I don’t subscribe to HBO, so I missed the new documentary on creationism, Questioning Darwin. I did manage to catch a few clips, like this one from Gawker. Hear creationists say what they really think!

Amanda Marcotte has a sound take on their position. It’s not stupidity driving these weird excuses, it’s fear.

By going back and forth between creationists and Darwin’s life story, the documentary crafts a compelling image of the conflict between two world views: That of curiosity and that of incuriosity/fear. I agree with the New York Times reviewer that the creationists are presented non-judgementally, but as these clips amassed by Gawker make clear, the creationists do all the work for you anyway. There’s a pastor explaining he would have to accept it if the Bible said “2+2=5″ and people talking, over and over again, about the strategies they have to employ to shut down their minds in the event that they’re presented with an opportunity to think more broadly.  The major emotion that comes off them in waves is that of fear: Fear of asking questions, fear of the “world” (which is always talked about negatively), fear of difference, fear that thinking might lead them into dark places, fear that they really aren’t special that manifests in making up a God who loves you so you never have to go a moment without that feeling, fear that they will fall into the abyss without blind obedience to authority, and, of course, fear of death.

Exactly. These people are not incapable of understanding evolution; they are instead practicing motivated reasoning, and are being entirely rational in fleeing into irrationality, because they don’t know how to cope without their beloved myths and fantasy stories.

I don’t say this lightly, but Saletan is one of the more dishonest pundits out there — I’ve read multiple columns by this guy where he lies with numbers and fudges the evidence to fit his preconceptions, and this is no exception. He’s once again arguing that creationism is compatible with science, and he has to make some dodgy claims to do so. Look here:

And what about the engineers in Ken Ham’s videos—the guys who made demonstrable contributions to science and technology while declaring themselves young-Earth creationists? Those men are what a good social scientist would call “evidence.” They back up the hypothesis that you can be a perfectly good engineer while believing nonsense about the origins of life. We can’t wave that evidence away, any more than we can wave away fossils.

The alternative hypothesis, advanced by McElwee, is that “to espouse [creationism] is to preclude practicing science.” The engineers in Ham’s video falsify that hypothesis. They espouse creationism while successfully practicing science.

Do you see the lie? He eases into it so artfully; these are guys who made “contributions to science and technology” drifts into “you can be a perfectly good engineer” and then he wraps it up by noting that the engineers in Ham’s claims practice science.

Engineers can practice real science, but an engineer is not the same thing as a scientist. I agree that creationists can be perfectly good engineers, but how can you trust the scientific acumen of someone who insists that the earth is only 6,000 years old? That says right there that they have no respect for the evidence. How can Saletan ignore Ham’s bogus distinction between historical and observational science, in which he flatly rejects any possibility of inference about the past from the present? This creationism is utterly incompatible with biology, anthropology, geology, astronomy, climate science, geochemistry, cosmology, and any other science that deals with cause and effect and history. These sciences apparently do not matter to Saletan, as long as engineers make satellites and doctors do surgery.

Saletan cites Ham’s videos as falsifying the claim that creationism is incompatible with science. Ken Ham makes a big deal of this, too.

There are a few problems there. Who says Ray Damadian invented the MRI? Why, Ray Damadian. The Nobel Committee disagrees, since they gave the 2003 prize to Lauterbur and Mansfield for their work on the MRI. Damadian contributed to some aspects of the engineering, but he didn’t ‘invent’ the thing — there was a whole series of people who contributed.

But even if he had been the sole inventor, as Ray Damadian and creationists love to pretend, it doesn’t change the fact that creationism, and Ham’s ignorant redefinition of science, does irreparable harm to science and science education. That two non-scientists, Ken Ham and William Saletan, are urging everyone to ignore lies and delusions and misrepresentations, does not change the fact that any science that takes history seriously gets flushed away by their foolishness.

The image of creationism as an oncoming threat rather than a receding symptom is just another hypothesis. So is the claim that you can’t practice good science while being a creationist. These hypotheses are much beloved among liberals, atheists, and scientists. But the facts are opposed to them. Give them up.

“Much beloved”? What the fuck? What we see is bad science being promoted by a kook with a religious agenda, and useful idiots like Saletan promoting blissful neglect and agreeing with creationists. I am not giving up on biology, which is what Saletan is asking me to do. I am giving up on Saletan.

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As pointed out in the comments, Atrios has an excellent takedown of Lord Saletan. I agree with every word.

I have a bookshelf where I stuff all my creationist books: weird volumes from Answers in Genesis, the Creation Research Society, strange self-published kook rants, the oh-so-serious garbage from the Discovery Institute, crappy odd tracts from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. It is an evil bookshelf. I rarely open them anymore; I have to roll a sanity check every time I do, and I fear that someday they will reach out and suck my brains out through my eye sockets. They live on brains, you know, especially the sweet fresh brains of children, and I have been denying them access. I should probably make an addition to my will to have them properly disposed of after I die — a toxic waste incinerator, perhaps, or stored with spent nuclear fuel rods deep in a mine somewhere, or cast back into the outer darkness from whence they came.

So I’m a bit worried about Dana Hunter. She’s been carrying out Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education, actually reading the awful garbage that Christian organizations put out for home schoolers. I’ve been monitoring her closely, looking for signs of a break from reality: Gibbering. Iridescent hued ichor splattering her web pages. Rivers of blood flowing from my USB ports every time I click on that URL. You know, the typical sort of thing you get with supernatural madness.

You should be monitoring it too. If you see any signs of total cerebral implosion, let me know — I am prepared to stage a science intervention in an emergency. Otherwise, I’ll be in Seattle in June for a routine checkup of Dana’s sanity. I hope she can hold out for that long.

In that silly debate, Bill Nye made a wise tactical decision: to focus exclusively on the specific topic of the debate, whether creationism was a viable scientific model, and to avoid getting bogged down in the question of whether there is a god or not. I think that was a smart move, simply because a “good” debate (it’s debatable whether there is such a thing) addresses a single clear point with rhetoric and logic. Outside of the arena, though, the question of the relevance to evolution is fair game, and unfortunately, some people give the wrong answer.

Phil Plait, for example.

So evolution is not anti-religion in general. But is it atheistic? No. Evolution takes no stand on the existence or lack thereof of a god or gods. Whether you think life originated out of ever-more complex chemical reactions occurring on an ancient Earth, or was breathed into existence by God, evolution would take over after that moment. It’s a bit like the Big Bang; we don’t know how the Universe came into existence at that moment, but starting a tiny fraction of a second after that event our science does a pretty fair job of explanation.

I can’t stress this enough. The conflict over the teaching of evolution is based on the false assumption that evolution is antagonistic to religion. This is why, I think, evolution is so vehemently opposed by so many in the United States. The attacks on the specifics of evolution—the claims about irreducibility of the eye, for example, or other such incorrect statements—are a symptom, not a cause. I can talk about how we know the Universe is old until the Universe is substantially older and not convince someone whose heels are dug in. But if we can show them that the idea of evolution is not contrary to their faith, then we will make far, far more progress.

Are orbital mechanics atheistic? Can we say, well, the orbit of a satellite is entirely compatible with the idea that a god is keeping it aloft — that we could imagine that this god is actually doing all the heavy lifting and flinging of the equipment about, but because he is so lawful, he’s doing it in a way that precisely mimics the movements that it would follow if it were obeying the laws of Newton and Einstein? In a trivial way, sure, you could pretend everything is being directly manipulated by a sentient and anthropomorphic (but invisible and intangible) god, but that’s mere philosophical wanking. We certainly aren’t launching satellites with prayer, and it’s anti-scientific to propose theological excuses for processes that are accurately and entirely explained by math and physics.

Conversely, if you believe that satellites are held aloft by god-power and Newton and Einstein are superfluous, then some astronomer or engineer asserting that the laws of physics describe and explain the motion of orbiting masses is making an anti-religious argument. We understand the forces; we have good descriptions of how they work; we have repeated, independently verified, empirical observations of the mechanisms at work; we make predictions and test them using our godless explanations, and adding a god factor to the equations does not help or explain anything.

Similarly, we understand the forces that drive evolution. We have our equations and measurements and collected observations, too, and nowhere in them do we have a god fudge-factor. Yet somehow, some engineers and physicists (and it’s almost always engineers and physicists; did you notice the background of the ‘experts’ Ken Ham flaunted in little video segments during the debate?) are perfectly happy to wave away the knowledge of biologists and declare, well say there, evolution takes no stand on the existence of gods, and is perfectly compatible with religious explanations … despite the fact that virtually every religion on the planet makes clear claims about the origin of biological organisms, and that virtually every religious person squawks in complaint when a biologist explains the actual processes and mechanisms that drive evolutionary change. Which never seem to involve a super-man nudging nucleotides or making organs out of mud. And also are so chance-driven that you can’t even argue that it was a process begun in a Big Bang that ineluctably led to us.

We have been living under a system in the US for decades, in which scientists have been bending over backwards to avoid bringing up the profound conflict between religious and scientific claims, in which public school classrooms have been stripped of solid scientific discussions of evolution by social and political pressures. And then every time this goddamn apologia for creationists comes up, someone has to lay the blame for why “evolution is so vehemently opposed” on people who point out the true and obvious statement that yes, evolution contradicts religious just-so story, despite the fact that with few exceptions, scientists, like Phil Plait, insist on making these invalid excuses for the compatibility of science and religion. Scientists have largely been intellectual cowards (with exceptions!) on the God issue for decades, and you can’t now blame the publication of The Genesis Flood on our aggressive forthrightness.

The excuses don’t help. The creationists are angry at us because they’re not stupid, and they recognize what is obvious that the accommodating scientists try to deny: that accepting the mechanical and unaware nature of the forces that have brought us into existence directly contradicts their paternalistic idea of a benevolent universe that loves them and created them with conscious intent. I can see through that bullshit, and so can they.

Stop treating everyone like five year olds who see the logical and physical contradictions in the Santa Claus story. We’re all grown ups here, I hope, so why do we have people who are aware of how science works trying to insist that maybe it doesn’t, all to appease people clinging to a cherished lie?

Evolution does take a stand on the origin of life and of human beings, and it is not god-driven, god-dependent, or even god-compatible. So if you’re one of those non-biologists who insists that biologists should just throw out their knowledge of how evolution works to make happy nice with people who are actively opposing science, I give you two choices: either learn some biology so you can actually make an informed contribution to the discussion about what the science says, or shut the fuck up.

If you can’t do either, I could start yelling at you that space travel is impossible because Jebus evolved us to live in a universe made of water, and I’ll sound just as ignorant as you do.