This Sunday at 6am Central, let’s talk about a little historical creationism. Ken Ham is going to hate me for saying this (he probably already does), but he and Adnan Oktar have a lot in common: both have simply stolen recent crude theological assumptions and crafted them into particularly silly dogma.
I read Turkey Sex Cult Chief Sentenced to More Than 1,000 Years in Jail and thought at first it was going to be about some ghastly poultry fetishist, but no, it’s something completely different.
A Turkish Islamic televangelist was sentenced to 1,075 years in jail on Monday for running a decades-old cult whose members were accused of crimes ranging from sexual assault to blackmail, money laundering and even espionage.
Adnan Oktar, who wrote books on Islamic creationism under the pseudonym Harun Yahya, was put on trial in Istanbul alongside 236 other alleged members or enablers of his network, state-run Anadolu Agency reported.
He became well-known in Turkey over the years, especially for provocative TV shows broadcast on his own channel. On screen, the cult leader surrounded himself with young women he called his “kittens,” who were often dressed in revealing clothing while he uttered opinions on religious and political matters.
Goodbye, Harun Yahya/Adnan Oktar! I still have a couple of copies of his Atlas of Creation, a truly silly book.
Oh, that is a useful term. As Aaron Rabinowitz explains, “Cheap talk skepticism occurs when someone expresses skepticism in a way that comes at little cost to them, though it frequently comes at a significant cost to others.” These are people who cultivate an environment in which they can make bold assertion and receive little pushback, who don’t actually invest something of themselves in challenging the status quo. And Rabinowitz delivers examples!
If there is any room for criticism in this explosion of cheap talk skepticism, I believe it should be focused on the individuals with the platforms that allow them both the time for proper skepticism and the obligation to skepticism properly. In the parts of the skeptical world referred to as the Intellectual Dark Web, there has been rampant cheap talk skepticism around both Covid and the recent American election. Under the umbrella of “distrusting institutions”, there has been such an absurd amount of “just asking questions” that Sam Harris felt compelled to very publicly “turn in his IDW membership card”. Unfortunately, Harris neglected to explicitly criticise anyone by name, which makes is hard to determine if his criticism was meant just for the brothers Weinstein, or if he was including folks like Maajid Nawaz, who he has frequently promoted and who I’d argue has been one of the worst of the cheap talk skeptics.
For example, here’s Nawaz retweeting Team Trump Twitter sharing a video from OAN (One America News Network), an unreliable right wing “news” organization, which they claim is evidence of election tampering. Rather than emphasise the high likelihood that the video proves nothing of the sort, Maajid’s response is “I see what this looks like & I hope I’m wrong” followed by “sensible people should agree that this entire controversy needs to be resolved ASAP & urgently”. That tweet is not an isolated event either, here he is unknowingly sharing election fraud conspiracy materials from the explicitly antisemitic Red Elephants website. Here he is getting strung along by Trump’s reality tv shtick . Here he is citing Ted Cruz’s election denialism as proof that Nawaz was “right all along”. I could continue, but the pattern is obvious, and it’s not unique to Nawaz. This is deeply irresponsible, but the cost of cheap talk skepticism will be born by the American electorate and not by Nawaz, who has since circled back around to claim the OAN video produced a state audit, but not to point out that Georgia found no significant fraud of the sort that Team Trump and OAN were claiming.
Nawaz has also engaged in cheap talk skepticism around Covid conspiracy theories, favorably retweeting a thread by a guy who thinks Covid is caused by 5G and directly quoting his claim about “the myth of a pandemic”. Similar cheap talk skepticism towards Covid and the Covid vaccine has arisen from Brett Weinstein and unsurprisingly from James Lindsay, given his ongoing business relationship with conspiracy theorist Michael O’Fallon. James recently attended a Sovereign Nation conference and a conservative event in California with Covid lockdown skeptic Dave Rubin. Rubin has attended several anti-lockdown events and posted cancel bait tweets implying that he’s hosting dinner parties in violation of social distancing rules. Again, the cost of their skepticism is far less likely to be born by them than by medical workers and vulnerable individuals, like my aunt Sue who suffered a stroke while being treated for Covid. Society doesn’t even condone the desire that they should directly experience the consequences of their skepticism. We’re forced to hope that their cheap talk remains cheap.
It’s a great term. Add it to your lexicon! One of the things skeptics and atheists have to do is police their own — we’ve been telling religious people to do that for years — and it’s only fair that we do the same for ourselves.
It looks like the world didn’t magically fix itself at midnight last night. Crass, stupid religion still exists, and there is a Cube for sale. You can buy this!
Ooops, sorry, wrong Cube. Although when you see the actual cube, you might prefer my mistake.
via Dan Phelps
The “Inspiration Cube” is a $50 box with pre-recorded phrases from Joel Osteen. You know that since Joel will want to profit off this, that it’s going to be cheaply and cheesily made, and the output is going to be crap, both in tech and content. But look at all the buttons! The only one I like is the bottom-most, the “OFF” button.
Remember Cardinal Pell? Tim Minchin wrote a catchy song about him. Did you see Spotlight? Even the mainstream movie industry could make critically acclaimed movies about Catholic sex abuse. It was an easy target. Now Rebecca Watson singles out another rape apologist in…watch to the end for the unsurprising twist.
I’ll refer you to the Washington Post, in a 2018 article:
Organized secularism has been struggling with charges of misogyny, sexism and sexual harassment for almost a decade. The problem went public in 2011 when a then-little-known atheist blogger, Rebecca Watson, described unwanted sexual advances from a man at an atheist conference who followed her into an elevator and to her hotel room.
She was flooded with both supportive and haranguing comments. World-renowned atheist Richard Dawkins told her to “stop whining” and “grow up.” Dawkins — whose appearances at secularist gatherings can make or break attendance — has been called out multiple times for sexist statements but remains much in demand as a speaker.
Richard Carrier, a science historian and popular secularist speaker, has both apologized for and denied accusations of unwanted sexual advances at secularist and atheist events. He has been banned from at least one conference.
Michael Shermer, who has denied allegations of sexual harassment and assault from several women, remains editor of Skeptic magazine and a top speaker at secularist events.
Most recently, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, another star speaker and best-selling author, was suspended in the spring by Arizona State University for what it described as a decade of inappropriate behavior, some of it at secularist events.
Has Dawkins ever commented on the behavior of his good buddy, movie co-star, and lecture circuit partner Krauss? I am also amused by the sneaky low blow of saying that Carrier “has both apologized for and denied accusations”.
I presume a Christian painted this, completely oblivious to implicit heresy.
That abomination is a denunciation of both the cult of MAGA and the cult of Christianity.
But it’s so intuitive! The idea that the less people know, the more they have an unwarranted confidence that they know more than they do, seems to explain so much. There is now evidence that the Dunning-Kruger Effect is an artifact.
The two papers, by Dr. Ed Nuhfer and colleagues, argued that the Dunning-Kruger effect could be replicated by using random data. “We all then believed the [1999] paper was valid,” Dr. Nuhfer told me via email. “The reasoning and argument just made so much sense. We never set out to disprove it; we were even fans of that paper.” In Dr. Nuhfer’s own papers, which used both computer-generated data and results from actual people undergoing a science literacy test, his team disproved the claim that most people that are unskilled are unaware of it (“a small number are: we saw about 5-6% that fit that in our data”) and instead showed that both experts and novices underestimate and overestimate their skills with the same frequency. “It’s just that experts do that over a narrower range,” he wrote to me.
Then I have to rethink who it applies to. We’re so used to pointing at stupid people doing stupid things and explaining it as Dunning-Kruger in action, and it’s not.
The most important mistake people make about the Dunning-Kruger effect, according to Dr. Dunning, has to do with who falls victim to it. “The effect is about us, not them,” he wrote to me. “The lesson of the effect was always about how we should be humble and cautious about ourselves.” The Dunning-Kruger effect is not about dumb people. It’s mostly about all of us when it comes to things we are not very competent at.
Wait wait wait. So I may have been a victim of the Dunning-Kruger Effect when I thought I knew what the Dunning-Kruger Effect was about? Dang. Well, that was a good solid punch in the balls to start my morning. But then, it’s always good to rethink your assumptions and reconsider your ideas, so thank you very much may I have another?
Are there dumb people who do not realize they are dumb? Sure, but that was never what the Dunning-Kruger effect was about. Are there people who are very confident and arrogant in their ignorance? Absolutely, but here too, Dunning and Kruger did not measure confidence or arrogance back in 1999. There are other effects known to psychologists, like the overconfidence bias and the better-than-average bias (where most car drivers believe themselves to be well above average, which makes no mathematical sense), so if the Dunning-Kruger effect is convincingly shown to be nothing but a mirage, it does not mean the human brain is spotless. And if researchers continue to believe in the effect in the face of weighty criticism, this is not a paradoxical example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. In the original classic experiments, students received no feedback when making their self-assessment. It is fair to say researchers are in a different position now.
Wait, what, so maybe I’m not afflicted with Dunning-Kruger? OK, I need to get out of the house and take a walk now.
As if Mark Meadows wasn’t already sleazed enough by his association with the Trump White House, last year it was revealed that he was also entangled with creationists, like Ken Ham and Joe Taylor, starred in a documentary about a creationist “expedition” to find an allosaurus, with a lot of backstabbing among the various unpleasant protagonists. Now there are new revelations.
Maybe this isn’t the worst criminal offense, but the part that offended me most was that in the original documentary, they played up the fact that Mark Meadows’ 9 year old daughter was the one who discovered the fossil dinosaur. Except, as it turned out, she hadn’t. The whole “discovery” was contrived media hype. Oh, look, a little girl found the evidence that disproved evolution!
“Raising the Allosaur” was successful enough that it spurred Phillips to create the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival in 2004. Just before the festival opened, however, Phillips had to yank the film: It turned out that the skeleton had not in fact been discovered by Haley Meadows, but had been uncovered two years earlier by Dana Forbes, the landowner who eventually sold the site to Meadows. A paleontologist named Joe Taylor had identified the skeleton as an allosaur in May 2001, a year before Meadows’ trip. When these facts were exhumed they mired Phillips’ documentary in controversy.
Oh, yuck. Meadows knowingly had his own daughter join him in an outright lie, put her into a movie lying about her role, and set her up for public exposure. That’s disgraceful. I hope she someday escapes this poisonous creationist trap.
Of course, there is some comeuppance.
This led to a bitter dispute over who owned the dinosaur. Before the conference, Phillips sent out a letter to attendees that said “a series of ethics-based issues have been brought to our attention,” leading him to suspend sales of his film “pending a season for Creation Expeditions to appropriately address the aforementioned issues.”
Creation Expeditions posted a note to its website claiming that its ministry had “endured an outrageous attack.”
[Who is Phillips? What is “Creation Expeditions”? Doesn’t matter. This is a tangled web of lies and shifting alliances. This is creationism!]
In other news, Meadows bought the plot of land the fossil was on, and sold it to Answers in Genesis and didn’t bother to report the rather substantial income from the sale. The second saddest fate is that of the Allosaur fossil, which was also sold to AiG (they have so much money!) in a deal funneled through a “charity group” and which also ripped off a fellow creationist.
The allosaur eventually found its way to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which is owned by Answers in Genesis. That group received the skeleton as a donation in May 2014 from a charity group that had bought the fossil from Taylor, the paleontologist.
“It was a bad deal that we had to accept,” Taylor told the New Yorker, who said the dispute mediation with Creation Expeditions would have left him nearly $100,000 in debt and destroyed his business. He sold the fossils for about $125,000 to a Christian foundation, which eventually donated them to the museum. At that time the estimated market value of the allosaur was about $450,000.
But remember, Christians are the moral people.
It’s not a credible compromise with creationism, so why do people keep telling us we ought to use it to teach evolution?
Here’s a curious letter to the editor of the local paper in Little Falls, Minnesota. I know where that is! If you draw a straight line from Morris to Duluth, it lies about halfway along that line. I haven’t been there. I don’t think many have. If I wanted to go to Duluth, I’d take I94 east, get on 35 in Minneapolis, and not go anywhere near it. It’s a small town backwater, in other words, which can be quite nice if you like the quiet life, but it’s also the kind of place where ignorance can fester.
Like in the mind of this guy, Michael Dalquist Randall.
Evolution is going the way of the dinosaur due to modern scientific evidence.
How would you know? Seriously, go to any university where science is taught, and you’ll find the biology department is full of professors who accept evolution, teach evolution, and research evolution. That hasn’t been changing. The actual modern scientific evidence is all supporting evolution — all the fossils, the genes, the geology, the biochemistry, the comparative anatomy, etc., etc., etc. Check out the biology curriculum at these universities and you’ll find it’s typically built all around evolution. It’s the unifying principle of the science!
I notice that Mr Randall claims the “modern scientific evidence” supports his assertion, but he doesn’t provide any. I can predict what he’d say if he did, though: a lot of nonsense about complexity (not an obstacle to evolution), or nit-picking about details, which he doesn’t understand, that he’ll claim invalidate some scrap of evolutionary theory.
More and more scientists in every field are becoming Creationists as the outdated “evidence” of evolution is overshadowed by modern discoveries that reveal The Theory (yes, theory, not law) of Evolution to be what it truly is: a desperate (and not very tenable) attempt to prove that there is no God and that there is no need for a God.
The idea that more and more scientists are becoming creationists is nonsense. You can find a scattering of individuals who claim to have abandoned evolution after studying science, but most of them are lying: they went into it with a predisposition. Others may be sincere, but they are not numerous, and aren’t going to advance science at all — they’ve become religious apologists, not scientists.
What Mr Randall is demonstrating is confirmation bias, in which anecdotes about miscellaneous individuals are treated as hard data only because they fit his preconceptions.
Again, what is the outdated “evidence” of evolution
, and the modern discoveries
that overshadow them? He doesn’t say.
Yes, we know it’s a theory. We also know that there isn’t a ranking of credibility where “law” is better than “theory”. It just doesn’t work that way. Laws are strong definitions of simple ideal relationships; theories are explanatory frameworks that can integrate information about significant bodies of knowledge. A theory can encompass many laws, does that mean theory outranks law? That’s probably not a productive way to use the concepts.
I personally think that evolution makes gods superfluous, but that’s not why evolution was proposed. Darwin agonized over the effect his discovery would have on religious belief, it’s one of the reasons he sat on it for 20 years. Rather, evolution was an explanation of observed natural phenomena. You might as well complain that “2+2=4” is an attempt to usurp the divinity of numbers, and was clearly formulated to undermine godly revelation.
Evolutionism was a valid theory in Darwin’s time, but if he had the evidence available to him that we have today, Darwin himself would probably not believe in Darwinian evolution.
Once again, we get a vague reference to unevidenced evidence
that would have made even Darwin a creationist. Sorry, guy, I would suggest instead that the molecular evidence of common descent alone would have been ample confirmation of evolution. I suspect, though, that if you sprung the mathematical basis of evolutionary theory on him all at once, he might find it a little too overwhelming.
Mr Randall, go read a book other than your Bible or the propaganda from ICR or AIG (which he cites in the letter) and learn something real about evolutionary biology. It’s awesome stuff.
