Extract from Rachael J. Denhollander’s article “If the foundations be destroyed” inVol. 24(1) 2010 of the “Journal of Creation” publication.

The “beginning of the end” for teaching creation science or Intelligent Design (ID) in the public school classroom came in 1947, in Everson vs Board of Education, a case which, interestingly enough, addressed no issue of science at all, and was actually decided in favor of the more “conservative” client. What Everson did do, however, is completely reshape the understanding of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, ultimately providing the framework for banning creation science and ID in the classroom.

The Establishment Clause in the U.S. Constitution simply states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Thus, in every Establishment Clause challenge, the Plaintiff must prove two essential elements: 1) That the government is involved in religion, and 2) that such involvement has the effect of establishing a religion. Currently, there are a myriad of tests the court may apply in determining whether an establishment of religion has taken place, the most popular of which is known as the Lemon Test. The Lemon Test arose from the case Lemon vs Kurtzman, and requires a three-prong analysis which holds that the Establishment Clause has been violated if any of the following are true:

a) There is no valid secular purpose for the government’s action.

b) The primary effect of the action is not secular.

c) The government action fosters excessive entanglement with religion.

While other tests have occasionally been used or suggested, these have generally all been merely “revisions” of Lemon, rather than entirely new tests themselves. It is generally the Lemon test which has been used to rule out ID and creation science as unconstitutional, and it is Lemon which also finds its roots in the Court’s reshaping of history in Everson vs Board of Education.

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Gary Habermas is one of the world’s leading scholars on the resurrection. His website and other published materials (such as his book, The Historical Jesus) are outstanding, being first class resources for anyone facing the “latest” regurgitated challenges to the resurrection and related topics.

But I recently discovered another reason to visit his website; the Historical Resurrection Quiz. The quiz is multiple-choice-based and focuses on the historical sources, challenges and arguments concerning the resurrection. The quiz is broken up into levels of various difficulty, requiring you to attain a particular level of knowledge before moving on the next (more challenging) level. All answers are scored and bonus questions at the end of each round is an opportunity to score more points. I found it to be both fun and educational.

Adam was watching me play the first time through and each time I got one wrong he would provide helpful encouragement such as, “Oh you got one wrong, you’re not a real Christian”. Despite his encouragement, I managed to get to level 8 before I had to stop, so I didn’t quite get to finish the quiz. The questions do get harder with each level, though there is some repetition and “dummy” answer options to help narrow down the choices.

Here are a few sample questions from the quiz:

• Why is the Minimal Facts approach effective?
• True or False: If Jesus did not rise from the dead, Christianity is false and we should live accordingly.
• What is the role of evidence in any investigation into Christianity?
• What is the principle of Enemy Attestation?
• What is the Jerusalem Factor argument for the empty tomb?
• What is the Minimal Facts method?
• The fact that Jesus’ disciples sincerely believed that he had risen from the dead and had appeared to them helps to eliminate at least two opposing theories. What are they?
• Regarding the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, what distinguishes the disciples from Muslim terrorists, who also willingly suffered and died for their beliefs?
• Which two Apostolic Fathers report that the apostles were dramatically impacted by Jesus’ resurrection?
• Nine ancient sources attest to the disciples’ claim to have seen the Jesus risen from the dead. These can easily be presented in three categories. What are they?
• How many sources attest to the willingness on the part of the original disciples to suffer and die for their beliefs?
• True or False: The willingness of the disciples to suffer and even die for their beliefs establishes the truth of their beliefs.

By the way, if you answered True for that last one, then you’re not a real Christian. ;)

This is a little too ironic to not share. Over at pastor Tim Guthrie’s blog, SBC Today, we find a response from him regarding the issue of Liberty University demoting Ergun Caner from the position of dean of LBTS to that of professor as a result of their investigation into the fabricated history Caner had erected about himself. (For those who are not aware, Guthrie had involved himself rather deeply in the controversy surrounding Caner and taking heat over it.) For several months Guthrie has been rightly cautioning people against the easy temptation of gossip and to reserve their judgment until all of the relevant evidence had been collected and sifted through and the Board of Trustees at Liberty University had weighed in on the matter. (We will ignore the dissonance of Guthrie not taking his own advice, nor will we comment about how he has conducted himself in the affair.)

What I want to do here is interact directly with Guthrie’s concluding thoughts, in his article oddly entitled “The Exoneration of Dr. Ergun Caner,” to critically analyze the various statements he made therein.

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As reported by Ray Reed at The News & Advance a few hours ago, Liberty University has confirmed that Ergun Caner’s contract as dean of the seminary, which will expire 30 June 2010, will not be renewed for the next academic year. In an official statement from Liberty University, it was confirmed that Caner “will no longer serve as Dean of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary.” Caner has been demoted to the faculty position of professor instead, which he has accepted.

The official statement reads in full:

After a thorough and exhaustive review of Dr. Ergun Caner’s public state-ments, a committee consisting of four members of Liberty University’s Board of Trustees has concluded that Dr. Caner has made factual statements that are self-contradictory.  However, the committee found no evidence to sug-gest that Dr. Caner was not a Muslim who converted to Christianity as a teenager, but, instead, found discrepancies related to matters such as dates, names and places of residence.  Dr. Caner has cooperated with the board committee and has apologized for the discrepancies and misstatements that led to this review.  Dr. Caner’s current contractual term as Dean of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary expires on June, 30, 2010.  Dr. Caner will no longer serve as Dean of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary.  The univer-sity has offered, and Dr. Caner has accepted, an employment contract for the 2010-2011 academic year. Dr. Caner will remain on the faculty of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary as a professor.

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The religious aspect of science (often referred to as ‘Scientism’) is captured once again in a recent piece on the highly informative CreationSafaris website. It requires very little commentary from me at this stage, as I think the point is well made.

Can you be called scientifically literate if you deny that humans evolved from lower animals?  What if you deny the universe began with an explosion?  American students have typically scored low on those questions, leading to charges that they are scientifically illiterate compared to other countries in Europe and Asia.  But now, the National Science Board (NSB) decided to drop those hot-button questions in the 2010 edition of Science and Engineering Indicators, a biennial compilation of the state of global science, on the grounds that they don’t accurately reflect students’ knowledge of science, but rather their beliefs.  The decision set off angry protests in certain quarters. …

… Joshua Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) [called] it “intellectual malpractice” to discuss scientific literacy without mentioning evolution.  “It downplays the controversy,” he said. … Yudhijit Bhattacharjee said, “those struggling to keep evolution in the classroom say the omission could hurt their efforts.”

… NSB officials counter that their decision to drop the survey questions on evolution and the big bang from the 2010 edition was based on concerns about accuracy.  The questions were “flawed indicators of scientific knowledge because the responses conflated knowledge and beliefs,” says Louis Lanzerotti, an astrophysicist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark and chair of the board’s Science and Engineering Indicators (SEI) committee. …

… Bruer noted that 72% of Americans answered the question about humans evolving from earlier species correctly when the question was prefaced with the phrase, according to the theory of evolution.  This shows that the questions “reflect factors beyond unfamiliarity with basic elements of science.”  The controversy over Indicators thus boils down to the question whether a student needs to believe, rather than simply know, the facts of a theory to be considered scientifically literate. …

And here’s the point;

… If students have to believe rather than understand a scientific theory, then science has become a religion.  According to the radical Darwinists, a scientist could have a PhD, earn international honors in science, publish hundreds of papers in peer-reviewed journals, and save millions of lives, and yet, if a Darwin doubter (roster), could be judged scientifically illiterate. Do you want radicals like that influencing education policy?  Do you want them requiring recitation of a pledge of allegiance to Darwin?  Do you want them forcing science curricula to say that to understand science, you must believe that nothing banged and became everything by an unguided process?

Indeed, hasn’t this kind of expectation (this commitment to materialism and scientism) already been exposed with the treatment of scientists such as Richard Sternberg and Guillermo Gonzalez, not to mention many others?

Those of you who think that the issue of gay equality is about fair-mindedness, tolerance and respect for differing views, think again: a Mississippi high school has cancelled its annual student prom shortly after they declined the requests of one of its students – a lesbian – to bring along her girlfriend as her prom date and to wear a tuxedo instead of a dress. The teen, Constance McMillen, has since been encouraged to sue the school. She was also awarded a scholarship check of $30,000 from talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres for her bravery in challenging the School District’s ruling.

But does she have a right to attend her school’s prom on her own terms? And should the school be forced by law to hold the prom in order to cater for McMillen’s requests? Should the school be coerced into making provision for the exception?

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[Last updated by Duane: 9 March 2010]

According to a recent SMH article, the South Australian Non-Government Schools Registration Board decided to ban the teaching of creationism as part of the science curriculum.

Under policies published in December, the board said it required “teaching of science as an empirical discipline, focusing on inquiry, hypothesis, investigation, experimentation, observation and evidential analysis.”

The SMH article provides an opportunity to discuss a wide range of issues relating to creationism and science. However I only want to make one simple point about the misconceived relationship between the two.

To put it simply (as the SA board have done), the empirical discipline, focusing on inquiry, hypothesis, investigation, experimentation, observation and evidential analysis – watch this – is an integral part of creationism. It’s not anti-science or non-science, but values the scientific method as a way to understand the world in which we live. The two are very much homogenous, in the same way that materialists might view the relationship between evolution and science.

Science is the study of the natural world, which Christians would say is the study of the world God created. While materialists don’t accept a Christian worldview, we all still live in the same world and so we all have access to exactly the same evidence.

In studying this evidence however, materialists must draw conclusions shaped by materialist presuppositions. Appeals to design (implying a designer) are not allowed. The fallacy of this objection is that it presumes that the design argument is an appeal to ignorance. However the inference of design is based on an analogy of what we do know scientifically, not what we don’t. So Christians are not limited by a materialistic paradigm. This doesn’t mean that creationists invoke God-of-the-gaps solutions to problems that the materialist’s paradigm cannot currently resolve. But it means that they approach the evidence with the view that God created and that God’s word provides clues about the world which can inform our presuppositions for understanding the evidence. A practical example of this is the work of PhD physicists Dr. Russell Humphreys and Dr. John Hartnett, who have both proposed models for the universe to rival popular big bang cosmology.

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Student refuses assignment on Devil

Granted, this is typically Mathew’s arena but I could not pass it up, being unsure that it was even on his radar out there in Australia. Every day there are countless stories of interest regarding society and culture with respect to Christian living, which I hear in my corner of the world on FamilyNet Radio (Sirius XM). Today I heard that in Hope Mills, North Carolina, there was a female student who was coerced with a failing grade on an assignment if she refused to complete it. However, she said the assignment violated her Christian beliefs.

Even though Tieanna Trough is an honour student and usually positive about school work, the report said, when she received an assignment to write a paper on making a deal with the Devil, she refused. “I believe you don’t write about how to sell your soul to the Devil,” she said.

According to CBN Newswatch, the assignment

was part of a creative writing class at Gray’s Creek High School meant to get students thinking. Students had been studying a short-story called The Devil and Tom Walker, about a miser who sold his soul to the Devil to get rich. The students were told to write an essay on how they would sell their souls to the Devil, or what trade they would make with the Devil.

When Trough refused to write the essay, she said her teacher offered her a lousy deal: either do it, or get a zero. Trough’s parents said their daughter’s rights were violated. They complained to school officials after Trough was given another assignment that still conflicted with their daughter’s beliefs.

“We can’t allow God into the classrooms, but yet we’re going to allow the Devil in the classroom? That’s the way I felt,” her mother said.

The book and its short-stories are standard curriculum material, the school principal John Gibbs said. “I don’t think it’s anything wrong. I mean, parents are going to do what they think is correct and, y’know, I respect that. We can sit down and talk about what we think is right.”

He doesn’t think it’s anything wrong? What if, in the context of English literature, the students were asked to write something about their soul with respect to God? Would the principal think something was wrong in that scenario? If engaging the creative minds of the students with respect to the Devil is okay, could God sneak into the classroom through the same backdoor entrance? Or is that the point at which we would discover a zealous display of Special Pleading?

And if a student refuses an assignment on the grounds that it violates her religious beliefs and the teacher responds by threatening to fail her on the assignment, does the principal really think there’s nothing wrong there? Really?