Your right, those Evo's are pretty emotional:
"What's wrong with the AIG museum is that it's presenting religious views as if they are science when they are not," said Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, which launched the petition."<
I think both sides are driven by emotional reactions in this case. On FR it is often noted that liberals are more emotion driven, while conservatives are more reason driven.
As a general principle, that’s valid. This is a case where some conservatives (and to be fair, there is nothing really conservative about this) are driven by emotion.
Abortion is another case where both sides are driven by strong emotional reactions.
I’ve been following this issue since the midseventies. I used to hear creationists debate evolutionary scientists. Invariably, the evolutionary arguments call for a certain set of faith-assumptions at certain key points, especially the overarching unprovable assumption that nature has always worked the same way in the past (uniformitarianism). If a thinker is granted any set of faith-assumptions he wishes, and is then allowed to shout down any other set of assumptions, then the thinker can erect a theory impenetrable to disproof, by simply clubbing the opposition out of the picture.
The question is ultimately a religious or philosophical question, not a scientific question, no matter how many graphs, recreations, or museum “how-it-might-have-been” exhibits one might erect. Our big cultural mistake has thus been not recognizing the religious nature of the question itself.
Sir Karl Popper, said by some to be one of the great philosophers of science (and certainly not himself a creationist, as he ridiculed theists), said:
“I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program—a possible framework for testable scientific theories. It suggests the existence of a mechanism of adaptation and it allows us even to study in detail the mechanism at work. And it is the only theory so far which does all that.
“This is of course the reason why Darwinism has been almost universally accepted. Its theory of adaptation was the first nontheistic one that was convincing; and theism was worse than an open admission of failure, for it created the impression that an ultimate explanation had been reached.
“Now to the degree that Darwinism creates the same impression, it is not so very much better than the theistic view of adaptation; it is therefore important to show that Darwinism is not a scientific theory, but metaphysical. But its value for science as a metaphysical research program is very great, especially if it is admitted that it may be criticized and improved.” (Unended Quest, Fontana Books, 1976).
Popper is not saying much for Darwinism, because just about any strange idea can be “criticized and improved upon.” At any rate, my point is that the word “metaphysical” is merely a way of tap-dancing around the word “religious.” Granted, many (perhaps most) of those who accept Darwinism (now the term is “neo-Darwinism”) are also theists; but I can’t see how anyone can survey history, examine the controversy with an open mind, and fail to see that the real driving force for the acceptance of evolutionary ideas is that it puts all those “woodenheaded fundamentalists” in their place. As Harvard paleontologist Richard Lewontin stated:
“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs,…in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
Some translation: Lewontin’s last sentence is a metaphysical declaration of his “prior adherence” to a personal faith? Does it sound “scientific” to speak of rigging your experiments (“create an apparatus…”) to produce materialistic (atheistic) explanations? For a long, long time, it is has been the voices of the Lewontins, the Dobzhanskys, and the Huxleys, with this sort of passionate religious belief in the self-organization of matter, that have controlled what is put in textbooks and what is displayed in museums. Any theory or point of view can reign supreme if its proponents are allowed to protect it in this way.