As I mentioned, I’ll be heading off to the Creation Science Fair early tomorrow morning. I’m aiming to get there around tenish, but I do have a 3 hour drive, and there are hints of snow tomorrow, so I may be a little late. Feel free to start without me.

Afterwards, let’s do lunch before I turn around and head home!

I’ve been collecting responses to the notorious debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye, and intend to write a couple of summaries of various aspects of the debate: Bill Nye won it hands down, but that does not remove him from criticism, and there have been some weird arguments presented both to defend and criticize him.

Right now, I want to focus on William Saletan, corporate tool and professional contrarian, who also seems to have some kind of weird Malcolm Gladwell envy. Don’t feel jealous, Will, to me you’re both glib and superficial apologists for capitalism. here’s the gist of Saletan’s bizarre interpretation of the creationism offered by the profitable folks at Answers in Genesis.

Creationism, as presented by Ham and his colleagues, is a compartmentalized myth. It doesn’t prevent its adherents from functioning as ordinary people or as scientists.

I would like to see evidence of this “compartmentalized” aspect of the myth. It looks to me like it’s spilling out all over. Saletan might want to look at the people Republicans appoint to oversee environmental concerns. John Shimkus, who believes global climate change is no threat, because the story of Noah’s Flood is literally true, and God promised he wouldn’t do it again; Paul Broun, who called evolution “lies from the pit of hell”. Is James Inhofe safely “compartmentalized”?

And then I look at what’s being done to public education. Louisiana is using state funds to promote creationism; are we building a wall around the whole state to compartmentalize it? About a third of Minnesota teachers are talking up young earth creationism in their classes — it seems to be an awfully porous compartment. The Texas Board of Education is packed with young earth creationists who do their damnedest to keep science out of the textbooks. Are these not doing harm?

Further, I’d argue that it does interfere with your ability as a scientist. Ken Ham trotted out a series of people who basically executed significant engineering projects, and called them scientists; Saletan, totally clueless as ever about what science actually entails, accepts that without question and thinks Ham was effective in portraying creationism as compatible with science.

Science is a process for generating new knowledge, and for creating a deeper understanding of how the universe works. Important as it is, it is not engineering. It is not about building gadgets for satellites. You can do science with satellite gadgets. It is an important distinction. And we’re dealing with people who reject science, who claim the universe is less than ten thousand years old, in defiance of all the science that says otherwise — you don’t get to claim that they are functioning as scientists.

But I also have to criticize Nye, who has been repeating this same kind of line over and over, and it really misses the point. Here’s Saletan again:

Nye portrayed creationism as a cancer. Each time he spoke, he closed with the same warning: Creationism threatens technology, innovation, and prosperity. He insisted that you can’t do good science or run a successful society while maintaining a distinction between real, experimental science and mythical “historical science.” At one point, he showed a satellite image of the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. “That capability,” he said of the satellite, “comes from our fundamental understanding of gravity, of material science, of physics and life science.”

Actually, no. It doesn’t. You can be a perfectly good satellite engineer while believing total nonsense about the origins of life. That doesn’t mean we should teach creationism in schools or pretend it’s a scientific theory. But it does mean we can live with it as a compartmentalized fetish. Believe whatever you want to about monkeys, Noah, and the Garden of Eden. Just don’t let it mess with your day job.

Impractical as this sounds, science isn’t about jobs. Nye is making a huge mistake tying understanding science to strictly utilitarian and immediate ends, and that may be a consequence of his background as an engineer.

Let me rephrase it to make the flaw in this argument obvious. What if we were talking about art?

Art is clearly important for a healthy society — it’s how we see and think about ourselves, it’s how we express human values, it’s fundamentally part of being human. It’s also an effective and powerful way to challenge preconceptions and make our culture better. But it doesn’t pay. And corporate art tends to be bland pablum that does nothing to fulfill the essential functions of art.

(If anyone here dares to make that stupid joke of smug philistines everywhere, you know the one that ends Want fries with that?, you deserve to be lobotomized and shackled to an assembly line for the rest of your life, OK? You don’t understand anything. You have drunk the kool-aid and think the purpose of your life is serving your bosses, you don’t understand art or science, and you can just fuck off.)

So here’s Nye asserting that the measure of the importance of science is how well it trains you to do a job, and here’s Saletan basically agreeing with him on the purpose of learning about science, and disagreeing with Nye by claiming that learning bad science isn’t going to have any impact on your work prospects, because he thinks The McJob is what science is all about. Not only is he building a fallacious case for science, he’s essentially throwing art under the bus along with it.

A pox on both of them. Nye is good at communicating a passion for science, but fails to note the conflict when he pretends that science is about being a better, more employable widget maker for Big Widget, Inc. Saletan is just a cynical contrarian twit who isn’t even aware that his cocky excuses for the corporate status quo are the opposite of contrarian or challenging or provocative. They’re simply sad.

I’m going to have to ask that all you confident utilitarians please sit it out when you’re asked to discuss the validity of science, because you’re prone to reducing it to the wrong foundation. I’m also going to ask what the hell is wrong with Nye for making an argument based on personal profit when he ignored Nick Matzke’s commandments for wanna-be debaters, which are all about locking down where the money will go.

It’s just inconsistencies all over the map.

The Twin Cities Creation Science Association is hosting their annual science fair again this weekend, at the University of Northwestern St Paul, 3003 North Snelling, Roseville, Minnesota, in Maranatha Hall. At least it’s being done at an appropriately Christian college.

Every year I note this thing, and every year I fail to attend. It’s just too depressing to see the sad little displays and the cheerful kids who are being detoured into failure. I always feel like I should go, though, just to witness it.

So I was thinking, maybe if I had a little more incentive…is there anyone else in that part of Minnesota who’d like to meet up, take a tour through the tackiness, and then get together to restore our faith in humanity with a beer or lunch? Let me know in the comments. I’d probably aim to get there around 10am, when it’s all set up and judging is going on, and be off by early afternoon. If anyone can recommend a good pub or something in that area, even if you can’t make it, it would be appreciated.

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Let me add: if you look at the photos of last year’s fair, you’ll see that these are fairly typical of even secular science fairs — the only weird bit is the required inclusion of a Bible verse, and every once in a great while someone trots out some nonsense about a young earth or whatever. If you think this is an opportunity to get together and poke fun at some kids, stay home, OK?

What I’ve seen over and over again is that there’s nothing creative about creationism — they repeat the same old arguments, and they’re all (except for the weird twist of Intelligent Design creationism) derived from American publications in the 1960s. And even ID is an American confabulation! So I tend to give my own country a share of the blame when I see an Australian like Ken Ham, or a Turk like Adnan Oktar.

I may have been too quick to accept guilt, though. I’m going to have to blame Australia more.

The recent revelation that creationism-teaching schools in at least nine states were receiving over $11 million of taxpayers’ money per year might have startled Americans. But that is tiny compared to the taxpayer funds pushing creationism in Australia.

Since the 1970s, Australia has ratcheted up public funding to private schools, such that, in 2013, more than 34 percent of all school students attend them. More than 90 percent of these private schools are Christian. These include a large Catholic sector, and some old, establishment schools, which parents choose more for lavish facilities and old-school-tie networks than any religious content.

Nonetheless, the fastest growth is in more strictly religious schools such as the 91 affiliated with Australian Association of Christian Schools, whose members must assent to a Statement of Faith declaring “the supreme authority of the Bible,” meaning that “the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are God’s infallible and inerrant revelation to man” and “the supreme standard by which all things are to be judged.” The Statement also affirms that, “in pursuit of their task, Christian schools only employ Christian teachers and Christian non-teaching staff who are able to subscribe to this Statement.”

To proponents of “inerrant revelation,” the Genesis six days of creation are a touchstone.

In 2010 (the most recent figures available), AACS schools received over $357 million from state and federal governments.

Whoa. So Australia is pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into propping up creationism? I’m not buying beer for any Australians ever again, until you stop.

Man, Todd Friel is painful to listen to — so many grating rhetorical tics. Can someone tell me where this weird habit of carefully voicing every vowel and adding extra vowels to the ends of words come from? When he calls Bill Nye unreasonable and lying, it comes out UN-REEE-ZUN-A-BULL-AH and LIE-ING-UH. It makes him irritating to listen to before I even think about the content.

Here, you can suffer too.

If you don’t want to listen — and I don’t blame you — I’ll give you instead his two stupid arguments against Bill Nye’s points in the recent creation debate. They are focused entirely on the bogus distinction Ken Ham makes between observational and historical science. I can tell I am going to have to spend a lot of time in the future slapping down idiots who triumphantly march up to me and declare that evolution is a historical science, and therefore I made it up.

His first case is an example of the two kinds of science. He has a bug on a piece of paper; he declares that he’s about to do “observational science”, and he merely describes it. It’s got spots, it’s got eight [???] legs, it’s some kind of ladybug or stinkbug. Already I can tell he’s not very good at this, but he announces that this is the only true science.

What would historical science be? Then he provides a couple of scenarios, that someone carried it in their pocket and put it there for him to find, or that it flew in through a window. But we can’t know! Nothing in the past can ever be tested scientifically! In Todd Friel’s world, he could have been snorting cocaine off a rent-boy’s butt yesterday, and because it isn’t happening right now in front of you, it didn’t happen. Awfully convenient for Todd.

But actually, we can test hypotheses about the past. Did it just fly in? If his recording studio were in Minnesota right now, we could definitively say no — a small beetle would last for milliseconds at -20°C. Did someone carry it in? Much more likely — we could check who has access to agricultural supply houses, we could talk to people, we can even be pretty confident that Friel set this all up in advance. Did God just poof it into existence on that piece of paper? That’s the least likely possibility. We can examine similar and prior conditions and determine the relative probability of whole sets of causal events in the past, and even make tests. For instance, Darwin hypothesized that Pacific islands were colonized by seeds that drifted across the ocean, and he did experiments, soaking seeds in salt water for varying lengths of time to test how long they could survive and germinate. To claim that you can’t do tests of ideas about the past is simply nonsense.

Friel was also LIE-ING-UH. He tried to rebut Nye’s claim of trees that are 9550 years old, older than the Earth in the creationists’ myth, by saying flat out that they were NOT dated by counting tree rings. Actually, yes, they were, and the ice cores were dated by counting layers. It actually is that straight-forward. Then Friel announced that their age was determined by radiocarbon dating…which is proved, PROVED, not to be reliable. Carbon dating is reliable within its boundary conditions. My car is reliable as well, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t work if I dropped it through a hole in the ice over Lake Minnewaska and then tried to start it as it was sitting on the lake floor. Does that PROVE that I cannot use it to drive from Morris to Minneapolis? Especially in the face of evidence that I do exactly that fairly regularly?

His second big example of Nye being an UN-REE-ZUN-A-BULL-AH man is that Nye pointed out that no wooden boat has been built that was the size of the ark, and that past efforts to build very large wooden ships failed because the material is not adequate to handle the stresses of the sea — they twisted and leaked and were a pain to maintain. I’d say that that’s pretty good observational science: build something, test it, and see if it’s possible. Then we can apply those observations to the past; is it likely that 8 Mesopotamian farmers could build a boat that exceeded the physical properties of the material, with techniques far greater in reliability than those developed by thousands of skilled shipwrights with centuries of shipbuilding expertise? Friel says yes. He waves his hands and said maybe Noah and friends figured out a better way to construct wooden boats.

Then, right after that, he floors me by announcing that we can’t convince Nye because Nye doesn’t care about the evidence.

Holy crap.

Hey, where did this giant palm print in the middle of my face come from? I guess I’ll never know, because it happened two minutes ago, and that’s historical science.

Uh-oh. I hope these don’t become more popular. This one is in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on 29 March, and features Paul Nelson — a young earth creationist who will hide behind Intelligent Design the whole time.

Debates are a great way to seduce a creationist audience into showing up to listen, but they’re awful for presenting a good analysis: you are publicly pitting a scientist up against a proven, expert liar, and committing to allowing lies to be told for half the time of the event. Sometimes they’ll pay off and you’ll get good exposure of the nonsense; sometimes you’ll find the slick fraud on the creation side getting more attention than he deserves.

Just a hint, though. The title of this debate is “Creation vs. Evolution: A Debate on Origins and the Tree of Life,” which is hopelessly broad. Paul Nelson has carte blanche to babble on in a tuneless song of silliness trying to hit the one chord that will resonate with the audience, and that’s what you’re going to get, and it’s going to be really hard to pin him down on anything. Part of the art of doing these debates, I’ve learned, is to craft a decent structured framework for the discussion, so that you’ve got a clear question to answer and even an audience of biased Christian ninnies will notice when the creationist (or the evolutionist!) goes wandering off topic. I hope it’s not too late to refine the subject a bit.