Stop letting creationists host your ideas

I sat through the whole debate last night, which was supposed to address the premise that “The hominin fossil record demonstrably supports human evolution”, with Erika (Gutsick Gibbon) on the pro side, Jerry Bergman against. It was half bad. Erika was well-prepared and tightly on-topic, and her part was worth listening to. Bergman, as I predicted, was a sloppy mess with a scattershot collection of slides which were mostly off-topic and irrelevant, and was full of wrong examples that didn’t make his case. Would you believe he talked about Nebraska Man, a hoary old chestnut of tabloid excess that never had the support of the scientific community, presented alongside Piltdown Man as evidence that the fossil record was fake? How about the claim that Australopithecines were just the bones of pygmies?

But I almost gave up in the first few minutes, before either had a chance to speak, when the screen loaded and there across the top in big capital letters was the banner “STANDING FOR TRUTH BIBLICAL MINISTRIES” with the logo for that disgraceful organization popping up throughout. The moderator/host was that smug twit, Donny Budinsky, a hardcore young earth creationist with no education in science, geology, paleontology, or evolutionary biology, who promotes these inane “debates” between creationists and sane evolutionary biologists. WHY? This was a promotional event for the dumbest collection of ignorant yahoos on YouTube. These are terrible people, and yet so many science educators will voluntarily send traffic their way, and, by the way, platform dogmatic buffoons like Jerry Bergman.

I don’t understand it. Most of the people on our side are educators who know how to deliver a presentation, and have the ability to do it well. It has become easy with tools like StreamYard and Zoom to host a video session with multiple simultaneous contributors. We don’t need grifting yahoos like Donny Budinsky to organize and host these “debates”, and if you ditch mind-numbing parasites like Bergman, you don’t even have to waste time on them — Erika had a robust, informative 45 minutes of science talk imbedded in the superfluous, distracting garbage of the Jerry and Donny Show, with an ad for creationism layered on top.

You know I despise debates, but even worse are debates that donate unwarranted attention and respect to lying apologists for anti-scientific claims. Stop it, everyone.

Missionary Lizards!

How many ignorant claims can a creationist pack into a short clip?

If there’s one thing the world uses to steal the hearts and minds of our kids it’s dinosaurs.

One thing? Absurd. We have all of reality to entice kids away from the lies of Answers in Genesis.

“Hey look kids. Look at these fearsome creatures. They’re amazing. They’re fascinating. They died out 65 million years ago. They’re products of evolution. They’re just the results of chemicals bumping together over millions of years.

Come on. If you’re going to convince people that evolution is not true, you should start by accurately describing it. No one claims that dinosaurs arose spontaneously from simple chemical processes.

Just like you, evolution’s true.” They use dinosaurs to convince our kids they’re nothing but rearranged pond scum.

We also don’t claim that.

Stop and think. Why would scientists be arguing that, when it’s not true, and wouldn’t accomplish much of anything? It’s clear that this guy is proselytizing and trying to recruit followers, so if we just assume that scientists have a similar, competing motive (we don’t), how does telling someone they are rearranged pond scum serve our purpose? Or Satan’s purpose?

We use dinosaurs to call our children back to the authority of the word of God. We call dinosaurs missionary lizards because we want to give children sound biblical scientific answers about these incredible creatures.

I do appreciate that contradictory phrase, biblical scientific answers, especially given that the Bible says nothing about dinosaurs. But AiG will tell us all about it! The next AiG video linked to by the above short is titled You’ve Been LIED to About How Dinosaurs Looked, which explains how a creationist artist uses the Bible to help him figure out how dinosaurs actually looked.

The unfathomable question is why AiG chose to use this AI-generated image of “dinosaurs” on their video?

Abomination, I say! Who is lying to kids about dinosaurs now?

Poor Martyn Iles

Martyn Iles lost his status as Ken Ham’s successor at Answers in Genesis (there’s a story there, I’m sure, but no one is talking), and now he’s an immigrant wandering loose in the United States, which is definitely not a good position to be in. Normally, I’d be sympathetic, but Martyn Iles? The Young Earth Creationist and far right kook? Nah. Deport him.

Prayer request: | need a new visa for the USA so | can come and go freely for our new project.
The lawyer recommends going for an O-1 visa, but it’s a high bar.
I’ll need some senior political and church figures to help me out with letters that verify my past activities… essentially to confirm that | have been a national leader in political, legal and grassroots advocacy work. And trust nobody who really hates my beliefs ends up with the application on their desk.
But once it’s granted, it’s a very good visa, and very durable.
So… Pray everyone is suddenly overtaken by a desire to do me just a small favour

OK, I’ll be generous: everyone can give him all the prayers he might want. I don’t know what his “new project” is, but I’m sure it’s garbage pandering to ignorance.

Fun times at AiG!

Well, this is interesting. Answers in Genesis has had a bit of a shake-up. You may recall that Ken Ham is stepping back from the responsibility of running his money-making scam; for a long time, it looked like his successor was going to be his son-in-law, Bodie Hodge, but then Ham brought in an Australian evangelical Christian named Martyn Iles and declared him his official heir to the throne of AiG. Bodie left to start his own evangelical mission.

I’m sure there was some drama going on behind the scenes. I hope someday someone comes out with a tell-all book.

Now there’s big news. Martyn Iles is out!

Some have noticed I’ve been quiet for a while. It’s because | amin a transition to something new.
In conjunction with some wise counsel and Christian colleagues, we are in the process of prayerfully discerning what’s next, now that | am no longer at Answers in Genesis.
We do have a fantastic project which appears to be coming together well… but we are just taking it a day at a time to confirm that it is of God and we’re meant to do it.
There is plenty going on behind the scenes. | am in the USA talking to donors, partners, and suppliers. Back in Australia for Easter.
The project (should the Lord enable it) has a purpose to evangelise, educate and entertain children and young people. It’s a technologically revolutionary, integrated, accessible, and high quality Christian education platform.
I’ll post updates. See where this goes.
“Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.” (Ps 127:1)

Fascinating. I’d love to know what conflict drove him away. I’m also curious to know what “technologically revolutionary” platform he plans to build; do you think it’s as “technologically revolutionary” as building a fake wooden tourist attraction?

More fossilized soft tissue

Ken Ham is excited about another discovery of traces of collagen in dinosaur bones. Me? I’m saying ho-hum, it’s mildly interesting, but it’s not what you think it is. Kenny-boy thinks it’s evidence that the bones are only 4,000 years old. I’m just wondering what processes protected collagen from degradation.

In this new study, researchers* used advanced mass spectrometry and protein sequencing to detect bone collagen in a well-preserved hip bone from an Edmontosaurus uncovered in the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota. This unexpected find is encouraging other researchers to pull fossils out of storage and look at them with these new technologies. And why?

The popular science article explains:

Furthermore, experts could uncover the biochemical pathways that enabled the preservation of organic compounds over millions of years. “The findings inform the intriguing mystery of how these proteins have managed to persist in fossils for so long,” said Taylor.

Yes, how these proteins could remain for millions of years is a big mystery. Evolutionists, try as they might, have yet to be able to present a plausible explanation for the existence of soft tissue in supposedly ancient fossils. Now the popular science article quoted Dr. Taylor, who is a creation scientist involved with this new find, saying this research will help us understand how proteins can last for “so long”—creationists too want to know how proteins can last a few thousand years. We don’t have the problem of millions and millions of years but there’s more work to be done to understand the processes that preserved them since the flood, 4,350 years ago.

The original paper doesn’t ask the question Ken Ham thinks it does. It has a narrow, specific scope: is the collagen part of the bone, or is it a product of external contamination? They show that it really is in the fossil.

They say nothing about the age of the fossil, except to briefly acknowledge it was “excavated from the Upper Cretaceous zone of the Hell Creek Formation in Harding County, South Dakota, USA.” They don’t dwell on that fact (it’s not the focus of the paper), but I know that there’s a huge amount of data screaming that it is 70 million years old. Any explanation for the preservation of soft tissue has to include all those facts. You know, the facts that Ham ignores.

Collagen is there. I’m willing to accept that. The bones are 70 million years old. The science demonstrates that. And we have plausible explanations for its preservation.

We previously demonstrated that the treatment of extant microvascular tissue with haemoglobin, an Fe-coordinating protein, can significantly enhance stability over multi-year time frames10, in effect acting as a preserving agent. Here, we extend this experimental observation to propose that enhanced resistance to degradation is due in part to Fe-catalysed non-enzymatic crosslinking of molecules comprising structural tissues, with haemoglobin suggested as the primary source of such Fe in vessels undergoing diagenesis.

This is just another example of Answers in Genesis cherry-picking the data they like and then misinterpreting/misrepresenting it.

I get email

This email was long and particularly vapid, so I’m not going into detail on it, but I do include the whole damn thing below the fold for your entertainment. To summarize it briefly, my correspondent is a friendly Muslim who wants me to know that he accepts evolution…for other organisms, but not humans. Humans are special. To make his point, he provides Evidence of the Divine.

This evidence consists of long, practically obsessive descriptions of how beautiful Mohammed was. His eyes were large, with deep black irises and bright whites, and his eyelashes were long and how good he smelled, I never smelled ambergris or musk or anything as fragrant as the scent of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. Also, he knew that horse hooves could strike sparks when galloping over stones, but there are no stones in the desert! How can you not be convinced of the existence of god and the falsity of evolution when you learn this?

He concludes by telling me how persuasive his argument is.

I want to let you know that I’ve shown this to scientists and they were utterly convinced that God didn’t exist and that we evolved from a common ancestor with primates. But after I showed them this proof that the Quran has Divine origins. They started to rethink their whole world view regarding God and atheism.

I include the entirety of his “proof” below, despite the fact that apparently it’s going to convince all of you to leave this site and go running to your nearest mosque. After all, how can you resist when Mohammed bats his lovely eyes at you?

[Read more…]

The argument for god from consistent anatomy

Aron Ra asked me to address a novel proof for the existence of god. You see, the only way you can get a nose in the middle of your face every time, or any kind of symmetry, is if a designer made it so. If you leave it to biology, you’ll get noses in random places on your body!

He really didn’t need a developmental biologist to explain this — the problem isn’t that the old goober in the picture doesn’t understand the developmental cascade that leads to a predictable morphology, it’s that he has a gross misconception that physics and chemistry and biology lack any process that can produce predictable outcomes absent a god skewing the results.

By the way, I was doing my best to keep it simple. I know that asymmetries are common. I can see, for instance, that my right forefinger is slightly longer than my left by about a millimeter; I know that my left ear is noticeably higher than my right (I had my peers loudly pointing that out in grade school.) Are those facts evidence that a god must not exist, or at least, that the god we have is terribly sloppy?

AiG ❤️ Dawkins & Coyne

Answers in Genesis is thrilled at everything Trump promises to do. You know what else makes them happy? That Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne have embraced a Biblical worldview, finally realizing that sex is binary and simple, just like the Bible says. Skip ahead to about 7:30 if you don’t want to hear them fawning over Trump, don’t bother listening at all if you don’t want to hear their appreciation of Dawkins and Coyne (also some guy named Pinky or Pink…they knew there was “pink” in the name).

It doesn’t mean much. These are creationists, they always pick and choose which words they’ll hear. But isn’t it interesting that some New Atheists are converging on a dogmatic religious view?