He thinks the Perseverance mission to Mars was a waste of money…because the Bible has already told him the answer. Also, he thinks it would be better spent on Christian evangelism.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I’d be happy to send Ken Ham to Mars. But let him raise the funds for air, food, shelter and anything else needed to keep him alive on the way and once he gets there.
Sending Hammy to evangelise on Mars? Sounds like a good idea.
Damn! I get the silver medal yet again
Grifter’s gotta grift.
Another advantage of sending ken “piglet rapist” ham to Mars — besides the obvious one of keeping the piglets safe with him multiple light-minutes away — is it would so enrage the Martians they’re bound to make themselves known. They might even send a few tripods as a goodwill gesture to discuss the matter.
PZ, you said,
“Inconceivable…I don’t think you understand that word.”
but the exact quote is
“Inconconceivable…You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
imback, which makes it an allusion, not a quotation.
Which of course puts the lie to their claim that they believe in science, just rejecting assumptions. They won’t even endorse repeatable gathering of data if they believe they already know the answer.
Shame on all of you who suggested sending Ken to Mars! Why on Earth would you want to contaminate the environment on Mars?
creationist are against research and science but they are instinctively fearful that any research will demonstrate all their beliefs are in error. The bottom line is their faith or belief is not very strong their pride tells them that they know what is real and the true nature of god and the creation.
uncle frogy
Isn’t it interesting how many folks want to tell an omnipotent individual what it can and cannot do?
The evangelical limit their god’s power by forbidding it from creating life anywhere else, as if life on another world really is our ancestor’s business.
Bohr had to tell Einstein to stop telling god what to do.
It’s just a godawful mess!
wzrd1 @11: They only want to follow a god that’s as shallow and petty as they are.
I don’t know why you would bother with refuting Ham.
You’ve been doing that for a bazillion internet years.
so did y’all know that putting asterisks causes formatting?
one star does italiic
two star does bold
All this speculation on the state of grace of extraterrestrials is giving me flashbacks to high school freshman English at a Catholic prep school. The teachers in general had about the distribution of eccentricities you’d expect in that environment but this old guy was one of the biggest straight up weirdos we’ve ever had—he taught a self-designed method for diagramming sentences based on football metaphors, and he’d go off on tangents about his coaching days and things like his career as a salesman for personal workout devices.
He took the unit’s focus on mythology as a launchpad to spin off about von Däniken’s theories of extraterrestrial gods, and he apparently considered the question of the need for the salvation of alien souls an open and interesting one. (In fairness I should say that all the actual science teachers I had at that school were quite competent and gave me a good foundation for college, as did the English teachers I had the next three years).
Anyway, C.S. Lewis wrote a whole trilogy featuring a habitable Mars and Venus as was the style at the time, and centering on the idea of original sin’s effects being limited to our planet. I only read it once and don’t exactly love it, recalling the unpleasant aspects of his whole worldview that tended to seep in—his view of secular scientists has a distinct whiff of Hamm—but on balance I’d still say it’s worthwhile in the sense that well-written but deeply weird and idiosyncratic fantasy is generally a positive thing to have out in the world.
drseteve@15– Maybe he found it easier to visualise a hanging participle if he called it an incomplete pass?
Ah Professor, why do you do such things to yourself? Spoiling a Sunday listening to “them” and their drivel. On the other hand, I quite enjoyed the video, so…
@15 drsteve: about the CSL trilogy, I would venture that the first volume is quite readable, pity for the antiscience screed at the end. The second (regrettably) I had to put down, as the good imagery and story were getting spoiled by religious miasma. Still, at least one of his monsters is quoted in JL Borges “Manual de zoologia fantastica”, not half bad as a tribute.
I read paralandra and the others I do not know where I got them I do not have them now anyway.I thought they sure had the strongn whiff of catechism class and were barley more then poor metaphor owing much to the parables in the bible then any science roots. catholic thought experiments nothing more.
uncle frogy
Saw a Tweet this weekend:
“Did you know you can fly a drone on Mars and that they can’t even keep the lights on in Texas? This is because scientists and engineers run things on Mars and fundagelicals run things in Texas.”
The concept of Adam’s sin causing the fall of all sentient beings in the universe raises a question: Does sin travel faster than the speed of light? If not, then the bubble of sin that’s expanding in all directions from the Earth currently has a radius of only 6000 light years. Adam’s sin influence, therefore, hasn’t even reached the nearest neighboring galaxy. It’s going to take 2.5 million years for the inhabitants of the Andromeda galaxy to start having any fun.
For the corruption to have occurred to the entire universe at once, though, would mean that sin can travel much faster than light. Think of the cool experiments one could perform to test this hypothesis.
Possibly smaller, if sin travels slower than light.
“The speed of sin” presupposes sin is a form of energy (matter); if it is something like a moving shadow (e.g.), than it might indeed travel (move) faster than light yet still have a measurable effect.
This could explain why evil can travel halfway around the world while sense is still putting on its shoes (to paraphrase Terry Pratchett).
As for sending Ham to Mars… Given the current rate of successful landings, there is a 50:50 chance that he’ll arrive as either a fireball or just go “Splat!”. So, there is only a half chance that he might try to evangelize anything already there. (If there is life on Mars, would he recognize it if he saw it?)
If he did arrive intact, we would then know that there is life on Mars, but not as we know it.
@22,Why (try to) land him on Mars? Just (try to) put him into orbit as a third inert “natural” moon, perhaps food for the Great Galactic Ghoul: “a fictitious space monster that subsists on a diet of Mars probes, and is sometimes facetiously used to ‘explain’ the recurring difficulties.” Although such an offering would probably disgust the Ghoul…