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Great news for academic freedom...and sanity...is coming out of Tennessee, where the legislature has enacted a law that would protect teachers and schools that want to question some of the left’s rigid dogma when it comes to biological evolution (the religion of Darwinism), climate change and human cloning.

When I had a guest from the Discovery Institute on the program a few months ago to discuss their objections to the Indiana Creationism bill authored by Senator Dennis Kruse, this was the point that my guest stressed: the best way to achieve the goal of undermining the indoctrination of children with Darwinian dogma is to approach it through the avenue of academic freedom.  That’s exactly what they did in Tennessee, and Discovery Institute is hailing its success:

"This bill promotes good science education by protecting the academic freedom of science teachers to fully and objectively discuss controversial scientific topics, like evolution," said Casey Luskin, science education expert and policy analyst at Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture. "Critics who claim the bill promotes religion instead of science either haven't read the bill or are putting up a smokescreen to divert attention from their goal to censor dissenting scientific views."

Not surprisingly, the liberals who control the educational establishment are not pleased, and are railing against the “undermining of science,” blah, blah, blah.  No, what has been undermined is not “science.”  What has been undermined by this bill is the hijacking of the word science by a movement that wants to protect its own interpretations of scientific data from any criticism or analysis.

Part of me thinks that these folks on the left know what they’re doing and it’s all calculated.  But then, there’s another part of me that thinks that some of them have been drinking the kool aid for so long, have been so inculcated by this language and culture of liberal scientists that their minds have been completely shut off to any alternative way of thinking.  Take for instance an assessment given by the excellent group of scientists at Answers in Genesis to the agitated folks at NPR who wondered why so many ignorant boobs question Darwin:

A recent National Public Radio blog post asks why so many have “trouble believing in evolution.” The writer cites Gallup statistics and then concludes, “Religious belief interferes with people’s understanding of what the theory of evolution says.” Implicit in his conclusion, of course, is the notion that anyone who actually understands evolutionary dogma will accept it. In fact, by pointing out in his title that accepting evolution is a matter of belief, he rightly acknowledges that acceptance of evolution—like acceptance of any position regarding origins science—involves faith.

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The AiG folks go on to explain this latter point in more detail, but I’m going to give my audience the benefit of the doubt and assume you all can understand the reality that no one witnessed the origins of the universe, nor is it repeatable, so therefore our belief about it ultimately hinges on informed faith.  But onto the real question of why so many people reject faith in “evolution,” the AiG scientists began:

The primary reason we reject evolution is our choice to have faith in God’s Word instead of faith in man’s ideas. The secondary reason we confidently reject evolutionary notions is not failure to understand evolution but because we do understand evolutionary claims and find them wanting! Religious belief—in the Bible, that is—provides the material to develop concepts (such as the fact that organisms reproduce after their created kinds) and models (such as the models of Flood geology and the Ice Age triggered by the global Flood) that are consistent with scientific observations. Understanding evolutionary ideas, however, unveils the unverifiable uniformitarian assumptions, circular reasoning, and equivocal definitions on which evolution’s support is based.

That, to me, is the most profound observation that most evolutionists fail either to understand or to admit.  There are huge, gargantuan, massive assumptions behind Darwinian thought.  And when you start to address them and acknowledge them, the kind of faith that is required to overcome them blindly – without scientific data to bolster what you’re doing – dwarfs any faith one must have in a Supernatural Creator.  But, as I said, many evolutionists are intentionally blind to this, believing what the echo chamber has told them:

The NPR blogger asserts, “The evidence for evolution is overwhelming.” Then he declares the evidence is in the fossil record. He neglects to mention the lack of transitional forms—a problem Darwin himself noted. He claims the “fossil record, carefully dated using radioactivity . . . works like a very precise clock” and provides “a very accurate measure of the age of a fossil.” Here the blogger shows his failure to understand several important facts.

In the first place, fossils supposedly millions of years old are not dated “by radioactivity.” Radiometric dating methods—other than carbon dating, which is incapable of dating anything millions of years old—are primarily used to date igneous and metamorphic rocks. Fossils, however, are buried in sedimentary rocks. Radiometric dating is sometimes used to date volcanic rocks sandwiching fossil-containing layers, but generally speaking the estimated ages of the fossils are not directly derived from this “very precise clock.”

Secondly, radiometric methods are all based on a number of unverifiable assumptions, such as assumptions about the original amounts of radiogenic substances, the constancy of the rate of decay over deep time, and the certainty of no contamination.

And finally, these dating methods are used to calibrate and confirm each other. While the methods may yield impressively precise numbers giving the illusion of reliability, in reality the accuracy of the dates can only be assessed by comparison with an objective standard of known age. If all the “known ages” are derived from methods resting on these unverifiable assumptions, then accuracy—how close to the truth a measurement really is—cannot be scientifically assessed.

The whole piece at AiG is worth a read and close examination if you find yourself struggling with this.  But the fact remains that as scientific inquiry and academic freedom are embraced, the pendulum is swinging back away from the non-Supernatural Darwinian faith...and the evolutionists are in an all-out panic to stop it.