Creationists attack space science

Linked from Little Green Footballs.

Creationists don't like the fact that the earth is billions of years old, and the universe even older than that. They prefer the whole shebang to have been magic-ed into existence some ten thousand years ago. In order to support this belief, they have to attack any and all science that points to the contrary.

We’ve had several posts about the creationist fanatics in Texas who are trying to push creationism/intelligent design/whatever into public school biology classes, but biology isn’t the only field they’re attacking. Earth and Space Science (ESS) courses are now a target as well, because they deal with scientific concepts like radiometric dating:

The new Earth and Space Science (ESS) course standards (and all other science course standards) will be up for approval before the State Board of Education (SBOE) during January 21-23. Some SBOE members—the seven who are Young Earth Creationists (YECs)—will attempt to make changes to the ESS standards in ways that will damage the scientific integrity and accuracy of the course. In particular, these SBOE members will try to negatively modify or delete the standards that require students to understand the following topics that deal with scientific topics they consider controversial: age of the Earth and universe, radiometric dating, evolution of fossil life, and the origin of life by abiotic chemical processes. These topics are the ones that YECs consider to be controversial; indeed, they are obsessed with them to the exclusion of everything else.