A Profile in Courage

The media tends to love talking about conservative activists like James O'Keefe, Bill Whittle or Erick Erickson  but they never really talk about the liberal ones like Zack Kopplin. Man, is he making life hell for the creationists down in Lousiana.

Encouraged by Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University — and a staunch critic of intelligent design and the Discovery Institute — Kopplin decided to write a letter that could be signed by Nobel laureate scientists in support of the repeal. To that end, he contacted Sir Harry Kroto, a British chemist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley. Kroto helped him to draft the letter — one that has now been signed by 78 Nobel laureates.

I can't figure out why creationists and intelligent design folks aren't content with teaching their stuff in church. They can talk about how Jesus rode dinosaurs or whatever they want in there. Kopplin had gone after the voucher program as well.

School vouchers, he argues, unconstitutionally fund the teaching of creationism because many of the schools in these programs are private fundamentalist religious schools who are teaching creationism. "These schools have every right to teach whatever they want — no matter how much I disagree with it — as long as they are fully private," he says. "But when they take public money through vouchers, these schools need to be accountable to the public in the same way that public schools are and they must abide by the same rules."

Those rules being a strict adherence to the scientific method. There is nothing scientific about creationism.

"Creationism is not science, and shouldn't be in a public school science class — it's that simple," he says. "Often though, creationists do not, or are unwilling, to recognize this." Science, he argues, is observable, naturalistic, testable, falsifiable, and expandable — everything that creationism is not. But what also drives Kopplin is the inherent danger he sees in teaching creationism. 

"Creationism confuses students about the nature of science," he says. "If students don't understand the scientific method, and are taught that creationism is science, they will not be prepared to do work in genuine fields, especially not the biological sciences. We are hurting the chances of our students having jobs in science, and making discoveries that will change the world."

"We don't just deny evolution," he says, "We are denying climate change and vaccines and other mainstream science. I'm calling for a Second Giant Leap to change the perception of science in the world."

In the final analysis, this is really the crux of the problem. In an age of globalization. we can't afford a bunch of religious nonsense to interfere with our economic growth and security. Young men like Zack Kopplin give me a lot of hope that intelligence is alive and well in young people in the deep south and the time to put this assinine, anti science garbage behind us is yesterday.

Honestly, I thought we already did that in the Age of Enlightenment but I guess we still have a few stragglers:)