Beneath Even Debating?

Andrew Sullivan cites this article in the TimesOnLine UK on a statement by Catholic Bishops in England regarding the literal truth of the Bible. The writer, Ruth Gledhill, states that:

Some Christians want a literal interpretation of the story of creation, as told in Genesis, taught alongside Darwin's theory of evolution in schools, believing "intelligent design" to be an equally plausible theory of how the world began.

Gledhill is identified as the religion writer for the Times Online so she should know better. That she would write such a sentence is evidence that either she's incompetent or she's willfully trying to deceive her readers.

Let's deconstruct her claim:

1) It is true that some Christians would like to have a literal reading of Genesis taught in public schools but no one has seriously tried to accomplish this since Louisiana's attempts were defeated by the Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard in the late 1980s.

2) The belief that Genesis is literally, and thus scientifically, true is creationism. It is not Intelligent Design. ID takes no formal position on any of the questions raised by the Genesis account. Genesis could be shown to be completely wrong in every particular and Intelligent Design would be unaffected.

3) Intelligent Design is not a theory "of how the world began." It says nothing about how the world originated. The theory of Intelligent Design makes only two claims: First, it claims that blind, unguided, impersonal forces and processes are not adequate by themselves to account either for the exquisite fine-tuning of the cosmos in every aspect of its structure, nor the high level of information found in the biosphere. Second, it claims that any adequate explanation of both the pervasive fine-tuning of the cosmos and the high information content of living things must somehow include intelligent agency.

Sullivan shows that he doesn't understand what's going on in the current debate any better than does Glendhill when he offers this comment:

The Catholic bishops of England tell American fundamentalists the bleeding obvious: not everything in the Bible is literally true. Money quote: "We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision." Of course. Anyone who believes that the world was literally created in six days a few thousand years ago is not expressing his or her "religious beliefs". Believing something that is demonstrably and empirically untrue is not religion. It is simply superstition or lunacy. It has nothing to do with faith in things we cannot know. The notion that it should actually be taught in public schools as science is beneath even debating.

This is a classic straw man fallacy. Sullivan wants the reader to believe that what's at stake in efforts like that currently being fought out in the courts in Kitzmiller v. Dover is whether students will be taught that "the world was literally created in six days a few thousand years ago." This, of course, is not at all what is at issue despite the attempts of the plaintiffs in the Kitzmiller case to create that impression.

What is being contended in the Dover case is whether a school board should have the right to insist that when biology teachers instruct students that life is the product solely of blind, unguided, impersonal processes that they also point out that not all scientists nor philosophers think that to be true. Some of them, perhaps many of them, think that intelligence must somehow have been involved.

It would be interesting to see Mr. Sullivan or the Catholic bishops demonstrate that any of this is "demonstrably and empirically untrue."