Tube Time

(Updated below)

John Evo has posted a couple of videos over on his site that you might like. The first is the BBC documentary, "A War on Science," and the second is the PBS/Nova documentary, "Judgment Day."

The Beeb's show is about an hour long, and takes a more general look at the anti-science movement. The Nova show is a two-hour documentary on the Dover trial concerning the teaching of creationism intelligent design in the classroom. Both are quite good. Thanks for finding these and posting them, John.

Further reading: During "Judgment Day," you'll hear discussion of a document produced by the Discovery Institute called "The Wedge Document." To save you some searching, here are links to copies of that document, in two flavors: 10 page PDF and the same content in HTML.

Reading this thing makes for some chilling moments. Here's an excerpt, the Goals section:

GOALS

Governing Goals

• To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
  
  
• To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and hurnan beings are created by God.

Five Year Goals

• To see intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory.
  
  
• To see the beginning of the influence of design theory in spheres other than natural science.
  
  
• To see major new debates in education, life issues, legal and personal responsibility pushed to the front of the national agenda.
  

Twenty Year Goals

• To see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science.
  
  
• To see design theory application in specific fields, including molecular biology, biochemistry, paleontology, physics and cosmology in the natural sciences, psychology, ethics, politics, theology and philosophy in the humanities; to see its innuence in the fine arts.
  
  
• To see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life.

And some say I'm paranoid to believe that there are people bent on turning my country into a theocracy.

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Update

2008-01-02 04:32

Afterthought: I never really get why people who believe in God feel so threatened by the theory of evolution. It has always seemed to me that if you want to believe in a Creator, even if you view humans as the pinnacle of this creation, it's far more impressive to think of this Creator as having the understated elegance to set up a system with a few simple rules that would lead to what we see today. You got your Big Bang, a handful of physical constants, your chemical soup, and your natural selection. Boom! A universe full of wonders! What else do you need? What's the problem?