2 + 2 = 17, for certain values of 2

A while back, I responded to Behe/Luskin’s claim that his model proving the impossibility of evolution of chloroquinone resistance was vindicated. I pointed out (as did Ken Miller) that showing that a particular trait required multiple point mutations did not affect the probability in the naive way that Behe and Luskin calculated — in particular, it did not require that the mutations be simultaneous. We’re familiar with a great many known mutations that involve multiple sequential hits to have their effect. I mentioned the work on steroid receptor evolution, and how cancer is an amazing example of the power of the accumulation of sequential variants.

Behe fired back, issuing a challenge to ‘show my numbers’. If he could have said anything to confirm that he was obliviously ignoring my point, that was it, and so I blew him a raspberry and ignored his challenge. I wasn’t arguing with his numbers, and we could even use his very own set of numbers — my point was in the operation he was doing with those numbers. His assumption is that you must have two mutations occur simultaneously, in the same individual, so that you simplistically multiply the probabilities together to get an improbably low frequency. I’m saying that’s invalid: these mutations can happen independently, they can accumulate to some frequency in the population, and then a second mutation can occur.

Now Larry Moran has carried through on the calculations. Using the known data on mutation rates, and throwing away Behe’s bogus demand that everything occur in the very same instant, he shows that the evolution of chloroquinone resistance ought to be rare, but not at all impossible, and with frequencies that are in the ballpark of what is observed.

Furthermore, Moran describes a paper that quantifies the presence of malaria strains in the population that contain pieces of the resistant combinations and that further describe the sequential series of mutational events that led to the most resistant strains.

All of the strains (except D17) are found in naturally occurring Plasmodium populations and the probable pathways to each of the major chloroquine resistant strains are shown. It takes at least four sequential steps with one mutation becoming established in the population before another one occurs.

None of the mutations occurred simultaneously as Behe claimed in his book.

The intelligent design creationists are somehow still crowing victory. I don’t quite understand how — their premises have been demolished, they’ve been cut off at the knees, but I guess their followers are easily bamboozled if they shout “math!” loud enough. Even if the math is wrong.

I hope you have a bucket handy

The Creation “Museum” is advertising on Nickelodeon with commercials aimed straight at your children.

Notice that nowhere in their ads do they mention biblical literalism, young earth, god’s extermination of most of mankind, or that their audience are all damned sinners. Instead, we get dinosaurs and animals and a lot of false implications that the museum is a fun place for kids.

It isn’t. It’s a pretty dry series of exhibits, full of earnest sincerity, and a good bit of it in the middle is an attempt to scare everyone away from hellbound evolution.

Oh, well, I hope they’re spending a lot of money on advertising, and that it all contributes to this year’s red ink.

More legal fun and games from Kent Hovind!

Kent Hovind wants the property he forfeited in his criminal conviction back! He has filed a lis pendens on the property that was seized. I am not a lawyer, and had to look it up, but apparently it’s an intent to make a legal claim on some real estate. I guess you’re not supposed to do that with properties forfeited to the government in a legal process, and which are under an injunction. But the law won’t step ol’ Kent!

So the court has fired back with a threat to hold him in contempt.

Kent E. Hovind is required to appear before the Court at 8:00 a.m., on September 8, 2014, to show cause why he should not be held in criminal contempt of Court, pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 401(3) and Fed. R. Crim. P. 42(a). This will be a jury trial and will be held in Courtroom 5, United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida, Pensacola Division, located on One North Palafox Street, Pensacola, Florida 32502.

He has an option to get a court-appointed defense lawyer. I hope he doesn’t, and instead relies on the advice of his wacky right-wing conspiracy theorist buddies, because the shenanigans are always so entertaining. Anyone remember subornation of false muster?

Another thumbs up for AtheistTV!

Ken Ham hates it! He’s actually pretty clueless.

The new channel brags of having “superstition-free programming,” which implies that religion is just silly superstition but atheism is rational and logical. However, laws of logic and rationality only makes sense if God, who is logical, created them and made us in His image so that we can understand them! Laws of logic shouldn’t exist in a completely random materialistic universe that the atheists believe in —and yet they do!

But god is illogical. There is no reason to believe in any deity, let alone the bizarre one Ken Ham worships, who is little more than a tribal warlord writ large, promoting archaic ideas like blood sacrifice.

If logic can only arise from a logical intelligence, where did Ken Ham’s putatively logical god come from?

It is incredible that atheists spend so much time, effort, and money arguing against Someone that they don’t even believe exists! Where are all their books, websites, and magazines that argue against the mythical Easter Bunny? This is because they do know God exists but they are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness (Romans 1:18).

No, I don’t believe god exists. I do believe religion exists. When militant EasterBunneyists start running for political office to promote their beliefs, I’ll argue against them more.

And why do atheists care so much about proclaiming their message? Atheism offers no hope and is ultimately a totally purposeless religion. If you die, that’s all there is, so why do atheists push so hard to preach their message of hopelessness? Why does it matter to them what anyone believes? It’s because they have the knowledge of God stamped on their hearts but are living in rebellion against their Creator (Romans 1:18; 3:10, 24–25).

Weird. No. I don’t believe in gods. One trivial, basic fact about atheism…and Ken Ham gets it wrong. Also, our message is that it’s a fool’s game to live for an imaginary life after you’re dead. Life’s beautiful, live for it now.

But here’s the part of Ham’s tirade I find particularly funny.

Sadly, this new TV channel is not just targeting adults with a hopeless message of godlessness, but they are also trying to indoctrinate children into an atheistic worldview. Isn’t it bad enough that humanistic thinking has lead to over 55 million deaths of aborted children in the U.S. alone, and now the atheistic humanists want to continue their attacks to poison and destroy the minds children who have survived the abortion holocaust. You see, we live in a world that is fiercely battling for the hearts and minds of our kids. And yet, it is a world where those who teach their kids the truth of God’s Word are accused of child abuse!

Unforgivable! They’re teaching children!

But here’s his very next paragraph:

But Scripture commands believers to “train up a child in the way he should go” (Proverbs 22:6), so we need to boldly stand on the authority of God’s Word and teach our children that the Bible’s history—and message of salvation—can be trusted. I encourage you to take advantage of our “Kids Free in 2014” program at the Creation Museum—bring as many kids as you can to hear the message that the Bible can be trusted, there is a God, and He died for them.

There is a god, and he’s dead! Oh, wait, he’s not. He was just restin’ for a bit. You have to catch ’em young to convince people to believe that kind of nonsense.

AtheistTV gets a thumbs up

I was home for a late lunch, so I flipped on the Roku and installed the AtheistTV channel. It was easy, but then you Roku owners know that part already.

The channel is well organized into various categories, but right now content is a little thin — the comedy category, for instance, contains one video, and the movie category…well, there are a few entries there, but it’s a stretch to call them ‘movies’. I guess atheists are a bit light on providing entertainment.

But I consider the sparse content on the day of the launch to be a good thing. My dread was that they’d take a shortcut to filling up the channel by importing youtube videos wholesale, and then it would be an exercise in wading through garbage to find the gems. That’s not the case at all — they’ve exercised restraint and quality control.

So what you’ll find there is a lot of material relevant to American Atheists: recordings of talks at the last few national conferences and the Reason Rally, and AA’s official talk show, the Atheist Viewpoint. There’s a lot of stuff transferred from the RDF. The Atheist Community of Austin is featured with a collection of videos from the Atheist Experience. When I say it’s thin, I’m talking relatively, compared to a movie channel — you could still veg out for many weeks nonstop trying to watch everything on it. It’s still important that they are being selective about putting up videos with thoughtful commentary about atheism.

It also looks ready for expansion, and I’m sure even more will be added. It’s a good strategy for introducing the content of the conferences to a wider audience, and that’s a natural procedure for generating new material.

Some suggestions I’d make: it really is American Atheist-centered, understandably, but it would be nice to see partnering with CFI or American Humanists or British Humanists, for instance, to fold in some of their content. It would also be cool to adopt more science content — HHMI, for example, has lots of free science videos that aren’t at all explicitly atheistic but would fit in well with a theme of scientific naturalism (whether they’d be willing to have them shown on an atheist channel is an open question). Not just science, but also history and philosophy categories would be a nice addition.

Check it out. I think it’s going to be useful. If you have a Roku, it’s definitely worth getting the channel (it’s free, so I’m not saying much there), but it’s also yet another reason to get a Roku if you don’t have one.

At least the title gets it right: the author is a “Know Nothing”

It’s weird. There’s this new Dawkins’ Flea, Nick Spencer, who has written a book called Atheists: The Origin of the Species, which I have not read nor am I interested in reading. But it also has this positive review by Michael Robbins in Slate, and I get so much mail about it — either people who declare “Checkmate, Atheists!” or “This is really stupid, you should rip into it”, in equal measure. I’m going to have to side with “it’s stupid.”

It’s unoriginal. It’s the same old nonsense parroted by anti-atheists for the past decade. In fact, all I had to do is skim the thing and see familiar tropes jump out at me, and until people started sending me link after link, I didn’t bother to read it carefully.

Let me tell you, reading it carefully did not make it any better.

Here are the key arguments that bored me:

New Atheists aren’t new. Oh, please. Anyone who tries to make this argument is an idiot and can be simply dismissed. WE KNOW. Every big-name New Atheist I know has grumbled about this stupid label. We didn’t come up with it. It was imposed on us from the outside, and every time it was brought up, we’d grumble, “But these ideas have been around for a long time…” and get ignored. And now we get accused of being ignorant of history, philosophy, and literature because we think we came up with this stuff for the very first time. We didn’t, and we sure don’t believe so. Fuck off.

Nietzsche! Nietzche, Nietzsche, Nietsche. This one is just annoying, but it’s a good, reliable marker for pseudo-erudite apologetics for religion. When they start talking about Nietzsche, you know exactly where they’re going: it’s not that he was an interesting, complicated, and unique philosopher, but all they want to tell you is that he was the last good atheist. Why? Because he was an anguished atheist who saw the loss of faith as a great tragedy for our culture, that was going to cause massive upheavals. You are allowed to be an atheist only if you feel deep regret and show the proper appreciation for the magnitude of religion’s contributions to humanity.

Many atheists do feel pain at leaving religion, especially if they were brought up deeply imbedded within it. Becoming an atheist means saying Mom & Dad & Grandma & Grandpa were completely wrong about something they thought was extremely important in their lives, and that’s sometimes very hard to do. But they still feel it’s clear enough and important enough to deny tradition, because that religion they were brought up with turns out to have been evil bullshit. I’d like to see these apologists make a similar argument against egalitarianism — the last good person to promote equal rights was the one who expressed deep remorse over his cherished lost racism, and who was unhappy that ending slavery would change the world.

And some of us atheists were brought up largely outside the fervent cults, and we look at religious culture and laugh. No brainwashing that we have to struggle to overcome, you know. And that’s a good thing.

Atheists are arrogant, Christians are humble. Yeah, Robbins actually pulls this old chestnut out of hat as the conclusion for his essay. Right. The people who claim to have a direct line to the Creator Of The Universe, Invisible Master of All Things, Who tells them that they have a special purpose and will live for Eternity, and who have a Divine Mission to make sure everyone else follows God’s marching orders, are humble. The ones who say we live in a thin skin of water and air on one small rock among uncountable trillions in the universe, who say existence is fragile and we need to work to maintain it, and that we’re nothing special, except to ourselves…those are the arrogant ones.

Here’s the big one: Religion is not an explanation for the facts of life. I have heard so many variants of this nonsense; of course Karen Armstrong and Marilynne Robinson and David Bentley Hart are cited, those masters of effusively saying nothing at all. When you point out a contradiction or a fallacy in their holy doctrine, theologians are always quick to start waving their hands and shouting that the Holy Book is not a science text! You have to read it metaphorically! You have to interpret it in a proper historical and social context! OK, I can do that. Given that it gets so much humanly wrong, we must conclude that these documents are the expressions of human beings’ struggle to understand their place in nature, and lack any sign of special, privileged knowledge from a divine intelligence. They are no more magic than Shakespeare’s plays, which means they might be good and interesting historical literary works, but only contain truths that were accepted as common knowledge at the time.

What always annoys me is that they expend so much wind telling us that their faith is not a science project, and that it is so unfair to try and impose standards for truth and understanding on it, that they never bother to get around to telling us what it is. At best we get a thesaurus dump: a flurry of adjectives and adverbs attached to a set of nebulous terms — but something does not become more true in correlation with the floweriness of the language. And sometimes we get outright nonsense, like this:

Science and religion ask different questions about different things. Where religion addresses ontology, science is concerned with ontic description.

For those not up on the lingo, ontology refers to the nature of things, and their relationships. It’s actually an important topic in biology — systematists, obviously, but also in my molecular biology background it’s a major concern in understanding the genome. Figuring out the relationships between genes is genetic ontology, and it’s something lots of people are studying! I have two major objections to that statement, though.

  1. If religion is about ontology, it’s fantasy ontology. Trying to puzzle out the relationships of gods and humans in the absence of any evidence that gods even exist is a silly game. Let’s start talking more about the marriage of Zeus and Hera, or the bizarre father-son dynamic of Odin and Thor.

  2. You really shouldn’t talk about ontology without epistemology. The only mention of that big subject, though, is to accuse atheists of “epistemic arrogance”. It’s true, though, that atheists and scientists think it’s very important to know how we know something, and it’s absurd to pretend that theists don’t, even if they are just taking the stupid “goddidit” shortcut.

But all that is par for the course for apologists. Deny, deny, deny; name-drop some philosophers; fling around some airy deepities; express profound indignance that anyone would dare to question the authority of ancient cultural dogmas and traditions. My eyes glaze over. They have no substance. Goodbye.

Joint statement by Ophelia Benson and Richard Dawkins

I’m very happy to see this: Ophelia and Richard had a meeting of the minds and made a statement deploring the behavior of some atheists.

In other words we have to be able to manage disagreement ethically, like reasonable adults, as opposed to brawling like enraged children who need a nap. It should go without saying, but this means no death threats, rape threats, attacks on people’s appearance, age, race, sex, size, haircut; no photoshopping people into demeaning images, no vulgar epithets.

Here’s Richard’s very important addition:

I’m told that some people think I tacitly endorse such things even if I don’t indulge in them. Needless to say, I’m horrified by that suggestion. Any person who tries to intimidate members of our community with threats or harassment is in no way my ally and is only weakening the atheist movement by silencing its voices and driving away support.

Now that is a step forward.

Ray Comfort is such a special little child of God

Did you know that science has discovered that gravity doesn’t exist in space, just like the Bible says?

comfortidiocy

Tell that to Newton. I wonder what keeps satellites in orbit, or the earth zipping around the sun, if they are hanging on “nothing”.

There’s more! Ray has attempted to cover his error.

comfortagain

There is invisible gravity in space, but the earth…it hangs on nothing!

What a maroon.

Sharp lines

Greta asks where you’d draw the line.

Is there any line that someone could cross that would make you unwilling to support them or work with them? Is there any line that someone could cross that would make you not link to their videos, not share their blog posts, not upvote them, not post admiring comments about them in public forums, not buy or promote their books? Will you really support the work of absolutely anyone, regardless of how vile their behavior has been, as long as they say one thing you happen to agree with?

Would you support the work of an avowed racist, who has publicly and unapologetically stated their opinion that black people are not fully human? Would you support the work of an avowed homophobe, who has publicly and unapologetically stated their opinion that LGBT people are mentally ill and should be locked into mental hospitals?

OK, atheists, think about it. Have you been outraged at the Catholic Church’s cover up of pedophiles, criminal behavior in orphanages or hospitals, or been horrified at their inhuman rejection of family planning in the third world? Have you ever thought to yourself that it was unbelievable that people actually remained in the church and even made excuses for that behavior? If you’re saying that all behavior must be tolerated in the name of the Big Tent, if you’ve been arguing that it’s just one little foible but that these cheerful misogynists have done good work otherwise, if you’re reluctant to call out the ugliness because it might besmirch the good name of atheism, go look in a mirror and say hello to the same damn thing as any Catholic apologist.

Atheists already have a PR problem, in that the stereotype is that we’re all amoral, horrible people. The only corrective is to make it clear that we stand for something more than just making fun of god — and everyone knows this. Atheists like to stand up for science (I approve), but some atheists freak out if we also use atheism as a rational justification for equality (I don’t even understand that). Neither science nor atheism dictate what you must do, but they are frameworks for seeing the universe free of the superstitious fog of human delusions, so that human beings can better pursue human virtues. All human beings. Not just the ones in your ethnic group or your socioeconomic class.

About that ‘big tent’ every movement aims to provide…atheism is a small tent. It was worse 15-20 years ago, when I’d attend atheist meetings and find myself the youngest guy there, but still fitting in as a white male academic. It’s definitely gotten better. But honestly, rather than simply expanding the tent, what I see is resistance, defensiveness, and a hardening of sexist and racist attitudes. And further, I see movement leaders acquiescing or glossing over these flaws because they fear antagonizing people already under the tent, rather than seeing that these same reactionary neophobes (or worse, disruptive trolls) are a major hindrance to further growth. And you have to be willing to adapt.

When you a non-white or non-male person joins your movement, like Sikivu Hutchinson, or Rebecca Watson, or Anthony Pinn, or Heina Dadabhoy, or Jamila Bey, or when LGBTQ atheists like Zinnia Jones or Chris Stedman join, they are not there to bring you cookies. They are not there to reassure you that straight white men are A-OK in their book. They are not there to allow you to check off an entry in your diversity bucket list. They are there to represent their interests, to criticize, to shape the movement to better fill the needs of more diverse people. You can disagree and criticize right back, because that’s what atheists do, but you must take them seriously, and you must try to change yourself, because that’s the only way we can grow this movement.

That’s our choice. We can either make atheism mean something, with substantial ideas that improve people’s lives — and science is one thing that does, but is only going to appeal to a niche audience — or we can fade out and die away, like any of the other tightly focused movements that sprang up in this land of a thousand religions and a thousand self-help movements. Diversify or die. Adaptation or extinction. Your choice.

I’m not making the choice that says we ignore the hidebound dogmatists and stiflingly loud haters in our midst. I’ve got lines that I won’t cross.