What is it with neurosurgeons and evolution?

Yesterday, I mentioned that creationist conference in Istanbul. There wasn’t much to say about the content of the event, but they did have photos of some of the displays, that looked exactly like the nonsense published in Harun Yahya’s Atlas of Creation. But now I’ve got an essay from one of the speakers, Oktar Babuna. I’m sorry to say he’s another data point damaging the reputation of good doctors everywhere.

A Turkish anchorman, neurosurgeon, and doctor of medical sciences, Oktar Babuna, exposes the absurdity of Darwinism by scientific evidence and explains the reason why this preposterous theory is promoted almost everywhere world-wide.

Between Michael Egnor and Oktar Babuna and Ben Carson, I’m hoping I never have a brain injury, because the profession seems to be a magnet for vapid nitwits.

He has the usual ignorant creationist arguments against Darwinism.

Darwinism is absurd because it proposes that life emerged by coincidence

No, it doesn’t.

and that human beings are a mere animal species.

We are animals (although not “mere” — biologists value every species, including our own). What definition of “animal” do the creationists have that somehow fails to include humans?

He tries to back up those assertions with the usual creationist “ooh, big numbers” approach: proteins are assembled from thousands of amino acids, humans have trillions of cells, therefore it’s all just too complex to have been constructed, except by one really smart engineer. This is a fallacious argument. You might just as well look at a beach, notice there are an awful lot of grains of sand out there, and decide that they are so numerous that they must have been placed there, one by one, by a very finicky deity. Every beach is an artisanal beach. Or you could just read Ian Musgrave’s brief introduction to abiogenesis and get the stupid smacked out of your head.

Then he makes the standard Yahya argument. They all look the same to him.

If we look at the beginning of life on Earth, the first cells emerged all at once. For example, the first cell was a cyanobacteria, a cell which exists even today and produces oxygen through photosynthesis. This cell emerged and remains the same cell. All species – from elephants to tigers, plants, fish, and reptiles – appeared all at once and never really changed. There is no evolution.

Ho hum. This is the fallacy of looking at a twig and declaring that there are no branches or trunks, the tree is a twig all the way down. All the things he mentions have known antecedents in the fossil record that are different from modern forms.

Don’t worry, though, Babuna doesn’t waste much time lying about the evidence. He’s got better things to do, like lying about our motives.

So, we can ask: why is this theory supported world-wide? Because evolution is atheism. The reason why Darwin is defended by so many scientists all around the world is in order to keep atheism alive. But this didn’t start with Charles Darwin. The idea that life appeared by chance goes back to the Sumerians, Ancient Egypt, and Ancient Greece. This is the beginning of materialism.

Charles Darwin was not an atheist. He was agnostic. He had no plans to promote atheism, and was actually reluctant to publish in part because he knew what controversy would arise, and in part because he was uncomfortable with contradicting religion’s explanations. Babuna reverses causality here. Atheism didn’t create evolution, but evolution was compatible with atheism, and modern atheism actually uses the scientific evidence to support the idea that gods are unnecessary.

You know what’s coming next, right? It’s so predictable. Hitler.

In Russia, Turkey, the US, and any other country, there is a dictatorship of Darwinism in all universities and schools. Darwinism implants the idea that humans are fighting-animals which have to struggle to survive. If you are strong, you will survive, but if you are weak, you will be eliminated. This is the selfish struggle of Darwinism. This selfishness takes law away from the world and provokes all kinds of violence, terrorism, and fascism. Karl Marx said that evolution is the basis of Marxism’s natural history. Hitler also put the foundations of fascism on Darwinism. When we look at terrorist groups such as ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, etc., these groups emerged for two reasons: religious ignorance and Darwinism. These people need to be educated.

No, evolution accommodates many strategies for survival, not just kill or be killed. Cooperation is just as viable as competition. You don’t need to physically eliminate your competition if you can outbreed them. Species and communities matter.

The relationship between Marxism and evolution is ambiguous and complex. On the one hand, Marx did appreciate the materialist approach; on the other, Marxism wants there to be an arrow of progress that can be consciously directed, something not present in evolutionary theory. Marx also saw Darwin’s version of evolution as more than a little bourgeois, appropriate for a nation of shop-keepers.

Hitler was anti-evolution. He banned Darwin’s books. The foundation of his ideology was God and the state, and he said so repeatedly in Mein Kampf, and religion was a staple of Nazi propaganda. Kinder, Kuche, Kirche!

But how can anyone take someone seriously who claims that ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram are rooted in Darwinism?

I guess that would be the kind of person who thinks religion consists only of good things, so anything bad must, by definition, be the spawn of satanic atheism.

Darwinism has taken love away from the world. It brings selfishness; it sees human beings as animals which can and should kill other animals. If we look at the three major religions –Islam, Christianity and Judaism – they all say that God created all human beings and all other living things with love. Love is the essence of religion. Love will come back to the world with religion. We hope that, with scientific struggle, Darwinism will go away with its egoism and lawlessness.

See? Boko Haram cannot be a religiously motivated terrorist movement, because religion is only about love. Darwinism is all about killing animals, which includes humans, therefore Boko Haram is a Darwinist organization.

With logic like that, how can you not trust Oktar Babuna with a scalpel and your brain?

Regrets, Turkey

Once upon a time, back in the days before I was totally locked into biology (and can never get out), I considered going for a history degree instead. All my electives were history classes, I was reading nothing but historical non-fiction for fun, and I might have gone for it except a) I liked biology better, and b) the damned language requirement. I never got far enough into a degree program to really commit to specific subfield, but one thing I was really into was Turkish history. The Turks were remarkable in how quickly they dominated their region, and further, I was very impressed with Ataturk’s secularization of the nation. You will sometimes hear atheists moaning about how Islam never progressed and needs to be more civilized, like Christianity — they’ve never looked at Turkey, apparently, or Iran. Or for that matter, appreciated the barbarism of Christianity.

But anyway, I’ve always wanted to visit Istanbul. I doubt it will ever happen, especially with the sectarian nastiness emerging among some Turks (I wouldn’t be able to shut my face about the nonexistence of any gods, which might get me into trouble), so I felt a twinge of envy at the fact that the creationist frauds at Reason to Believe got invited to a conference in Istanbul by Harun Yahya. That could have been me. All I’d have to do is abandon all pretence of scientific competence, declare my faith in an evil phantasm, and lie about the evidence for a few days.

No, unfortunately, I don’t think I can do that.

So, in addition to missing the historical power of visiting one of the great cities of the world, I also missed out on a conference that proved (their word) some amazing things.

The conference;
– Once again proved that genetics, biology, paleontology, physics, chemistry and astrophysics all answer the question ‘How did life begin?’ with ‘Creation’.
– Hosted leading academicians from the science world -all experts in their respective areas with many academic studies.

Some of the topics discussed by the prominent scientists during the conference were as follows:
– The true origin of man
– Why I say ‘God exists’
– Detailed examination and criticism of evolutionary theory
– Origins and creation of the universe
– Fossils: The conclusive evidence of the history of life

The answer to that first point is not “creation”, which is a silly thing to say. Also, the crew at RtB are not leading academicians from the science world. They are hack theologians.

I haven’t seen any record of the talks given, but some of the photos are revealing. Here’s that evidence against evolutionary theory:

oktarfossils

There’s Harun Yahya’s whole schtick. Here’s a fossil; it kind of looks like a modern form to the naive eye, therefore it did not evolve, and all of evolution is false. Never mind that if a time machine dropped you off in the Cretaceous, almost everything would look radically different, because, hey, there were jellyfish in the Cretaceous, just like now. It’s an illogical argument, and it’s also factually false, because the species of jellyfish then were different than the species of jellyfish now.

It’s an indictment of Reasons to Believe, by the way, that they willing participated in this Turkish clown show.

But at least they got to watch the dancing.

oktardance

‘The age of the earth has become a strangely toxic issue’

There are spit-takes galore in this video of Stephen Meyer, but don’t worry, he’s so slow and tedious and pompous that you’ll see them coming way ahead of time.

He confesses that the “intelligent design community” (you know, that dying horse that twitches occasionally) has avoided the issue because it has become strangely toxic within Christianity, and then he meanders on about how you can come to either a young earth or an old earth conclusion just by how you look at the evidence, which is very much a Ken Ham/Answers in Genesis sort of perspective.

But don’t worry, he and Ken will still be in opposition. He later admits to being an Old Earth creationist, with the peculiar reservation that he thinks the paleontologists/anthropologists are all wrong, and that humans were spontaneously created by god much more recently than is believed.

But he thinks the age of the earth is a tertiary issue, and The first issue is the reality of god — is god real or imaginary?. I think it’s clear that they have no evidence for a god of any kind, especially the twitchy nasty Christian patriarch he believes in, but it’s strange to argue that the age of the earth is unimportant. It’s a fundamental question: do you accept physical, scientific evidence, or don’t you? The age of the earth is really a relatively simple, straightforward question which has a largely indisputable answer that is supported by multiple lines of hard evidence. If you can’t agree on a basic physical parameter of our world, measured with multiple techniques to a high degree of confidence, you aren’t even speaking the same language.

I’d also say that if you think you can argue that Homo sapiens is only tens of thousands of years old, you’re talking gibberish.

But the real lesson of this video is that Stephen Meyer is a very silly man. I had a tough time listening to all 10 minutes of it because it’s just Meyer giving a stupid answer to a stupid question, and he is unbelievably long-winded, pedantic, and full of himself (a tone he can sustain for a painfully long time, as attested by those horrid doorstops that he has written). What really annoyed me beyond his drone, though, was that when he finally gives up the microphone, he immediately takes it back to praise, of all people, Lee Fucking Strobel, one of the worst, most dishonest, most unconvincing Christian apologists out there. I know atheists who left Christianity after reading that guy’s schlock nonsense. And here’s tedious superficial Meyer claiming he’s persuasive.

Can you die of an irony overdose?

That’s an important question to ask if you’re about to watch a David Barton video.

Something I’ve noticed about progressives and liberals is how careless they are when throwing false claims around.

Question answered. I’m dead. Will have to continue blogging from beyond the veil, using my spirit form. He killed me with his very first sentence.

This is David Barton, god-emperor of the fabricated historical quotation, claiming that progressives make stuff up. I just…I just…sorry, can’t comment. Got an ectoplasm clog right now.

What is the “false claim” that has him riled up?

For example, I was recently on a national television network where I was introduced as having a doctorate. A progressive instantly ran stories claiming that I don’t have a doctorate. That false claim is amusing on so many levels.

Oh. It’s false? Then what I expect is that he’s about to provide some verifiable evidence that he does in fact have an earned doctorate. That’s easy to do, you know.

But no, he’s going to explain that he doesn’t have to.

First, things like health information, and tax information, and college education information are fully protected by privacy laws, so they don’t know whether I have a doctorate or not, and I’ve always chosen not to talk about it.

Uh, no. Your educational records, stuff like grades and classes attended, are protected by FERPA. But obviously, stuff like whether you graduated from a specific institution are not: if someone puts “Ph.D., Harvard” on their CV, you can contact the registrar at Harvard and ask for a degree verification, and they’ll tell you whether that was earned or not. They have to be able to do that, otherwise people like me might start slappin’ the names of prestigious bible colleges on their CVs to look fancy.

So this is just a bogus dodge.

But what does he do immediately after declaring his degree status a private matter?

Second, just for the record, I do have an earned doctorate. There it is. <waves at a couple of framed pieces of paper in the background>

Third, not only do I have an earned doctorate, I have two honorary doctorates.

No. Your degree is not a piece of paper. It’s a record of academic work. I don’t even know where my version of that certificate I got 31 years ago is located — probably buried in a box somewhere. I certainly don’t have it framed, and putting it in a frame does not add extra weight to its importance.

Here’s how you do it, David Barton: you simply state the name of the institution, and the year you got it. It’s that easy. Then anyone can verify it. For instance, I got a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1985. There’s even a service, National Student Clearinghouse, where you can get verification for $12.50. To do that, though, you need to provide the name of the institution. It would also be nice to state what field you got those degrees in. It should also be an accredited college, because those fly-by-night goofy diploma mills probably don’t submit degree information to national databases.

Good thing I’m already dead, because claiming to give us information while not giving us information is classic Barton.

Isn’t Barton devious? He says he doesn’t need to tell you about his degrees (he’s so modest!), but then he deigns to tell you anyway, except that he doesn’t give you the information he pretends to be giving you.

Some people scrutinized those blurry images, though, and got a little tentative information.

As we and others pointed out, Barton’s assertion seemed a little odd since he never actually stated where or when he “earned” his supposed doctorate and the documents in the background to which he pointed were difficult to read, though one clearly came from Pensacola Christian College, from which Barton received an honorary doctorate. The other two documents appear to have come from Ecclesia College and Life Christian University, an unaccredited Christian university that has also awarded Ph.D.s in theology to televangelists like Joyce Meyers and Benny Hinn.

Somebody needs to tell Barton that Ph.D.s from unaccredited diploma mills don’t count as “earned”.

But, like everything David Barton does, he stands by his words. Which is why Barton has taken down that video. I guess he didn’t make the framed diplomas blurry enough.

And now my spirit is going to have to spend some time finding a new corpse to reanimate. I knew there was a reason we bought a house so close to a cemetery.

Diagnostic features of the taxon

I’ve been reminding everyone for 12 years now that Paul Nelson made a specific, quantifiable creationist claim and failed to deliver a promised explanation. This is not unusual. Jeffrey Shallit describes the common elements of the so-called ‘scientific’ creationist, and it’s astonishing how widespread these traits are. One of them is their eagerness to make explicit claims coupled with a reluctance to actually back them up.

The illustrious Robert J. Marks II, professor at Baylor University, is an example of this last characteristic. Back in 2014, he made the following claim: “we all agree that a picture of Mount Rushmore with the busts of four US Presidents contains more information than a picture of Mount Fuji”. I wanted to see the details of the calculation justifying this claim, so I asked Professor Marks to supply it. He did not reply.

Nor did he reply when I asked three months later.

Nor did he reply when I asked six months later.

Nor did he reply when I asked a year later.

It’s now been two years. Academics are busy people, but this is pretty silly. Who thinks the illustrious Professor Marks will ever show me a calculation justifying his claim?

That sounds so familiar. Maybe if you wait 13 years he’ll show you a calculation? Hope springs eternal!

Antivax, chemtrails, and creationism

hovindjail

Kent Hovind is getting divorced from Jo Hovind. I guess this isn’t surprising — maybe his former wife is smarter than he is (a hurdle easily cleared), and saw through all the BS and manipulation and realized it was time to get out.

He’s also remarrying, to an anti-vax crank named Mary Tocco. He’s made a video announcement of his engagement, and it’s another bit of obnoxious lunacy. He spends half of it blaming his ex-wife completely for the divorce — I guess he had absolutely nothing to do with it, despite getting the two of them arrested and imprisoned with demented legal advice — and the other half reassuring everyone that he checked with a whole bunch of fellow ministers, ranging in age from 60 to 85, and 15 out of 16 assured him that it was perfectly OK, and then he mumbles on about how this opens up whole new options for his ministry, allowing him to understand all those divorced people out there at last.

I predicted that there would be interesting times ahead for Hovind’s Creation Science Evangelism once he got out of jail — he’d left management of the creationist organization in the hands of his son, Eric, and I kind of figured it would not be an easy transition once he got out and tried to take back the ministry he’d run into the ground with his tax fraud. And it was so. Hovind is claiming that Jo and Eric conspired to steal all the assets of CSE out from under him. It’s gotten very ugly and confusing.

When Kent originally announced that his divorce, he claimed that Eric had stolen from him and would not let him have the web domain “drdino.com”. He claimed Eric sold himself over two-million dollars worth of equipment and supplies. He mentioned a couple of four-wheelers, a copy machine and a fork-lift. Deana Holmes, a non-practicing attorney, who has been following the Hovind story speculated that he was way off on his valuation and that a lot of the supplies were old T-Shirts, VHS tapes, DVD’s and CD’s of Kent’s old non-copyrighted videos which are all on YouTube. I don’t normally take Kent’s public word as fact, but assuming that we have a couple of old four-wheelers, a fork-lift, some office furniture, plus, the material that Deana mentioned, the price that Eric paid for this is probably about right. Deana pointed out that these accusations were pretty stupid in the light of his tax-liabilities and legal problems they could cause for his son. Kent said in court and in public that he took a vow of poverty and owned nothing. Then turned around and claimed publically that Eric and his mother conspired to take everything away from him. Which one is the truth Kent? Did you own nothing? Or did you own two-million dollars worth of items that Eric stole from you? Just like all of Kent’s statements that seem to change to fit the circumstance.

Eric has stuffed his ministry into a shiny new dumpster, called “God’s Quest”, while Kent seems to be trying to set up a place of his own in a gravel pit in Lenox, Alabama, where he’ll build a brand new Dinosaur Adventure Land. I’m sure this marriage with Mary Tocco will bring order out of chaos. After all, look at her credentials.

Mary is co-founder of the American Chiropractic Autism Board (ACAB) 2006, helped manage Hope For Autism, (HFA) a training program for physicians who want to help children with autism recover and is the Vice President of the Foundation for Pediatric Health. She is also the Director of Vaccine Research and Education for Michigan for Vaccine Choice, a non-profit (501c) watchdog group, insuring vaccine choice in Michigan. Mary Tocco is on the Board of Directors for WAVE, World Association for Vaccine Education (www.novaccine.com)

Wait. The American…Chiropractic…Autism…Board? Those words do not belong together.

Once again, the Hovinds — every one of them — set the standard for creationist inanity.

Freedom is something

Anjuli makes a good point, one that resonates with what I’ve been saying for years. Atheism is not a loss of something; it’s not about simple disbelief. It is about acquiring a more thorough and accurate and liberating understanding of the nature of the universe.

My atheism is not a loss of any kind and even when I embraced it (at the age of twenty-two), it was most certainly a gain. I conceived of it as gaining control over my own mind, and gaining the freedom to use it as I thought best. I also saw it as an escape from a particularly damaging form of social control. It was significant to me, as a twenty-two year old still settling into my identity, that I no longer had my life parameters set by people I regarded as cruel, stupid and ignorant (though I’ve mellowed somewhat on that front).

I have heard these sentiments so many times from so many people over the years, that accepting atheism was like crawling out of a straitjacket to finally be free, and to see the world with new eyes. And then there are others who shrug and just say that it was nothing, they just stopped believing in a god…and the whole damn culture that propagates god-belief and reality-ignorance at its core? An absence of oppression is not simply something that is, it’s something you have to struggle for. And free thought is more than just the absence of something, it’s a positive in its own right.

Support a criminal!

James Croft is looking for assistance to cope with his own life choices.

  • He chose to be a humanist.

  • He chose to speak out loudly about that.

  • He chose to join a protest against police brutality in St Louis.

  • He chose to try and record an instance of police beating a protester.

  • He chose to get arrested…oh, wait, no. He didn’t choose. The police chose to arrest him for daring to document their actions.

And now he’s e-begging to get money to cover his court costs and support his criminal lifestyle. Do you want to encourage that sort of thing? Then yes, you should give him cold hard cash and make yourself a co-conspirator, an accomplice, no less.