Those theistic evolutionists keep picking on poor Billy

Bill Dembski seems to be a bit peeved at those theistic evolutionists — they keep siding with the evolutionary biologists, whether they’re Christian or atheist or whatever! And all that despite the fact that the atheists often roll their eyes and laugh when the theistic evolutionists start babbling their vague claims about a guiding deity. The “biggest detractors” of ID have been his fellow Christians. How can that be?

I’ve got two answers for that. One: selection. When someone in an embattled school district wants a speaker to come in and explain evolution to them, they’re going to pick someone who isn’t also notoriously godless, out of a reasonable fear that it will start more fires than it will put out.

Two: knowledge. Those theistic evolutionists may not like us mean atheists much, but we both agree 100% on the evidence for evolution. Dembski is baffled by the fact that theistic evolutionists “shaft the ID community,” but he shouldn’t be — it’s because the ID community abandons common standards of evidence and wants to redefine all of science. Scientists, both atheist and Christian, easily find common cause in opposing IDiocy.

We’re also still happy to argue. For instance, here’s a little exchange that Dembski had with Ken Miller, and I think they’re both wrong.

A year or so ago, when Richard Dawkins’s website posted a blasphemy challenge (reported at UD here — the challenge urged people to post a YouTube video of themselves blaspheming the Holy Spirit), I asked Ken Miller for his reaction. He pooh-poohed it as “a clumsy attempt to trivialize important issues.” The obvious question this raises is whether systematic efforts by atheists to trivialize (and indeed denigrate) important issues is itself an important issue.

Hmmm. Miller says the blasphemy challenge trivializes important issues. Dembski agrees and talks about important issues, too.

What are they?

Is the concept of Hell an “important issue”?

Is it the idea that you can be damned for disbelief in a bit of dogma, or the whole idea of damnation itself?

Is the Holy Spirit an important issue?

How about the concept of an afterlife?

Maybe the important issue is the defense of a patriarchal Semitic sky god with a host of psychiatric issues, like low self-esteem, outbursts of destructive anger, and an obsession with genitalia and diet?

Both Dembski and Miller miss the point. Those are trivial issues, relics of foolish old mythologies, and the purpose of the blasphemy challenge was to appropriately trivialize the trivial. I think the challenge was an excellent idea — we need to demystify and desanctify the tired and falsified beliefs that parasitize our culture. The only important issue in the challenge was the promotion of irreverence about ideas to which some people in society still cling in futile trust.

So, see, I can picture both Miller and Dembski as being in the same boat with religious foolishness, but Miller has several saving graces that Dembski lacks: Miller is not trying to poison public education in this country, he’s actually very knowledgeable about biology, and he can give a coherent and accurate talk about real important issues. He can share some goals with a militant atheist like me, where neither of us have much sympathy for a militant creationist like Dembski.

Bobby Jindal, another clown in the body politic

Oh, my. Bobby Jindal was on TV, and he got asked about evolution. Here’s his answer to a question about whether he had doubts about evolution.

One, I don’t think this is something the federal or state government should be imposing its views on local school districts. You know, as a conservative I think government that’s closest to the people governs best. I think local school boards should be in a position of deciding the curricula and also deciding what students should be learning. Secondly, I don’t think students learn by us withholding information from them. Some want only to teach intelligent design, some only want to teach evolution. I think both views are wrong, as a parent.

One, that is an incredibly dumb answer. Devolving the responsibility for deciding science content onto a local school board is a horrible idea; has he never attended school board meetings? They are run by, at best, well-meaning people who care about local schools, but unless it’s a school district in a district with a university, you’re not likely to find any scientists on them. More typically, they’re going to contain a mix of very bad people: ideologues who want to shut down public schools, or push their unsupported nonsensical agenda, or the local cranks who’ve upgraded from writing letters to the editor of the town paper.

If he wanted to let the school board manage budgets, that’s one thing; unfortunately, thinking that a hodge-podge of random community members with few scientific qualifications are adequate to evaluate the science content is a classic instance of conservative idiocy. Standards must be determined at a higher level by a carefully chosen pool of competent, qualified experts.

Second, nobody is withholding information from students. Here, this is the complete curriculum for the intelligent design part of the syllabus:

A magic man done it.

There, finished! There are no experiments that need to be summarized, no details that need to be explored, no complicated mechanisms that need to be explicated. Parents can exhaustively cover the subject in a moment or two some evening, or perhaps Mom could could scribble it down on a note in her child’s lunch. If they’re ambitious, they could send them off to a Sunday School, which might be taxed by the sudden increase in difficulty over the usual pap they dispense, but they’ll cope, perhaps by dumbing it down a little more.

One thing is for sure, we shouldn’t marshal the resources of our public school to teach such trivia, nor should we dignify the vacuity of ID with a place in the curriculum when there is nothing to teach.

Jindal’s “ideas” are utterly ludicrous, nothing but the warmed over inanity of the Discovery Institute’s usual “teach the controversy” foolishness. This is a “Republican superstar”? Man, but that party has become a bucket of rejects and peckerwoods, hasn’t it?

Translation, please

Over the years, I’ve developed a rough classification system for creationist screeds. One of the most common is the ‘deluded parrot’, in which the writer just repeats the same tiresome old canards we’ve heard a thousand times before: “If man evolved from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys?” is a common example. Then there are the ‘malevolent vermin’, which you don’t see much of on the web — because they usually write profanity-laced threats to my personal email, and are quick to gloat over my prospective tenure in hell. The ‘pious aunties’ aren’t quite so vicious, but they are shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover there are people who don’t worship Jesus with every breath, and they write letters that tend to end with the standard phrase, “I will pray for you.”

And then there are these precious few where you read them, and the text is incoherent and fractured, like the writer has stripped the gears of his brain and every once in a while some random thought goes spinning wildly, and everything is out of sync everywhere. These are people who make no sense. I was sent this classic example, a bizarre example where the author no doubt thinks he’s making a profound point, but there has to be some really crazy logic at work here.

Evolution explains designer

Evolution versus creation is a false dichotomy. Evolution as a viable mechanism causing the ascent of man also explains the existence of the creator.

If man could evolve to his present status physically, culturally and technologically within the age of this planet (approximately 4.5 billion years), then obviously the technology required to build species entirely of one’s own choosing could be developed within the age of the universe.

Considering the amount of time that has elapsed, which is endless, and the quantity of appropriate locations for life to evolve, also endless, a coincidence of impossible magnitude would be required for us to be the first intelligent designers.

The dichotomy is stubbornly maintained by those who fight for freedom from the morality of Christians. It is also stubbornly maintained by those who fight for freedom from the result of the immorality of the atheists, who believe they will have to answer to no one.

Uninterrupted evolution reaches a climax when an intelligent designer evolves. At that point the designer easily outpaces random natural selection because of the deliberate nature of intelligent design. The Christian has more confidence in evolution and technology than atheists have.

JIM GRIEB

Brutus, Mich.

So, can anyone translate this? Somehow, I think he’s promoting Christianity, but how he got there from his starting point isn’t clear. It’s probably something quantum.

Release the hounds!

Carl Zimmer has this lovely post on the Lenski lab work on E. coli evolution, and look! The first author on that paper, Zachary Blount, showed up with an offer to answer any questions!

But sadly, you should also look at who the first person to take him up on the offer is: Larry Fafarman. If you don’t know of him, you’re fortunate. He’s a mentally ill, permanently obtuse, persistent freakazoid creationist who, given a chance, will run the rational discussion right off the rails.

If you’re interested, get on over there and counter Loony Fafarman with some intelligent discussion, ‘k?

Bad news from Louisiana

The Louisiana house of representatives has approved a bill that would allow science teachers to “supplement” classes with wackaloonery. Remember that crazy teacher with the weird ideas you had back in 8th grade? Now he would be encouraged to bring in bible tracts, anti-abortion screeds, and puff-pieces by right wing editorialists decrying climate change as a communist plot, all in order to balance the teaching of that darned evidence-based biology and earth science stuff.

Note also that this bill, the “Louisiana Science Education Act”, was introduced by a Democrat (Ben Nevers, the ignorant pissant) and was approved 94-3.

All I can think is that “Louisiana Science” must be some kind of polite euphemism for “bugfuck crazy stupidity”.

I don’t think Tom Willis likes us very much

Gosh. I sure hope the creationist extremists never get any substantial political power, because guess what some of them would like to do: they want to violently expel use crazy evolutionists. Ask Tom Willis, an utterly insane creationist (who is also, scarily, active in Kansas politics):

The arrogance displayed by the evolutionist class is totally unwarrented. The facts warrent the violent expulsion of
all evolutionists from civilized society. I am quite serious that
their danger to society is so great that, in a sane society, they
would be, at a minimum, denied a vote in the administration of
the society, as well as any job where they might influence immature humans, e.g., scout, or youth, leader, teacher and, obviously, professor. Oh, by the way… What is the chance evolutionists will vote or teach in the Kingdom of God?

i-4e9e62bef15f1d3d79b96cafb1901f17-smiley.jpg

But, of course, I myself, am not deluded. “Kingdom
Now” theology notwithstanding, I have no expectations that
such a proposal will ever be implemented, for the
simple reason that delusion is ordained by God to
reign until Christ returns. (2 Thess 2:10)

(Yes, the big yellow smiley face is actually part of his essay. So are the spelling errors.)

What great eliminationist rhetoric! Our only consolation, I suppose, is that so far he thinks his god has decreed that we shall be allowed to exist until he annihilates us in the end times.

The Creation Museum is still there

It’s awfully easy to forget Ken Ham’s monument to malevolent ignorance, the Creation Museum, but while we’re not visiting it, it’s apparently doing a bang-up business, and they’re even planning a major expansion. Stupidity sells, especially in America.

So it’s a good thing that some people are still shining the spotlight on it. There’s a new review of the museum from Demonbaby that’s worth a read. This one highlights the creepy and gruesome nature of Ham’s bogus theology.

Sorry, Vox, I don’t debate crazy pipsqueaks any more

A while back, I said, “Somebody somewhere is going to have to someday point me to some intelligent arguments for gods, because I’ve sure never found them. And I know, someone is going to complain that I always pick on the weak arguments…while not bothering to tell me what the strong ones are.”

In a fit of unwarranted hubris, the odious Theodore Beale/Vox Day rushed to arrange a debate on a local conservative radio show. Unfortunately, he didn’t stop to think — how would debating Vox Day, christofascist misogynist, beneficiary of wingnut welfare, prominent freakshow participant, possibly rebut the complaint that I only pick on the weak arguments?

Besides, I learned my lesson in the Geoffrey Simmons radio debate: it’s a waste of time to go up against one of these insane babblers, because all they can do is high-frequency repetition of nonsensical claims. I’ve also acquired a deep distrust of conservative radio — the outcome of that debate, in which Simmons was flattened, was that they merely reinvited him back on the show without me around to puncture his claims. The fact that the Northern Alliance radio show actually thinks Vox Day is a credible voice for conservative thought tells me right away that there is something wrong with them, and no, I’m not going to trust them at all.

I’ve also read Day’s horrible little book, The Irrational Atheist. Well, to be honest, I read a few chapters of dreck, then flipped through the rest rather quickly. It’s actually the “Vox Day Hates Sam Harris” book, with occasional potshots at other New Atheists, and it’s really not very good. You would think that if he had a strong rational argument with evidence for any gods, then he would have put it in there — nothing would more seriously deflate one of us scientific atheists who claim there is no evidence for god than, say, presenting credible evidence for god. That was what I actually skimmed through the book for, but it wasn’t there.

I would think that if he had some zinger of an argument, there would be better ways to reveal it than on an obscure AM radio talk show in a debate with an equally obscure professor at a liberal arts college. He could, for instance, put it right at the top of his web page, where we could all marvel at it before rushing off to our much-neglected church.