It’s the obligatory annual newspaper article on creationists confronted with evidence. In this case, young ignoramuses from Liberty University are filed through the Smithsonian Institution to practice closing their minds, while a newspaper reporter echoes their rationalizations. I hate these exercises in bad journalism: there is absolutely no critical thinking going on here, either among the creationists or the reporter writing it up. An example:
“I love it here,” said Ross, who has a doctorate in geosciences from the University of Rhode Island. “There’s something romantic about seeing the real thing.”
Modern creationists don’t deny the existence of dinosaurs but believe that God made them, and all animals, on the same sixth day that he created man. In fact, Ross’s only real beef in the fossil hall is with the 30-foot lighted column that is a timeline marking 630 million years of geology. As a young-Earth creationist, he asserts that the vast majority of the rocks and fossils were formed during Noah’s flood about 4,000 years ago. Most paleontologists date the T-Rex to 65 million years ago.
You know, it is possible to be a Christian and still have a rational respect for the evidence. Take, for example, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, an opponent of evolution in the 19th century, but also someone who worked out details of the geological column and determined that the idea that there was a single, defining world-wide flood was untenable. Or Charles Lyell, who struggled with the idea of evolution because it conflicted with his religious beliefs, but who was a major force in bringing about the understanding of geology as a product of continually acting forces. Or the Reverend William Buckland, who believed in a global flood, but regarded it as insufficient to account for the wealth of geological complexity — he would not have looked at the timeline and tried to compress it into the product of a single biblical event.
These were people working almost 200 years ago. The question of flood geology has long been settled — it’s wrong. And the evidence has only gotten stronger since for an old earth and a complex history. Marcus Ross is a man standing among a collection of some of the best and strongest and most thoroughly vetted and cross-checked evidence that directly contradicts what he claims, and he is spluttering out ignorant uncomprehending gibberish. He has a doctorate in the geosciences, we are always told, but he learned nothing. That ought to be the story here, about the peculiar psychology of these purblind creationists, but the journalist just let’s it slide by.
How bad is the ‘education’ these poor students receive at Liberty University? This anecdote tells the tale.
Near the end of the “Evolution Trail,” the class showed no signs of being swayed by the polished, enthusiastic presentation of Darwin’s theory. They were surprised, though, by the bronze statue of man’s earliest mammalian ancestor.
“A rat?” exclaimed Amanda Runions, a 21-year-old biochemistry major, when she saw the model of a morganucodon, a rodent-like ancient mammal that curators have dubbed Grandma Morgie. “All this hype for a rat? You’re expecting, like, at least an ape.”
Morganucodon is a genus of early mammals that lived over 200 million years ago. 200 million years ago. We’re talking about the Upper Triassic, in the early part of the Mesozoic. She is expecting apes? She thinks the only animals worth getting excited about must be primates? She is surprised by the fact that paleontology reveals a succession of forms, with the only mammals in the early Mesozoic being small rat-like forms? Oh, dear, don’t introduce her to the Paleozoic, she’ll be shocked at the mere fish that represent our ancestors of the time.
The real story here, the one that the staff writer for the Washington Post ignored, is that Liberty University is victimizing young people like that woman and making them believe that they are biochemistry majors when they’re actually being intellectually abused by an anti-scientific propaganda mill. There was a time when investigative journalism was actually practiced, and this would be an opportunity to expose a disgraceful pseudo-academic fraud.
OT to a degree, but NPR isn’t any better. A few weeks ago they had an imam on to discuss the beheading, by her husband, of the woman in Buffalo. The imam said that viewing the crime as an Islamic crime was wrong, since the Koran makes no mention of honor killings. Of course, no one from NPR mentioned that muslims also base their stupidity on the hadith and sunna.
I used to go to church, but “[there was] nothing balanced [t]here. [It was] completely, 100 percent [Christianity]-based”.
If creos were really interested in intellectual balance (rather than use it as a cry of persecution), they’d right the grievous wrong I note above.
I can almost hear the question “Where are the fossil saddles for the dinosaurs?”
“A rat?” So deep is the misinformation these people are adrift in.
“But I thought they said we came from munkees.”
The sad thing is that most of those kids are probably not going to do well in the actual real world of their careers. I’m sure there are some bright minds that are ultimately going to go to waste.
What a wonderful blog. Spot on. Many of these creationists have to know on some level that their world view is bunk. Or that other people will treat their world view as such. This is why many of these true believers hide themselves in the halls of places like Liberty University, or bible colleges. Its a sad way to live the only life you get.
They’ve been given all of the bad ways of thinking prior to dealing with the evidence. That was my experience. I was fortunate in desiring to learn on my own.
So they aren’t persuaded by the evidence at all. Homologies? Common designer. Succession of life forms? Ecological zonation.
It does take some indoctrination to close minds enough to fail to make reasonable connections between the data. That’s why they have that indoctrination, because “not looking at the data correctly” could “lead one astray.”
The only solution is the teaching of science and the importance of treating all data similarly (as well as pointing out how stupid homologous “common design”–which includes very dissimilar design when the organisms are not related) would be, if true). And many are “protected” from having to learn the rest of science as well.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
I should note that I am in no way in favour of ‘intellectual balance’ or whatever the fuck it is that morons and journalists (“Is there a difference? We’ll find out at 11”) blather on about.
Hearing ‘both’ sides is a concept appropriate for playground disputes. That it’s carried forward as some sort of banner cry for integrity merely shows how out of touch with modern science and knowledge so many of our institutions are.
The article does have a use. It tags Liberty University students as having skull caps of boiled leather. Nothing useful can penetrate once the indoctrination has been completed.
Once the tag is in place, anyone can evaluate a student from that univerity with the prejudice thus achieved. This will make hiring decisions easier. Also, college selection criteria and even dating choices.
“You went to Liberty? Hunh, I know something about them.”
Ugh, what a display. I work across the mall form NH museum, and I would love to know when they are there. I’m sure I could come up with some questions.
OT: http://www.theonion.com/content/news/lovecraftian_school_board_member?utm_source=a-section
I love that she thinks she’s better than a ‘rat’.
I’m afraid SaraJ is probably wrong. It is entirely possible to do biochemistry without acknowledging evolution. I’ve known reasonably successful biochemists doing good work on current problems while maintaining that god made all the “stuff” of life 6000 years ago. Their minds are simply (and completely) closed to anything that challenges their faith in imaginary beings.
She doesn’t have proper respect for rats! Rodents are really successful and very cool.
She needs to go to a real school.
Do they have primordial ooze there? I would love to play with some primordial ooze.
Speaking of Flood Geology, I was watching “How the Earth Was Made” on the science channel last night, and I was astounded to see that the rocks under New York City were Manhattanite schists. You can’t tell me that’s a co-incidence – Manhattan rocks on Manhattan island? Teh LORD must have put them there!
(reiterating PZ’s comment)
And in doing so demonstrates that he somehow survived a PhD, with a very solid advisor (Fastovsky), and in a geosciences department, while apparently learning absolutely no petrology, sedimentology, stratigraphy, paleontology, structural geology, or geochronology. What a success story.
Not true, since there isn’t any such animal. Now, it is true that most paleontologists accept a geological age of about 68-65Ma (maybe a little longer) for T. rex, but I don’t know what the hell this T-Rex thing is (okay, I’m through being a dink now, although I do have a desire to smack the writer in the head).
Question for Pharyngites. I do not have a Science education. I majored in theater and for 25 years I have worked in the theater. Do people who get undergraduate degrees in the sciences, in the case of this girl bio-chemistry, typically go on to do science work? How will that that be possible for her? If my professors had taught me that God makes the lights come on, and God makes the sound cue happen at just the right moment for Lear’s monologue, I would not have found much success in my field. Are there any stats on how their ‘science’ grads find work?
A bit of a window into the causes of creationism/ID:
Here we’re so used to the convergence of ignorance, particular kinds of religion, and creationism, that it becomes difficult to disentangle cause and effect.
In Europe, though, we can see that ignorance and disregard for science can be a greater factor than religion.
Unfortunately, at Liberty University [sic], ignorance is as assiduously taught in some areas, as knowledge is taught in other areas. Only ignorance of evolution and of geology serves their religion.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
That is an educational disgrace.
Every time I encounter this phenomenon (museum trips by creationists with specialist guides to “reinterpret” the data for them) I die a little inside. It really is the most terrifying thing about our species.
We can be confronted with the data, with the actual facts, we can encompass it, understand it and integrate them into our previous understanding of the world synthesising a more accurate understanding with every forward step taken.
And yet there are those of us determined to say “Nuh uh!” when the data is presented.
How the fuck can anyone do the research to get a PhD in geosciences and a) not be confronted with the “real thing” and also honestly remain a YEC? How can a biochemistry undergrad not be confronted by this sort of data (from a biochemical perspective), almost daily? It beggars belief. I know no university or system is perfect, but what the fuck are these people being taught? How slack are the degree programmes? A YEC with a PhD in geosciences can only have obtained that degree dishonestly. It’s simply not possible to do otherwise AFAICT.
ARGH! I am just disgusted.
Louis
I have to wonder what the job prospects are for “Science” grads from Liberty. There can’t be that many openings at the Heritage Foundation.
I agree with PZ that the journalist in this case (and journalists in general) should do more than regurgitate what their sources tell them. But articles like this still serve a very useful purpose. By reporting it straight with no commentary, they provide a forum for creationists to show the world exactly how they think. It’s the world’s job to respond appropriately. Unfortunately, the U.S. populace is largely ignorant about evolution. But that’s not the journalist’s fault or responsibility.
Re polluting young minds: I showed up briefly this morning at the local city hall (Ottawa, Canada) to sit with some freethinkers trying to impress upon the local government that they really should let the atheist bus campaign run here, despite the anxiety of certain members of the transit committee who’ve opposed it (much to my embarrassment–honest–we’ve a progressive population here–really…)
There was some evangelical church group there, too, out on the sidewalk in the rain, waving placards, some guy talking to reporters about how they just don’t want people to go to hell.
What really struck me was how young many of the church group were. Lotta school age kids there–guessing early high school, late elementary, looking at them.
I’d come out to check them out, stand with a guy who was playing a guitar, singing a few songs in support of freedom of speech. Some little black guy musta been ten or twelve or something from the evangelical group was apparently elected to come over to me, try to press a pamphlet into my hand.
Almost wanted to say to him: ‘Kid, seriously, just run for it. These people are gonna mess you up.’
Didn’t. Just politely declined the pamphlet (recognized it as one I’d already seen anyway–it had already been passed around the group I was with, with some amusement).
But man, I couldn’t help echoing a certain line in my head again: ‘What chance has he, after all?’
AS far as I can glean from their website, Liberty doesn’t actually offer any evolution courses, so we shouldn’t be too surprised at inane comments like Amanda’s. Yet, I am.
Thanks PZ – it’s posts like this that make this site one of my favorites.
Robert G. –
I am sure you are right and some of them will do fine in their prospective careers. That is why I used the qualifier “most” in my sentence about how I felt students from Liberty would not do well in the real world of science.
I look at it from a hiring perspective. If I have 2 people apply for a job as a biologist and one of them went to Liberty and the other one went to, say, Harvard, but both are otherwise equally qualified… who do you think I am going to hire?
Speaking as an engineer who uses geological information, I just can’t imagine how anyone could get a PhD in geoscience, & yet believe that the Earth is about 6000 years old. The cognitive dissonances created by their ideology conflicting with their studies would’ve hurt, surely?
Someone get Amanda a copy of “Your Inner Fish”, ASAP.
But. . . but. . . Matt Nisbet just told us that “The elite national papers remain the go-to source for coverage of science“!
The charade of granting Doctorates to people who fundamentally disbelieve the Science has to stop. Marcus Ross, who was also profiled in the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/12/science/12geologist.html) is someone who should never have been granted his PhD. I would like to know who the examiners were that failed to ask the question:
“What do YOU think happened to the abundant Mosasaurs 65 million years ago?”
The examiners should not have accepted weasel answers like “the evidence suggests …”, but demanded a personal statement. I though this was standard in oral examination for a PhD, and at that point Mr Ross either has to lie, or bear witness to his true belief. While there may be many scientifically acceptable hypotheses – Noah’s flood is NOT one of them. If he answered with one of the scientific hypotheses, then he is lying – since this is not his personal opinion. If he answered using Noah’s flood – he would have been politely shown the door. Either way he should have failed the oral and been refused accreditation.
Before I get pilloried for advocating some enforced orthodoxy, as PZ pointed out 200 years ago there were religious naturalists who would have passed this test, because they did believe in the evidence that pointed to a very old Earth.
I don’t care so much about Bachelor’s or Masters degrees, but a PhD should be awarded to those who have and intend to advance our understanding in the field. There’s a great deal of status that should go with holding a Doctorate, and Mr Ross and his ilk are arrogantly lying in order to obtain this credential. Institutions should be allowed to deny a candidate their PhD if it is clear that they have lied to the examiners.
I too have been puzzled by the concrete-like mental barriers necessary to effectively compartmentalize and thus maintain two diametrically opposed modes of thought. My solution is to group people who know something of, or even work in science into two groups: scientists and technicians. A scientist is someone who appreciates the deep implications of their particular discipline, and who actively integrates those implications into their world view. On the other hand, a technician would be someone who knows how to use certain elements of science for some specific and restricted purpose, but never really think how the tools they use actually work (even in research), and thus experience no cognitive dissonance. The walls of mental separation are reinforced because holding the contrary thoughts provide emotional security and addresses existential questions for them.
I wouldn’t be too hard on the journalist — I thought the message was subtle, but came through pretty well:
So the students are being taught to expect that an ape would be identified as the earliest mammal. Elephants, lions, wolves, hippos.. us.. all from an ape. That is what they are being taught is the message of evolution, that any animal can evolve into anything else — maybe an ape could even evolve into a tree.
If I was at that museum (which I love, as even the boulders out front are testement to evolution) and saw the creationists trooping through, I would indeed tag along, just to see how they do it. How can they look at all that evidence and still not even understand the simplest thing about descent with modification. Sigh. At least maybe some of them will keep their eyes and minds open.
Chris @ #16: One of the favorite tricks of denialists in any field is to trot out a scientist to back their claims — but almost invariably, the scientist in question will turn out to have a specialty that is totally different from the field being discussed.
In the creationism game, the creos are notorious for finding engineers and pushing them as scientific experts on evolution and biology, even though the engineers usually don’t know a lick of biology (or worse, are Google PhDed).
“Most paleontologists…” – wtf
This may sound like a No True Scotsman argument but isn’t that part of the job spec?
Also, to balance the T Rex pedantry, I’d add rat pedantry. Granny’s more like a shrew. I mean the teeth. The species is even named for its teeth, ffs.
That girl is 21? Musta beeo held back.
She thought that all mammals on Earth are descended from apes? I knew creationists were experts at coming up with ridiculous misconceptions of evolution, but that’s a bit much.
“Liberty University is victimizing young people like that woman and making them believe that they are biochemistry majors when they’re actually being intellectually abused…”
I agree completely.
I just wrote an email to the journalist who wrote that article for the Washington Post, complaining that he and his colleagues aren’t doing us any favors by assuming there is an actual debate on the subject. Stop calling it a debate!!!
Re: Job Prospects
Most of these folks will get jobs TEACHING SCIENCE!!! At private christian K-12 schools or as home-schooling parents, producing another generation of kids who don’t understand science.
Only the few that lie their way through to a doctorate end up teaching at Liberty or working for the DI.
Sadly, that was the kind of college grads who staffed the Bush Administration. You may recall, Monica Googling and hundreds more like her reportedly were 4th tier Xian U grad. There ought to be safeguards that prevent that from happening in the future
Most Christians are less like Pat Robertson, and more like Homer Simpson… it’s just that the wackos are the loudest….
There are few “good” University student-run newspapers- and when they see drivel from “real” news outlets- it sets precedence of what’s considered to be good journalism (which is anything but good).
I’d still hire the graduate of PCC over the Liberty graduate.
The cool thing about morganucodon is that it had two jaw joints, one of which eventually became the mammalian middle ear. So what they had there was a wonderful example of a transitional fossil which according to creationists isn’t supposed to exist. I wish someone had been there to point that out to them.
Actually I don’t think the article was that bad. It showed these people to be the dingbats they are.
#16 Chris asked
“Do people who get undergraduate degrees in the sciences, in the case of this girl bio-chemistry, typically go on to do science work?”
The unfortunate truth of the matter is that very few people with REAL science degrees manage to get work as practicing scientists, there just aren’t the jobs there. The competition is so great that most are forced to change career directions simply in order to make ends meet.
The real irony is illustrated by Marcus Ross himself – the Noahs ark believing paleontologist. He switched from ‘real science’ to ‘creation science’ once he had his degree and has a permanent position almost immediately in Liberty University – something he would have found virtually impossible to achieve in such a short space of time if he’d remained in normal academia (even without renouncing modern biology). In other words the competition for biologist jobs in Christian ‘Universities’ is much less than in real Universities and so creation scientists ironically have much better chance of employment than those of us who stick to the facts.
there was an interesting article on why journalism has gotten so wishy-washy over at Daily Kos, particularly in regards to CNBC. “Balanced, and fair journalism” at the expense of stating the truth and calling bs has fallen victim to the media’s need for “access.” The big names won’t talk to people who pooh-pooh them, and if you can’t talk to a big name, your particular rag is worth nothing.
It’s become less about the news and more about PR.
They give the time of day to idiots like this for fear of alienating themselves from their wider sources of info.
Bone Oboe #3
Dinosaur saddle discovered. Irrefutable proof that dinosaur and man lived together.
Surely the journalist should have asked “_Why_ are you expecting `at least an ape’?”. I can barely imagine what the answer could be.
Here’s my fav comment so far from the article:
SamWainwright wrote:
spidermean2 WROTE – Yes, the soil just turned into humans THRU TIME. YES, THRU TIME. THRU TIME.
————-
Obviously you’ve never heard of Stanley Miller or Hal Urey. Look up the Miller–Urey experiment at Wikipedia or other sources and all the experiments done since then. After all they did their work in 1952.
The Miller–Urey experiment (or Urey–Miller experiment)was an experiment that simulated hypothetical conditions thought at the time to be present on the early Earth, and tested for the occurrence of chemical evolution. Specifically, the experiment tested Soviet scientist Alexander Oparin’s and J. B. S. Haldane’s hypothesis that conditions on the primitive Earth favored chemical reactions that synthesized organic compounds from inorganic precursors. Considered to be the classic experiment on the origin of life, it was conducted in 1952 and published in 1953 by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey at the University of Chicago.
Re-analysis published in October 2008 of material from the experiments showed 22 amino acids rather than 5 were created in one apparatus.
You need to learn about the basic building blocks of life – Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen, Hydrogen. While you’re at it study about enzymes, peptides and proteins.
I believe in God and I am a Christian, but I’m not an idiot. If God created the universe, then he created the laws of physics and works within those laws.
“…that Liberty University is victimizing young people like that woman and making them believe that they are biochemistry majors when they’re actually being intellectually abused by an anti-scientific propaganda mill.”
That really nails it, PZ! Liberty University should be on trial for and found guilty of fraud and shutdown.
The 21 year-old Ms Runion was also confused and disappointed there were no unicorns.
@islandchris (#29): I agree with your underlying sentiment that granting a Ph.D. to someone who doesn’t believe what he’s saying is harmful to society (due to granting them a respected voice) and, well, *icky*. I still have a problem with disqualifying someone who can do the required work on the basis of privately held opinions, however stupid those opinions may be.
To get a Ph.D. from a reputable institution requires that you publish in peer reviewed and respected journals. No one will get a biology doctorate from a real school by publishing in the Journal of Magical Old Men With Beards, so by definition, such a person must have been able to contribute to his field. Whether he has to jump through hoops of tortured logic to sleep at night is really none of my concern.
Besides, it’s rare that you have an Einstein who single-handedly redefines a field. It’s far more likely that knowledge is built over the contributions of dozens or hundreds of people working on similar problems. This guy might make a significant step that allows someone else to make a further leap, even if our fundiebot wouldn’t be willing to make the entire leap himself.
*punctuation geek*
“but the journalist just let’s it slide by.”
Shouldn’t be an apostrophe there.
*/punctuation geek*
I expect this sort of nonsensical thinking from Liberty U students but the University of Rhode Island? WTF?
How is it possible for a person to possess a “doctorate in geosciences” from a presumably accredited public university without accepting the basics of science?
Why would Ross even bother getting a science degree instead of one in, say, Xtian apologetics – a field where he won’t be ridiculed by his colleagues.
No.
The very point about science is that (ideally) scientists don’t believe. They parrot precisely what the evidence says, with the precise quantities of uncertainty that come attached to that. There is no such thing as a personal statement in science; personal statements are automatically not science.
I’m sure questions like “what do you think” occur in PhD defenses (I’ve only seen 2 so far and don’t remember them in detail), but that’s just shorthand for “what do you know about the evidence”.
I wonder how many of these Liberty students will end up like Glenn Morton. He got out in the field, saw how geology really works and realized that everything he had been taught by ICR was completely wrong.
This all makes sense what Liberty is doing. The problem is really is no debate within the scientific community about evolution or the age of the Earth. So their solution is to make a diploma mill to produce hack PhDs for their side in their fake debate.
Most likely Amanda will transfer off to a real school, get another degree in something easy and doesn’t conflict with her beliefs and then BS everyone she is a biochemist from this real school.
I don’t think we can disqualify someone like Ross from getting a PhD for the reasons that Deon Garrett outlined. Its rather unfortunate that he wasn’t exactly being honest in what he believed in but, like all science, progress is made by what is published rather than what is in the mind of individual scientists. If his published data was sound and he defended it well then he has a right to a PhD. Its not as if this is a major problem in biology, it’s very seldom we hear of such creationists getting that far (real biology to your average fundie is like garlic to your average vampire). Besides they are not much use as advocates of creationism over evolution in the culture war since they are easily shown to be liars due to their current views being diametrically opposed to that which they published to get the PhD.
@SaraJ
It depends on who ends up in government, doesn’t it? Remember what we learned about staffing at the Justice Department a couple years ago. Real merit can be trumped by ideology if the wrong people get into office, so there’s a scary possibility that people like this would end up serving a future Republican administration. I don’t think it could get so rotten that we’d have a “White House Science Advisor Ben Stein” but it’s clear that delusional people can get cushy government jobs in the right political climate.
But you’re right that the scholars described in this article would never get actual research, geology or biotech jobs. I wonder what the experience of being turned down for such work will be like for these sheltered minds.
Glen Davidson #17 wrote:
We can see that here as well — when we enter the insulated, isolated pseudoscientific world of “alternative medicine.” The people who believe in “healing energy” and homeopathy seem to have no problem simultaneously accepting that
1.) alt med therapies like reiki are completely scientific, supported by numerous studies, and backed by serious and respected researchers
and yet
2.) science is a dogma, mainstream scientists are close-minded to alternate forms of reality, and personal experience trumps the so-called “experts” and their negative controlled studies.
If chi energy were really “verified by science,” wouldn’t it have gotten the Nobel Prize by now? Ah, but those who award the Nobel Prize are doing science from a different approach — one which hasn’t caught up yet to the ordinary folks. How could all the biologists and other scientists who made so much progress over the last 150 years be so wrong about evolution? Why, they haven’t been doing it from the right perspective — the gee whiz common sense view of the open-minded True Believer.
What I think both the creationists and the alt med proponents are boosting is the idea of good-enough science. IF you have some Phds on your side, if you can point to some studies, if you can throw around science-y words, then your science is good-enough. It’s science as done with a different approach, but just as valid as the other approach. In fact, it’s better, because it gets the right answer.
To their way of thinking, there’s not one scientific method converging on one understanding of reality. There’s lots and lots of ways of doing science, and they get different results. You get to pick which science you will follow, just like you get to pick which religion you will follow.
And no cognitive dissonance, because it’s good-enough.
I’m about two-thirds of my way through a Biochemistry degree at a decent British University. I just don’t see how this happens. The evidence for evolution in biochemistry is everywhere – and I have to say pretty obvious. Even protein sequence homology between closely related species should be enough!
“If it’s really true that the museum at Liberty University has dinosaur fossils which are labeled as being 3,000 years old, then that is an educational disgrace. It is debauching the whole idea of a university, and I would strongly encourage any members of Liberty University who may be here to leave and go to a proper univeristy.”
-Richard Dawkins
“There are people who believe that dinosaurs and men lived together. That they roamed the Earth at the same time. There are museums that children go to, in which they build dioramas to show them this. And what this is, purely and simply, is a clinical psychotic reaction. They are crazy. They are stone…cold…f***…nuts. I can’t be kind about this, because these people are watching The Flintstones as if it were a documentary.”
-Lewis Black
and in the child abuse section. saw this article while reading the dracula fish article…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/bryonygordon/4966672/Deborah-Drapper-Follow-the-Bible-not-the-Beckhams.html
It could be an extreme case of compartmentalization, but I suspect some of these “PhD creationists” are basically faking it, so they can have a well-paid, secure teaching gig at a fundie school, without competing in the wider academic market.
I mean, who is best equipped to cherry pick the “evidence” for YEC and deny evolution…. someone who is functionally blind to the actual scientific evidence, or someone who knows evolution is the right answer, but is running a scam to deny it?
If this sort of thinking was limited to Liberty U. then I wouldn’t really be concerned. Unfortunately it is not though. This same teaching is going on in hundreds of christian colleges in America. Hundreds.
I know. I went to one.
SLW13 #36
But of course there’s a debate. Similarly, I’m going to write an email complaining to the WaPo for writing the entire article in Luganda, a language understood by only 10 million world-wide.
What’s that? The article in in English, not Luganda? Says you, Stalinist. Why are you so afraid of teaching the controversy?
Two hundred years ago? Leonardo Da Vinci determined that the idea that Noah’s flood was responsible for the observable geologic features was untenable. That was 500 years ago!
I had a student a few years ago who might as well be Ms. Runions. She was a bright girl, but was very limited in critical thinking skills because she constantly questioned herself. She would stop by after class to confirm that she was wrong about what we had been working on. After I pointed out that no, she was quite right (at least 8 or 9 times out of 10), she would still doubt herself.
Guess where daddy insisted his little girl had to go to school…
Next visit they will be bringing pitchforks & torches … it’s their way.
It’s funny how fundamentalists have to embrace a kind of empirical nihilism to support their belief in the existance of a moral absolute.
You know, it is possible to be a Christian and still have a rational respect for the evidence.
What? How? By being a nihilist? Theism depends on ignoring the vast mass of evidence around us, namely that the universe behaves exactly as you’d expect it to if there was no god.
Matt B @ #63 wrote:
There are certainly hundreds but there are also nominally christian colleges and universities that do an excellent job. I teach at one where our chaplain, a good friend, will tell my evolution students, if there is a “choice” of “answers” between science and faith, you have to go with the science. I have him come into class because I can tell the students that the genesis stories are a bunch of bunk, or I can have an ordained minister do it…it carries a lot more weight with the students when he does it.
It was very important to me when looking into where to take a job, I found somewhere that my atheism would be respected and wouldn’t be an issue. There are christian colleges that fit this model as well, granted they all don’t. Not being a religious person I don’t really understand their viewpoints but I’d guess they have to be pretty comfortable in their beliefs to accepts things that don’t agree with their bible. Maybe the fundies don’t have quite as much faith as we think they do?
I taught physics one summer at an institute for gifted nerds. The guy they hired to teach biology was a YEC. He was hired on the condition that he stick to real biology. However, he did manage to work some of his BS in on the side “after hours”. Not one kid was hoodwinked. Stupidity is a prerequisite for creationism.
The core of fundamentalism?
http://www.psychologytoday.com/conditions/narcissistic.html
NBC News has a rather snarky poke at these creotards.
http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Creationists-Take-Over-Natural-History-Museum-Scoff.html
If chi energy were really “verified by science,”
Actually, chi energy (and “traditional chinese medicine”) is conclusively disproved by science. Simply enough – it’s had 2,000+ years to show its efficacy, but we didn’t, during those 2,000+ years, see a significant longevity advantage in China.
Why is it that people can do a meta-analysis of results from tests for the last decade (to try to prove acupuncture works) but a meta-analysis of the “tests” of the last 2,000+ years isn’t significant?
Kryptonic @ #45.
“Nice“.
Well, time to throw in the infidel towel. Since it’s on the ‘ol inert-nuts it’s gotta be troo. Now, in light of this new “evidence” should I start going to church, or power down the laptop and head off in search of a tall glass of dark liquor? One way or the other I’ll end up comfortably numb or comfortably dumb.
Aww shit, I can hear that Narwhal song creeping back into my thoughts again.
Marcus Ranum says: “Theism depends on ignoring the vast mass of evidence around us, namely that the universe behaves exactly as you’d expect it to if there was no god.”
It also behaves exactly as it would if put on auto-pilot by said deity. Spinoza’s God is perfectly consistent with the world we see, just as a lack of deity would be. I don’t have a dog in this fight, but there are principled Xtians.
… I don’t know what the hell this T-Rex thing is …
Yes you do. It is a well-established popular nickname for Tyrannosaurus rex.
Immunologist wrote:
A scientist is someone who appreciates the deep implications of their particular discipline, and who actively integrates those implications into their world view. On the other hand, a technician would be someone who knows how to use certain elements of science for some specific and restricted purpose, but never really think how the tools they use actually work (even in research), and thus experience no cognitive dissonance.
One could hold that attitude and still be functional in a technician-level job, but if I were going to hire a tech, I’d want one who actually liked science enough to understand how the process worked. I’ve known too many truly professional, often-ingenious lab technicians to ever be willing to hire an incurious hack instead.
What the hell else were they expecting?
Really sloppy work, here, on the Smithsonian’s part; mixing up all the laboriously prepared evidence for evolution with the secret evidence of creation by the ancient Rodent God.
“”…at least an ape.”
What the hell else were they expecting?’
A Crocomonkey?
I my be naively optimistic, but I like to hope that the museum got through to a few students. There may be a few in the crowd who believe the evidence about the age of the Earth and evolution by natural selection, but just keep quiet about it due to peer pressure. That’s what happened to me in high school. I just knew not to mention the word “evolution” around certain people. My own church, and the people in it, mostly accepted evolution, but there were a few didn’t. Those few sort of bullied the rest into pretending to agree with them. Those people are the reason that I and many others stopped going to church. I like to hope that the loud bullies don’t necessarily represent the rest of their group.
I wonder if our society will come to the point where children who’ve been indoctrinated so and then come around to reality can sue their parents for damages…
@ Islandchris #29 – you suggest we bring down the thought police on people to guard our precious PhDs? They not only have to understand and analyse material, but make the correct statements of belief about it? Sounds fairly cracked to me.
I know nothing about Dr Ross’ case, incidentally. He may have become a creationist after gaining a doctorate I imagine.
The complaints about the journalism here seem ludicrous to me. The facts of the story are reported, a perfectly adequate sketch of the situation, both particular and more broadly, is drawn. There’s no pro-creationist spin – the reader is allowed to make up their own minds.
The writer stop short of saying “Creationism is wrong.” That would in any case be a result of the paper’s editorial decisions.
And honestly, I fail to see what would be achieved if the masses accepted evolutionary theory as true because the papers told them it was true.
Brownian @ 64:
You’re right. You caught me. I’m an evil Stalinist and sometimes I forget that I have to be polite about every single opinion I hear, no matter how stupid or baseless they are. If I’d gone to Liberty U, I would have already learned this lesson.
Filed under “lame apologetics”
It also behaves exactly as it would if put on auto-pilot by said deity. Spinoza’s God is perfectly consistent with the world we see, just as a lack of deity would be. I don’t have a dog in this fight, but there are principled Xtians
Uh, no. Because to be a “christian” you’re assuming something about the existence of a “christ.” Spinoza’s god is bullshit, too.
Wait, the *rocks* were formed in teh Flood? And the fossils became fossilized by the water? They do know what fossilization *is*, right? What-
Stop it, QD. You’re nitpicking individual details creationism again.
(smacks self)
As a young-Earth creationist, he asserts that the vast majority of the rocks and fossils were formed during Noah’s flood about 4,000 years ago.
How does he explain PYGMIES + DWARFS???
I imagine that the nearest course any of these creationist colleges offer to degree level biology would not be accredited in any proper university in the US, or elsewhere.
It just isn’t tenable to go into advanced level science while maintaining these stupid beliefs. Science is difficult enough anyway without constantly having to tell yourself that it is fundamentally wrong. Learning, say, taxonomy would be impossible if your mental setting were “false” – the real detail is overwhelming without having to construct a “goddidit” cladogram corresponding to every “this is real” one.
I mean, people do study fairies, but there’s nothing internally inconsistent in the evidence for fairies to challenge their initial belief in them.
Ray Ladbury:
Judging from Liberty’s admissions, well, yeah.
As opposed to one of the schools I attended, which is a standard state school.
@Deon Garrett(#50)
I agree wholeheartedly that there’s something profoundly “icky” about REQUIRING a scientist to believe anything in particular – and I certainly accept that ok or even good science can be done by individuals holding bizarre personal viewpoints.
However, we can also consider fields like engineering, or aviation, where we would reasonably want to know that our lives are being entrusted to individuals who meet ALL the standards of the profession. If the Captain of your flight started talked about “warming up the unicorns” prior to take off, there might be an understandable rush to the exits.
I was beyond annoyed with the coverage of Capt. Sullenberger’s skillful landing of his plane in the Hudson River as “Miracle on the Hudson”. I don’t know if Sullenberger is religious (has was raised in an atheist household), but in an interview with Katy Couric he made it clear that in the seconds he had to save everyone his focus was entirely on flying the plane.
I don’t know what the answer is: perhaps we should institute the idea of a LICENCE to practice as a Scientist, so that you can have a PhD, awarded for past achievement, but require a current licence to work as a scientist in situations that require such a licence. We do the same for Engineers and Medical Doctors. In such a situation your licence could be revoked for malpractice, and that might have a sobering effect on fundies getting PhD and subsequently behaving like IDiots.
Marcus Ranum says “Uh, no. Because to be a “christian” you’re assuming something about the existence of a “christ.” Spinoza’s god is bullshit, too.”
And you are assuming you know what they believe without even discussing it with them. Kind o’ bold, ain’t it?
Have you ever even read Spinoza?
To all the douche-nozzles (including you, PZ) bad-mouthing the WaPo reporter: bite me.
It’s not the reporter’s job to challenge the idiocy of the people he’s covering, he just needs to record what he sees and hears accurately. (And heaven forfend he should make the minutest error of fact! You’d be all over him like birds on Tippi Hedren.)
Perhaps it would have been a better read if he’d asked the Jeetards pointed questions (like how a PhD can reconcile YEC with carbon dating), but for all you know — such questions were asked but the answers were unintelligible gibberish. Worse, had he included any resultant nonsense, the article would have become your worst nightmare: a one-sided “debate.”
Anyway, you can go ahead and bite me.
notherfella @ 84:
“The complaints about the journalism here seem ludicrous to me. The facts of the story are reported, a perfectly adequate sketch of the situation, both particular and more broadly, is drawn. There’s no pro-creationist spin – the reader is allowed to make up their own minds.”
I totally disagree. The story doesn’t have a “pro-creationist spin,” but merely by treating creationism neutrally the writer is giving it waaaaay too much credit. Sure, the journalist told us the basic facts of the story, but the whole article assumes at face value that the Liberty U kids were there to seriously “confront” evolution. Which is bullshit. The students quoted in that article clearly have no freaking clue what evolution is or how it really operates. Why is this guy reporting on a “debate” where one side of the argument doesn’t even understand what they’re arguing against? That’s not honest or truthful journalism.
The students at liberty and most of the flea bitten “xian colleges” are probably wasting their money. Which is too bad, college and university have gotten way too expensive. For the first time in decades, the percentage of students going on the higher education is declining.
Even a xian secondary school for kids runs 6,000 to 10,000 USD/year.
Higher ed. varies all over the map and between private and public. I doubt one can find a state U. for rock bottom 8,000 to 10,000/year. Private is way more.
If people choose to waste 4 years of their life and 50-100,000 bucks, well, it is a free country.
FWIW, not all xian affiliated universities are anti-science. Evolutionary biology is taught at most mainstream ones, BYU, Notre Dame, most Lutheran, Baylor, Texas Xian, SMU, some Nazarene, Calvin, and so on. Most xians including some evangelicals have realized that believing in the flat, geocentric, 6,000 year old earth has nothing to do with xianity and is counterproductive.
Re DrJ @70:
Who was it that said, “The Bible teaches us how to go into the world, not how the world goes”? And wasn’t it said around the time of Galileo?
What I still find odd is that Liberty University sent me a whole bunch of recruitment information and a fairly generous offer when I graduated from highschool a few years ago… I still have no idea how they would have ever found out about me. I graduated highschool at an international school in Moscow, I’m Canadian, and was not nor ever have been a member of a religious organization (unless I accidentally signed up somewhere… is that possible?). Needless to say, I didn’t take them up on their offer.
SaraJ says: “The sad thing is that most of those kids are probably not going to do well in the actual real world of their careers. I’m sure there are some bright minds that are ultimately going to go to waste.”
Not true. Students of course CRST 390, Origins will have a very bright future as preachers and politicians.
@Ray
Are you asserting that Christians do not, in fact, believe in some sort of Christ figure? Or that a God impregnating a human woman is consistent with “autopilot”?
Just wanted to get that straight.
Also, +1 that Spinoza’s God is bullshit. God and nature are the same, everything happens happens because it must, etc. Pantheistic garbage. People are too obsessed with creating God where it isn’t necessary.
In effect that license already exists, its commonly known as a curiculum vitae (please excuse my Latin) or list of publications. Peer reviewed publication does more than any licensing board would. And like others have pointed out, science is what is published, not what the scientist believes. All the tools and methods of science are designed to eliminate the individual’s beliefs from the work. Not perfectly, for sure, but pretty well.
There’s nothing strange going on here. It’s standard cultural anthropology and analogous to cargo cults. If you belong to a coherent subculture that distrusts outsiders (sinners, atheists, etc.), it’s reasonable to stick with the subculture. There are more outside distractions here than in Melanesia, but one need only trust the leaders.
These aren’t students who’ll go into the broader world of professional biology (Who wants to associate with atheists, etc?) The most biologically oriented will teach in fundamentalist schools. The occasional student who gets a higher degree in the real world and returns to creationist subculture will be a subcultural icon. On the other hand, the student who switches cultures drops dramatically in status.
Our broader culture contains many bizarre subcultures, but few of them have the extensive alternative credentialing system of fundamentalist Christians.
Hey, Clark, do you work for Fox News?
All those who’ve ever been quoted accurately, even once, by a professional journalist, please put your hands up.
Anyone?
Anyone?
Heaven forfend indeed.
For next year I nominate PZ to take over that beat!
@Chris
Unless your entire show consisted of sequenced audio and auto-follows, then you had a stage manager calling the show.
So in fact, God did make the sound cues happen.
Buried in all the dreck and drivel of the article is this statement, “Creationists have been popping up in enough mainstream institutions that one museum has produced a creation-vs.-evolution primer to help volunteer docents handle their sometimes-pointed questions. When the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, N.Y., published its guide, more than 50 museums called looking for a copy, according to director Warren Allmon.” This little book is a wonderful asset for those fighting the battle against ignorance and and misrepresentation. It is written for people who aren’t biology experts. The newest edition just became available.
They obviously did “confront evolution,” to their satisfaction and in line with their teacher’s objectives. They don’t understand evolutionary theory, true, but that was not the point of the exercise anyway. And the article allows us work that out ourselves.
I’m saying that in an article like this, if you report the facts in an unbiased way, that is more than enough. Clearly nothing short of a condemnation will satisfy many of you. But the article would be no more “honest and truthful” for including it. Not all news is written for rabidly zealous biologists!
Incidentally, although they will deny it fiercely, the manner in which commenters on this blog stride into theology is highly reductive and a little embarassing.
re: “It’s science as done with a different approach, but just as valid as the other approach.”
(out of context, original implication by Sastra was that it’s not just as valid)
I think I may have seen it here on Pharyngula but in any case I liked the phrase: cargo-cult science.
It kind of looks like the real thing but it’s all hollow inside.
As for the article, I’m 50-50 on it. Coming from my viewpoint it seemed as if the author was poking fun at the creationist students and their teacher. I can’t be sure what the average Joe reading the paper with his morning coffee would think of it. And while I would personally like for the author to have pointed out the idiocy of the creationist beliefs, I can’t really expect a general circulation newspaper to write anything more snarky than it already was. Maybe on the editorial page.
Slightly OT, but there is an interesting video on YouTube by Dr. Steve Austin, head geologist for the Institute for Creation Research. Link is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3darzVqzV2o. The video basically takes Charles Darwin to task for allegedly misinterpreting the geology of the Santa Cruz Valley in Argentina, for opining that it was caused by gradual erosion, when in actuality (it is claimed in the video) it was created catastrophically by the busting of a glacial dam during the last ice age.
The interesting part is the comment thread, wherein enthusiastic (but mostly unqualified) rationalists such as me got to duel with a real-live creationist. The thread is heavily moderated by Austin’s ‘Administrative Assistant’ who refuses to post most anything critical of Austin or the implications of the video (typical for creationists, I have found) but the rationalists managed to give as good as they got for the first couple of weeks.
It was interesting to note the strategy of the video and Austin’s carefully framed posts. No overt claims of Noachian deluge, no frontal attacks on Darwinian evolution, but the very clear implication that Darwin was an idiot (sorry, I mean ‘was misguided”) and that therefore all of evolution is wrong. I had great fun jousting with Austin and his ‘admin’, but I am worn out, and have better things to do.
Traffic had died down recently, partly due, no doubt, to the slow posting, censorship, and inability to actually discuss anything coherently under the lash of the ‘moderator’. However, I see today that Austin has attracted a large number of creationists fawning over him and his theories in the last day or two. I would invite any interested Pharyngulites to pay the good Dr. A. a visit and see if they can turn the tide of creationist tomfoolery that is going on over there.
I’m sure you’ll deny it fiercely, but the prediction that your opponents will disagree with you has no bearing on its truth. You’d do better to support your arguments with evidence.
Let’s try it out:
“Incidentally, although they will deny it fiercely, concern trolls are more annoying than helpful, and are composed entirely of rabbit semen.”
Nope, I was wrong. The ‘they will deny it fiercely’ really drives the lapine jizz component of the claim home.
I grew up with a neighbor who, until after highschool, was your garden variety christian. Bright girl, did great in school, but as soon as she graduated her parents shipped her off to liberty for “college.”
When she came back I remember her popping over one night while I was working on my car, proceeded to have a conversation. We were both now college graduates. Now keep in mind at the time I had no idea what “liberty university” was, so my mind was about to be blown.
The conversation started out pretty normal, but as it progressed into astronomy things got weird fast. The level of mutual respect kept either of us from discounting the other’s position, but ultimately it ended with me having asked a few questions about the predictions for things like CMB, which she simply said she wanted to go check out or maybe email her past professors. This was a time when I was fully prepared to enjoy a religious view on these things, but it was started to become clear to me that somewhere in her education she had missed out on some pretty key stuff.
That might well have been the beginning of me getting all skeptic on bad science, but it really wasn’t until a year or so later that I saw some other news regarding “liberty” that I put the pieces together on what had happened to her.
Again: perfectly rational, bright girl. Lots of potential. Should have gone to a legitimate university. Probably would have even kept her christianity intact, but with a real education for her future instead. Hope she found a good job anyway.
notherfella:
Could you please explain to me the difference between those two statements?
Sorry, the correct link for the comments page mentioned in #109 is http://www.youtube.com/comment_servlet?all_comments&v=3darzVqzV2o&fromurl=/watch%3Fv%3D3darzVqzV2o. See ya’ll over there!
Thank you very much, Marcus Ross, for my home state seem like a podunk little province that cranks out bible-thumping rednecks from it’s universities…
I agree with Bob L @55: “[T]heir solution is to make a diploma mill to produce hack PhDs for their side in their fake debate.”
Creationists may be dumb, but they’re not stupid. When everyone says that ID isn’t accepted because it’s not published in peer-reviewed journals, changing the peer group is an ingenious solution. They already did it with law (LU grads in Bush’s administration), why not do it with science?
Arrrgghh… Correction:
Thank you very much, Marcus Ross, for MAKING my home state seem like a podunk little province that cranks out bible-thumping rednecks from it’s universities…
“The video basically takes Charles Darwin to task for allegedly misinterpreting the geology of the Santa Cruz Valley in Argentina, for opining that it was caused by gradual erosion, when in actuality (it is claimed in the video) it was created catastrophically by the busting of a glacial dam during the last ice age.”
What do Darwin’s opinions on geology have to do with his theory of evolution by natural selection? If they want to debate geological theories shouldn’t they reference an actual geologist?
She called Morgie a rat? How sad. My seven-year-old son has a t-shirt from Smithsonian with Morgie’s cartoon image on the front. Even at seven, he knows Morgie is very special.
Portal comment, methinks.
If he comes back to defend himself – game on.
And I generally believe in self-fulfilling prophecies.
Re: Ericb @ #117: That point was made repeatedly by me and others in the comment thread. The tag line for the entire video is “what else was Darwin wrong about”.
Hey Brownian, get fucked. No one ever quoted you on anything in your life, accurately or otherwise, except perhaps your views on goat-felching and sister-touching. Bite me.
Free Lunch you know what to do: bite me.
I admit I do get a charge out of all the pseudo-brainz in here who complain about journalists–journalists doing their fucking job.
The students are victims but they already proved they were drooling idiots when they chose Liberty University.
@Brownian: It’s true, I needn’t have included that subclause, thank you for pointing that out! And you really put the smack-down on me with your analogy too. Gee.
@Lowell: The difference lies mainly in theology’s heritage as a substantial academic subject. It is similar to an ill-educated creationist picking ‘holes’ in evolutionary theory. Their attempts come across as infantile. Because of course they don’t have any depth of understanding on the subject. Hence creationist arguments first betray poor understanding, and then rip their straw men to pieces.
This, of course, is the point I was making. Especially with regard to the rejection of Spinoza’s philosophy, where I think a good point was made that should not be trivially dismissed.
‘The tag line for the entire video is “what else was Darwin wrong about”. ‘
It sounds like a waste of time. Scientists can be wrong about lots of things, especially things outside of their area of expertise. Darwin’s theoriest are interesting from a historicaly viewpoint but if his theories hadn’t been substantiated by 150 years of evidence no one would care about him now. It’s not like he’s some kind of scientific prophet whose writtings are brooded on by a bunch of secular monks.
$50 says he tosses around a few “you atheists don’t understand anything about theology”s and then proceeds to demonstrate his vast knowledge of ‘theology’ by spewing doctrine specific to the Reformed Southern Baptist Church of God the Living Redeemer (Reformation of 1879) only.
These trolls are easy enough to kill. You just gotta restrict your discussions of ‘theology’ to deities such as Triglav, Olorun, Astarte, Wahini-Hai, Dievas, Huecuvus, Izanagi,…
Then we bring in Heddle, and make the fuckers talk specifics enough so we can see just how many times Yahweh–who speaks to each of ’em without possibility of misinterpretation, of course–can’t seem to get His fucking facts straight.
The scribbler for the Daily Planet wrote “I admit I do get a charge out of all the pseudo-brainz in here who complain about journalists–journalists doing their fucking job.”
Strangely, all of the complaints were about the journalist not doing his job properly and ending up writing a fluff piece about a fake university.
I admit I do get a charge out of all the pseudo-brainz in here who complain about journalists–journalists doing their fucking job.
Ouch ouch ouch! Bit uppity for a new boy aren’t you?
But watch out guys – this one’e a journalist.
Sorry mate, I don’t have the personal courage to attack you or your peerless profession, but I’m a bit worried that there are some misguided hot-heads here who might.
Careful people – I think he knows shorthand.
Notherfell
I’m saying that in an article like this, if you report the facts in an unbiased way, that is more than enough
But the reporter could have done a better job of doing even that. There’s an infuriating impartiality to the report that automatically lends a sense of credibility to the creationists’ views. That their ideas are contrary but still legitimate, a vital part of the American scene, almost. The reporter seemed to go out of his way to avoid any flavor of actual criticism, but it is the view of the reality-based community—all over the world— that groups like this are anti-science and hurt America’s/the world’s progress. Enough people feel this way that that could have been emphasized, and it would have been very pertinent to the story.
Clark Kent, Brownian (if I remember correctly) is a girl. Immature insult fail!
Actually, It’s a well-established popular nickname for Tyrannosaurus rex.
I know it’s of minor importance and why the hell did I bother writing the comment. I wrote that comment because a huge part of science is about being nit-picky. If you’re going to write about science for a popular audience, I would hope you would make an attempt to get the details right.
I’ll use an anecdote to explain why I care: I recently edited a blurb of text which referred to pterosaurs as flying dinosaurs. I made some pretty sharp edits on the text and sent it back. The writer told me it was fine to refer to pterosaurs as flying dinosaurs because that was how they are often referred to by the public.
That’s why I care.
@SteveM (#100)
Your CV and published papers approach works great if the individual is being vetted by other scientists familiar with the field. I also appreciate and support the general “free market” principle that your credibility as a scientist should be related to the quality and quantity of your peer-reviewed work.
But even amongst Scientists the potential for fraud is high. While the exposure the notorious case of fraudulent human cloning perpetrated by Hwang Woo-Suk can be seen as “the system performing as intended”, his paper appeared in Science, and he had US collaborators who vouched for him.
Worse, during the initial revelations he was still seen as a hero in Korea until the full extent of the fraud was revealed. Only when confronted with a massive loss of trust in Korean Science did it seem the Government was prepared to act, and he lost his job and faced various charges.
I just checked to see what he’s doing now, and perhaps this makes your point: he’s back at work now cloning dogs for a California startup! I certainly hope whoever paid $150,000 to have their pet cloned (I think it was in Texas) gets independent verification that they have received cloned pups.
And unfortunately, Brownian is also someone who runs off squeeling at the slightest criticism!:)
Re Doc @51;
Is that a Haiku?
Also, UC @13; see Dennis @47. I’m not sure where the MU apparatus is kept but it would seem to be an ideal exhibit for a science museum.
Who’s getting charged up again?
THIS is a 300 level class???
Josh, you’re wrong. Of course tyrannosaurus rex exist – they’re in the bible!
Rev – ixne on the ournalistjhe!
Can I quote you on that Clark? Unlike your colleagues, I can promise to get all the words–even the hard ones–down correctly.
notherfella, you know as well as any of us here that the theists we’re discussing are so far from Spinoza that the only reason you’d even bring him up is an attempt to bolster a weak argument by tenuously linking it to a good one (that, or to demonstrate you know who Spinoza is, kinda like first-year English majors plastering quotations from Nietzsche across their notebooks to show how ‘deep’ they are.)
Spinozans don’t challenge funding for stem cells, they don’t demand we ‘teach the controversy’ about evolution, they don’t demand abstinence-only sex education, they don’t refuse to fund programs advocating condom use as a way to stem the tide of HIV/AIDs in Africa, and they sure as fuck don’t build their own universities so they can indoctrinate children as part of a long-term strategy to bring about a theocracy.
I’ve met Brownian. He is very girlish, and all the confusion over his gender would be cleared up if only he would shave more regularly.
notherfella,
Please reconcile Spinoza’s pantheism with any baseline crdeal formulation of Christian theology. “Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures” will do for a start.
I submit that Spinoza repudiated both the ideas expressed by “Christ” (the annointed one of god, over and above the substance of all things as one, divine, substance) and “sins” (Spinoza’s ethics, as I understand them, grant no absolute status to the concepts of good and evil).
“Get a Charge” just seemed like such an incorrect Phrase.
I think “have a public meltdown exposing my ass for being a babbling moron” is way more appropriate.
KristinMH, the rumors of my being a girl have been greatly exaggerated. (Have you been listening to journalists again? They never get anything right. I suppose it’s alright, though. They’re just doing their jobs.)
Gr. crdal = “creedal”
Boy, you wear your fanciest dress the one time your favourite blogger comes to town….
I went to a talk (here at one of the National Labs) by a science journalist a couple of weeks ago. He was very engaging, straightforward, and entertaining. He was also scrupulously honest, and despairing of all journalists who sensationalize or quote-mine.
He said, “If you want a journalist to use certain words, USE THOSE WORDS.” He talked about, when trying to meet a deadline, calling up scientists (eminent ones) and saying, “Can you say ‘such-and-such’ with honesty, so that I can quote you, honestly?” He also talked about researching stories for months so that he had good background, felt that he understood things to a depth and breadth that he could accurately portray it, and so forth.
I was very impressed. I understand that lots of journalists do NOT go to those lengths, and it’s pretty sad.
(Incidentally: http://stevenkotler.com/ )
Since, according to the story 40+% of Americans believe in creationism, clearly it’s not enough to merely quote the facts of the story without spelling out the insanity of the situation. I don’t think creationists are entitled to respect just because they have strength in numbers. If a bunch of Holocaust deniers had gone to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles to “confront” the concept that the Holocaust actually happened, I doubt that any journalist would have felt the need to report on the story in a factual, neutral matter (or to report on it AT ALL).
Also, stating factual inconsistencies and holes in someone’s position does not equal bad journalism. RamblinDude is right. These journalists keep giving creationism respect it doesn’t deserve.
Our mild mannered reporter seems to be on a roid rage. And all that simply because one of his apparent profession was, correctly, criticized for being no better than a parrot.
And notherfella, the fact that people have been guessing for ages about the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin, does not in and of itself entitle that subject to any respect. As has been pointed out to you, leprechaunology holds the same level of validity. You’re going to have to refer to something other than the voluminous nature of theology if you wish or anything other than a cursory dismissal.
Don’t be too harsh on Clarke.
It can’t be easy being in a job when you so often have to have to tailor what you write to the whim of a propiotor, or what you imagine the intelligence of you readership to be.
And it’s not like they can even anwer back, is it?
So lay off them.
Freedom of the press demands it.
My bad, Brownian! I must be thinking of someone else.
Nevermind. Accusations of goat-fucking are immature when directed at either sex. Plus they are so 1999.
Perhaps you have not had much experience with fundamentalist families, parents…
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
And racist, considering I am a hirsute, swarthy Mediterranean-type to whom such a stereotype is hurtful and sets back the progress my people have made….
After all the piss-taking of journalists, co’s comments are appropriate. There are things scientists can do to assist the reporter they’re talking to gets it right (helpful, considering the journalist often has all sorts of deadlines, may not be familiar with the subject or the terminology).
Plus, I know a few journalists who are much more rational than the average, and would’ve kicked ass in this interview, whether they were out of bubblegum or not.
Not if you are currently fucking a goat.
Again, racist, Rev BDC. If my grandfather were still around, he’d smack you upside the head. Bessie, his favourite goat, would too. Grandma would just look shamed.
Where’d notherfella go? I wanna hear the nuanced discussion of Spinoza that’s gonna embarrass us all.
Which ever Mediterranean swarthy country Brownian’s family is from: Where the men are men and the goats are scared.
For those interested: The German bus ad campaign has started a few days ago with its appeal for donations.
http://www.buskampagne.de/ (has technical difficulties atm)
http://www.helpedia.de/activities/buskampagne/
So there I was in Corfu Town, and I came across Stavros, looking miserable.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, gesturing with his palm towards the buildings around the harbour, “I build all those houses…and do they call me “Stavoros-the-house-builder” – no!”
“And those, boats, all my boats..” another sweep of the hand indcicated the little brown boats bobbing in the water, “But do the call me “Stavros-the-fisherman” – no!”
“But I fuck one sheep….”
Uh, we’re talking caprinophilia here AnthonyK, you pervert.
I haven’t been following this thread closely, but a quick skim suggests that Brownian is a hirsute, bearded, swarthy, Mediterranean-Lithuanian girl from Canada with a fancy dress. Is that right?
In mild defence of good journalism, there is a value in reporting “Just The Facts, Ma’am”. In reporting in that way about creationists the paper gets to maintain an arm’s distance from creationism. In fact too much of journalism nowadays is filled with so much opinion that it’s hard for some to distinguish where facts stop and opinion takes over. So for me, yes please, moire factual journalism.
However (and this is a BIG however), this style of journalism relies on two rather important things:
a) a sufficiently informed audience.
b) a sufficiently honest media in general, or journalist in specific.
These two things are sadly frighteningly rare.
In the case of this article following various creationist students around a museum the article’s audience (in general) is NOT sufficiently informed about the relevant science to make an capable decision. That doesn’t mean they need to be lead there like good little proles, but it does mean they need things to be put in accurate context. Creationism simply isn’t science, the huge body of evidence scientists have collected and collated to date is contrary to any but the most innocuously deistic conception of creationism. And even that is violated by elementary epistemology, logic and reason.
Secondly, the “Just The Facts, Ma’am” journalism ISN’T honest (waits for collective howls of apoplexy from our new journo friends) when it comes to creationism (or any form of denialism, others have mentioned Holocaust denialism and Climate Change denialism), and specifically this kind of “creationists in a museum” juxtaposition. It, at the least, artificially and erroneously promotes the idea that a valid scientific alternative to evolutionary biology exists. At the worst it actively promotes creationism, which is, let’s be honest, a demonstrable falsehood. “Just The Facts, Ma’am” can be a tool of great dishonesty when context isn’t adequately provided. This incidentally is a tool people like the DI try to use. Partial presentation of the facts is a classic tool of disinformation and propaganda.
Of course blaming the media alone is not very constructive, but some of them have their share of the burden to bear, as do some school boards, some educators, etc etc.
So actually, Clack Kent and others, FUCK YOU.
Louis
She said she was a goat….
A few years ago I was visiting the Natural History museum in Ottawa with my young children. We were watching a computer generated animation of plesiosaurs in motion, and to see how her thinking was progressing I asked my daughter who would have filmed such a thing. She was astonished at the foolishness of my question – if it had really been filmed, she said, it would have been in black and white!
I would venture that at the age of 8 her powers of reasoning compared favorably to the current student body of Liberty U.
AnthonyK @ #156,
Oh for fuck’s sake! I am half Greek. I am sick and fucking tired of hearing/reading this tired old trope about Greeks fucking sheep. It’s nonsense. It’s stereotyping people unfairly, and worse it’s wrong.
We actually prefer goats. Sheep are ugly and stupid and only the boy sheep have horns. Get your facts right.
Louis
P.S. Do I need to mention the tongue in cheekiness?
Dr. Meyers:
Among a healthy list of grievances I hold against the modern media is that it sacrifices objectivity in order to achieve neutrality. Empirical truth (insofar as such a concept exists in a modern news service’s paradigm) must lie somewhere between two opposing views, usually the two loudest. Thus, in order to avoid the career killing accusation of bias, a modern news reporter simply summarizes (poorly) those two loud views, and retreats, patting himself on the back for reporting “both sides.”
We’ll have to wait for the newspaper article on Brownian to be published before we’ll know the truth.
The last time someone tried to tamper with peer review in order to make science more amenable to the prevalent political views was when Josef Stalin put Trofim Lysenko in charge of Agriculture (and Biology) in the Soviet Union, leading to crappy science and horrifyingly catastrophic famines.
Who?
I’d have thought that whilst the greek boys are servicing the sheep—and goats—they would have been panting with their tongue hanging out… They really do it with tongue lodged in cheek? Wow…!
I also like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain…
notherfella:
If by “substantial” you mean a lot of ink has been spent writing about it, sure. That doesn’t mean it has any intellectual merit.
No, it’s nothing like that. Evolutionary theory is based on reality. Theology is based on make-believe.
Your analogy doesn’t work. You need to understand evolutionary biology to effectively “pick holes” in it. You don’t need to understand all the details of someone’s imaginary friend to know that there’s no good reason to believe it exists.
I could’ve just referred you to the Courtier’s Reply: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/the_courtiers_reply.php
Rev BDC @ #166 Isn’t Dr Meyers that guy I talk to on Talk.Origins occasionally (or used to)? I thought his name was Phil Zebedeh Nmiersh. My mistake.
Blf @ #167 We are nothing if not talented. we invented everything dontcher know. Of course it was a while back….
Louis
I have to point out two things to #1 in regards to honor killing.
1. I think Islam requires a trial first before execution so the Imam is correct. Local cultures may often omit the trial.
2. Honor killing is not restricted to Islam. A fair number of so-called Christian nations have also allowed a husband to kill if he finds his wife committing adultery (Texas for instance until 1974 made killing the male partner [though not the wife] justifiable homicide) or lowering the charge from murder to manslaughter. Or, as a related aspect of honor, in Peru and some other countries a rapist can evade conviction (assuming both he and the victim are unmarried) by offering to marry the victim and she accepts (due to the dishonor of no longer being a virgin, she is often pressured to accept].
Brownian:
Are your turn offs smoking and people who don’t read good but don’t want to read better either?
How interested are you in world peace? Do you have a talent?
Enquiring
pervertsminds want to know.Louis
And RogerS in the Science Of Watchmen thread is still saying that the flood model is the ‘best fit’…
No, notherfella’s right. When astronomers and engineers make the calculations that allow them to send probes to other planets, they do nothing but embarrass the whole enterprise by effectively ignoring epicycles, despite the fact that works upon works have been written about them from Ptolemy on through to Copernicus.
Assholes think successfully landing probes on Mars is enough to justify creating straw-circles, only to sweep them away with a heliocentric solar system containing elliptical orbits. The fools!
@islandchris #29: The charade of granting Doctorates to people who fundamentally disbelieve the Science has to stop. Marcus Ross …is someone who should never have been granted his PhD.
I agree wholeheartedly. I have been absolutely disgusted by this ever since I read the NYT article. An even more flagrant example is that of Kurt Wise, who earned a PhD in evolutionary biology at Harvard – under Stephen J. Gould, yet – and is now working for DI. Gould knew of his beliefs, yet defended him against those in his dept. who didn’t want to give him the degree. I imagine he thought he was protecting free speech, or demonstrating a graciousness that creationists don’t demonstrate toward us, or something of the kind. It was, in my opinion, a hideous mistake.
To those who criticized islandchris:
I still have a problem with disqualifying someone who can do the required work on the basis of privately held opinions, however stupid those opinions may be.
you suggest we bring down the thought police on people to guard our precious PhDs? They not only have to understand and analyse material, but make the correct statements of belief about it? Sounds fairly cracked to me.
In an undergraudate program, I suppose an argument could be made that as long as he showed up for class and passed his exams, he was entitled to the degree. That isn’t how graduate school works, however. In order to obtain a PhD, one is required to do original work based upon a foundation of the body of work of one’s predecessors. You don’t just show up and parrot back what the professor wants to hear.
Ross and Wise have both displayed an utter contempt for the most basic principles of science. Ross has stated, publicly, that he doesn’t feel there is an evidentiary basis for evolution, but, even if there were incontrovertible evidence, he would STILL refuse to believe it – because it contradicts the Bible. Furthermore, Ross’ professors were made completely aware of his position efore he graduated, if not from the very beginning.
If a young person were to apply to a graduate program in physics, and tell the interviewer, “I’ll absorb and regurgitate everything you tell me, but I want you to know, up front, that I reject absolutely everything in physics since the eighteenth century. Quantum mechanics, relativity, string theory – it’s all nonsense. Newtonian mechanics tells us everything we will ever need to know about how reality works.” – should s/he be accepted into the program? Of course not – yet this is precisely what was allowed to happen at both Harvard and URI. When it comes to evolution, universities are beginning to look the other way, presumably because the fundies have everyone in America scared shitless.
When these people are awarded these degrees – I won’t say that they “earned” them – they then use them to validate the Christian cracker factories for which they go to work, while cheapening the degrees for those who come after. As mentioned earlier, Ross is now at Liberty U, teaching his students about the “glaring holes” in evolutionary and cosmological theories. I can imagine the admissions counselor at Liberty telling parents of prospective students, “Our Biology Dept. is first rate; we have a Harvard-trained PhD here now.” It’s absolutely disgusting, and it shouldn’t be allowed to continue. I’ll go so far as to say that if they earn the degrees legitimately, then flip out and start spewing this sort of nonsense (like, for example, this raving lunatic: http://www.geocentricity.com/), the university that awarded the degree should rescind it.
This isn’t about belief; it’s about how science is done. They want to subordinate evidence to faith? Let them go into theology.
Ah, so you’re to blame!
Ok, first instalment: FSM-damn-you mother-(and sheep- and goat-)fecking arseholes! (Not very imaginative, I know, but I’m not a sailor.)
Louis:
Yes.
Very.
Brevity.
Sheep are preferred in more northern climes – where the wearing of sturdy boots provide a convenient ‘foot-holder’ for your partner of choice. The thicker coat also protects, somewhat, against the elements.
As Louis intimates, the presence of horns in lieu of sturdy-boot hoof-receptors, as well as much less voluminous coats, is much preferred in southern (shall I say, less manly) locales.
Earp @ 171:
While I won’t dispute that honor killing is the sad practice of many cultures, unless there’s something I don’t know about Texas law in particular, I don’t think that qualifies. First year criminal law students all learn that finding one’s spouse in bed with someone else per se meets one of the elements necessary to mitigate murder to manslaughter. While outrageous to modern ears, it isn’t quite a legal honor killing.
Manslaughter is (in broad, common law terms — different states have different specifics) mitigated murder. Mitigated by the fact that it was committed in the heat of the moment, upon being justifiably “heated up” (not the technical term) with no time to cool down. The law has long regarded (and many states still regard) finding one’s spouse in bed with someone else as a per se justifiable reason for becoming heated up. But no law in any state (as far as I know, even Texas) has ever deemed it justifiable to learn that your spouse has cheated on you, and then calmly and collectively carry out your own form of justice by murdering your spouse or his/her lover.
PZ, if you’re still reading this thread – would you accept a grad student who made it clear that s/he didn’t accept evolutionary theory, and never would?
Only slightly OT but Darwin is Going to Hell!
I’ve been interviewed. For about an hour. I didn’t recognize my own remarks when they finally made it in the paper.
I mean, the reporter kinda got things right, but not completely.
I would have understood it if he’d been telling the other side’s story.
He was telling mine. And he didn’t get it right. My words were twisted into something they hadn’t been.
So fuck you, clark and notherfella. I will never talk to one of you fuckers again.
May I just opine that 2009, so far, has yielded a bumper crop of fresh morons?
Fuck. I have completely ignored that thread.
Brownian @ #177
Good.
Marvellous.
That’s me buggered then.
Louis
Hmmm HTML tags, I fucked ’em.
Louis
Boy, sheep, HTML tags…
Is nothing sacred to you, Louis?
<sex ref=”@186″>An HTML fetish? That’s a new one…</sex>
Heh. Who can say what goes on between those Cascading Style Sheets.
You don’t need to be deeply versed in theology to know it’s baseless for much the same reason that you don’t have to play Dungeons and Dragons to know that there isn’t in reality any such thing as an orc.
Some theology can be interesting but that’s not the same thing as being true.
No, no, this can’t be teh trvth! What were the Rohirrim fighting off at Helms Deep if not an army of orcs and other nasties? Butterflys?
The news is written for the average layperson. And the average layperson wants to know what the facts are. So the article should have included relevant facts.
A few short statements to the effect of “scientists know that X is Y because of Z measurements” would have been helpful.
People will be reading this piece and wondering whether the creationists have a valid interpretation of the data. It is the journalist’s job to answer that question.
Brownian @ #187:
That would be: women, goats, HTML tags thank you.
One draws the line at some things.
Louis
You know, it is possible to be a Christian and still have a rational respect for the evidence.
Good to hear you say it. I dislike whackos as much as the next guy, but needlessly demonizing an entire group of human beings serves no beneficial purpose.
Finally we have an administration that seems to be taking science seriously. No more Liberty U. appointments to science policy-making positions, for a few years anyway. Obama issued this memo, keeping a campaign promise.
I like the Rude Pundit’s take on this.
Some comments on Ross at rate my professors. I had not been to that website until just now. The site is kind of a joke, but I could not resist the temptation to also look up PZ.
Good to hear you say it.
You’ll notice he didn’t stick around to actually defend it.
needlessly demonizing an entire group of human beings serves no beneficial purpose.
Does the claim that Christians don’t have “a rational respect for the evidence” really demonize them? Isn’t claiming “faith” as a reason to believe in something for which there is no other reason to so believe explicitly making a virtue of a lack of respect for evidence?
I’m fully aware, and glad, of the fact that most Christians aren’t wingnut creationists, and maybe that’s all you mean. But to claim that Christians have the respect for evidence notherfella was asserting that they do is to deny the testimony of Christians themselves when they say what they believe and why.
@16 T-rex are for Keds!
I don’t see how. He is buried with high honors, in….an Anglican church.
No one is going to be moving him soon to anywhere in the South Central USA.
Sastra @58 and Marcus Ranum @74,
After reading your comments, I queried “Traditional Chinese Medicine” on PubMed out of curiosity. Even with the filter of “English language only”, there are more than 3500 articles that came up. I just glanced at one in position two (Chin J Integr Med. 2009 Mar;15(1):60-2. Epub 2009 Mar 7). Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the actual article, but from the abstract, the simple study design with comparative analysis for additive effect seemed all right, though I would have preferred to see a group getting only TCM (that would have been ideal, but ethically, of course, it can’t be done to the human patients – because there is no independent evidence that TCM works at all). But the basic premises of the TCM seem too fantastic and weird.
Some of these articles, of course, deal with studies on pharmacologically active substances isolated from Chinese herbs and plants. Those are fine, but the article dealing with Chi (or Qi) are very iffy.
There was another study, in fact, that criticized the design of TCM clinical trials as biased (Recent Pat Inflamm Allergy Drug Discov. 2008;2(2):123-7).
No — it’s the reporter’s job to report the facts, not just the opinions. It’s his job to record what he sees and hears, and to do some research — an investigation — about what he has seen and heard. A reporter is not a video camera.
For example, it is the job of that particular reporter to point out that Morganucodon not only isn’t a rat or any kind of rodent, but doesn’t even look like one. Its head looks, if anything, like a shrew’s, and its limbs are sprawled like those of a lizard (or a platypus or echidna).
Nor is a reporter a postmodernist. See comment 163.
Not making errors of fact is part of the job description of a journalist. See also comment 145.
A substantial academic subject that is built on air, on an assumption that theologists never test.
Instead, we must shrug and ignore it. That’s because it’s not testable: if it’s wrong, we can’t find out that it’s wrong.
HTML tags – fetish objects? Pffft. Absurd.
Though I do find the tags [w] and [/w] useful as an invisible markup for the occasional comfort break.
Its longer equivalent [f] and [/f] is sadly rarer, but does indicate a longer break.
David, or anyone, what’s the firefox addon for easy html markup again?
I do notice, which I regret, the occasional image sullying the pure white spaces of these forums. As an apictorial Darwinian I, of course eschew this, and would not expect such functionality in any addon I use.
Re: Ross at Rate My Professors – one of the commenters had this to say,
It’s in interesting class if you’re into apologetics and some of the creation/evolution stuff you learn is amazing.
His profs at URI should be hanging their heads in shame. I may email this to them.
Dr. Ross has an interesting history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_R._Ross
and is most likely full of shit in that he is trying to play poth sides of the fence.
I should be used to this kind of story by now…*sigh*
What I cannot understand is that this is legal,to willfully brainwash and as stated upthread,intellectually abuse young people and waste their life obtaining a useless “University” degree.
How can a place like Liberty even be legal?? I dont get it.
I have a biology degree from Oral Roberts University. It is not mere hyperbole to characterize evolution as a unifying theory in biology. Going through high school in rural MN, then biology classes at ORU where evolution was the 800 pound gorilla in the room…just imagine trying to make sense of genetics and biochemistry as a series of coincidental facts, rather than observations demonstrating shared heritage. These kids aren’t dumb, but they’re missing out on such a rich and fascinating world.
Which, in my mind at least, begs the obvious question…Just who in the hell is responsible for ORU’s (and Liberty’s) accreditation??
I quote from the movie The American President:
Free speech involves not only the speech that you approve of but the speech you disapprove of. That’s what makes Liberty University legal.
One Small Step To Debate
Students of Moon Landing Hoax University Take Field Trip to Hotbed of Space Travel: The Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum
Every winter, professor Guy Smiley takes his Advanced Moon Studies class to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, hoping to strengthen MLHU students’ belief in a theory that man never landed on the moon, even in the military industrial complex’s memorial to space exploration.
His yearly visit to the Smithsonian is part of a wider movement by moon landing theorists to confront Aldrinism in some of its most redoubtable secular strongholds.
“There’s nothing balanced here. It’s completely, 100 percent based on the official government story,” said Smile, and did we mention he’s a professor of advanced moon studies?
Like the Moon Landing Hoax University students, avowed landing theorists across the country are making a practice of challenging the conventional wisdom at space museums (questioning why astronauts didn’t sink into a hundred feet of moon dust), planetariums (booing any mentions of Neil Armstrong), and video rental stores offering Apollo 13 (replacing the DVDs with copies of Capricorn One).
In the upcoming issue of Inquiry, a leading magazine of the didn’t-leave-Earth movement, the list of “faked landing vacations” includes the New Mexico Museum of Space History, the Nevada desert, and a Hollywood soundstage.
At the Smithsonian, officials said they were unaware of any organized visits by hoax proponents but said they are welcome. “The first manned moon landing was in 1969,” spokesman Randall Kremer said.
Modern hoax proponents don’t deny the existence of air travel but do dipute space travel. In fact, Smiley’s only real beef in the hall is a placard stating that three flotation bags were “used on Apollo 11 at the end of its historic lunar landing mission on July 24, 1969”. Smiley asserts the landing didn’t happen. Most astronauts disagree.
The group moved on, talking quietly among themselves. At a diorama of a moon landing site, a MLHU student described how ionizing radiation would have proved lethal to any astronaut.
“Yeah, film in the cameras would have been fogged by this radiation,” said David Asfour, 28, a general moon radiology major.
From wikipedia (citation numbers removed):
Oral Roberts University:
Liberty University:
It seems to me that these organizations should have to be held responsible for ensuring their universities’ curriculum and the graduates they produce are up to snuff in the individual fields in which they confer degrees. At the very least, if my university were accredited by these people, I’d be quite embarrassed.
And in ORU’s case, it amazes me that they let “The Association of Thelogical Schools” accredit universities to hand out degrees in science, of any kind. (Unless, of course, the NCACS is responsible for those parts, in which case they should seriously be reevaluated.)
“if you’re into apologetics”
I’m not into apologetics unless I’ve done something wrong.
@208,
what does giving children a useless education and a brainwash for good measure have to do with free speech??
Im not saying creationists cant say what they want to say,im saying they shouldnt be allowed to teach that shit to innocent children.
Prof. Myers,
I’m a fan but please leave the poor reporter alone. I’ve written similar articles (not for the Post, Lord no); I don’t portray this topic as a “controversy” with two equal sides but, in this case, I think this is perfectly fair. The story is about their little trip to the museum; there wasn’t too much room for cultural commmentary or scientific insight.
I always ask critics: “How would you have done this better than me?” Should he have written an article about a deluded Ph.D.-holder? Or a stupid group of Christian students? That’s not an article that would have been published, nor would have one that took a confrontational, unprofessional, blog-worthy tone.
That kind of article wouldn’t have been any fun to comment on, either. Here, the reporter gave us all the information; now experts like yourself can sound off. I’m sure the reporter has a perspective on this topc but most readers are so used to opinion pieces and bad journalism that they feel cheated by a reporter who does his job and doesn’t include those opinions in an article.
The Washington Post is a fine newspaper that does a difficult job well. Sure, not always, but denying the honesty of that statement brings similarly shortsighted arguments to mind.
There are so many things that worry me about print journalism today without having to hold in my mind the unsettling thought of one of my favorite bloggers believing I should be out of a job.
From the WP article:
“Why should we be afraid to test our worldview against reality?” asked Bill Jack, a Christian leadership instructor who leads groups across the country for a company called Biblically Correct Tours.
And this from a Christian creationist. Nuff said.
Citizen Z @ #209: Very, very nice.
That Regent University was originally gonna be called ‘Christian Broadcasting Network University’ and that they have Pat Robertson as their Chancellor makes me laugh.
That more than 150 graduates of this Tier 4 university were hired by the federal government during the Bush administration(see here) makes me cry.
@islandchris
That is like saying an atheist has to believe in God in order to get a PhD in theology or philosophy of religion.
This is patently false. lots of atheists study philosophy of religion and theology without believing in God. One can study something and not believe in it.
I’m sure Ross does intend to advance education. He is teaching isn’t he?
And people of his ind contribute to science every day. Next time you go use the MRI machine remember the person who invented it was a YEC also.
I personally am not a YEC but there is no denying that those people can do good science.
I think that destroys the view that proponents of creation are somehow stupid or not knowledgeable about science.
Garret – don’t worry too much, this is only a blog. My impression was that this was a kind of “deep cover” piece where the reporter didn’t make his opinions too obvious. Given longer, he would have probably written and rewritten it to be as clever as possible, or to include a few more snarky scientists, but I’m sure you’ll agree that the reporters own attempts at style are usually the first thing to go when a sub gets at it.
We like to laugh at these things here, so I guess the only real complaint is that he didn’t make them seem foolish enough.
Facilis the Fallacious Fool. Still no reason or logic. Your record as an idiot is still perfect. One of these days you will learn the truth that your god doesn’t exist and your bible is a work of fiction. Until then, keep your delusion like the above posts to yourself.
Facilis – your posts are getting shorter and shorter.
Nearly there dearheart!
Press on!
An atheist getting a degree in theology and then working in that field(whatever it is youre meant to do there)would not have to rationalize and compartmentalize like a creationist doing biochemistry or geology.
Analogy FAIL.
Facilis Law:
Sense = n/length.
n, regrettably, non-zero
@Facilis #219
“I think that destroys the view that proponents of creation are somehow stupid or not knowledgeable about science.”
There are exceptions to every rule.
Of course, strictly speaking, facilis ought not to stop posting completely – one letter posts would preserve the integrity of arithmetic
Facilis, are you by any chance referring to Damadian as “the” inventor of the MRI? You really want to bring that controversy up here?
facilis:
Yes there is, by the very definition of their position. What you have just proven, however, is that there’s no denying the fact that you don’t have to claim to be a YEC in order to completely misunderstand science.
Except…that it isn’t. Religion – of which there are far, far more than the one you recognize as your god’s – can be studied as a phenomena and evaluated as to its effects on the world fully without the belief that the claims those religions make is true. In science however, a scientist in any field – by definition – does have to prove the efficacy of their claims in order to be taken seriously by the scientific community. But then again, you already know that, so ya got anymore BS to throw?
Apparently you do.
Generally, that’s exactly what they are. The exceptions are accomplished, shameless liars. This has been demonstrated over and over again. It’s a repeatable result.
Kseniya:
I know I’m a bit late on this (I saw after the fact that you commented on a recent thread I’d sat out), but I’m glad to see your pixels back here. Between you, brokenSoldier, and Ichthyic, it seems we’re having a mass return of the prodigals! ;^)
Hello, Bill. Yes! (I hear it’s nice in New Zealand this time of year.) So where is Etha? :-)
Scott Hatfield’s name has been showing up here from time to time, also. As has Kristine’s. Neither of them ever fail to make me happy on some level.
It is nice to be remembered… :P
Not just remembered, Soldier. Missed.
Posted by: Kseniya | March 12, 2009 1:43 AM
Careful! You could make a guy blush syaing that, and then I think my Y-chromosome might make me go punch something to make up for it… :P
I’m happy to see that notherfella was so happy to defend his ideas.
Along with him, the humbly named Clark Kent.
Beyond this, Facilis has joined the defending group. Which makes me all the more comfortable to be on the accusing side.
It’s one of those nights where you don’t have to do much work to prove your point.
Something good has to happen in order to make up for the continued presence of Silver Fox, Facilis, Barb, Alan Clarke and RogerS.
Chris writes:
“The charade of granting Doctorates to people who fundamentally disbelieve the Science has to stop. Marcus Ross, who was also profiled in the NYT”
I agree; Graduate science programs should be in the business of educating and making scientists, not giving to degrees to people who don’t actually accept what they are learning or the fruits of their research.
Wouldn’t the invention of the MRI be more a matter of engineering than science anyway. Being a YEC wouldn’t impair my abiltiy to function as a Petroleum Engineer analyzing well tests signifcantly, but it would diminnsh my ability to appreciate and understand why things are the way they are. It certainly would make the universe much duller and the night sky out here much less amazing. The required incuriosity certainly diminishes the enjoyment of life of YECs. I doubt that the smug self rightous certainty makes up for it.
I think the confusion of over Brownians gender and sexual proclivites is due him it being from the macho province with the sissy name.
Texas Cowboy – “In Texas I once saw a man kill bear with a rattlesnake.”
Alberta Comboy – “That so – In Alberta I sonce a man kill a rattlesnake with a bear.”
Alberta – where men are men and all the livestock as well as most of the wildlefe are nervous.
What I think would be additionally interesting about this hypothetical is that, whereas a YEC worldview wouldn’t impinge on the ability to successfully analyze well tests per se, the worldview of this engineer would rather frequently smack up against the fact that we use the principles of evolution, in part, to prospect for the petroleum in the first place.
Paul @99,
I’m asserting that not all christians believe in the divinity of Jesus. Hell, some of them don’t even believe in God. Now you can tell them they aren’t Xtians. That’s fine. Their fellow Xtians also tell them that.
What is more, Spinoza’s concept of God is perfectly consistent with a Universe that makes sense to science. I don’t happen to believe in it, but it is not beyond the pale.
My point is that there are concepts of deity that transcend the sky pixie you decry, and it is possible for a thinking person to embrace some of these.
If they don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus, or in God, then I for one have no problem with them. But then they don’t believe in a deity. The issue is belief in the supernatural, not in the man called Jesus who may or may not have existed.
Of course, because Spinoza’s “god” pretty much just is the Universe.
Of course there are — cultures all over the world and throughout history have conceptualized the supernatural in a variety of ways.
And here you’ve lost me — apart from the weakest of Deisms, explain how a “thinking person” can hold a belief in a deity and be consistent with our understanding of the physical world.
And note that Deism itself is only “consistent” with such understanding, and adds nothing to it (almost by definition), while at the same time having absolutely no implications for morality or behaviour and demanding no rituals or prayers — in other words, all those things religions do. So even if one believed in a Deistic god, that belief wouldn’t matter in the slightest in terms of one’s life. Deism isn’t a religion, it is an idle speculation.
The comments on that NBC news report somebody linked to made my brain explode. Specifically, this one, by somebody named Faith (shocker of a name that is…): “Science is a step of faith… Science is not exact and can not be confirmed in a lab.”
Here is the link again. Love the snarkiness.
http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Creationists-Take-Over-Natural-History-Museum-Scoff.html
I find myself in the uncomfortable position of defending dishonesty, but I still maintain that Doctorates should be awarded based on the candidates work, not his beliefs. Personally I can’t understand the cognitive dissonance associated with producing work you fundamentally don’t believe, but apparently some can handle it. If his work contributes to the body of science and passes peer review and can be adequately defended, I don’t see why he should be denied his doctorate. That science is characterized by rational analysis of data independent of personal belief is what sets it apart from religion. To insist on this kind of “test of belief” is to become a religion based on doctrine and no longer be science.
I understand there are some who deny the biological origin of oil in the first place and attribute it to some unknown inorganic geologic process. In this way they can deny the concept of “peak oil” and postulate that oil is being continuously produced in the earth. “Denial” really isn’t just a river in Egypt and seems to appear anywhere.
Yes. There are some who hold exactly that position. The mental gymnastics are sometimes fun to watch…
Actually, it is being “continuously” produced within the Earth (e.g., there’s “proto-oil” getting ready to cook in the Gulf of Mexico right now) if you integrate across deep time. This, of course, has nothing to do with the concept of “peak oil” because of the time scales involved (something else that those who deny the biological origin of oil are ignoring). Typical.
Ha! Nice. Steve will be here all week, folks. Have you tried the calamari?
Hey, I thought I was the one making stupid jokes around here!
*mutter mutter, at least mine are original*
Re: PZ and YEC student – I think I can guess exactly what PZ would do – nothing.
In any academinc discipline, but particularly science where personal opionion is utterly irrelevant, success depends on hard work, mastering new skills, and understanding then presenting the facts.
The student would succeed or fail based entirely on these criteria.
N’est-ce-pas?
Theory of evolution–always evolving –rodent-like ancestors, whales, apes –what’s next?
You’ll know someday –that we were humans from the beginning –no antecedents different from us.
What would be interesting to know is how Liberty U. grads do in science careers? Many scientists and people in science-related fields do fine without swallowing evolution. Though, belief in orthodox Darwinism is starting to be a litmus test for moving ahead in science careers –shamefully true.
Barb the Bimbo is Blathering again. Nothing important or cogent there. Move along, nothing to see except a pile of manure.
Barb, what knowledge do you have about careers in science?
And answer my question about GLBT children being kicked out of their homes.
Barb wrote:
Yes! Barb finally get’s it. Welcome to science, Barb. Come on in; the water’s great.
Or maybe not?
You know, if it bothers you that science evolves over time (I don’t know why so many of you non-scientists see this as a weakness, but okay), you could not be a hypocrite and stop using things that science provides for you. Like, maybe, I dunno, electricity? How about water? Petroleum? We use the principles of evolution to help prospect (successfully) for petroleum-bearing sedimentary horizons. If evolution bothers you, and you’re saying that it doesn’t work, shouldn’t you stop using the benefits of it? Isn’t that being hypocritical?
Which science-related fields?
And I presume that you can define orthodox Darwinism for me? I mean, you wouldn’t make an assertion that you couldn’t back up, would you? Wouldn’t that be bearing false witness?
Theory of evolution–always evolving –rodent-like ancestors, whales, apes –what’s next?
You’ll know someday –that we were humans from the beginning –no antecedents different from us.
What would be interesting to know is how Liberty U. grads do in science careers. Many scientists and people in science-related fields do fine without swallowing evolution. Though, belief in orthodox Darwinism is starting to be a litmus test for moving ahead in science careers –shamefully true as evidenced below:
Matt M. The article does have a use. It tags Liberty University students as having skull caps of boiled leather. Nothing useful can penetrate once the indoctrination has been completed.Once the tag is in place, anyone can evaluate a student from that univerity with the prejudice thus achieved. This will make hiring decisions easier. Also, college selection criteria and even dating choices.
“You went to Liberty? Hunh, I know something about them.”
Creationists think the same of YOUR indoctrination, PZ and Matt. And you’d miss out on a lot of good academic and scientific talent to blacklist grads of Liberty U. In fact, Liberty U. and Patrick Henry College (many Christian home school graduates) are two with nationally successful debate teams or moot court finalists, if I recall correctly. I think PHC defeated Oxford.
I’m sorry, but belief in evolution does not distinguish smart from stupid, educated from uneducated, good scientists from bad, good researchers from bad, good doctors from bad. The world-reknowned pediatric neuro-surgeon, Ben Carson, MD, e.g. is a God-believer –and probably not an evolution-believer though i don’t know the latter for sure. He certainly isn’t an atheist.
You’ll find that some creationists can explain evolution as well as any evolutionist. They KNOW it; they just don’t BELIEVE it. It’s religious for both sides.
Amusing that you cite evolutionist scientists of 200 years ago after ridiculing me for referring to creationists from the past who were some of the GREATS in science.
And you wonder why we call you ignorant on all things scientific.
What external energy sources did you consume for breakfast today Barb?
Sorry about the recent double post –the 2nd one was the completed one and I didn’t know I posted the first incomplete one. I’d delete 247 if I had the option.
Oh Josh, all of your ever changing scientific knowledge just falls apart when it is bashed by the rock solid certainty of Banal Barb’s basic beliefs. ‘Tis is truly a rock that she possesses.
As if Barb-I-know-the-human-heart-beats-without-an-outside-energy-source-because-my-alpha-male-is-a-super-smart-jesus freak-MD knows the first goddamn thing about science careers.
(That reminds me of one of my favorite Venture Bros. episodes: Careers in Science, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careers_in_Science)
Barb the Bimbo Blathering. You are only good for a laugh Barb. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Intellectual content of your screeds is zero. Nothing to see except a manure pile, keep moving folks.
Don’t suppose you read my lengthy post, Barb.
No, you talk, but you never listen.
Your prayers must be of similarly low quality.
No wonder Jesus doesn’t listen to you anymore. He’s probably reading science books and watching David Attenborough, delighted that humans are at last thinking for themselves.
Not like you. eh Barb?
Banal Barb, before you cut and paste in a sad attempt to cover for yous lack of knowledge on any subject, I want you to tell me about Wernher von Braun. I ask because he was part of your list of scientist who reject evolution.
Well, to be fair, von Braun’s rockets were the result of intelligent design. You don’t suppose a windstorm in a POW slave-labor camp would just magically whistle up a V-2, do you?
;^)
Isn’t that where the male Darwinists wear black hats and don’t shave? Have I got that right…?
Well–what kinda winds are we talkin’ about, here? I mean, are you thinkin’ a storm, or are you thinkin’ about a STORM?
I figure a strong afternoon thunderstorm is probably only be capable of building something like an Estes Big Bertha with a single D-cell engine. I figure a V-2 is probably going to require some rather wicked tornado action.
Well Bill, it is my contention that Banal Barb does not really read a lot of the stuff she cuts and pastes. And if she does, she does not understand the meaning. A few days ago, she put up a list of scientists who reject evolution. It was amazing how many of them were dead before Darwin was born.
On the list was Wernher von Braun. People like Banal Barb like to insinuate that atheists are like Nazis. Well, how come she has a (reformed) Nazi on her list of good guys.
And Bill, that was a very funny take on a silly creationist trope.
Janine And answer my question about GLBT children being kicked out of their homes.
Did you ask me this? Did this happen to you? I don’t know personally anyone to whom this happened. Are you asking what I think of it? I personally would not cut off relations with relatives or friends who identify and act as homosexuals. I find it’s usually the gays/lesbians who retreat from and hate anyone who disapproves of their orientation/lifestyle. They say, in effect, “love me; love my life choices -if you don’t, we’re done.”
I suspect there was some sort of parent-child problem early on –like rejection of the whole person and alienation by same sex parent; and it’s possible that the child rejected the parent, too, early on. There are any number of dysfunctions as causes for homosexual orientation–and it certainly is not always parents –especially nowdays with all the gay promotion/propaganda.
the bottom line: there is a time of first thought for all of the following sexual dysfunctions: pedophilia, incest, adultery, homosexuality, necrophilia, rape –and like all sins, these, too, should be rejected and resisted at the first inclination and opportunity , rather than obsessed about in the mind and indulged in deed.
I don’t think you can BE what you don’t think about or do.
Barb is still the Blathering Bimbo. Just a big manure pile folks. Hold your nose and move along.
Larry Fafarman is currently panning you on his blog. He says that Darwinists are afraid of dissenting opinions. Of course any posts disagreeing with this position are censored.
I’ll be here all week; don’t forget to tip your waiter.
<rimshot>
Josh:
I should’ve known I’d find a fellow rocket geek here!
I love the smell of black powder in the morning: It smells like… rocketry!
Tulse, I stress that I cannot speak for myself in justifying an Xtian or even a deist faith. I was raised in a very liberal Methodist tradition, but stopped believing at about 8 years old. I continued to go to church because
1)The minister was a pretty profound thinker who challenged the moral complacency of the middle-class community (and the Viet Nam War)
2)I liked singing in the choir.
The biblical edication turned out to be quite useful for me when I went off to College and had to confront the bible thumpers that haunt college campuses.
I’ve found no use for a belief in God in my own life. At the same time, I acknowledge that others have–among them Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Dietrich Bonnhoeffer… Now maybe they would have been just as brave and just as effective without such a belief, but they chose to ground their lives in such a belief, and I am not one to challenge the result.
After the revolution, Thomas Paine authored an anti-religious pamphlet. When he showed it to Ben Franklin, the latter urged him not to publish it. Franklin felt that religion could serve a useful purpose for society, even if it served little purpose in his own (Franklin’s life). Paine published it anyway, which is why we don’t hear much about him after that–it ruined his reputation in America.
It may be that there are some people who need to believe in God to function.
Not all Xtians are bible thumpers like Barb. If they find comfort in their faith, who am I to deny them that comfort.
Barb the “human heart beats a lifetime without an external energy source” moron said:
So your problem with the theory is that it changes according to new information and ideas?
If I had the option I’d delete all your posts.
a)you don’t think
b)you express strong, offensive, and incorrect opinions about these things you claim not to be or do
c)tell it to Jesus. He loves you.
We think you’re an emotionally retarded waste of space.
It you have nothing to say, then don’t say it or, more accurately, go off and not say it somewhere else.
A vacuum would be good, a perfect vacuum.
*giggle*
Thank you Barb. As expected, your extreme homophopia blinds you to human sufferings.
Wow. When one is told that they are like pedophiles and rapists, one can really feel the love and concern. And you want to blame the homosexual for for cutting off family relationships.
Sorry, Barb, but I have seen too many kids kicked out on to the streets by loving christians like you. But once more, I want to thank you. You have shown yourself to be an inhumane monster who thinks she is justified in her actions.
Please ask me why I dislike the likes of you. Barb, you might never understand but fortunately, most of the people here do.
Yeah, it’s her more her dislikes that are the problem.
Fuck’s sake is the Jesus channel not working any more?
I swear it’s not me clogging up the lines.
Because people like Banal Barb are willing to deny comfort to others and curb intellectual curiosity.
Barb, if your MD husband had any sense he would go run off and have an affair with a woman closer to his own intellect while you are typing here.
If you haven’t launched D-cell-powered payloads out of the dew-covered grass by the light of the rising sun, then you haven’t lived.*
*Or something like that.
Feynmaniac
Perhaps he already has and that is why she is here typing!
the bottom line: there is a time of first thought for all of the following sexual dysfunctions: pedophilia, incest, adultery, homosexuality, necrophilia, rape
Did you really equate homosexuality to necrophilia, incest and pedophilia?.
Does anyone you know outside your little sheltered world of your church take anything you say seriously?
You say some of the outright most ignorant wild ass fantasy bullshit I have ever heard.
Noe of which is based in any reality outside the made-up lay world you’ve created inside you deluded little head.
Those rockets, if I’m thinking of the same ones are awesome, and the best present for kids out.
Have you tried the prayer-powered ones? I wouldn’t bother – they don’t actually go anywhere, they just explode and cover everyone with shit.
YES!
The king is back. Typos for everyone!
KoT
male Darwinists wear black hats and don’t shave
@SteveM #243: Ultimately it is about the work, not beliefs.
@AnthonyK #246: In any academinc discipline, but particularly science where personal opionion is utterly irrelevant, success depends on hard work, mastering new skills, and understanding then presenting the facts. The student would succeed or fail based entirely on these criteria. N’est-ce-pas?
Guys – really, I don’t understand why I come up against so much opposition the once in a while that I say this on science blogs. It isn’t simply about their beliefs – they can’t do the work if they don’t accept the basic principles of science. They certainly shouldn’t be given the credentials to teach.
Not that anyone in the academic world hangs on my opinion – but I am immovable on this.
Oh – and Larry Moran agrees with me: http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2007/02/what-is-science.html
Janine, ON the contrary, I do not insist that atheists are like Nazis. What I say is that Nazis are not Christians (as sometimes alleged) but practical atheists –or if they called themselves Christian, they were totally out of touch with Christ and His teachings. Naziism was influenced much more by Darwin and atheistic ideology and not at all by Christ. Master race and all that –just helping along the evolutionary process of survival of the fittest by exterminating the less fit, undesirables, etc.
The German intolerance for Jews was not rooted in their historic Christianity –though some in world history have felt justified to hate Jews as “Christ-killers” (and Christian haters) –but not me. Modern christians certainly see Jews as our antecedents in faith and revere THEIR Biblical history as OUR history. Some of the dislike of Jews in history has been for the same reason as the dislike of Muslims –that they considered conversion to Christ as a death in the family–(worthy of death in some extremist Muslim families), that they were sometimes perceived as keeping to themselves as though others were inferior –and maybe some because Jews were considered financially shrewd at the expense of non-Jews. No reasons to apply the Darwinian and (incidentally atheistic) “solution,” of course.
Nerd of Redhead: why does your laughter seem so bitter and joyless?
Barb – why does your faith seem so bitter and joyless?
Perhaps it’s just you.
Good to see that your historical analysis is of the same high standard as your social commentary and insight into modern biology.
Barb the blathering Bimbo, why do your posts seem so insane? Maybe because you are. They are certainly dumb. Plus, we have no use for your idiotic posts except for their comedy. Move along folks, just a huge manure pile. Hold your noses as you walk past.
Banal Barb, as usual, missing the point. On one of your cut and paste jobs, you had as one of your “good guys” who rejects evolution, Wernher von Braun. Look up the name. I do not think you will like him.
I point this out because it shows that you have no idea about what you are talking about.
Nerd of Redhead: why does your laughter seem so bitter and joyless?
You are able to hear the tone over the intertoobz? Color me impressed.
Jesus is ashamed of you Barb.
You lack compassion, you are prideful, and you are ignorant.
I bet he’s regretting getting crucified in the first place.
So Barb tell us what the Theory of Evolution says about a master race.
Please.
Atheistic ideology?
Banal Barb, showing off her ignorance on all subjects.
May I present from the “not at all German” Martin Luther and On The Jews And Their Lies. There was no christian based antisemiticism in German history. Amazing how a person can be so wrong with every statement she makes.
Rev – isn’t the full title of Darwin’s book “The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, Why I’m Part of the Master Race, and the Necessity of Massacring the Jews 100 Years After My Death”?
We apologists tend to leave out the last part.
Barb, you are a class-A moron.
Hitler’s racist views had nothing to do with evolutionary biology. We humans have had racist beliefs throughout our entire history. Just look at the Bible. It’s full of racism and genocide, a great deal of it condoned by Yahweh.
AnthonyK shhhhhhhhhhhhh. That’s only the title we use at the dual Secret Atheist World Domination / Puppy and Baby Recipe swap meetings where we set our Atheistic agenda based on our Atheistic ideology.
Barb – Why are you committing the sin of familiarity with unbelievers? Your soul is in mortal danger. Surely you don’t wish to end up in hell with all of us.
Barb the walking fallacy,
No true Scotsman fallacy
Just flat out wrong
Anecdotal evidence
False equivalence
_ _ _
If anyone is ever teaching a course in elementary logic and need examples of fallacies, Barb’s comments are a rich source. Man the school system failed her BADLY.
I don’t believe in Atheistic agendas….
Of course, I should add the usual caveat that, even if Hitler’s actions were in some way motivated by Darwin’s writings, it would have no bearing on whether descent with modification through natural selection is a useful scientific theory. It’s descriptive, not prescriptive.
I know Barb is probably incapable of grasping that point, but there you go.
Barb #283 wrote:
Although this has been addressed extensively elsewhere (the Nazis mostly drew upon pre-existing ideas of breeding stock and “cutting out cancer” when justifying their eugenics policies), I want to point out something here.
According to the Christian religion, the purpose of placing humankind on earth is so that the saved may be winnowed out from the damned. God created man to be with Him, but not all are worthy. Some are too proud, too stubborn, or too wicked. Thus, those who are not fit for eternal life will be thrown away, into a pit of Fire for all eternity. Only an elite minority will be retained. The desirables kept, the undesirables eliminated.
I don’t see how this scenario is much different than what you view as the “evolutionary process.” Many Christians have killed infidels and sinners in order to “help along” the process described above. If anything, it would inspire even more violence, because those who are unfit are not just weak, but wicked — and we’re dealing with the will of God and a moral selection, and not just a mindless and indifferent natural process which involves changes over time in genetic material.
She’d fail a course in elementary humanity.
What a sad, sad example of failed christianity she is.
Barb burbled “Liberty U. and Patrick Henry College (many Christian home school graduates) are two with nationally successful debate teams or moot court finalists, if I recall correctly. I think PHC defeated Oxford.”
Ah debating, or how to argue when you don’t know the facts.
You know, if it bothers you that science evolves over time (I don’t know why so many of you non-scientists see this as
weakness, but okay),
I know that our knowledge does evolve and progress –and that’s why you folks should be more humble in your confidence in Darwin –there have been many changes in the theory –like Punctuated equilibrium by Edlredge and Gould — to accommodate evidence or lack thereof in the case of PE —
You really believe in macroevolution though you have absolutely NO evidence of it –from the past or ongoing in the present. The evidences you put forth don’t PROVE your claims.
Some of us see that the cells of life ARE irreducibly complex, and see that as nullifying Darwin’s idea that life evolved spontaneously without a Designer/engineer. I’m sorry, but to me, evolution is one of the silliest notions science ever came up with. I’m not talking about all of it –natural selection occurs within a kind of creature -but we just don’t see these transitions that evolutionists claim occured.
I don’t think creatures gradually became more complex and higher functioning from the simplest cell to the human being–by any natural process. By divine engineering? Perhaps –but not so slowly as you think. A resurrecting God who heals the blind and the lame with a word doesn’t need Darwin’s method. And that method has not been proven yet. Your evidences are not proofs.
“Wow. When one is told that they are like pedophiles and rapists, one can really feel the love and concern.”
The pedophile deserves as much sympathy as the homosexual –both have fixated on abnormal desires and feel compelled, that they can’t help it, that the desires are intrinsic to them. Both also have victims whom they have historically drawn into their lifestyle –and probably were victims themselves at one time. Yes, today, gays can find each other, as they are out of the closet and probably growing in numbers because of the gay propaganda/promotion –and fatherless society–so they may be less eager to convert the uninitiated into their lifestyle –but they do feel that anyone of their sex is fair game for their crushes and their pursuits –gay or straight.
This is not a good trend –not inevitable –no one has been proven to be “born gay.”
when the first gay thought/attraction/opportunity for intimate activity comes, you close the mental door to it –just like any other temptation to do something you ought not. It helps when kids are encouraged in normal sexual identity as they grow up, when they have parents of both sexes in their homes, when they are helped to identify positively with same sex parent –when they are protected from molesters of either sex.
Banal Barb
Jesus died for somebody’s sins–but not mine.
You know that sooner or later, I have to link to a song.
Barb again
“Naziism was influenced much more by Darwin and atheistic ideology and not at all by Christ.”
Obviously you have not read Mein Kampf!
Jesus Christ – sorry about Barb, lord, we’re not all like her – She’s a fucking expert now!
Barb the Blathering Bimbo. Another post for our amusement. We learn nothing from them, since you post nothing cogent. You are just good for a laugh. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Good joyous laughter Barb the Bozo.
Barb #302 wrote:
If it turns out that you’re mistaken, and that all the scientists are correct on evolution after all — would you have to accept that God used “Darwin’s method?” Or would that break your faith in God, for God would no longer be needed to explain, what you needed God to explain?
Sastra 299
You’re wrong on the purpose of creation of humans. God didn’t make us to damn us. He made us to love and serve and glorify God –and to fellowship with us. Maybe we are a Divine experiment gone bad.
Disobedience broke fellowship and brought mortality.
We die. There is one hope offered for eternal life –and that’s through faith in the resurrected Christ –who said, “Because I live, you shall live also.” “to all those who believe on his name gave he the right to be called “the children of God.” The Good Shepherd cares for the sheep and will separate them out from the goats in the Judgment.
You have a choice.
Seriously Barb. You should stop. No one here expresses any confidence in Darwin past his putting forward the theory. He was wrong on some things, but not on the basic idea. We’ve told you this before.
Wrong Barb. You just chose to deny it.
No all you see are complex biological systems you think are designed. You have utterly failed to show that they are designed in any way. Confirmation bias and the typical human response to want to see patterns and assessing a meaning to them is what is causing this. You have nothing that backs it up. If you do, please point us to it.
Yes and you have shown through many posts that what you think is silly has no bearing whatsoever on reality. The transitional evidence in fossils is everywhere. It’s not that you don’t see them it’s that you have a preconceived notion that they don’t exist and them existing would weaken your sheltered narrow view of the world. So you ignore or deny them.
You are an ignorant bystander covering your eyes so as not to have your little world disturbed.
Barb, would any amount of evidence convince you that Evolution exists?
Wow, what a self-important dick.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Barb, your are funny and stupid. If you ever stop posting, then number of laughs will drop considerably.
Banal Barb blurted
First you claimed that homosexuality is a sin, like being a rapist. And than you blather on about the need for sympathy, never mind you place this in the same category as being a rapist. And you claim that just closing the mental doors will lead one to no longer being gay. Yet again you show that you know shit about what you are talking about.
And again, you skip over the fact that there are plenty of homeless GLBT children, kicked out of the homes by loving fundamentalist christians like you.
And please, you have shown that you have “sympathy” for sinners like homosexuals. Show some for the rapist for according to you, I am like a rapist.
Barb,
If you want proof go do math. In science, there is just evidence and theory.
Coming from someone who thought human hearts don’t require an external energy source that doesn’t say much.
No. Consensual relationships between adults is not morally equivalent to raping children.
Why does an all knowing being need to experiment? And how would an all powerful being make an experiment go bad, i.e make a mistake?
No, Barbie, you’re wrong. You conflate reality and fantasy, and that doesn’t contribute anything but nonsense to the conversation.
There you go again, certain that your particular brand of religious nonsense is “the Truth”, but as I just said, all you are doing to mixing up fantasy and reality. We die. That’s it. All your claims about eternal life? Just wishful thinking, nothing more.
Yes, we have made a choice. We choose not to fall prey to ancient superstitions and fantasies, but to embrace the real world in which we live. I’m sorry you have made the wrong choice.
If gays don’t accept Jesus, how come they yell his name when they’re having sex?
Nazis belt buckles said, “Gott ist mit uns.”
I realize that most of you already know that. Maybe Barb does, too, and that’s why she resorted to the “no true Scotsman” line.
Sorry, Barb, ol’ Adolf was a creotard just like you.
Maybe you want to get yourself a buckle like this one?…
http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/belt.htm
Banal Barb blurted
Why did a perfect being feel the need to have sycophants constantly at his feet?
You bet Barb – Every time I see Christian Bagge walking around town I notice he’s grown back both of his legs and feet. Not!
How come he still has no feet Barb? He’s a devout christian.
HEY! That’s no way to talk about Odin! I mean, sure, He may let Loki mess around with us a little to much (how else do you explain intelligent design, moon hoaxers and reality TV), but no one is perfect.
Barb, could you please explain how you reconcile your use of petroleum with your non-acceptance* of evolution? Again, we USE the principles of evolution, in part, to prospect, SUCCESSFULLY, for petroleum. It works (we find the bloody oil). How do you reconcile this?
*I don’t use disbelief or non-belief in these conversations. The acceptance of a scientific theory’s validity isn’t a matter of belief (sensu the deniers’ views on the word), no matter how often they assert that it is.
Barb #308 wrote:
You misunderstand. I wasn’t saying that Christian theology holds that God made us in order to damn us (though the Calvinists may argue so.) I was pointing out that the Christian narrative claims that our purpose on earth is for us to make, as you put it, a “choice.” Those who choose well will be saved; those who do not choose well will be damned.
The fit will survive (with God) — he unfit will be ‘cut out’ and tossed aside like garbage. It doesn’t matter that you think this is all done for the best, to improve life in heaven, and that the damned deserve their damnation, or ask for it, or whatever. The Nazis were also doing what they did for, they thought, the ‘best end’ — and compared the Jews to a cancer that would eat away and destroy what was good.
This message is similar to the “message” you say we get from evolution. But evolution is only an explanation for how things got to be the way they are: it’s not a moral story where the Evil must be purged in order for the meek and righteous to inherit the earth.
I don’t think it’s at all strained to see a parallel between Christian theology, and eugenics. Those who are insufficiently “God-like” or “God-loving” are eliminated so that only the better ones may live in an improved environment, with God.
Bullshit, Barb. Bullshit. We can see the formation of anti-Judaism in early Christianity right there in the development of the tradition, in the texts. It’s pointless to say “The German intolerance for Jews was not rooted in their historic Christianity” and then lamely attempt to adduce “reasons” for European antisemitism that are just sterotypes, themselves manifestations of antisemitism.
Are you aware that, during Holy Week, throughout the middle ages, European Jews knew to lay low, and often had to hide their children from bloodthirsty mobs roused into action by a Good Friday sermon? What is it specifically about Holy Week that would make Christians angry about usury, or insularity?
Barbie blathered:
I’m sorry, but to me, you are one of the silliest Christards who’s stumbled in here, all drunk on religious ignorance and certitude.
Remember, we’re not laughing with you, we’re laughing at you…
Barb wrote, in response to a comment of mine:
Why the heck do you think I have confidence in Darwin? Darwin just lit the candle. And others had poured the wax and dipped the wick before him. I don’t have confidence in Darwin. I have respect for him as I think he was a hell of lot smarter than me (and I respect intellect). I have confidence in the 150 years of rigorous testing that his theory has withstood since it was first penned. That is a Rather-Important-Distinction. Stop insisting that we prostrate ourselves before the higher mind without question. That’s just simply untrue. You obviously don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.
And YES, there have been changes in the theory. So what?
There have been changes in Atomic Theory. For example, Atomic Theory existed prior to the discovery of electrons. It was adjusted to accomodate them. Are you trying to assert that this is somehow bad? Why? We figued out something new about the universe–yeah that sucks a lot. How can you be married to an MD and have this much contempt for knowledge?
You’ll find that some creationists can explain evolution as well as any evolutionist. They KNOW it; they just don’t BELIEVE it.
Because they’re clods who reject evidence that doesn’t shore up their non-evidence-based, emotional beliefs in invisible magic sky fairies, and who lack a rudimentary ability to distinguish reality from fantasy. Like yourself.
God only knows.
Seriously, Barb, now you’re just being obnoxious. You accuse us of lacking humility? Have you not seen the beam in your own eye? You’ve been coming here long enough to have viewed numerous discussions regarding “proof” and “truth” in science. You should know by now that we do not PROVE things in science in the way that you’re using the word prove. If you haven’t figured that out, then what the heck makes you think you’re qualified to authoritatively assert anything regarding science? You don’t seem to understand the first thing about how science works, yet you will tell me, a professional scientist, in no uncertain terms what my our evidence does or doesn’t say? Seriously? And then you have the gall to accuse us of not being humble? Apparently you’re as contemptuous of Christian knowledge as you seem to be about all of other kinds.
Hey AnthonyK – How do you do comic sans in the quote lines?
Don’t know. It has something to do with squiggle squiggle blah comic sans close squggle. I try to get around it by not quoting stupid people.
Well, that’s that NY resolution fucked. Thanks a lot Barb, SF, and facilis!
<p style=”font-family: Comic Sans MS”>Like this for people saying stupid shit</p>
of course I added block quote tags
Anyway, I should ask Barb. Comic Sans is her first language.
Chimpy, how can we trust you? I am afraid you are trying to spread you typo cooties. Are you Patient Zero?
Yay, thanks Rev. Now, if I can only find someone fuckwit stupid to quote…
Janine, would that make god’s little googball an impatient zero?
DAAAAMN! >:[
I know you can do Patricia!
AnthonyK, what is a googball? Time to google.
I have no plans for total font domination, yet.
A “googball” is a a “goofball” without the effin’. Barb to a T
I’ll take a cootie, if I can learn this.
there you go