Dinosaurs in Texas: But Wait, There's More!

Guambat was following the thread from the Texas Board of Education decision to open the door to creationism in science classes, and discovered those damned Texicans is putting on a full Court press to replace scientific method with religious authority.

The thread came via this particularly pithy response to those calling it a "debate": How to respond to requests to debate creationists. -- PLEASE, stop reading this post and go read that one first (but ya'll come back, y'heah?) --

Anyway, Guambat decided to have a sticky-beak of Prof. Gotelli's blog, and noticed this item: Legal analysis of the ICR's recent lawsuit, which linked to this: You Don’t Trust Creationists With Your Science Education… Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Trust Their Lawyers, Either.

The upshot of that is news that The Institute for Creation Research Graduate School {ICRGS) is suing the Texas Higher Education Coordination Board (THECB) to allow it to advertise, and thereby validate, its "science education programs from an institutional viewpoint of Biblical and scientific creationism."

Guambat's online legal research service doesn't yet have the suit in its database, but the suit, file-stamped April 16, 2009, can apparently be found here.

The recent background for the suit is fully detailed in this article from the National Center for Science Education.

It seems that someone in the inner-workings of THECB set up a kangaroo committee to give a cursory review of the ICRGS program, and recommend an OK.

And they nearly got away with it, as the NCSE article so carefully detailed. But in the end, the THECB withheld its seal of approval. So, ICRGS brought that lawsuit.

The Institute for Creation Research, which sponsors the Graduate School, calls the decision "censorship" and "religious discrimination" in an article authored by its Special Counsel. He wrote,

Many Acts & Facts readers will recall a similar controversy in California 19 years ago. ICR sought due process in response to political persecution from a California education official named Bill Honig.

That legal controversy resulted in a victory for ICR's graduate school--and for academic freedom.

He referred to a case brought in California which apparently never got to judgment, so what kind of victory was achieved is dubious. The victory was, apparently, only in getting past a motion to dismiss; there was no decision on the merits rendered in the case, ICR Graduate School v. Honig, 758 F.Supp. 1350 (S.D. Calif. 1991). The NCSE article explained what happened in that case:

It was not the first time that the ICR's graduate school was embroiled in regulatory controversy. The ICR first began to offer graduate degrees in 1981, choosing not to seek accreditation for the program.... But it applied for, and received, approval for the program from the state superintendent of public education, which was necessary for it to award degrees in California. In 1988, when it attempted to have the approval renewed, it encountered difficulties when the then superintendent of public instruction, Bill Honig, deemed its facilities and curriculum to be below the standard of comparable accredited schools.

Faced with a revocation of its state approval, the ICR filed suit. The case was eventually settled, and the ICR's graduate school was granted a religious exemption from the usual requirements for state approval. Meanwhile, the ICR was also moving to seek accreditation from a source presumably not "controlled by evolutionists" — the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools, founded in 1979. As of 2008, TRACS requires candidate institutions to affirm a list of Biblical Foundations, including "the divine work of non-evolutionary creation including persons in God's image"; TRACS's own Biblical Foundations statement, offered as a model, affirms the "[s]pecial creation of the existing space-time universe and all its basic systems and kinds of organisms in the six literal days of the creation week."

TRACS became a federally recognized accreditation agency in 1991, when Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander, overruling the recommendation of his advisors, approved it as such.

Comparing this Texas case to the California one is sort of deja vu all over again. There is deeper background to the California situation, provided in the Bay Area Skeptics Information Sheet, Vol. 8, No. 3 (1989):

By law, no postsecondary school in California can award degrees
unless the school has been certified by a recognized accreditation agency or has been approved by the superintendent of public instruction (the chief of the State Department of Education). To gain his approval, the school must show academic resources and programs comparable to those at accredited schools that offer the
same degrees.

In 1981, when the superintendent was Wilson Riles, the Department approved the granting of MS degrees in biology, geology, "astro/geophysics" and science education by the ICR Graduate School (ICRGS), an arm of the Institute for Creation Research. The ICR is not a scientific institution. It is a fundamentalist religious
organization and is avidly committed to creation-science, the fundamentalist effort to devise quasi-scientific "evidences" that the Bible is an accurate book of history and of science. In its literature, the ICR calls itself a complex of ministries" and lists the ICRGS as one of these.

In 1987, after the superintendency of the Department had passed to Bill Honig, the ICR sought renewed approval.

In August 1988, the Department sent a five-man committee to assess the ICR's degree programs. The committee's report, dated 5 August, was baloney. It omitted or obscured anything that might have disclosed the nature or aims of the ICR and the ICRGS, and it promoted the fiction that the ICR did scientific work. It mentioned "creation-science" only once, in a throw-away line; it never told what "creation-science" was. It never told that the ICR itself called the ICRGS a religious ministry. It attributed "academic and research capabilities" to the ICRGS's faculty, even though no academic or research achievements had been claimed in the ICRGS's application. It ended with: "The committee recommends to the superintendent by a vote of 3 to 2 that full institutional approval be granted."

The two committee members who had voted against approval -- Woodhead and Hurlbert -- decided to furnish Bill Honig with individual accounts of what they had seen.

On 16 August, Woodhead sent to Honig a two-page letter. It was on stationery of the Department of Geology at Occidental College, and its signature block identified Woodhead as the chairman of that department. The text said, in part: "One problem with the course of study at ICR is that the curriculum is quite restricted in each of the science departments, apparently as the result of the small size of the faculty. (1) A more serious problem is that course titles . . . do not actually represent course contents as indicated by the corresponding syllabi. The result is that students' transcripts must be misleading to other educators or potential employers.

"The major problem . . . is that the teaching of scientific method is entirely ignored. Laboratory equipment and computing facilities are almost entirely lacking, and hardly any classes include laboratory components. A glance through the catalogs of any of the schools the ICR considers to be comparable shows that in every instance laboratory work is an essential part of the scientific curriculum. (2) Yet students working for advanced degrees at ICR do so without laboratory segments in their classes. . . .

"On another level, though, I wondered how ICR can expect its students to successfully challenge the results of modern science if they are not taught scientific method. For that reason I spent a large part of my time during the three days of our visit perusing masters' theses. . . . I looked at seven or eight . . . and found them, as a group, to be dreadful. . . .

The other dissenting member of the committee, Hurlbert, sent his observations to Honig, on 26 August, in a 37-page document.... In his introduction, Hurlbert epudiated the report of the committee, saying that he had had little influence on its content and that he did not consider himself to be an author of it.

Hurlbert told that the materials distributed to committee members before their visit did not include curricula vitae of the ICRGS's faculty. So ". . . about ten days before our site visit, I requested that the [Department] arrange for a full set of complete curricula vitae to be sent to each VC [visiting committee] member. I was told this was not possible. . . ."

"Three sets were made available to us at ICR and we scanned them as time permitted. However, most . . . were very incomplete, many being nothing more than one-page summaries of the sort that might be given to a journalist preparing an article on ICR. . . . ICR seems not enthusiastic about having complete curricula vitae of its faculty members inspected by outsiders."

On page 5, under "Problems in the report of the Visiting Committee," Hurlbert told how the report had not disclosed the ICR's major purposes and had naively parroted the ICR's claim to having programs in science. Yet the primary purpose of both the ICR and the ICRGS were clear in documents that the committee had seen: "to teach `creation science'; to increase the number of `creation scientists' with conventional (in name) graduate degrees in science; to foster the teaching of `creation science' in private and public schools by increasing the number of teachers trained in the subject. . . ."

On page 7, in the same section, Hurlbert noted how the report said that the ICRGS's courses "attempt to present a two-model evaluation addressed to the origin of life." He commented: "This is the most misleading statement in the VC report. It suggests there is a balanced and fair presentation of the evidence and the differing interpretations of it. Virtually all of the documentation and testimony support exactly the opposite conclusion. . . ."

On page 17, under "Conventional scientific interpretations are NOT `fairly presented in ICR courses,'" Hurlbert told this: "One of the students interviewed misinterpreted a QUESTION from the VC about WHETHER a fair balance of viewpoints on origins, etc. was presented. . . . He thought we were SUGGESTING such balanced presentations should be the norm. He objected strongly to the supposed suggestion, and seemed unaware that -- according to the claim in ICRGS's Application (p. 3) -- he had been the recipient of balanced presentations."

On page 21, under "Purposes of ICRGS are religious, not scientific," Hurlbert said: "ICRGS's claim that its purpose is `to discover the truth about the universe by scientific research. . .' is inaccurate. By ICR's own testimony, all the major truths relating to `origins' are already known and are given in the Bible and in the ICR tenets. . . . The Absolute Truth is already known to them and ICR's primary purpose is to disseminate it."

On page 24, under "Misrepresentations of weaknesses in ICRGS program": "Most of the faculty members have doctoral degrees, though often not in the fields in which they are teaching and advising students. The archetype in this regard is Dr. Henry
Morris. His doctorate is in civil engineering. Yet he teaches a course (Advanced Studies in Creationism) that treats the `origin and history of the universe, of the solar system, of life, of the various forms of life, and of man and his cultures . . . using data from paleontology, astronomy, biochemistry, genetics, . . .' Dr. Morris has no formal training or practical experience in any of these fields."

On page 25, in the same part: "According to [the dummy catalog submitted with the ICR's application], `The Master's program in Biology trains students in the nature and origin of the living state through a broad background in all areas of vertebrate biology.' The statement is quite odd. One would not expect the study of vertebrates to shed much light on the origin of life. But of course from ICR's point of view, each `kind' of vertebrate originated fully formed from the hand of God. That is the only opinion that ICRGS staff and students are allowed to hold."

"It is complete misrepresentation, however, to claim that the program provides `a broad background in all areas of vertebrate biology.' Aside from the course in Human Biology, ICRGS does not offer a single course in vertebrate biology. Not one!"

After explaining more misrepresentations mounted by the ICR, Hurlbert said: "The ICRGS program severely violates the trust placed in it by the students. The students are misled into thinking that with the skeletal curriculum and facilities provided by ICRGS they can put a small stone in a sling and upend some nasty,
humanistic, evolutionistic Goliath, some large body of conventional scientific evidence and theory.

"[Henry Morris] was quite frank in stating to the VC that he likes the students to take on these big topics because the resultant theses can then be used to produce creationistic publications. . . ."

"The students are deceived in many ways. They are encouraged to think that the selective quoting of `authorities', selective neglect of evidence, setting up and demolishing of straw men, and adhering to prescribed opinions regardless of the evidence all are valid modes of scientific analysis."