Yesterday, Massimo Pigliucci wrote a post titled “PZ Myers is a witless wanker who peddles pablum.” Pigliucci says he didn’t really mean it, but was just imitating PZ’s overblown rhetoric to make the point that it’s a bad thing. My title is an imitation of Massimo’s approach to post-titling, since he uses all the words above to describe PZ in apparent seriousness.

Actual issue at question was the attempt by Tennessee father to ban a biology textbook with the following statement:

In the 1970s and 1980s, antievolutionists in Arkansas, Tennessee and Louisiana passed identical bills calling for ‘equal time’ for teaching evolution and creationism, the biblical myth that the universe was created by the Judeo-Christian god in six days. But a court ruled that the ‘equal-time’ bill was unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated the separation of church and state.

The father, you see, didn’t like creationism being called a myth. But PZ’s accusation of witless wanking and pablum peddling wasn’t directed at the father, it was directed at Center for Inquiry blogger Michael De Dora basically agreeing with the father. A month ago I mounted a partial defense of De Dora, suggesting he might just be a bad writer and not motivated by anything pernicious. In this case, though, the shock is hard to convey. CFI is one of the most important organizations in the world for defending secularism and debunking pseudoscience. To find a CFI blogger saying biology texts shouldn’t say anything negative about pseudoscience feels like stepping into a Star Trek-style mirror universe.

De Dora’s argument is that because creationism is a religious idea, science can’t disprove it. He seems to be taking his cues from Pigliucci, whose ideas about this I’ve criticized here, but he takes Pigliucci’s merely misguided nitpicking and draws the seriously absurd conclusion that we can’t say creationism is wrong in science class. Scientists can’t do that unless they “put on the philosopher’s cap,” which you’re not supposed to do in a biology classroom. The silliness of De Dora’s position becomes acute in this paragraph:

Some have argued that teaching the Earth is 4.5 billion years old is the same as denying the Earth is 6,000 years old. But one clearly imparts scientific knowledge; the other clearly denies a religious idea. One is constitutional; the other is not. Scientific knowledge makes many ideas seem crazy, but there is no reason for a high school biology teacher to actually go into denying all of them, specifically the religious ones.

Logically, though, the Earth’s being 4.5 billion years old entails its not being 6,000 years old. This means that by “philosopher’s cap,” what De Dora means is basic logic. Oh, there’s a small philosophical issue there insofar as a few oddballs in the history of philosophy have denied that the logical law of non-contradiction holds, but science would be crippled if scientists had to constantly kowtow to philosophical worries about logic. Is there a single mathematically informed paper that’s ever been written that could still have worked if we took exotic skepticism about logic (and related mathematical principles like “4.5 billion is not 6,000″) seriously?

Also, there’s nothing inherently religious about the idea that the Earth is 6,000 years old. The only sense it in which it is a religious idea and the idea that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old is not is this: The latter is thoroughly supported by all our scientific evidence, while all our scientific evidence points us towards rejecting the latter and as a matter of sociological fact hardly anyone believes the former except because they are in the grip of religious dogma.

The practical absurdity is that you can’t make the evolution-creation issue go away simply by not talking about it. Every high school teacher whose curriculum comes anywhere near a controversial issue knows that they run the risk of getting angry phone calls from parents even if they do their best to avoid the controversy. Thus, in middle school and high school, I never had a teacher who could talk about evolution without a little disclaimer along the lines of “we’re not saying anything’s wrong with creationism, we just want you to understand evolution.” (This problem wasn’t restricted to science class–even our English class’s unit on Greek mythology came with a disclaimer.)

The question is not whether to let creationism be an issue in biology classrooms, but how to address it. I actually think creationism is a wonderful teaching opportunity, given that the creationist literature is so full of false scientific claims and correcting those falsehoods is an excellent way to explain current evolutionary theory and the evidence for it. A great deal of what I know about evolution I owe to popular-level debunkings of the claims of the antievolution movement. What’s De Dora’s objection to that approach to teaching evolution? That instead we should vaguely tell students about the falsehoods “some people” have promoted in an attempt to defend unspecified “non-scientific ideas”?

I won’t say De Dora’s view, if taken seriously, would damage science education in the U.S., because U.S. science education is already in such bad shape. Taking De Dora seriously certainly would impair efforts to improve science education, though, and that’s why I worry about it much more than Pigliucci’s nitpicking.

As for Pigliucci: scroll to his second to last paragraph, and you’ll see him apparently claiming that people who disagree with his philosophical claim are guilty of taking a “cavalier attitude toward the substance, rationality and coherence of one’s arguments.” As fun as it would be to complain about the hypocrisy of throwing insults like this, the real issue is why anyone would make such absurd statements. Why are people who are basically on the same side as Dawkins, Myers, et al. so eager to write firey denunciations of them based on minor disagreements?

I’m not saying the issues shouldn’t be aired, I find them fascinating (much as I find the discussion over Sam Harris’ TED talk, which I largely disagreed with, fascinating). But why try to turn these disagreements into proof that the New (read: Bad) Atheists are screwing everything up? This is very disappointing to see coming from Pigliucci given that, on the one hand, he’s done real good in the fight against creationism, but on the other it’s hard to come up with an interpretation of his behavior here that makes him come out looking good.

EDIT: After a bit of reflection, what bothers me about Massimo’s post is the level of eagerness to trash the people who happen to be some of the most currently successful communicators on science and religion issues. That eagerness is weird and wrong. I could speculate on the causes, but the main thing to notice is how widespread it is. Also, those who are interested can read PZ’s responses to De Dora and Pigliucci here and here.