You guys are so unlucky. You don’t get to regularly read the glory that is the awesome creationist Neal. I shall be generous and share a few of his latest rants with you.
Note: the language in these comments is about what you’d expect from a potty-mouthed 8-year-old. You have been warned.
Those crazy rascals behind Expelled have some new games they want to play: they’ve put out a casting call for victims of persecution. It’s a pitiful plea, but it will probably net a nice collection of complaints — because it’s true. We do reject Intelligent Design from the academy, from science, and from science education, and there’s a very good reason for that: it’s the same reason we reject astrology, alchemy, creationism, haruspication, necromancy, ornithomancy, and witchcraft from our science courses. Because they aren’t science.
Taylor Kessinger gets it. He’s a junior at the University of Arizona who wrote a nice, lucid opinion piece for the school paper.
What an amusing find: a grad level course taught by creationists that claims it is impossible to write out 10262 in decimal notation, which prompts Tiny Frog to immediately commit heresy by writing it out. You’ll burn in hell for that, Tiny Frog!
That’s not the only lunacy on the creationist page. Try these:
Probability experts point out that if the chances are greater than 1 in 1050, it will never happen.
There is absolutely no chance that the creation could have happened by chance (as you point out in your mathematical computations). Although, if there is theoretically a one in 10262 chance that the world could have happened this way, then in the everlasting eternity of time this (the current universe) could be that one in 10262 chance. In order for probability to be put in effect, there needs to be an actor. E.g., in order for a set of dice to come up snake eyes, someone needs to shake and throw them. If I place the dice on a table, what are the chances that I will get snake eyes? None. That is, none until someone acts on the dice. God needed to be present as an actor in the beginning or nothing could have happened.
The truth is that God made you and me. One day we will all give an account to Him of our lives. Why is it important to believe in the Creator and not in evolution? What impact will that have on our eternity?
Evaluation: Students will be monitored by teacher observation during the classroom discussion, group work and answering the appropriate questions. Reflection paragraphs will be collected. The teacher will try to determine the students’ new courage and ability to defend their belief in the Creator.
Right. This is what creationists consider to be good science.
Last night, Jeffrey Shallit debated a creationist. We must now shun him for violating the code of the evilutionist.
No, not really. But it’s another case where the best tactics aren’t clear and simple. On the one hand, we do want to engage the public in a discussion of the ideas, and sometimes a debate is a good way to do that; but on the other, it’s giving the anti-science opponent a platform and a good deal more credibility than he deserves. I’m confident that Shallit mopped the floor with the twerp, but that’s not the point — it’s that a creationist was given equal standing with science, which is not a good result.
Another concern is that if Shallit had a bad day and did not clobber his opponent, the creationist will have much to crow about. This is a game where the science has nothing to gain and everything to lose.
Mark Hoofnagle has a very good discusion of the to-debate/not-to-debate dilemma. I’ve had a few requests to do this sort of thing, and I turn them down and suggest alternatives. If they’re going to give the stage to a creationist some evening, give it to me or another biologist the next evening; let us discuss the science without have to trudge through the drivel a creationist will yammer about. It also has the advantage of drawing in an audience that is willing to think and learn; creationist debates are typically stocked with committed yahoos from the local church, and the last thing they want to do is actually think.
Another reasonable alternative, if the creationist is going to be up there on stage whether you like it or not, is to propose that he give a short talk in which he gives his dreckspiel, and then bring a panel of experts on stage to handle questions from the audience…real experts in geology and biology and physics, who don’t give talks of their own, but are available to address any issues the audience wants to bring up. Turn the creationist talk into an oral defense of his thesis, followed by the kind of grilling to which scientists are accustomed. Remember, they are the ones with the very weak case, and they should be expected to work to defend their argument.
But these debates do happen, we can learn from them, and good for Jeff for taking a creationist head-on. I’m also going to be in a debate of my own in February (not on creationism, though, but on religion), so I can’t be too much of a purist on these matters. But we should be thinking of different ways of handling these public arguments with creationists other than accepting the format they choose to impose on us.
Homer Jacobson wrote a paper 52 years ago in which he speculated about the chemical conditions underlying the origin of life. After discovering that the paper is frequently cited by creationists, and after reviewing the work and finding multiple errors, he has retracted the paper. Good for him. It won’t matter to the creationists, though; this paper will continue to get cited and mangled and misused.
The writeup makes an excellent point.
It is not unusual for scientists to publish papers and, if they discover evidence that challenges them, to announce they were wrong. The idea that all scientific knowledge is provisional, able to be challenged and overturned, is one thing that separates matters of science from matters of faith.
Yes. Science has an integrity and dedication to the honest evaluation of the evidence that religion lacks.
The Minnetonka school district is one of the best in Minnesota, with an exceptionally concerned and active set of parents and teachers who work hard to keep informed and support their schools. They established an organization, TonkaFocus, to oppose creationism in the schools and attempts to demolish their international baccalaureate program, a very smart move — pro-science parent activism is always something to encourage.
Minnetonka was also the home district of Dave Eaton, an ID sycophant who was a crony of the odious Cheri Yecke, and who was responsible for some of the shenanigans in our state’s last attempt to get some decent science education standards. He’s gone, fortunately, but one of his pals, Bill Wenmark, is still on the Minnetonka school board.
But, we hope, not for long. He’s up for re-election on 6 November.
School boards should be places for people who know something about education and who want to improve schools for our kids. Creationists who want to damage science education and make our kids more ignorant do not belong on them, and Bill Wenmark is one of those wackos who wants to inflict his religious vision on other people’s children — he needs to be replaced on the school board. Greg Laden has more on Wenmark, who doesn’t particularly like TonkFocus or the ACLU or legitimate science education. I have to second Greg’s suggestion:
Minnetonkans! Vote for The Other Guy!
John Lynch seems to have about as little to say about this statistic as I do: 60% of adult, educated, normal Americans believe Genesis is literally true. Or, more accurately, 60% of Americans say they think Genesis is literally true.
There is a difference. There is an attitude that religious explanations must not be questioned that is common here: what we need to do, and what I think the “New Atheists” are most successfully doing, is waking people up to the idea that that is not true — you can argue with religious proclamations, and having a divinity degree does not make you smart, let alone infallible. In fact, theologians face an image problem if they keep throwing up these long-winded clueless twits to be chewed up by meanies like Dawkins and Hitchens.
I told you that the Discovery Institute was going to have conniptions over the Stein/O’Reilly interview. O’Reilly defined ID as the idea that “a deity created life,” and I could have mentioned this nonsense from Stein:
There’s no doubt about it. We have lots and lots of evidence of it in the movie. And you know Einstein worked within the framework of believing there was a God. Newton worked within the framework of believing there was a God. For gosh sakes Darwin worked within the framework of believing there was a God. And yet, somehow, today you’re not allowed to believe it. Why can’t we have as much freedom as Darwin had?
So now ID is a framework for god-belief. This is far off the reservation; the DI wants you to believe that there isn’t a shred of religious motivation behind their propaganda…a lie that was cleanly refuted in the Dover trial. It’s a lie that they want to continue to ask you to believe, however, but O’Reilly and Stein and all the happy creationists who freely associate ID with their theistic creationism haven’t got the message.
So the Discovery Institute Media Complaints Division has issued a hasty demurral. I knew it would be coming.
I wonder if the guys behind Expelled are doing a frantic rewrite right now?
Maybe not—there is something else to consider. This may be exactly what they want: official denials coupled to widespread public perception that ID supports their religion. If the Discovery Institute convincingly argued that their guess was entirely secular and had nothing at all to do with god, it would die away and disappear overnight. They’ve got to walk this risky tightrope of pandering to the religious for their support while struggling to maintain plausible deniability that they have a religious agenda. It’s got to be hard, poor fellas, but they may actually appreciate fronts like O’Reilly and Stein keeping the religious fervor going, while allowing them to remain officially aloof from it all.
Oh, no … we’ve almost missed it! Now we have to make a mad scrabble for birthday hats and noisemakers and cake and ice cream. It’s the big 6010th birthday for planet earth, according to Ed Darrell and Phil Plait and these guys in Austin. Hmmm. Maybe we should at least make a quick trip to the Dairy Queen.
Oh, wait. I don’t believe that crap. Neither do any of the people I linked to above. But some of the wacky people at World Net Daily do.
But the author of the book frequently described as the greatest history book ever written, said the world was created Oct. 23, 4004 B.C. – making it exactly 6,010 today.
In the 1650s, an Anglican bishop named James Ussher published his “Annals of the World,” subtitled, “The Origin of Time, and Continued to the Beginning of the Emperor Vespasian’s Reign and the Total Destruction and Abolition of the Temple and Commonwealth of the Jews.” First published in Latin, it consisted of more than 1,600 pages.
The book, now published in English for the first time, is a favorite of homeschoolers and those who take ancient history seriously. It’s the history of the world from the Garden of Eden to the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.
<snicker> “homeschoolers and those who take ancient history seriously”. How can WND not be a parody site, I sometimes wonder.
Ben Stein and Bill O’Reilly.
Bill made a thousand creationist hearts flutter in dismay when he opened with his introductory definition: “intelligent design, that is, a deity created life”. It was, unfortunately, the last hint of intelligence in the whole segment.
Ben Stein is an astonishingly ignorant person. He goes on and on about several themes.
