OK - back to a bit of research. Don't expect anything earth-shattering here - just the "grunt work" of researching and documenting.
The previous parts of this investigation:
- Who Are The Members? (Part 1 - in the early days, the BCSE, despite making impressive claims for itself and being willing to make serious allegations about others, were reluctant to reveal the identities of those behind their own claims).
- Who Are The Members? (Part 2 - in which I exposed the fraudulent method the BCSE used to claim artificially inflated membership numbers for itself).
- Who Are The Members? (Part 3 - in the days before the BCSE had named any of its leadership, I named ten core individuals, documenting their lack of experience in science education, and their credentials as campaigning atheists. When the BCSE eventually named seven leaders, all seven of them turned out to be on the list I had revealed many weeks before).
- A Note On The BCSE's Membership (Showing the evidence of the BCSE's failure to attract a broader membership).
- Who Are The Members? The Website Editors (In which I revealed the identities of the BCSE website editors - all of are campaigning atheists).
- (Also the series on the BCSE's de facto leader, who turns out to have no credentials or experience either in science or education: one, two, follow-up).
So far, I have provided evidence in four key areas:
- The "British Centre for Science Education" is not composed of scientists or educators.
- Its leadership contains no science educators at all, no educators at all, and only one scientist (retired). The evidence showed that 9 of its 10 core members were hardline atheists, many with experience in anti-religious campaigning.
- This picture is also true amongst its website editors. Five out of five proof-readers are non-science educators who are also campaigning atheists.
- The BCSE's attempt to persuade real science educators to lend it support has failed. In order to gain any members, the requirement for a monetary donation had to be dropped.
Today I will continue to document details of the BCSE's membership. We have seen that the BCSE does now have a defined membership - even if nothing definite is actually required of its members.
So who cared enough to join? What kind of membership would the BCSE attract? Who will feel drawn to it? Will the country's science educators be forming a queue? Or will it just attract the "usual crowd" of Internet atheists? These are questions which will give us more data - as we seek to document what kind of organisation the BCSE really is.
Gathering The Data
When someone joins the BCSE, they are then marked as a BCSE member in its forums. I think that this is so that forum participants can tell who is who - which is a good thing. Here, for example, is what you see when BCSE website proof-reader John Flemming posts in that forum:
So, for this analysis I decided to count the number of posts made by each and every person marked as a "BCSE Member" - and analyse the results.
Once the BCSE members already listed in previous articles are dropped out, the following names are, in order, the ten members who post most in the BCSE forums. As you can see, some of them are not willing to be publicly identified with the BCSE using their full names - I can understand that!
Dave Oldridge, George Jelliss, "wilmot" = Paula Thomas, "jon_12091", James Rocks, Chris Sergeant, "molecanthro" = Mark Whitten, "psiloiordinary" = Mark Edon, "Gwynne", Steve Denton.
Anybody not on this list of ten has averaged less than one message per week to the forum over the past few months.
Here We Go Again...
So. You know where this is going. How many of these individuals will be Bible-believing Christians? None, of course. How many will be atheists? The majority!
Remember what the point is here. I'm not saying that no atheist has anything to say about science or education. Neither am I saying that they can't be charming or talented people. I don't believe that for a moment. What I am doing is pointing out that the make-up BCSE's membership is too skewed to be anything like a coincedence. Like attracts like - and the kind of membership attracted by the BCSE tells us what we need to know. Here, then, they are:
- George Jelliss: A prominent member of Leicester Secular Society. Mr. Jelliss maintains the LSS's website. In April 2006 the LSS organised a special outing to demonstrate in support of "Jerry Springer The Opera", a spiteful and gratuitous mockery of everything connected with Christianity. So I think I can tell where they're coming from...
http://www.leicestersecularsociety.org.uk/jstopera.htm - Paula Thomas, a political campaigner.
"As I think is well known I am an atheist."
Responding to a comment from another BCSE member: "... but that arises out of Christianity's complete lack of ability to view women as anything more than baby factories."
http://www.justscience.org.uk/..._parentId=773
http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=4473#4473 - James Rocks: Mr. Rocks is the founder of a similar group to the BCSE, "Science Just Science", and (like many of the BCSE's leadership) works in the world of IT. (Which I point out because you might expect that those who write to the press in the name of organisations with "Science" in their titles might, well, be from the world of science!).
"I consider myself to be a militant atheist (I have been referred to as a fundamentalist atheist ...)"
http://justscience.1.forumer.com/a/kyuuketsuki-kent-uk_post7.html - Chris Sergeant: Another atheist, describes Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" a piece of "rational science" !
http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5729#5729 - Steve Denton: Another atheist.
- "Gwynne": An atheist, explains that his reason for joining the BCSE is so that his children aren't influenced by religion.
http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2418#2418 - Mark Edon: Another atheist. Like BCSE committee members Brian Jordan and Ian Lowe, Mr. Edon signed the infamous petition demanding that the Prime Minister legislate to make any kind of non-atheistic child-rearing illegal:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/freethinking/?showall=1 - Mark Whitten ("molecanthro")
Mark is the first BCSE member I have come across who actually has a graduate qualification in a biological discipline. I salute him! (He's only been in Britain a few years and so never attended a British state school... but still!).
Having seen Rod Liddle's recent Channel 4 program "The Trouble With Atheism", Mark labelled it as a "anti-science nonsense". Mark also supports the "brights", a secular humanist group - "A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview... A bright's worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements... The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview" (http://www.the-brights.net/).
http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=590#590
http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3909#3909
http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2161#2161
The British Centre for Slandering Evangelicals
One more. Dave Oldridge is a Catholic (not Roman). So he is not an atheist. But the Internet appears to contain gazillions of quotes demonstrating a very deep dislike for evangelical Christianity. So he's very much at home in the BCSE. I won't go into that, as this article is long enough - you can turn up plenty in the BCSE forum along those lines if you want. Oldridge's acceptance by the BCSE does show up the BCSE's hypocrisy: Catholic doctrine is explicitly theocratic - it claims that the church has a head on earth, and that he is the rightful political and temporal ruler of the world. That is of course why the Vatican is a state and has political ambassadors. To those who've followed my series on "Theocracy" and the BCSE's vacuous claims that evangelical Christians are planning to replace democracy, this utter silence on actual theocratic doctrine is another clue. It tells us who and what the BCSE are really opposing.
Conclusion
OK, so that's 8 out of 10 who I was able to identify as being atheists. And generally of the militant variety. Let's throw that into the pot. Of the top ten leaders at launch-time, all the website editors, and the top ten most active members in the forum, there are 20 out of 23 whom I have identified as atheists - and generally of the militant, campaigning variety.
Let's run a similar calculation to one we've run before. The number of atheists in Britian is sometimes estimated at around 10%. Let's be generous, and say 15%. Let's be very generous, and ignore the "militant" factor. Let's do some maths. If you choose 23 people at random, the probability that it just happens that 20 or more would be atheists, is approximately equal to... just under 1 chance in 27 trillion. Or, just under 2 million times less likely than winning the UK's national lottery.
So - is the BCSE's make-up a coincedence? Is their science really independent of their religion? The answer's not hard to work out...
David Anderson
Non-anonymous factual corrections welcomed by e-mail. Comments are moderated - please read my comments policy.
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