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.

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.

[Read more…]

That nice but batty lady, Denyse O’Leary, is teaching a course in intelligent design. At the University of Toronto. Woe, the devaluation of a great research university…!

Oh, but wait. It’s actually taught at St Michael’s College, a Catholic institution within the University of Toronto. And you have to look at the course entry to believe it. It’s a non-credit course under the category of “Scripture, Spirituality & Pastoral Care”, and the listing is buried in the middle of a lot of theology, mysticism, New Age nonsense, and gibbering madness.

it fits in perfectly.

Kent Hovind may be rotting in jail, but his son Eric is continuing the family tradition of lying to the public. Eric Hovind is going to be here in Minnesota on 28 October,
giving a talk at the Russian Evangelical Christian Church in Shakopee. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it, but this could be interesting. Not Hovind — I understand he’s just doing his daddy’s same old patented high-speed babble with corn-pone jokes — but these new Russian evangelicals have been in the news lately, and have been exhibiting a particularly virulent strain of hate and ignorance. I know nothing about this particular Shakopee church, but I’d be curious to find out if there’s any connection to Watchmen on the Walls. If anyone goes, let me know.

Uh, and if you’re gay, you might not want to go. Just in case.

Tsk, tsk, Canada. I know you caught this disease from your southern neighbor, but still…
this is a sorry state of affairs.

The Alberta government has been quietly increasing funding to faith schools — to 100 per cent in the case of “alternative” programs — and allowing creationism to be taught alongside the Alberta curriculum.
Currently, this movement is most visible in the Ontario election campaign where Conservative Leader John Tory has promised a free vote on funding for all faith schools, pointing to Alberta as an example.

In response to a question, Tory said, “You know it’s still called the theory of evolution. But they teach evolution in the Ontario curriculum, but they also could teach the fact to the children that there are other theories that people have out there that are part of some Christian beliefs.” His comments show a dismal lack of scientific literacy.

It sounds like many people are working to correct this deplorable backsliding, but they haven’t gone quite as far as Sweden.

The Swedish government is to crack down on the role religion plays in independent faith schools. The new rules will include a ban on biology teachers teaching creationism or ‘intelligent design’ alongside evolution.

“Pupils must be protected from all forms of fundamentalism,” said Education Minister Jan Björklund to Dagens Nyheter.

Now that is clear, unambiguous, and forceful. Maybe Ben Stein should pay a visit to Sweden sometime.

Here’s an interesting essay on why people don’t accept evolution: it’s not simply a consequence of a conflict between religious teachings and the conclusion of science, but is also a conflict created by the nonintuitive way that evolution works — that a very small selective force operating over long periods of time can generate dramatic outcomes, often with no obvious, linear progression from one point to another. It’s well-said, but not an entirely new idea (thermodynamics and information theory seem to often throw people for a loop, and creationists seem utterly baffled by genetic algorithms)— we’ve often commented on how the concepts may be difficult to grasp, but once the ideas of thinking in terms of populations without individual change sink in, it does become obvious. It’s also one of those fields where, although some find it hard to believe, a solid understanding of basic math and statistics are indispensable.

The essay also feeds into an argument that some of us have made: education and learning all help correct the problem, it’s not just a matter of trying to accommodate people to a different worldview. Being able to turn on that little light-bulb of understanding is key to getting people to accept good science.

Nice bumper sticker.