How to organize against a creationist lecture

Got a creationist coming to your town or school? A commenter from Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education left an excellent summary of how to counter these travelin’ frauds effectively. The key is simple: recruit. Get the information out. Don’t let them come in and babble unopposed or with an audience imported from the local fundie churches — get informed people there, and the creationists will crumple easily.

Notice that this isn’t about suppressing their information (or even expelling them) — it’s shining the light of open public criticism on their shenanigans.

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I like Dembski a little less now

ERV has put up her account of Dembski’s nightmare evening, in which he got grilled and mocked by the students in the Q&A. It sounds like it was great fun — for everyone else, at least — but this part really irks me.

Finally, the Creationists had had enough. Somebody had to stand up for Jesus.

“Im just so disappointed in OU students and how closed minded they are!!!”

Dembski made it perfectly clear at that point that the attacks against me were no accidental oversight. Dembski used this Creationist as an opportunity to attack the students that were exposing him as a fool: “Well dont be so hard on them. Theyre just sucking up to their professors.“

Way to make excuses for your own failure by belittling the students, jerk. You flopped, Billy, and it was your own fault — you can only succeed when you ship in a church-going claque, and you had a room full of independent-minded, skeptical students, instead.

Maybe it’s because rocks and critters are more honest than creationists

I’ve just come back from my introductory biology classroom in which I’ve been trying hard to convince students of an important historical fact: the scientists, especially the geologists, who came up with the idea that the earth was old were working in a Christian tradition, and they came up with their ideas because they needed to explain the evidence, not because they were driven by theological considerations or because they had been bribed by the Evil Atheist Conspiracy. Sometimes you just have to put them in the shoes of a geologist in 1850 to get them to see the true motives. Then I discover that ChrisR is also trying to make the point, that it’s the evidence not ideology that informs our conclusions.

It’s our studies of the rock record that have led geologists to propose that the Earth is so unimaginably old, not the edicts of the Evil Secular Conspiracy. When we observe huge angular unconformities, where rocks have been tilted almost vertically, eroded and then covered with flat-lying rocks, we see that they require a large period of time to have formed. When thermodynamics tells us that it would take tens of thousands of years for an ingneous intrusion hundreds of metres across to solidify from lava, we assume that that means it tooks tens of thousands of years to form. When present day estimates of sea floor spreading – measured in mm per year – match those estimated from the increased radiometric ages of the ocean floor away from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, we conclude the Atlantic Ocean has been formed after tens of millions of years of slow continental drift. The list goes on and on; and useful as the fossil record is, I could continue for quite a while without having to mention the E-word.

I was also trying to get across another piece of evidence that the biologists were trying (and before Darwin, failing) to interpret, one that is quite ironic now. One of the big questions before natural historians was to explain all the gradations of form in the natural world — why are there so many species of mouse, for instance, that vary in little ways, and why are there ‘mouse-like’ forms that are larger, like rats? Why is the world swimming in transitional forms, and why aren’t animals more distinct from one another, in other words?

It’s a sign of the degeneracy of the modern creationist that instead of grappling with these questions honestly, as the 19th century creationists/natural historians did, they instead simply deny the existence of the evidence. Like Chris says, rocks aren’t coy about their age, and I’d add that organisms aren’t hiding their relationships.

Hilarity in the recent ID creationism escapades

Here’s a hot prospect for the Discovery Institute: Fred Sigworth, a professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale. Snap him up, quick! He’ll fit in perfectly! He gave a talk to the Yale Christian Fellowship which sounds like it was hilarious.

“Being a Christian is good preparation for work as a scientist, and science can help prepare you for being a Christian,” he said.

Oh? How does faith help you be a better scientist?

Sigworth said that both religion and science require working with incomplete data…

That’s a revelation right there. Science does require working with incomplete data, and religion requires working with no data at all. Therefore, religion must be more powerful than science! I am converted! Hallelujah!

OK, seriously, it sounds like a very silly talk by yet another gomer striving to invent rationalizations for his ridiculous religion. No news there.

Wait…how does that qualify someone to be a fellow of the Discovery Institute? Isn’t ID a secular theory?

Not if you listen to Bill Dembski’s Q & A last night…where he said, “I’ve got plenty of ulterior religious motive, I’d like to see ID succeed because of my Christian background and beliefs.” In addition, it sounds like not only did a professor get up and rip him apart on the flagellum, but the audience was laughing at poor Dembski. That’s what we need more of: the creationists getting laughed off the stages at their propaganda ops.

ERV was also at the Q & A, and recorded the audio. We’ll have to check later and see if she’s put anything up on it … although I’m a little concerned about the sound quality. It sounds like she might have been laughing hysterically the whole time, which could have drowned out some of the juicy bits.

Hovindian revisionism

We’ve all heard how the Creation Science Evangelism, Kent Hovind’s organization, has been strongarming YouTube to suppress criticisms of his bad science. Well, check this out: now CSE has been caught red-handed revising their licensing. Where before they declared everything free and good to disseminate, now they are retroactively claiming copyright.

I take that as an admission that they can’t stand the heat.

If you’ve ever been tempted to visit the Big Valley Creation Science Museum…

…don’t bother.

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A reader sent me a link to his photo set from the BVCSM, and I’m afraid all you’ll find there is the Wall O’ Text approach to instruction. You know what that is: print out a page from Answers in Genesis, blow it up real big, and slap it on a wall … instant museum!

There is one amusing revelation — creationists sometimes have the wackiest ideas — and it made me laugh.

Did you know that ALL dinosaur footprint fossils found are pointing in the same direction?! This is IRREFUTABLE PROOF of the dinosaurs running from a global flood!

Creation Logic 101: you don’t need any! And now that you know everything that’s entertaining about the place, you won’t need to pay out $5 to some nut in a small town in Alberta, Canada to see it. Go to the Royal Tyrrell instead.

Actually, the funniest comment I’ve seen in a while is a testimonial proudly displayed at the top of the BVCSM website:

“I spent more time in this museum than I did in the Smithsonian”

The picture at the top of this article is the Big Valley Creation Science Museum: a small remodeled ranch house. This is the Smithsonian Institution: 19 museums and 9 research institutions, and over 100 million objects in their collections. That statement above is a testimonial to the delusions of the creationists, nothing more.

Deranged creationists: here are your instructions

Oh, that little scamp, Billy Dembski. He’s all upset about his shabby treatment at Baylor, and he’s displacing his anger into a defense of Robert Marks.

President John Lilley of Baylor appears to have made up his mind that Prof. Robert Marks’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab is to have no place at Baylor. There is only one court of appeal now, the Baylor Board of Regents, who can reverse Lilley’s decision and even remove Lilley as president. Here is the list of board members. I encourage readers of UD to contact them (respectfully) and share their concerns about this gross violation of academic freedom.

One amusing bit of background, though: the Evolutionary Informatics Lab didn’t exist. It was a web page, nothing more, so it’s a little strange to complain that it doesn’t have a place at Baylor. What’s actually been refused is that the Evolutionary Informatics Lab doesn’t get to pretend that it’s a Baylor initiative. It’s a bit excessive for Baylor to refuse to host a faculty member’s wacky web page, but there’s nothing to stop them from putting it up on, say, the DI’s servers. It’ll be just as effective there as anywhere. Or, hey, does geocities still exist and offer free hosting?

The other thing, though, is that Dembski then goes on to list all the members of the board of regents, including home phone numbers and addresses. I guess Dembski responds to the fact that he has been Expelled with Intimidation and Incitement, which must be the next two movies in the creationist trilogy.

Oh, and no more links from me to UD while Dembski has his hit list online.