Would you believe there is actually an award called the Award for Liberty and Truth? You just know in this Orwellian country of ours that it couldn’t possibly be given in recognition of actual liberty or truth … but it’s even worse than that. It is the Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth, and it’s handed out by the Bible University of Los Angeles, better known as Biola; named after a prissy old fraud, given out by a bible college with delusions of grandeur, and guess who the winner is this year?

Ben Stein.

I like it.

It’s a fake award by a fake college named after an infamous creationist and now given to a second-rate character actor. It’s the creationist version of the Nobel Prize!

A poll by the St Petersburg Times reveals that the people in Florida are ignorant. 21% want creationism only taught in the schools, and 29% want both evolution and creationism taught. It’s a horrendous result, and it’s also strikingly different from the results we’ve see in similar polls, which usually aren’t quite so lop-sided.

Wesley makes a good point, that one reason is the form of the questions asked, which set up an adversarial relationship between religion and science and lead people to make a choice between the two, increasing the likelihood that people will break to support their church. He argues that “framing works,” and proposes a different set of questions that, while generally similar, would produce a less one-sided result.

But wait, hang on there — this doesn’t tell me that framing works. It tells me that you can play rhetorical games with polls and get people to nominally agree with my position, or you can tinker with them to get people to agree with some other position. If the purpose of a poll is to get insight into how the minds of the populace are working, neither is very desirable.

I’m looking at the original poll and seeing that I would have no problem answering the questions in a pro-evolution way — there’s nothing to bias me in any crazy way, but I don’t have any pro-religion buttons to push. What I see in the results is that many Floridians do have great, big, easily manipulated religious buttons, and that 69% are abysmally ignorant of the science they are dismissing. Those are important True Facts, and in an important sense the St Petersburg Times poll is better than the one Wesley proposes: the answers aren’t reassuring, but they do expose the ugly reality we have to confront. There is no virtue in designing a poll that doesn’t push the religion button, because in the real world these people are getting the religious message every day and every week, and leaving it out only allows us to fool ourselves into thinking that the superstition and ignorance fostered by American religion aren’t the fundamental source of creationist foolishness in this country.

I think Wesley is looking for a way to frame the problem away, rather than a solution. If framing works, it is only as a blindfold.

I’ve been overestimating creationists. Every time I look at what they’re saying about evolution, my estimation drops yet further … you’d think that after years of tracking this stuff, they’d bottom out, but no. The latest examples are some snippets from a presentation by Caroline Crocker. Crocker is one of the martyrs of ID — she was released from a temporary teaching position at George Mason University, and claims it was because she is a creationist, when the real explanation is that she’s an incompetent kook.

Her powerpoint slides have to be seen to be believed. Here’s one example. Can you spot the egregious errors?

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I’m busy, and I don’t want to deal with a nause-inducing interview with Casey Luskin, Guillermo Gonzalez, and Mark Mathis. Somebody else yak up over it, and let me link to it.

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I’m still shying away from listening to this abomination, so get with it and tell me what’s on it. First up: Jyunri Kankei.

The culture wars are proceeding as expected, and Ben Stein’s reputation is following a predictable trajectory.

Popular character actor and mendacious old fool Ben Stein has a little movie coming out about how “BIG SCIENCE” doesn’t want you to know the truth about evolution. Stein salutes the scientists who are bad enough to question Darwinism in his upcoming documentary Expelled, about an unscrupulous Nixonite hack who parlays his unlikely pop cultural fame into an inexplicable career as an entertainer/propaganist. Rex Sorgatz asks, “do you remember when Ben Stein wasn’t bat shit crazy?” Actually, uh, not really.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Fresh from his recent reappearance on KKMS, where he debated me with a new strategy which gave him a slight chance of winning (i.e., one in which I was not present), Geoffrey Simmons is now crowing victory. It’s very strange. Why would anyone with any sense think that demanding a ‘debate’ in which one is unopposed and has a sympathetic moderator and which suppresses audience input is in any way anything but an act of cowardice and intellectual bankruptcy?

This is posted on Evolution News and Views, the Discovery Institute’s version of Pravda, but since they don’t bother to link to any of my articles to which they specifically refer, and since they don’t take comments themselves, I see no point in linking to them. Here is the complete text of Simmons’ vainglorious howl of triumph.

Against Stupidity, God Himself Is Helpless – Old Jewish Proverb

Before the recent KKMS (MN radio) debate, Dr. P.Z. Myers blogged on Pharyngula that he would decimate me. Within minutes of the show’s conclusion, he blogged that he accomplished his goal, never conceding a single point from an hour long show. It is worth one’s while to read his blogs and those that follow as they readily speak to the character of these folks, much moreso than I could ever do. Richard Dawkins was also quick to compliment the professor and add to the feeding frenzy. Again, no concessions. They had their hearing aids turned off before the show even started.

Other than winning points for outright rudeness and making up fiction, what part of the debate did this tax-paid professor win? Could it be the five or so fossil pieces from dog-size animals that represent intermediate species between land animals and the quadrillion-cell whale with unexplained tons of blubber, communication skills that span thousands of miles, a windpipe separate from the esophagus (unheard of in land animals), segmental decompression, a heart the size of a Volkswagon, ability to dive thousands of meters deep or eat a krill diet? Or, was it the fact that a sperm and egg cell can unite to form a 10-75 trillion cell human being without going through 10-75 trillion trial and errors? Perhaps it was my misunderstanding of their ways of critiquing the theory of evolution? To me, it’s like having your brother correct your homework. Lastly, where is the rule that says one has to have an alternative and provable explanation for the origin of life before one can criticise Darwinian thought? Cannot a child point to the leaks in a dam and warn people of an impending flood without any knowledge about dam construction? Their rule, this requirement, doesn’t exist.

– Geoffrey Simmons, M.D.
Author of What Darwin Didn’t Know and Billions of Missing Links

So much, so wrong.

We all had our hearing aids turned up, I assure you. How else could we laugh at Dr Simmons’ remarks?

For a perfect example, look at his claims here: he claims the whale fossil series consists of “five or so fossil pieces from dog-size animals”. Go ahead, look at any summary of the fossil evidence for whales; there are far more than 5 pieces, and the size of the animals ranged from a 100 pound deer-like beast to, well, whale-sized. You can also find nice diagrams of nasal drift — remember, Simmons claimed there was no evidence of blowholes in the fossils. There were no concessions to Simmons because Simmons was wrong on every point.

I’ve read his books, and as usual, he resorts to the litany of complexity to make his case. He doesn’t stop to consider how all that complexity arose, just its existence is all he uses to claim justification for his claim of Intelligent Design creationism. That doesn’t fly, Dr Simmons. We have mechanisms that generate such complexity and refine noise into functionality that do not require intelligent intervention. Sure, single-celled zygotes develop into organisms with many trillions of cells. We can study that and find lovely developmental mechanisms behind it; we can watch mitoses occur; we can find the molecular interactions that lead to differentiation. Telling me that there are lots of cells there does not support your apparent contention that they all poofed into existence with the assistance of a meddling cosmic superbeing, either phylogenetically or ontogenetically.

Oh, and little children who call up the National Guard and demand that we evacuate the town because the dam is leaking when they’ve never seen the dam, know nothing about how the dam is constructed, and have no evidence that it is leaking other than that the crotch of their pants are suddenly wet, are not brave heroes. They’re petty liars seeking attention.

Guillermo Gonzalez’s appeal of his tenure denial went before the Iowa State University board of regents this morning.

To no one’s surprise, his appeal was denied. Seriously, this was a no-brainer; it would have been grounds for suspicion if the board of regents had overruled the opinion of his peers to force Gonzalez on the physics and astronomy department.

Now Dr Gonzalez needs to quit trusting the blandishments of the Discovery Institute and get to work on reconstructing his career. Peter Irons wrote me this morning and asked what odds I’d give on Gonzalez getting tenure; I’d have said they were incredibly long. Now the next question for the betting people out there: what are the odds that he’ll revise his tenure strategy to land a job with academic credibility vs. taking the easy way out and going to some joke of a Bible college and trying to get rich off his ‘martyrdom’?

Go read this first rate summary of an ID meeting by one of its unsympathetic attendees. It’s genuinely bizarre. The talks by the ID proponents are frankly, complete garbage (not that the account is that blunt), which explains the message everyone got afterwards.

A few days after the meeting ended, we all received an email stating that the ID people considered the conference a private meeting, and did not want any of us to discuss it, blog it, or publish anything about it. They said they had no intention of posting anything from the conference on the Discovery Institute’s web site (the entire proceedings were recorded). They claimed they would have some announcement at the time of the publication of the edited volume of presentations, in about a year, and wanted all of us to wait until then to say anything. These actions made me aware of the extent to which the ID movement was willing to bear false witness in order to achieve its goals, and that kept me from falling prey to my empathy for the underdog.

A stealth science meeting? I’ve heard of requests to embargo discussion outside of a meeting until publication — which is reasonable, since many journals are jealous entities who demand that their submissions be virginal and unpublished anywhere else — but that’s not the case here. After reading the account, it’s clear that they’ve got no science and bad science, and really just want to control the release of information, so they can massage their PR and generate false impressions of scholarly work.

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Poor Geoffrey Simmons, so painfully pathetic. He’s back on KKMS right now, given an hour where there isn’t one of those wretched evolutionists to point out the absurdity of his comments. So far, all he’s doing is giving a litany of complexity — the eye is so complex, and the eyes are at the top of your head to give you the best visibility, and they’re exactly the right distance apart to give you binocular vision. It’s painfully panglossian and naive.

Oh, and he snipes at the ‘experts’ and claims that the ‘Darwinists’ don’t understand the complexity of childbirth, unlike him, the MD. Good grief, I’m a developmental biologist!

You can tell that without me there he’s feeling free to make up even more lies, not that he was significantly inhibited the last time he was on.

Hmmm…should I suggest that maybe they should give me a solo hour on air too, to discuss what evolution and biology are actually about? I doubt that they’d take me up on it; they’re clearly desperate to make up for their embarrassment last week by giving Simmons a little uncritical bootlicking, and they would feel no such obligation to me.

Go ahead, call in at 651-289-4499 and let them know how tiny and frightened this makes Simmons look.