The Creation Museum trip just got better

My friend Mark pointed out to me that we’ll have some wonderful programming during our visit to the Creation Museum with PZ. Emphasis mine.

“The Ultimate Proof of Creation” with Dr. Jason Lisle

When: Fri, August 7, 12pm – 1pm
The Ultimate Proof of Creation There is a defense for creation that is powerful, conclusive, and has no true rebuttal. As such, it is an irrefutable argument—an “ultimate proof” of the Christian worldview. This presentation will equip you to engage an unbeliever, even a staunch atheist, using proven techniques. Read more about the accompanying book here: http://www.answersingenesis.org/PublicStore/product/Ultimate-Proof-of-Creation-The,6134,186.aspx

Dr. Jason Lisle did graduate work at the University of Colorado where he earned a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics. He grew up in a Christian home, and because his family believed in the authority and accuracy of the Bible, he had little difficulty in dealing with the evolutionary bombardment he received in school. To learn more about Dr. Lisle please visit: http://www.answersingenesis.org/events/bio.aspx?Speaker_ID=40

This event is free with paid museum admission or Museum membership. Seating is first come first served.

Good luck, Dr. Lisle. You’ll have a room full of staunch atheists on which to test your hypothesis. This also sounds delightfully hilarious, but I’m not willing to pay four dollars for it:

“It’s Designed to Do What it Does Do Workshop” with Buddy Davis

When: Fri, August 7, 1:30pm – 2:30pm


Join Buddy Davis to explore God’s unique design of many different animals. He will show how God should be given the glory instead of time, matter, and chance. In this one hour workshop, you will have fun with several activities including sculpting a Tyrannosaurus Rex head from clay. You will also have the opportunity to sing-along with Buddy, including the ever popular “It’s Designed to Do What it Does Do.” Come learn how God has designed different creatures in unique ways to do what they should do.

Gifted by God in many ways, Buddy Davis is a sculptor, speaker, and singer/songwriter for Answers in Genesis. An adventurer and paleo-artist he leads very popular children’s workshops and plays many acoustic instruments. To learn more about Buddy please visit: http://www.answersingenesis.org/events/bio.aspx?Speaker_ID=5 Ticket cost is just $4 with museum admission; a discounted rate is available for Museum members. This workshop is sponsored by Cedarville University.

Note to self: Cedarville “University” promotes crackpot religious artists who seem to think sculpting dinosaurs is proof for creation.

Unfortunately we won’t be there long enough to see “Ape-Men: The Grand Illusion” and “The Hearing Ear and the Seeing Eye,” the latter having such probing questions as “Why don’t your ears see, and why can’t you hear with your fingers?” I guess now I’ll never know! Oh wait, I know what the answer is. God. Right.

Three more weeks until the trip. I can’t wait!

August will be amazing

It’s official! I’ll be attending the Secular Student Alliance conference in Columbus, OH from August 7th to the 9th and I’ll be joining PZ in his visit to the Creation Museum on that Friday. Wooo! I’m pretty sure this will be the most amazing trip to the Creation Museum ever, so I’m super excited. Totally going to get a photo of me riding a dinosaur and then sobbing in front of the evolution exhibits.

You don’t need to be a member or a student to go to the SSA conference or the Creation Museum trip. Midwestern people, you totally need to come. I mean, I’ll be there. …Well, okay, more importantly PZ and Hemant and Dan Barker will be there. I just like to think I’m that important.

If you can’t come, you should at least think about donating to the SSA. It’ll help counteract the money we’re giving Ken Ham.

Q&A – Defeating Creationism

“Jen,

Hey, I’m a big fan of your blog. I just thought of an interesting Q&A for when you are taking your week off: How best can we defeat Creationism? Creationism was completely defeated in the scientific community more than a hundred years ago and in the US court system numerous times in the last 50 years. However, Creationism still has a very strong grip among everyday US Americans. The polls have consistently shown that roughly 50% of all Americans believe that humans were created in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. What can we do to reverse this trend?

thanks,

Jason

http://chaoskeptic.blogspot.com“

Wow, you know, you guys could have thrown me a couple gimme questions. Nope, right onto solving the creationism problem! Haha, well, I’m just an undegrad with some odd ideas floating around in my head, so I’m unlikely to have the best solution, but I’ll at least ramble about what I think for a bit.

I honestly don’t think acceptance of evolution will increase in the US until religious belief decreases. We already see this trend among young people, which gives me hope that it will continue with time. I know a lot of scientists will argue that acceptance of evolution (and science in general, for that matter) is compatible with religious belief – but I’m going to have to side with the likes of PZ and Coyne and Dawkins and say this isn’t true. Scientific thinking is inherently opposed to religious thinking. Science is based on facts and experimentation and tweaking our idea of what is true so it becomes more and more accurate. Religion is based on belief and faith, where even facts that prove you wrong can be brushed away with some nonsensical mental acrobatics.

So how do we defeat creationism and intelligent design? Defeat religious and supernatural belief. We need to promote skeptical, critical, scientific thinking, and that’s incredibly hard to do when people still believe in miracles and ghosts and heaven and all other sorts of nonsense. Thankfully as people become less and less religious, they’ll probably accept evolution more and more. I think there will always be the extreme evangelical creationists, but the best we can do it make it so they’re a crazy little minority. Once we get to that stage we can start bugging the liberal Christians (since we’re talking about the US) to really understand evolution.

What do I mean by that? There are plenty of Christians who do believe in evolution. While I’m glad they exist, they either don’t fully understand the implications of evolution, they interpret the Bible so liberally that what it says doesn’t even matter anymore, or they’re doing some impressive doublethink (which I think most liberal Christians get particularly adept at). Religious people who attempt to reconcile their beliefs by saying God “guided” evolution do not really believe in evolution by natural selection. They believe in evolution by some omnipotent being fiddling with mutations, which is not scientific thinking. At least they won’t get in the way of evolution being taught in schools, but they still don’t really understand it. I think the only religious people who can really accept evolution are the ones who take a deistic view of God – that he decided to let evolution be the mechanism of how all the variety of life came to be. But that still doesn’t make any sense. The whole beauty of evolution is that it is a natural process. It didn’t need some god to create it, because it works based on chemistry and physics and probability etc etc.

And now I’m just rambling. Let me summarize: It’s going to be freaking hard.

Three more days until Seattle!

Thursday I’ll be traveling to Evolution 2009 in Idaho, but I’ll be stranded in Seattle for about 9 hours waiting for my flight. These seem like the things I definitely must do while there:

– See the Space Needle, go up for look
– Pike Place Fish Market (weee flying fish!)
– Pacific Science Center
– Original Starbucks
– Freemont Troll
– Go frown by the Discovery Institute’s door

I know you guys probably all think I should try to get in the Discovery Institute…but I know I’d fail. Apparently two other female atheist bloggers got a tour through lies and subterfuge and were shown around by Casey Luskin (posts here, here, and here). Other than white lies with friends, I’m uncontrollably honest…so I don’t think I could go in acting like a big supporter of intelligent design. Even if I tried I probably wouldn’t be able to keep a straight face. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure the second I tell them I’m on my way to an Evolution conference they’d slam the door in my face (er, well, keep it locked).

Oh well. Maybe if I’m feeling especially brave that day I’ll at least try – just need to remember not to wear one of my atheist/sciencey shirts. I drew this to sum up how I’m feeling (click for larger):
Of course the little devil has to be a blogger.

Oh no…not another bad book

I think I’ve set up a horrible trend for myself. A biology grad student that I’m friends with gave me this book today, saying I’d probably appreciate the ridiculousness:
Noooooooooooooo, not Ken Ham!!! What do I do? Do I try to ignore it? Do I even bother reading it? Just skimming the book was fairly amusing, in a scary sort of way. It’s full of ridiculous cartoons and illustrations, which makes sense for the target audience…ahem. I actually have good books to read…but the stupidity emanating from my backpack is calling me. Gaaah! At least the Professor and the Dominatrix was just a failed work of fiction, not a book of fiction that people actually believe to be true.

Well? Should I be masochistic again, or hide this book away and forget about it?

A BS in Biology without Evolution

If you are at least vaguely aware of the Evolution/Creationism debate, you know there’s a lot of things wrong with biology education in the United States. You have rallying cries to “teach the controversy” (which doesn’t exist), but thankfully those are being shot down more and more often. There are some students who will never even hear the word “evolution” throughout high school. I know in my high school freshman biology class, which every student had to take, we never mentioned the topic. Once I got to AP Bio my senior year, we covered it well, but that’s only 50 students out of a school of 1400 – and those are the ones who are actually interested in biology, so they have a better chance of accepting evolution anyway! Why aren’t we teaching it when we have the chance to reach everyone?

Well, even when dealing with Biology majors in college, we fail at that.

Now, I’m sure some universities do a great job at teaching evolution to their Bio majors. Obviously since I’ve only attended Purdue, that’s the one example I have – but I’m sure their craptacular methods apply to other universities. It’s especially disappointing since Purdue likes to tout itself as this big Engineering/Science Research I University, yet it can’t even convince all of its Bio majors to accept evolution, not to mention other science programs here.

What’s the problem? The only time evolution is taught in a class required by all Bio sub disciplines is BIOL 121. That’s the introductory class you take the fall of your freshman year, and a whooping four class periods (that’s less than 3.5 hours) are devoted to evolution. While it’s explained well, it’s still so cursory that I knew more about evolution just because I was a nerd and perused Talk Origins in high school.

Other required biology classes will briefly mention evolution, but not in a way that teaches it to a class. You can see some students rolling their eyes when a professor says something like “You can see how this could have evolved.” I’ve had multiple students – some in the very top of the program – tell me that biology courses at Purdue have actually strengthened their faith in God and creationism. They claim that learning all the complexities of biology prove God had to have a hand in it (and then my brain subsequently explodes after hearing “Irreducibly Complex” for the bajillionth time).

Most of the Bio majors allow you to choose the official Evolution class (BIOL 580) as an elective, but that’s only one of your choices out of maybe 20 to 30. And if you don’t accept evolution, how likely are you to take a graduate level class about it? I think the scariest realization pops up when you look at two Bio majors in particular:

Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology:
You think this would be evolution-crazy since, you know, it’s the Evolution degree, right? Well, not so much. You’re required to take 580-Evolution, but that’s all. The only two other evolution related classes are Evolution of Behavior and Sex & Evolution, but you can pick your classes such that you don’t have to take those. They’re just suggestions. They don’t even include any of the human evolution courses offered through anthropology as options for your degree…and past that, I don’t think there are really any other evolution courses at Purdue. I don’t know about you, but it’s a little unnerving that someone can get a degree with “Evolution” in the title after only taking one class.

Biology Education:
This, however, is the scariest of the two. You’d think with all our educational woes we’d desperately try to train a new generation of Biology educators who could properly teach evolution. Well, we don’t. Evolution is one of 47 electives a Bio Ed major can choose, and even though there’s an Education course specifically about teaching Evolution, they’re not required to take it. It’s not even listed as a biology elective – it would just be a general elective if you had any free time (haha, free time! What a ridiculous idea). I would think this is pretty damn important for a future biology teacher to know.

I guess this explains how you can still get rogue creationist teachers who feel that it’s their duty to sabotage teaching evolution with their own beliefs, even when the curriculum is pro-evolution. You can graduate from many places with a degree in Biology and still not even have an elementary grasp of evolution. This is a Serious Problem. All the biologists and scientists who lament about our country’s rejection of evolution need to put the education of Average Joe on hold for a bit and start worrying about students. Professors especially need to speak up. Now, they’re not the blame – the professors who do teach evolution do a great job, and curricula are riddled with bureaucratic bullshit. But they’re our best hope for having some say in the matter. So to any biology professors out there, please fight to ensure all biology majors take at least one comprehensive course in evolution. Even if most of them are bound for med school, we can’t hope to educate the public until we educate our own kind first.

Creationists make Jen’s brain go boom

This gem of a letter was published in the opinion section of our student newspaper today. It’s kind of hilarious until you realize that it probably isn’t a Poe, and this student is attending a Big Ten university that prides itself in science.

Evolutionists fear possibility of God’s existence

In reference to Ms. DeWeese’s March 31 column, thank you so much for writing on an important subject. Unfortunately, Ms. DeWeese’s approach does not permit open debate about the origin of our universe and of mankind. Evolution has many gaps that should be openly discussed in the classroom. The Darwinists are terrified of scrutinizing evolution and fear the possibility that God exists. Fossils don’t even prove that an organism reproduced, let alone evolved. Evolution is a theory that argues that everything came from nothing. Knowing this, they are justified in their fear of debate.

I thought that the foundation of science was questioning. If schools insist on teaching the philosophy of evolution, then there should be an open discussion. Darwin’s book was not called “Adaption of Species”; it was called “Origin of Species.” If you choose to believe that you came from nothing, where did you get your value? If evolution is true, then people are just an accident. Evolution says the strongest should live, and the weak should die. I believe that all people have intrinsic value because they were created by God. I recognize that my belief in the Bible is faith, just as evolutionists’ belief in “Origin of Species” is faith. If evolutionists are so confident that their theories are factual, then wouldn’t they encourage discussions about the weaknesses of evolution?

As a high school student, I bought into the ideology of believing in God and evolution. After exploring opposing arguments, I realized that belief in God and evolution are logically incongruent. A director cannot use an undirected mechanism to create. While this discussion cannot be settled in 300 words, it’s a reminder that there are two sides. Even though evolutionists will attack the intelligence of theists, there is another side of the story. It’s worth considering.

John Westercamp
Junior, School of Management

I don’t even know if it’s worth replying any more, but I feel duty-bound. I’ve had about three pro-evolution letters published since I started school here. The idea that people can spew this kind of imbecilic bullshit and not have someone lay the smack down on them saddens me. At the same time, I have physics homework to do, and the only response I can come up with is “You are an ignorant baffoon, please do not procreate.”

I have a feeling that wouldn’t help the situation much.

Creationists make Jen's brain go boom

This gem of a letter was published in the opinion section of our student newspaper today. It’s kind of hilarious until you realize that it probably isn’t a Poe, and this student is attending a Big Ten university that prides itself in science.

Evolutionists fear possibility of God’s existence

In reference to Ms. DeWeese’s March 31 column, thank you so much for writing on an important subject. Unfortunately, Ms. DeWeese’s approach does not permit open debate about the origin of our universe and of mankind. Evolution has many gaps that should be openly discussed in the classroom. The Darwinists are terrified of scrutinizing evolution and fear the possibility that God exists. Fossils don’t even prove that an organism reproduced, let alone evolved. Evolution is a theory that argues that everything came from nothing. Knowing this, they are justified in their fear of debate.

I thought that the foundation of science was questioning. If schools insist on teaching the philosophy of evolution, then there should be an open discussion. Darwin’s book was not called “Adaption of Species”; it was called “Origin of Species.” If you choose to believe that you came from nothing, where did you get your value? If evolution is true, then people are just an accident. Evolution says the strongest should live, and the weak should die. I believe that all people have intrinsic value because they were created by God. I recognize that my belief in the Bible is faith, just as evolutionists’ belief in “Origin of Species” is faith. If evolutionists are so confident that their theories are factual, then wouldn’t they encourage discussions about the weaknesses of evolution?

As a high school student, I bought into the ideology of believing in God and evolution. After exploring opposing arguments, I realized that belief in God and evolution are logically incongruent. A director cannot use an undirected mechanism to create. While this discussion cannot be settled in 300 words, it’s a reminder that there are two sides. Even though evolutionists will attack the intelligence of theists, there is another side of the story. It’s worth considering.

John Westercamp
Junior, School of Management

I don’t even know if it’s worth replying any more, but I feel duty-bound. I’ve had about three pro-evolution letters published since I started school here. The idea that people can spew this kind of imbecilic bullshit and not have someone lay the smack down on them saddens me. At the same time, I have physics homework to do, and the only response I can come up with is “You are an ignorant baffoon, please do not procreate.”

I have a feeling that wouldn’t help the situation much.