Creationist crusade reaches Singapore

This is how the world was created:

The multi-heads of a naga (Khmer style)

The Gods sprinkled the cosmos with stars, planets and dust, but a tiny portion of residue coalesced together to form the first and the greatest naga (serpent or cobra) king, called Sheshnaga. It had 1,000 heads that joined to form a giant hood. Atop its hood was Earth, but Sheshnaga could also spew enormous amounts of venom, and when he did so, it would be the end of each great cycle of life.

The second great naga king was Vasuki, who had a long and strong body.

That was a time when the Gods were weak and the Demons strong, so much so that the Gods themselves were driven out of their heavens. But Lord Vishnu suggested a plan -- by churning the cosmic ocean of milk, they could dredge up the elixir of immortality from the bottom, and so gain the strength to take back their heavens and defeat the demons. Yet, to churn the cosmic sea was too much for just the Gods alone to do; they needed the demons' strength too. Thus, a truce was called and the demons, hoping to gain the elixir for themselves, were induced to assist.

Together they went about making the biggest milk-churn the world has ever known, using Mount Mandara as the churn/pivot, and the Serpent King Vasuki as the rope. They wound Vasuki around the mountain, and then, the Gods grabbing the tail and the demons grabbing his seven heads, proceeded to pull the great serpent back and forth, turning the mountain and churning the ocean. 

Needless to say, the whole thing, which lasted a thousand years, made Vasuki a bit nauseous, and he kept belching fire into the demons' faces, while the Gods had partly cloudy skies and a nice breeze on their end. Finally Vasuki couldn't take it any more, and vomited up a great poisonous cloud, threatening to kill everything and everyone, gods and demons included. But Shiva popped down and swallowed the poison, saving the world, and turning his throat blue at the same time (that's why Shiva is often depicted with a blue complexion). 

Eventually the Gods get their elixir, trick the demons out of theirs, and Vasuki heads out, waiting for the next time the Gods decide to use him for a tug-of-war. The Earth, now saved, carries on in the present cycle.

This story has great authenticity [1]. It is millennia old, coming from one of our longest-surviving civilisations.  It is celebrated in epic poems and temple sculptures, and has spread well beyond the land from where it originated. Go to East Gallery of Angkor Wat, and one of the world's most beautiful bas-reliefs can be seen depicting this event. A few photos here.

Should I insist that this creation story be taught in schools  in place of evolution in biology classes?

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He wanted the TV station to screen his preferred account "to let the public know the truth about our origin."

What is his "truth"? While he didn't say the word, we can surmise it is Biblical Creationism, for his main reference is a site called Answers in Genesis. Genesis is a section of the Old Testament of the Bible. See also links provided by a Yawning Bread reader, in footnote [2]

In creationist lore,  the world was created by a Christian God called Yahweh (all other Gods being false, in case you didn't know) and so on.

Andrew Loke is spreading religiously-biased disinformation, and it is inexcusable that the Straits Times felt his letter deserved to be published.

This is just after the Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong said in a speech 31 October 2005, 

Editors and journalists must have high personal integrity and sound judgment - people who understand Singapore ’s uniqueness as a country, our multi-racial and multi-religious make-up, vulnerabilities and national goals.

This too is while other letter writers in the Straits Times Forum, writing in support of a (government-)controlled press, were saying things like,

Virtually the entire scientific community, globally, accept that evolution had occurred from the most basic amino acids in a primordial soup to the human species. It is called a Theory, which in scientific language means a widely-accepted model that is well supported by evidence that is able to explain past phenomena, as well as predict. Like all science, knowledge is never complete, otherwise there'd be no more science left to do, and there are details not fully understood. No branch of science claims the infallibility that religionists do. (But just because religionists claim infallibility doesn't make them right.) Where these gaps exist, there are exciting debates among scientists about the precise histories, which drive them on to search for more clues. But the overall architecture, the macro-story, is not in dispute.

Laymen tend to think that when scientists call something a theory, it means they don't believe it themselves. This is to misapply the colloquial meaning of the word. In everyday speech, 'theory' does connote an assumption  with a slightly speculative flavour, but not in science. 

A tentative working model in science is called a hypothesis. When loads of evidence have accumulated and all other hypotheses have fallen aside, the working model is promoted to a theory. This is a heavy-duty word, indicating considerable reliability. In the realm of science, we should think of its meaning as something like when we use the phrase, "the theoretical underpinnings of aerodynamics". Consider this: when we jet across continents in big tubes made of aluminium and composites,  we trust our lives to scientific theory.

You'd note, we don't trust our lives to theological "fact".

Nothing ever really becomes fact in science, because everything is subject to some limit or another. Even when an apple falls straight down from the tree, its path is not really straight, and it isn't always down either.

In contrast, the (Christian) creationists' pet myth has no evidence behind it whatsoever, yet their adherents think it should be taught as science!

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An attempt to insist that Creationists' accounts of the world's origin be taught alongside the Theory of Evolution in American schools was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1987. The Court said it would violate the separation of church and state.

The idea was then repackaged as "Intelligent Design", saying that the world is so complex, only a superior intelligence (whose name is not disclosed, but you can guess it is intended to be Yahweh) could have planned and created it. The world couldn't have come about by itself.

The last few months, the frontline was the Dover Area School District in rural  Pennsylvania, with only 2,800 students. William Buckingham, a fundamentalist Christian on the school board, wanted the board to adopt an intelligent-design textbook, 'Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins', as a supplement to the traditional biology book, but no vote was ever taken. 

Instead, the school board ruled that science teachers must read a 4-paragraph statement to classes knocking evolution and suggesting intelligent design. Still, 50 free copies of the textbook were donated to the school. 

11 parents challenged the decision in court, arguing that the intended message was clear, that intelligent design is merely creationism in disguise, and is therefore unconstitutional.

During the trial, it was revealed that this "intelligent design" textbook,  'Of Pandas and People', was originally named 'Creation Biology', with only minimal changes made in 1987, mere months after the Supreme Court ruling against teaching creationism in schools.

The trial phase is over, but the judge is not expected to deliver his decision until January 2006. [See addendum 1]

However, a few weeks ago, Dover voters booted out all 8 members of the school board who were up for re-election. One of the winners, Bernadette Reinking, told the New York Times: "I think voters were tired of the trial, they were tired of intelligent design, they were tired of everything that this school board brought about."

The United States being the disunited states, the saga repeats itself over and over again in different school districts. While the Dover Area case was going on, the Kansas Board of Education decided to introduce creationism/intelligent design into Kansas schools -- for the second time!

As columnist Tom Teepen wrote in the Tallahassee Democrat on 15 Nov 2005,

In 1999, a board majority that had been elected as conservative but not specifically anti-evolution pushed creationism into the state's science curriculum. The next year, an appalled electorate voted the anti-evolution zealots out, and the anti-science "standards" were scrapped.

End of issue, right? Not exactly. Here we go again.

Gulled anew, Kansans elected another conservative slate two years ago and, sure enough, it has now ordered "intelligent design" -- a re-gimmicked version of creationism -- into the state's science classes. And this time, the board went further.

The board answered the awkward criticism that intelligent design fits no definition of science by simply redefining science, scrapping the phrase "a search for natural explanations of observable phenomena."

If unadmittedly, that was to make room for God -- specifically, if only implicitly, the Christian God -- but it equally opens the way for magic, gremlins and things that go bump in the night.

This is the common pattern. Voters sucker for conservative candidates, often running as champions of back-to-basics schooling and traditional values, and find they have installed anti-science activists.

I found this comment by Andrea Bottaro on an online forum (discussing the Dover election) explaining the phenomenon:

when Creationists say that people, and not the courts, should decide what gets taught in their own schools they are telling you only half of the story. The other half is that the vast majority of voters do not normally vote for school board elections, which makes these extremely susceptible to well-organized special interest campaigns, such as those of fundamentalist Creationists. Whenever the importance of a school board election with respect to the teaching of solid science vs Creationism is made clear to the public, turn-out increases and the science side almost invariably wins. It happened in Dover today, it happened in Kansas after the 1999 debacle, and hopefully will happen in Kansas again next year. When people really get to cast an informed vote about their school programs, they regularly choose science over pseudoscience.

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And now, the Creationists' crusade has come to Singapore, as you can see from the letter published by the Straits Times.

I have argued again and again that our elites and our government are blindsided about fundamentalist Christianity, which in some ways is as dangerous as al-Qaeda ideology. Fundamentalist Christian views slip through because some decision-makers and editors here hold sympathetic worldviews, the same way Kansas and Dover borough voters elect crazies to their school boards, only to wake up in shock at their hidden agenda.

Don't be surprised if one day, Singapore finds itself with religious fights like in the US.

© Yawning Bread 

Footnotes

1. This is one of the many versions of the creation story from the Indian tradition, from which sprang Hinduism and Buddhism. See www.illuminatedlantern.com/cinema/features/snakes.html.
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2. Apparently, Ken Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis has been featured in the news lately, having opened a museum in Kentucky dedicated to showing how the Christian God created the world in 6 days, 6,000 years ago. The museum features how humans lived side by side with dinosaurs, which is impossible. Dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, while the Homo sapiens didn't even come into existence until about 100-200,000 years ago. See here and here from the Telegraph newspaper and livescience.com about Ken Ham's museum.
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Addenda

1. The judge delivered his decision on 20 December 2005, ruling in favour of the parents against the school board. See an Associated Press report in Judge rules against Pennsylvania biology curriculum
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