The Gospel According to Donald Johanson

With the new Creation Museum, which teaches a young earth, drawing tens of thousands of visitors, scientists who hold to Darwinism may have discovered a public-relations answer. According to an article in today's Chicago Tribune, the 3.2-million-year-old bones of "Lucy," a small, apelike creature believed to be an evolutionary presursor to human beings, will go on a six-year museum tour, beginning this week. The exhibit, called "The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia," opens on Friday at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

But some paleontologists aren't too happy about the bones being transported out of Ethiopia, where they were discovered. They worry that the bones might be damaged and that they will be unavalable for further study while on tour. But not all think that way:

Donald Johanson, the paleoanthropologist who found Lucy in 1974, said her exhibition should have important payoffs in teaching children and adults about science.

"Seeing the original Lucy will surely heighten public awareness of human-origins studies particularly at a time when the validity of evolution has come under fire in our schools," said Johanson, now the director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, where he continues to do research but also has become a popular educator on human evolution through books and lectures.

"A broader exposure of Lucy to the public does have great educational value," he said.

It should be interesting to see what the interest in Lucy is, given that according to opinion polls roughly half of the American public has expressed serious reservations about the theory of evolution, which nonetheless has enjoyed almost unquestioned hegemony in academia and the mainstream media. Perhaps one explanation for the throngs at the Creation Museum is that there are so few politically correct alternatives for people who question the evolutionary metanarrative, which usually excludes God.

The CT Liveblog

The latest on Ted Haggard, the Huckabee candidacy, and vacation Bible schools.

President Huckabee?

In an opinion piece this week in National Review Online, S.T. Karnick suggests that two trends may help long-shot Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee actually win the presidency. Huckabee placed second in the recent Iowa straw poll despite barely registering a national blip in the race against better-known and better-financed candidates such as Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney.

The first trend, Karnick states, is that governors usually win the presidency, while senators (most of the other candidates) usually do not:

The reasons governors beat national politicians are probably fairly simple. They have accomplishments they can cite, have served as CEO of a large government organization (as the U.S. presidency is), and, most importantly, they don’t have a voting record on important and controversial national issues.

Senators, by contrast, don’t have the individual political-administrative accomplishments to which to point, have records dotted with controversial and polarizing votes, and typically have made a lot of enemies on the national level.

This does not bode well for the Democratic triumvirate, each of whom serve or served in the Senate. But of course several of Huckabee's Republican opponents have executive experience. Romney ran Massachusetts as governor, Giuliani ran Gotham as mayor. But Karnick says the hugely important evangelical vote is unlikely to coalesce around either of these two: Giuliani has character problems, while many Bible-believing Christians distrust Romney's Mormon faith (and perhaps his recent reversal on abortion?).

That's where Karnick's second reason comes in. Huckabee is a former Baptist minister, able to connect with evangelicals in a way the other candidates cannot:

A former Baptist minister who served two terms as governor of Arkansas, a state long controlled by Democrats, where he nonetheless enjoyed high approval ratings, Huckabee is hardly more obscure than Bill Clinton was in 1991 (unless you think Clinton’s tenure as leader of the National Governor’s Association made him world-famous). His appeal to evangelicals is a given.

So can Mike Huchabee become a viable presidential candidate and perhaps even steal the Republican nomination? It's an interesting argument. Stranger things have happened, I suppose. No one gave Clinton any hope against Bush I, after all.

Weblog

The latest news on volunteers in New Orleans, the "name of God" controversy, and Amnesty International's decision to back abortion, among many other links.
Compiled by Ted Olsen

Weblog

The latest news on the Korean hostages in Afghanistan, the Peru earthquake, and religious minorities in Iraq.
Compiled by Ted Olsen

What Did Paul Really Mean?

'New perspective' scholars argue that we need, well, a new perspective on justification by faith.
By Simon Gathercole

The Democratic Pandering Tour

As the Deomocatic presidential pandering tour continues, the candidates held a forum last night for the party's gay and lesbian lobby (following a debate earlier in the week for leftwing bloggers). At least some of the party's homosexual supporters are, like many prolifers in the Republican Party, feeling used and taken for granted. According to coverage in today's Chicago Tribune:

Perhaps the most personal question of the evening was posed to Sen. Hillary Clinton by [lesbian rock singer Melissa] Etheridge, who told Clinton that she had felt personally hurt and abandoned by the Clintons after President Bill Clinton's inauguration.

"I remember when your husband was elected," Etheridge said, calling it a "hopeful time" for gays and lesbians. But "in the years that followed, our hearts were broken. We were pushed aside. All those great promises that were made to us were broken."

"What," she asked, "are you going to do to be different than that?"

Clinton said she remembered things differently, recalling the political appointments, public remarks and "the ongoing struggle against [conservative Republican House Speaker Newt] Gingrich and the Republican majority."

"We certainly didn't get as much done as I would have liked," Clinton said, "but there was a lot of honest effort."

While I disagree strongly with Etheridge on gay marriage, I feel her pain. As they say in the big city, you're graded not on effort, but on results.

Be that as it may, since the candidates are apparently meeting with every constituent group they can think of in their mad dash for the nomination, here's a modest suggestion: Why not meet with all those pro-life evangelicals who were promised that the Democrats would take their concerns seriously if only they would look beyond party labels and give them a chance?

For some reason, I'm not holding my breath. Here's what Heath Shuler, a new Democratic representative from North Carolina (and a self-professed pro-lifer), told CT recently:

I don't think it's as much about legal measures. Our communities have to do better. Our churches have to do better. I think that's part of growing up in a community like I did. It was a small, very [tightly] knit group, and you knew people in your community and your church whom you could lean on and [who] would help you make these difficult decisions. Everyone wants to talk to us about legislation.

Those are fine sentiments, but Rep. Shuler seems to think he was elected to be a pastor and not a legislator. We don't need more sentiments and promises, but more actions. It's time for some pro-life deeds to back up the pro-life words, Democrats. You received a good number of evangelical votes in the last election, which helped you to regain control of Congress. Don't presume those votes are now yours forever.

Cancer's Unexpected Blessings

When you enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death, things change.
By Tony Snow

Iran's Cultural Revolution?

Iran's nuclear ambitions are just one aspect of the mullahs' iron-fisted approach to maintaining their power. According to an article in the Monday Wall Street Journal (entitled "Domestic Terror in Iran"), the powers that be that run the Islamic Republic are cracking down against "anti-Islam hooligans," as well as "trade union leaders, student activists, journalists and even mullahs opposed to the regime." After describing the recent public execution of seven men, the author, Amir Tahiri, states:

"The Mashad hangings, broadcast live on local television, are among a series of public executions ordered by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last month as part of a campaign to terrorize an increasingly restive population. Over the past six weeks, at least 118 people have been executed, including four who were stoned to death. According to Saeed Mortazavi, the chief Islamic prosecutor, at least 150 more people, including five women, are scheduled to be hanged or stoned to death in the coming weeks.

"The latest wave of executions is the biggest Iran has suffered in the same time span since 1984, when thousands of opposition prisoners were shot on orders from Ayatollah Khomeini."
...
"The campaign of terror also includes targeted 'disappearances' designed to neutralize trade union leaders, student activists, journalists and even mullahs opposed to the regime. According to the latest tally, more than 30 people have 'disappeared' since the start of the new Iranian year on March 21. To intimidate the population, the authorities also have carried out mass arrests on spurious grounds.

"According to Gen. Ismail Muqaddam, commander of the Islamic Police, a total of 430,000 men and women have been arrested on charges related to drug use since April. A further 4,209 men and women, mostly aged between 15 and 30, have been arrested for 'hooliganism' in Tehran alone. The largest number of arrests, totaling almost a million men and women according to Mr. Muqaddam, were related to the enforcement of the new Islamic Dress Code, passed by the Islamic Majlis (parliament) in May 2006."

Iranian Christians International says there are more than 6,700 Muslim converts to Christ among the 65 million people living in Iran (and perhaps 15,000 Iranian Christians of Muslim background worldwide). One wonders whether they are also being caught up in the terror campaign. According to Tahiri, "Mr. Ahmadinejad wants university textbooks rewritten to 'cleanse them of Infidel trash,' and to include 'a rebuttal of Zionist-Crusader claims' about the Holocaust." These appear to be code words targeting the country's minuscule Christian minority.

An estimated seven Christians have been martyred there since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Certainly the entire country, including its Christians, can use our prayers.

Sex, Lies, and the Bridge Collapse

Notes on the latest news from the CT Liveblog.