Premium Episode 74: The Conspiracy To Teach Intelligent Design Creationism In Public School (Sample)
A divorce. A mid-life crisis. A man born again. His multi-pronged, incredibly sneaky quest to take down Darwinian Evolution. Plus Travis goes harder than we've ever experienced and writes a special missive to one of the guys behind Intelligent Design. We do a dramatic reading, of course.
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Music by G-Dog from the Doom Chakra Tapes label (http://doomchakratapes.bandcamp.com/) and Nick Sena (www.nicksenamusic.com)
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SOURCES:
Creationism Poll
https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creationism.aspx
Edwards v. Aguillard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwards_v._Aguillard
Interview With Phillip E. Johnson
http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/le_berkeleysradical.htm
Touchstone Article by Phillip E. Johnson
https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=12-04-018-f
Santorum Amendment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santorum_Amendment
NOVA Judgement Day: Intelligent Design On Trial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2xyrel-2vI
Kitzmiller v. Dover
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District
William Dembski Says that Darwinism Is In Its “Death Throes” After Intelligent Design Gets Reamed In court
https://books.google.com/books?id=shhVeaEVp8YC&q=%22Darwinism+has+met+its+match%22#v=snippet&q=%22Darwinism%20has%20met%20its%20match%22&f=false
Interview With William Dembski On The State of Intelligent Design in 2016
https://seanmcdowell.org/blog/how-is-the-intelligent-design-movement-doing-interview-with-william-dembski
Welcome, listener, to the 74th Premium Chapter of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Failed Campaign to Teach Intelligent Design Creationism in Public School episode.
As always, we're your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
This week, we are going down a creationist rabbit hole to find out more about the Intelligent Design movement in the United States.
These are the fine people who attempted to substitute religious beliefs for science in U.S.
public classrooms, attracting the ire of one Travis View.
This is a branch of American thinking that is very confusing and fascinating, and I'm excited that Travis finally gets to tell us what originally got his goat before QAnon started getting his goat good.
It's true.
the failed campaign to teach intelligent design creationism in public schools.
In the year 1859, English scientist Charles Darwin published the book he's most famous for,
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
By drawing from decades of experimentation and research, Darwin laid out evidence that the diversity of life arose through common descent through a branching pattern of evolution.
Over the decades, Darwin's theory was investigated and refined until it eventually became the unifying concept of life science.
Quite an achievement.
One of the most influential scientists of all time.
He's the guy who made those awards.
Yes!
But Darwin's theory, it led to me personally wasting countless hours trying to explain science to people who had no interest in learning it.
You see, whenever I choose a topic for an episode, like a premium episode, it's always something that I personally have interested always.
But this week is special.
Back when I was a college student in LA around 2003, 2004 or so, I had this very nerdy way of blowing off steam.
I would go on these primitive web forums or perhaps a blogspot blogs, and I would argue with creationists who rejected evolution.
I was fascinated by them because it was just amazing to me that there was this really sizable community of people who just don't accept clear, simple scientific evidence.
You know, one time when I was arguing about a battle story, I was arguing with creationists and then none other than Henry Gee, The paleontology editor of the scientific journal Nature swooped in to back me up.
It was thrilling.
I'd see it coming.
I love Travis's inner life.
It's like my inner life with fucking Seth Abramson.
Yeah.
So for those who aren't familiar, creationism is basically the belief that God created the world and the universe basically in its present form.
One particular branch of creationism, which is known as young earth creationism, holds that the book of Genesis should be interpreted literally, and that the entire universe is somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years old.
Now, this is not a fringe view of the United States.
In fact, according to a 2019 Gallup poll, 40% of U.S.
adults believe that God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago.
Fantastic.
Before that, it was like really shitty Minecraft stuff that he was up to.
But then he got his act together.
Yeah, very blocky, very polygonal.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, the weird thing is like 10,000 years ago, like the human population was already pretty developed.
There was an estimated 5 million people.
There's one estimate.
And they had migrated all over the world and they have even developed agriculture, like the modern day Mexico and the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East.
You're telling us that George Soros did not personally bury every dinosaur bone?
No.
I'm pretty sure I heard that somewhere.
Here's the funny thing about creationism, though, is that a lot of people think that it's inherent to Christianity or that it's been with Christianity forever.
But in reality, creationism is more specifically tied to an American evangelical Christianity.
Like, the Catholic Church, for example, accepts both the old age of the Earth and evolution.
Travis, pro-Catholic Church?
Absolutely, absolutely.
But no, I'm just saying, like, theologically, theologically, there's no reason that you have to believe that the Earth is 10,000 years old if you are a Christian.
In fact, that calculation that's between 6,000 and 10,000 years old, or 6,000 years old, That didn't appear anywhere until the 17th century.
This idea that that's what Genesis shows is a really fairly new concept in Christianity.
But it became really, really important to, like I said, American evangelicals.
In the United States, there was a campaign throughout the 20th century to teach creationism in public school.
and then to stop teaching Darwinian evolution.
Like in some states that campaign was really, really successful.
For example, in 1925, Tennessee passed a law called the Butler Act,
which prohibited the teaching of evolution in public school.
It was outrageous.
Basically said that you can't teach anything that contradicts the creation story of the Bible.
Clearly unconstitutional.
After one Tennessee teacher taught evolution anyway in defiance of the law in the same year, it led to the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, which was portrayed in the classic play movie Inherent the Wind.
Now, the funny thing is that that Tennessee law stayed on the books for 42 goddamn years.
It wasn't repealed until 1967.
But if that were true, Travis, wouldn't we be seeing a generation of like fervent religious fanaticists?
Yeah.
That don't seem to have any education.
Right.
But the campaign to prevent children from learning science hit a major roadblock in 1987.
That year, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Edwards v. Aguilard.
That particular case examined the constitutionality of a Louisiana law that required creationism to be taught in public schools whenever evolution was taught.
Like, the whole idea with the law was like, oh, I'm just saying, like, just teach both sides, both sides.
But there isn't a choice.
Let the market decide.
There's no two sides.
It's like fucking a hundred years Oh, interesting.
R.I.P.
I mean, respectable Scalia.
in a 7 to 2 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the Louisiana law violated the First Amendment because it
advanced a particular religious view.
By the way, Scalia was one of the guys who dissented. Fuck that guy.
RIP, I mean, respectable Scalia. My god, Travis, such vile of a thought.
We're gonna lose Travis on this episode, I feel like.
I can feel the beginnings of a battle.
Yeah, do we know who killed Scalia?
No, nobody knows.
A pillow over his face killed him.
Both Jake and Julian.
Do we know the hand that fed that pillow?
So we got a Supreme Court decision, law of the land.
Now, at this point in the story, you might think that the creationists would give up.
There's just no hope of reversing a Supreme Court decision in this lifetime.
So that should have ended the dreams of people who wanted the story of Adam and Eve taught in state-funded geology class.
But of course it didn't.
This isn't where the story ends.
It's actually just where it begins.
Because instead of giving up, the creationists regrouped and devised a new strategy to rid public classrooms of the teaching of godless evolution.
And that idea was to start calling creationism something else.
That new name, that rebranding, was Intelligent Design.
Intelligent Design.
The story of the campaign to push Intelligent Design into schools is super fascinating to me because one part, it's a story of like a real conspiracy.
If I sound a little bit manic, a little jaygish, it's because like I'm trying to convince you that people are secretly plotting to make the country stupider in like a comprehensive, organized way in plans that are supposed to last for decades.
That's right.
This is a Christian conspiracy.
That's right.
Listen to Travis Fewkid.
So this was, in this case, we're talking about intelligent design.
It was fortunately like a failed conspiracy, but like if they were successful, then it might have made the United States like even more hyper-religious than it is.
It could have changed like the course of American history, but fortunately they failed.
They've changed it anyway just by trying.
Exactly.
Basically, here's what happened.
A small group of people thought that American society was just too secular.
People weren't trusting God anymore.
The church attendance was going down.
People started thinking that being gay was okay.
They were uncomfortable with the whole situation.
And so, they hatched this decades-long plot to make the country more religious by pushing pseudoscience into the brains of children.
Though they had a cultural agenda motivated by religious convictions, they attempted to conceal their true motives by claiming that they were only interested in teaching good science.
So, the modern intelligent design movement was the brainchild of a Harvard-educated law professor named Philip E. Johnson.
According to Philip E. Johnson, in the first half of his life, he wasn't really that religious, and he was actually content to focus his time on like building his law career.
But something happened to him at the age of 38.
He got divorced and got unhappy with how his career was going.
Here's what Philip E. Johnson said in an interview with Touchtone magazine.
When my marriage ended, I wondered what I was going to do with the rest of my life.
That's when I had my conversion experience.
This, I think, is true of many people.
What leads you to a conversion is the loss of your faith in something else.
My faith had been, quote, if you're a bright person with the right credentials, you'll have a happy and meaningful life.
I expected that I would go from one distinguished position to the next, advance my career, be happy and satisfied.
That's what life would be about.
It seemed to me that wasn't happening and I was just going to be a law teacher for the rest of my life.
It wasn't very meaningful or as good as I thought it would be, so I lost faith during that pragmatic period.
Instead I thought, what makes me think That what I have is better than the Christian life.
Everything that you're going to hear in this episode, everything that happened, everything that I'm talking about basically sprung forth from the fact that this dude had a midlife crisis.
He realized that maybe I'm going to experience some roadblocks in my life.
And then he decided to just dedicate himself to basically ruining the minds of children.
If I can't be successful and satisfied, none of the children will either.
Right.
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