Creationism in Indiana

The battle over creationism in public schools is heading for Indiana, as lawmakers there prepare to submit a bill to mandate the teaching of intelligent design there. And in the process, they’re leaving behind all sorts of evidence of the essential equation of ID and creationism.

The proposal comes a little more than a month after Bosma and a handful of other House members met privately with Carl Baugh, host of the Trinity Broadcasting Network show “Creationism in the 21st Century,” to discuss bringing intelligent design to public schools.

Baugh was in town as the guest of Zion Unity Missionary Baptist Church, a small Indianapolis church whose pastor, the Rev. Fredrick W. Boyd Jr., is an acquaintance of Baugh’s. Baugh is founder and director of the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas.

Boyd said Bosma and the lawmakers already were pursuing the idea, but they wanted to hear Baugh’s thoughts on how to create the legislation.

Folks, if you want to show that ID is not old fashioned creation science under a new name, you gotta stay away from folks like Carl Baugh. Carl Baugh is a young earth, global flood, humans lived with dinosaurs creationist. He’s also a complete fraud, still pushing the Paluxy “manprints” more than a decade after even his fellow creationists at the Institute for Creation Research and Answers in Genesis admitted they weren’t human footprints and urged their followers not to use them as evidence any longer (and more than three decades after they were debunked by Walter Lammerts, founder of the Creation Research Society, who recognized that the Paluxy prints, if they were genuine, created just as much of a problem for creationism as for evolution because, as he put it, “On the basis of a worldwide flood what were people doing walking around yet after so much sediment deposited?”).

One of the state lawmakers may have given away the game a bit as well:

Rep. Tim Harris, R-Marion, also believes evolution and intelligent design should be taught.

“It takes just as much faith to believe in the evolution hypothesis as it does what we are now calling intelligent design,” he said.

If the bill passes and legal action is required, they will have a difficult time explaining away these things in a court case where the key issue, as in the Dover case, is whether ID is a genuine scientific theory or “creationism in a cheap tuxedo” (since the Supreme Court has already ruled 7-2 that creationism cannot be taught in science classrooms). Approximately the same difficulty that the ID advocates have in explaining why they keep saying that they don’t want ID taught in science classrooms, yet their own earlier material shows them quite clearly encouraging schools to do so and while their senior fellows are arguing in favor of teaching ID in science classrooms, as William Dembski did last night in a debate at Boston University. All of which points up the Janus-like nature of the ID movement.