so is a miraculous book that proves the existence of God) when serious scholarship places Daniel in the second century BCE. Instead, he is, to some extent at least, a preterist: one who believes that the Bible is truly prophetic, but that most of the Bible’s prophecies have been fulfilled already. This interpretation is also held by, among others, RC Sproul.

This is, though, a new departure for Tyndale. In his autobiography, Kenneth Taylor, Tyndale’s founder, states that the Six-Day War “seemed to be a clear act of God in helping his ancient race to whom the promise was given of repopulating the desert” (page 246) and long before Left Behind Taylor’s premillennialism led to the publication of Hal Lindsey-esque books like Israel, Act III by Richard Wolff. However, current vice-president Ron Beers says that

As a Christian publisher, we want to represent a diversity of viewpoints…There is nothing strange about Tyndale selling both views. There are a variety of perspectives on the end times. Some people had a problem with the theology in the Left Behind books.

Well, the theology was on some people’s list, along with the anti-intellectualism, political paranoia and crap writing…

Perhaps another reason why Tyndale has turned to Hanegraaff is simply because his view is now becoming more popular. LaHaye’s premillennialism made sense under the shadow of the Cold War, and afterwards during the (apparent) liberalism of the Clinton years. But times have changed since the first Left Behind novel appeared almost ten years ago. With Bush in the White House, US forces in Iraq, cultural conservatives besieging media and academic institutions they accuse of “bias” (an accusation that encompasses the teaching of evolutionary theory), Falwell proclaiming a revolution, and the rise of a postmodern age of religious-identity politics, visions of being raptured away from an unholy world may well appear less attractive than the idea that the world can be captured for Christianity. To be sure, we still have Mike Evans heading up Amazon bestseller lists with an apocalyptic take on current events, but Evans spices up his premillennialism with extensive anti-Arab racism and a portrait of Israel as an ally against the Muslim hordes. Perhaps readers are enjoying these elements while deciding that the rapture is postponed.

Peculiarly (or not), although LaHaye is offended by Tyndale daring to publish books that disagree with his theology, he has no problem with being promoted by Kensington Books, which does a nice line in gay erotica. But I suppose Kensington is helping him move into the mainstream, so it’s best to keep quiet.

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On a side note, Hanegraaff’s co-writer (as with so many other Christian novels, one suspects the famous Christian provides the name, while the less-famous one actually does all the work) is Sigmund Brouwer. Like LaHaye’s co-author Jerry Jenkins, Brouwer is a professional writer with over a hundred titles in adventure, science-fiction, and children’s books. He has also published The Unrandom Universe: The Latest Scientific Discoveries Will Strengthen Your Faith, which adopts what looks like a theistic evolutionist perspective. One wonders how this fits with Hanegraaff’s young-earth creationism and his creationist tome The Face That Demonstrates the Farce of Evolution.

(Dallas News link from Christianity Today)

Wheely Racist

Jack Wheeler hits a new low for WorldNet Daily:

The Jewish Talmud makes the following observation:

There is no beauty like Jerusalem, no wealth like Rome, no depravity like Arabia.

This was written in the 3rd century A.D. – three hundred years before the Arabs embraced Muhammad’s Islam. But neither the adoption of Islam nor all the intervening centuries since has decreased the addiction Arab men have to pederasty.

And what’s the evidence? Exhibit A: Yasser Arafat:

Arab pederasty was personified in Yasser Arafat, one of the vilest human beings to ever infest the earth. During the Cold War, Arafat was a frequent guest of Romania’s Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu, who would put him up in his palace in Bucharest. Always included in Arafat’s retinue was a selection of young boys. What Arafat didn’t know was that Ceaucescu’s secret police, the Securitatae, would covertly film his bedroom escapades. The Israeli intel agency Mossad has copies.

This follows on from a previous WND article by Aaron Klein, “Does Arafat Have AIDS?” There it was revealed that

Ion Pacepa, who was deputy chief of Romanian foreign intelligence under the Ceaucescu regime and who defected to the West in 1978, says in his memoirs the Romania government bugged Arafat and had recordings of the Arab leader in orgies with his security detail.

Various Israeli security sources have in the past suggested publicly Arafat might be homosexual. They’ve claimed Arafat’s former personal driver – a Mossad double agent – used to find teenage boys to bring back to the PLO leader. His wife, Suha, mostly lived abroad and rarely saw her husband.

Wheeler adds, with great subtlety:

Yasser Arafat was the Hitler of Palestinian Arabs.

I think I prefer Edward Said’s “Papa Doc of Palestine” description.

Wheeler likes to be known as “Indiana Jones of the Right”, having led a double life of philosophy teaching and of adventure, helping insurgents in “Soviet colonies” in the 1980s. World O’Crap recently noted:

you can get some of his mind-stretching insights at NewsMax (like the famous one where he scratches out the eyes of Peggy Noonan for saying mean things about her fellow Reagan speech writers); at the Moonie Times (for instance,  one in which he brags of having first outted Hillary Clinton as a bisexual in 1993); and CounterPunch (in which he argues that Janet Reno is America’s Saddam Hussein).

CounterPunch? Peculiar, but there it is. According to Rightweb, Wheeler founded the Freedom Research Foundation (FRF) in 1984, with help from Howard Phillips’s Conservative Caucus, and he has been involved with various Central American countries, Afghanistan, and Angola. An article by Franklin Foer in The New Republic (only available to subscribers, but a bootleg can be read here) gives more detail, and explains how Wheeler got funding from the Reason Foundation and Lew Lehrman to explore links with anti-Communist fighters, support for whom became “the Reagan Doctrine”:

Wheeler invited anti-communist rebel leaders from Nicaragua, Laos, and Afghanistan to Jamba, Angola, the headquarters of Jonas Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (unita). There, Lehrman gathered his guests and had them sign a communiqué declaring “our solidarity with all freedom movements in the world and … our commitment to cooperate to liberate our nations from the Soviet imperialists.”… Savimbi had become the poster child for this new breed of freedom fighter.

Wheeler, of course, was getting into bed with characters just as unsavoury as the Arafat he excoriates today:

To the credit of National Review, it published [Polish journalist Radek] Sikorski’s damning indictment of unita, including allegations that it had burned 13 people alive… A string of Human Rights Watch reports documented that unita violated just about every section of the Geneva Conventions.

Plus:

well before the horrors of successive Afghan regimes made clear that these “freedom fighters” merely wanted to replace the totalitarianism of godless communism with the totalitarianism of Sharia, the mujahedin’s thuggish tendencies were clear to those willing to look. Take the warlord Gulbulddin Hekmatyar, the mujahedin leader to receive the most American aid. As an Islamic student leader at Kabul University, he encouraged his followers to splash acid on the faces of unveiled women and fire guns at their uncovered legs. During the anti-Soviet jihad, he betrayed a similar tendency toward indiscriminate cruelty, assassinating Afghan intellectuals and Western journalists. And, as recently as last month, he ordered his followers to “cut off the hands of the foreign meddlers.”

Foer concludes:

…When I visited Jack Wheeler, he showed me the books on his desk. They included Sleeping With the Devil, Robert Baer’s polemic against Saudi Arabia, and David Pryce-Jones’s The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs. He picked up one and told me, “It’s amazing how similar Islam is to Marxism. I mean, it’s the same thing all over again.” This has become a standard interpretation on the right and has logically led to talk of reapplying the Reagan Doctrine. But the map looks a lot different now than when Wheeler first considered the possibilities of global antiSoviet revolution. Not so many counter-Islamist insurgencies burn across the globe. So reviving the Reagan Doctrine could require digging deeper into the bag of opposition groups for rebels that have even less popular support or even worse track records than their ’80s analogs.

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A couple of footnotes:

1. Thank you to a commentator for finding the actual passage of The Talmud quoted by Wheeler: this is from the Avot of Rabbi Nathan, also known in English as The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan. It’s actually from the sixth century, and is extra-canonical. I have no idea whether Wheeler has used the passage in context.

R. Nathan said: “There is no love such as the love of the Torah; there is no wisdom such as the wisdom of manners; there is no beauty such as the beauty of Jerusalem; there are no riches such as the riches of Modea; there is no strength such as the strength of Persia; there is no adultery such as the adultery of the Arabians; there is no haughtiness such as the haughtiness of Elam; there is no hypocrisy such as the hypocrisy of Babylon, as it is written [Zech. v. 11]: ‘And he said unto me, To build for it a house in the land of Shinar’; and there is no witchcraft such as the witchcraft of Egypt.”

2. A lengthy cached interview with Wheeler can be read here.

3. Ion Pacepa, the source of the Arafat-homosexuality accusation is a particularly shady character. He has been the toast of the neo-conservatives for some years, since he “revealed” that basically anything bad that was ever said against the USA or Israel was the result of Communist propaganda. Back in March Joe Conason noted that the National Review was carrying

a weird article by Romania’s former Communist spy chief, in which he insinuates that Kerry, and anyone else who talked about atrocities in Vietnam, was really an instrument of KGB propaganda. (It is remarkable to see a “conservative” magazine publish a smear written by a man who once facilitated the atrocities of the Ceausescu regime.) The essay by Ion Mihai Pacepa, who defected to the West in 1978, is titled “Kerry’s Soviet Rhetoric,” and claims that his testimony about the war in 1971 “sounds exactly like the disinformation line that the Soviets were sowing worldwide throughout the Vietnam era.”

Pacepa also claims that Russia has hidden Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, since the Soviet Union provided them in the first place. According to Arnaud de Borchgrave at UPI, Pacepa is still wanted in Romania and remains undercover.

Stars In His Eyes

Hindu Astrology introduces us to one of their “noted astrologers”:

Vinod Kumar Gupta a hidden treasure in himself is known to the astrological world for his accurate predictions…Not only as an astrologer he is also a renowned Vaastu Expert. Many big industrial houses can be credited to his account. He can draw the horoscope of the house/factory from which he can make predictions and suggest some remedial measures for the malefic of teh [sic] planetary effects.

A list of 19 past predictions is given to prove his occult powers. For some reason, however, his latest prophecy (reported in Express India on October 23) is absent:

A city-based astrologer has predicted that Kerry would replace Bush in the next US presidential elections.

Vinod Kumar Gupta…has predicted that Kerry will be elected new president in the elections to be held in November. According to Gupta, in the annual horoscope of President Bush, mercury is in the eighth house from July 2004 to July 2005 which would affect his prospects in these elections.

While, John Kerry, claimed Gupta, has Moon and Mars in the fourth house in the annual horoscope up to December 2004 which gives him a gain in popularity and victory in elections.

Demons Fight to Win US Election

As the US election gets underway, one neo-Pentecostal “prophet” makes a shameless bid for the limelight, according to Charisma:

Prominent Pastor Issues ‘Emergency’ Call to Prayer for Today’s Elections

Emergency? Yes – completely unexpectedly, Bush’s rule is being challenged!

Dutch Sheets, who has pastored Springs Harvest Fellowship in Colorado Springs, Colo., for 12 years, said the Holy Spirit had not led him to issue a call to prayer for the elections until last Thursday.

“That began to change this morning, as I sensed clearly that the warfare over this election went to another level — big time,” Sheets said on his Web site (www.dutchsheets.org). “As it was in 2000, it is an all-out war in the spirit realm for the soul of this nation, and I sense in my spirit that we have not yet broken through into victory.

Apparently, they are also voting in the spirit realm, and the voting demons (Sheets is close to Peter Wagner, as if you couldn’t guess) may upset God’s own candidacy. The prophet goes on to warn us:

“Do not make the fatal mistake of laying the results of this election solely on the will and sovereignty of God,” Sheets said. “We must not allow a faulty theology that simply says, ‘We have asked God to intervene, the rest is up to Him,’ to give us a false sense of security. Sometimes asking is all that is necessary, sometimes not. In this battle it absolutely is not.”

However, the fearless latter-day Elijah is mindful of his tax status and quickly adds that

his last-minute call to prayer is not a partisan issue. “It is simply a righteousness issue,” said Sheets, who changed his schedule and traveled to Washington, D.C., to pray for the elections this past weekend. “God must have a man in office who seeks His face. If all of us do our part, we will prevail in this election and see America take another turn toward righteousness and revival.”

No, no, not partisan at all. Which was why back in 2000 Sheets warned that (as reported on Belief.net):

If there is not enough prayer, God’s person will lose the election and the turning of this nation [toward God] will be drastically delayed.

Given that Sheets seems to have been quite happy with Bush over the past four years, no doubt those who believe that Sheets speaks with the very authority of God Himself will draw their own conclusion about which man God wants in office. All perfectly above board.

(By the way, Sheets was my source linking Doug Giles to Mell Winger, who is also based in Colorado, at Ted Haggard’s megachurch. Sheets praised Giles’s “powerful evangelistic ministry”.)

Another Brilliant Visa Decision

Some say that the refusal of the US authorities to grant Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan a work visa shows that there must be some secret evidence that he’s a terrorist supporter (since not even Daniel Pipes could pin anything of any substance on him). It couldn’t possibly be because a) US authorities just discriminate against Arabs and Muslims willy-nilly and/or b) there’s nothing more alarming for the pro-Likud crowd than a prominent Arab Muslim moderate, since such a person undermines their “argument” that any Arab complaints about Israel are based on fanatical anti-Semitism.

But now word comes about the arrest in Syria last month of Nabil Fayyad, a prominent liberal. According to a website highlighting his case:

Fayyad, a chemist by trade and owner of a pharmacy in Damascus, is a Sunni Muslim scholar and linguist who studied theology in Beirut. He has authored a number of books and written extensively about the growing power of Islamic fundamentalism in Syria. He is also an advocate for liberalism, tolerance and individual rights and freedoms.

Perhaps the kind of person the US ought to be consulting? Nope:

Fayyad was planning to visit the United States in September to give lectures about the growing influence of Islamic fundamentalism in Syria but ironically his request for a visa was denied by the U.S. Embassy in Damascus. The reason for the denial of a visa is unknown, but it may have unfortunately emboldened the Syrian government in arresting him without fear of a significant outcry.

Well, suggestion “a” in my first paragraph seems to me to be the most likely reason. The authorship of this article is anonymous, but it seems to be the work of Bassam Darwich, who offered similar sentiments to Joshua Landis. Darwich edits Annaqed, which hosts some of Fayyad’s articles (Alas, Darwich also feels the need to link to various inflammatory anti-Muslim websites and to host articles by one-note demagogues like Pipes and Joseph Farah).