“Awaken Generation” and its coterie of goons is yet another discovery I rather wish I hadn’t made, because I can’t help but point Internet fingers at something with a tractard-beam as strong as the one that blog has. Once again, Frank Turek has bent over and, with a hearty grunt, explosively shat some of the most foul, semisolid ultrastupid all over the back of my screen, or so it appears.
Frank has decided to be wrong today about various facets of evolution and morality. I’m not a psychologist, a biologist, or a philosopher, but I think I can ably handle Frank’s objections in his post, “Evolution Cannot Explain Morality.”

Some atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, insist that morality is simply the product of evolution. Common moral sensibilities (Don’t murder, rape, steal, etc.) help ensure our evolutionary survival. There are number of problems with this view:

I’m not sure Hitchens–a journalist, not a scientist–has had much, if anything, to say one way or the other about evolution, with or without describing its relationship to morality. I think Frank is merely grabbing the name of a well-know atheist and ascribing characteristics to him that seem convenient. This is because Frank is as lazy as he is ignorant. But this is not central to the post.

1.Rape may enhance the survival of the species, but does that make rape good? Should we rape?

I’m not clear where he gets the idea that rape is useful in terms of species survival. A female is obviously better off with a male around to help with child-rearing, and rapists aren’t known for sticking around to be fathers. There is ample consensual copulation (with or without the aim of procreation) among humans so that wanton, forced sex is not beneficial, even in the coldest mathematical view.
But even if it were, Frank’s question is about as stupid as questions get. We humans are not slaves to whatever processes have led us to what we are. We use birth control (the ultimate back-at-ya in the face of natural selection within an intelligent species, really), extract wisdom teeth, and do our best to treat and eliminate nasty genetic diseases. We circumcise a lot of our male infants, a procedure which has been shown to reduce STD transmission rates. We do this because we value life and fairness, not owing to some cosmic mandate.
Frank is confused about a lot of things, but here he seems to think that evolution implies that we aren’t supposed to interfere with our own inherited traits and tendencies in any way. In that case, since he’s presumably of a mind that we’re all born sinners, why fuck around and try to do any better? Just submit to inevitability.

2. Killing the weak and handicapped may help improve the species and its survival (Hitler’s plan). Does that mean the Holocaust was a good thing?

This is not even worth addressing except to note that Frank thinks “survival of the fittest” implies a need to consciously cull the ill from the herd. This is as demented as it is cynical and is, of course, something no sane scientist believes.

3. Evolution provides no stable foundation for morality. If evolution is the source of morality, then what’s to stop morals from evolving (changing) to the point that one day rape, theft and murder are considered moral?

If nothing else, Frank has no shortage of false premises. He’s a little short on “getting” stuff, though. If he had given this any thought, he might realize that a society collectively “evolving” in such a way to render murder and theft benefical is akin to expecting a fish species to thrive while losing its fins and gills. He thinks evolution is something that can just up and change course on a whim–I’m sure he envisions it as a conscious process, as he can’t see the universe in any other terms. And like a lot of fundies, he freely interchanges complex behaviors with genes. It gets worse:

4. Dawkins and Hitchens confuse epistemology with ontology (how we know something exists with that and what exists). So even if natural selection or some other chemical process is responsible for us knowing right from wrong, that would not explain why something is right or wrong. How does a chemical process (natural selection) yield an immaterial moral law? And why does anyone have a moral obligation to obey a chemical process? You only have a moral obligation to obey an ultimate personal being (God) who has the authority to put moral obligations on you. You don’t have a moral obligation to chemistry.

HI think he’s not so much making a straw-man argument here as he’s showing how utterly confused he is. He genuinely seems to think that biologists propose that “morals” are something tat can be neatly packaged in DNA and passed on to the next generation, like hair or eye color. His questions are meaningless; no one has a moral obligation to obey either “a chemical process” or God (I can freely fornicate, blaspheme, and have other gods before the Biblical one, all at the same time and while extending both middle fingers toward the sky and cackling. And don’t assume I haven’t done this.)

As I mentioned in an earlier post (Atheists Have No Basis for Morality), several atheists at a recent I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist event at UNC Wilmington struggled greatly when I asked them to offer some objective basis for morality from their atheistic worldview. They kept trying to give tests for how we know something is moral rather than why something is moral. One atheist said “not harming people” is the standard. But why is harming people wrong if there is no God? And what if harming people enhances your survival and that of most others?

This is more pathetic than anything else. I can see a panel of atheists struck silent by questions from this guy because he doesn’t ask anything more meaningful than a cocker spaniel would if it could talk. If he can’t understand why it’s intrinsically wrong to harm other people for no good reason even when there are no deities in the equation, he’s not just cum-dumpster dumb, he’s a menace.

Another said, “happiness” is the basis for morality. After I asked him, “Happiness according to who, Mother Teresa or Hitler?,” he said, “I need to think about this more,” and then sat down. This says nothing about the intelligence of these people- there just is no good answer to the question. Without God there is no basis for objective morals. It’s just Mother Teresa’s opinion against Hitler’s.

At this point it’s clear that Frank is telling us an apocryphal tale. Lying is the stock-in-trade of people like him, so I’m not surprised.

See also Neil’s post: Does our Morality come from our DNA?

You can if you want. I didn’t. I’d had enough by the time I got to the end of Frank’s mess.

Naturally, the troupe of clowns constituting the Discovery Institute, the primary American ganglion in the slimy and slithering beast known as Intelligent Design creationism, are closely following the goings-on in Texas. Even before today’s win for the good guys, John West was already making a complete ass of himself for the umpteenth time and with the usual barrenness of cogitation and lack of originality.

Apparently Texas Board of Education member Rick Agosto isn’t just content to censor science by removing any criticisms of evolution from the science curriculum. The San Antonio Democrat even wants to prevent citizens from expressing their disagreement with that censorship. This morning Agosto demanded that some citizens quietly holding signs stating “Don’t Censor Science” at the Board meeting take down their signs. He even called on security personnel to forcibly remove the signs, but Board chair Don McElroy intervened to stop that abuse of power.

True to form, West’s first sentence is an unapologetic lie. This is just one more example of the DI bitching about scientific orthodoxy without mentioning what these scientific criticisms are and where they come from; there’s clearly no censorship at work here. His second sentence is therefore a lie as well. I don’t know exactly what went on with the protesters, but color me skeptical when it comes to the accuracy of West’s reportage, and since the sign-holders were allowed to carry on, he really has nothing to complain about. Besides, that whole angle is, like everything else the DI upholds as central to the evolution “debate,” a red herring.

Agosto’s over-the-top behavior toward non-disruptive attendees at the meeting followed his earlier denunciation of intelligent design as not being based on science. Agosto doesn’t appear to have actually read anything by intelligent design proponents…

See, this is where credible people provide a summary of why their critics are wrong, or at least a link or two to some oft-referenced argument refuting the critics. People routinely link to well-known pages on talk.origins, for example, when a creationist lets fly with a canard about there being no transitional fossils or no evidence for speciation. West, of course, doesn’t offer any of this; he just tries to hand-wave away the idea that ID isn’t science. Sorry, John, lots of us have read things by intelligent design proponents, and they bear all the integrity and scientific content of an episode of a hardcore porn flick, except the acting in those is better.

…and his comments attacking intelligent design were completely gratuitous since the Board isn’t even considering adding intelligent design to the science standards.

Right; they’e trying to overturn evolution in favor of…what? A vacuum? It can’t be straight-up Biblical creationism, since that’s been illegal since the 1987 Supreme Court ruling in Edwards vs. Aguillard. So out with it, John–if Texas aimed to add ID creationism to its curriculum, you and the rest of the DI locusts wouldn’t be swarming around energetically, propagating even more bullshit than usual in an effort to make it happen?

Interestingly, at yesterday’s Board meeting Agosto used his right of personal privilege to bring back non-Texan Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education to speak before the Board. Because Scott spoke at the January meeting, she was supposed to be near the bottom of the speakers’ list yesterday in order to allow new people to testify.

Got that? Genie Scott is the executive director of the National Center for Science Education, and West (a Washingtonian) is complaining about her presence at a meeting held to determine critical amendments to the science teaching curriculum in America’s second-largest state because she’s not from Texas. It’s rare to see an argument that blatantly weak, even from this crew. Casey Luskin routinely shits on his keyboard when he tries to get in the trenches and argue science particulars, but at least his brand of stupid takes a token amount of routine fisking to expose. What West says here is just full-frontal moronic, and speaks to the DI’s global lack of of a tenable reason for opposting evolution.

But Agosto seems to have been more interested in hearing from arch-Darwinist Scott than hearing from his own constituents or other Texans patiently waiting to testify.

Quick! Someone add “arch-Darwinist” to the list of terms piling up here.

Starting at 10 a.m. CDT today, the Texas Board of Education began a two-day process that will determine whether the nation’s second-most-populous state will trash its science education standards.

The Texas Freedom Network and Texas Citizens for Science are liveblogging the hearings. You can also listen to them live on the Texas Board of Education website.
If there was ever actually doubt over whether this row deals with legitimate concerns about what science to teach, consider who’s in Austin right now: Casey Luskin, the Free Market Foundation, and Focus on the Family, among others. I hope Luskin has to take a gram of Xanax to fall asleep at night, given that his job is literally to fly around the country and lie in ways intended to disrupt the education of American schoolchildren. Either he has no conscience or he squashes it with pharmaceuticals, but either way he’s somewhere between Dick Cheney and Charles Manson on the morality scale.