This is a war between two worldviews, which Skip explains nicely. Here’s the short summary.
| Wisdom | Ignorance | Biologists love boobies, beavers, and the weenus! | Creationists fear boobies, beavers, and the weenus. |
|---|
Which side would you rather be on?
Uh-oh. Those Catholic creationists had better watch out: the Vatican thinks they’re pagans.
Believing that God created the universe in six days is a form of superstitious paganism, the Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno claimed yesterday.
Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a “destructive myth” had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies.
He described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a “kind of paganism” because it harked back to the days of “nature gods” who were responsible for natural events.
Yes, I can see how the major monotheistic religions might take offense at the “God of the Gaps” and Designer gods—they are attempts to shift the deity from the cosmic and the abstract to the mundane and the petty, and also to put those gods in the realm of the testable.
I can’t say that I agree entirely with Consolmagno, though.
“Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism—it’s turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do.”
No, we don’t need religion for that. Atheists can have a conscience, too, and we are aware that there are human limits to what we should do. Too often, religion is used as a justification for doing the inhuman to heretics and unbelievers…and to pagans. It’s a piss-poor substitute for morality, unless you think propping up the obscenely rich or damning people for what they do with their genitals is “morality” (and isn’t that also an awfully petty concern for their majestic deity?).
Noooooo! I’m a proud graduate of the University of Oregon, and I think Eugene is a wonderful place…and now I learn that damned dumb creationists were drooling stupidly in the student union. Three creationists lectured on their nonsense there.
There was Tom Alderman.
There is “a mountain of evidence that the universe was designed,” he said.
“Design has been proven to an extreme probability,” he said.
No, there is no evidence for design, let alone “proof” of design—even the fact that he is talking about proof shows that he knows nothing about how science works.
At least he nakedly revels in the religious foundation of Intelligent Design creationism.
“I’m confident that Genesis is true,” he said. “God’s deity and power are revealed in the cosmos.”
Alderman said that the Big Bang must have had a cause that is timeless and immaterial.
“It sounds like the God from the Bible,” he said.
Alderman’s qualification to pontificate on this subject is that he’s a lawyer. A Republican lawyer. Surprised?
Then there’s Geoffrey Simmons.
Simmons said many animals, such as giraffes and blue whales, have no fossils on record or any record of species from which they could have evolved. Simmons said intelligent design supports the theories of natural selection and survival of the fittest, but neither of those theories proves evolution.
“Billions of years isn’t enough time,” Simmons said. “Nobody has shown that a dog can become a cat.”
Evolution of whales? No fossil giraffes? Jebus, do I even need to mention that this bs about dogs evolving into cats is insane? This guy is totally out to lunch.
His qualifications? He’s an MD (Sorry, Orac.) If I ever visit Eugene again, I’m going to try and stay very healthy.
Next up, Jim Long. A professor at UO! Fortunately, he doesn’t say anything nearly as stupid as the other two guys, but man, he ought to be embarrassed by the company he is keeping; could he at least have had the integrity to point out that his fellow speakers were making up nonsense?
Long said that he does not include evolution in his curriculum; instead, he teaches that a creator designed the cell with impressive power and subtlety.
He’s an emeritus professor of chemistry who seems to be teaching a bit of general and organic chemistry. I doubt that he has much opportunity to teach that baloney about cells—cells and evolution wouldn’t be in his purview.
There are only a few comments on the article at the Daily Emerald site, but at least they’re all pointing out that these speakers were full of it.
Wilkins takes apart the pathetic trio piece by piece, and I’m informed that the honor of the UO is saved by the fact that Eugenie Scott will be giving two lectures there next week, and Bruce Alberts will be lecturing on the teaching of evolution the week after that.
The following missive was slipped over my transom in the dead of night. It reveals a dark secret, a clandestine society that has been working for years to hide their origins and true purpose. It begins with a murder and wends its way through a series of codes that are, as it turns out, reducible and simple, to reach a shocking conclusion.
I know who the author is, but I’m not telling. I will say that it is not Dan Brown (fortunately!).
Speaking of too incredibly stupid to be believed, here’s a candidate for Lieutenant Governor of the fine state of South Carolina.
“I think everything ought to be taught … and let people decide for themselves. There is no science to support trans-species changes, in other words, a monkey becoming a man,” the Republican said in an interview Monday with The Associated Press.
“A bunch of amoebas didn’t get together and design all this,” Jordan said, referring to the human body. “We’d be operating on people … looking at their hearts, their liver and their lungs, I’d tell the techs, ‘Can you believe those little amoebas figured all this out?’
“I mean you’ve got to be stupid to believe in evolution, I mean really,” he said.
He’s a medical doctor, as you can tell, and you can also tell from that middle paragraph that he’s so full of Shinola that his eyeballs squeak when he blinks. Who in their right mind would think that evolution proposes that the human body was assembled by the planned, conscious action of protists? It’s revealing of a limited mind that he can only myopically imagine evolution as a kind of design by the miniscule, instead of design by nonexistent vapor.
And what is it with creationists and amoebae? The amoeba is a general form found in diverse groups, and it’s yet another indictment of their etiolated imaginations and scant scholarship that they can only think of amoebae when they need to come up with a word for that vast domain of the single-celled.
Dr Jordan seems to be wingnuttily deranged all the way down to his core. Tell me, SCarolinians, that this guy doesn’t stand a chance of getting elected.
“There are only two nations I know of that have been supernaturally blessed: Israel, because God chose them … and the other is the United States,” Jordan said.
Oh, yay. Go us.
I’d really like to hear his opinion on the Civil War, too. Was the Unpleasantness that kept the nation intact a blessing, too? Or was the sanctity the sole position of the Confederacy?
Not all my mail is from cranks and ravers; I actually get some nice and friendly and interesting mail, too. Like this one, from Hank Alme, who asks a good question:
To what extent does intellectual honesty require me to also read guys like Behe and Dembski, and to understand their arguments?
That’s an easy one: intellectual honesty doesn’t require that you read any of their crap. One of their great successes is that they’ve managed to convince many people that it’s only fair to read their books, often reading them instead of good science. It’s not true! You are far better off reading a solid science text than wasting it on their drivel.
The only reason to read any of their work is not because it’s the honest thing to do—if we carried that reasoning to its logical conclusion, I’ve got a library of stuff you need to read first—but because it will prepare you better to deal with their arguments. It takes the edge off that first moment of shock, when they say something so awesomely stupid that you find it incredible that anyone would even suggest such a thing. I’ve experienced that moment: your eyes focus on infinity, your lips move involuntarily as you try to parse the absurdity, your brain spins its wheels for a while as you mentally downshift, trying to get yourself in the proper frame of mind to handle the curious words of the deranged person in front of you. Otherwise, though, there isn’t much point to wading through the dreck.
So no, don’t read Behe and Dembski. Read Carroll and Dawkins and Gould. Understanding the science is all the preparation you need.
By the way, I’ve noticed that commenting is way down. It could be you’re all bored with me, or that it’s my fault since I’ve been distracted with grading and exam preparation, or most worrisome, the TypeKey requirement has stymied potential commenters, or at least discouraged them. Let me know if there’s a problem— the comments contribute much to the site, and I’d hate to see them chased away.
Lisa Jardine is a historian who clearly understands how science works:
The thought uppermost in my mind was how odd it is that non-scientists think of science as being about certainties and absolute truth. Whereas scientists are actually quite tentative—they simply try to arrive at the best fit between the experimental findings so far and a general principle.
Read the rest. She ties together the ideals of how science should be carried out with a story from Pepys and an unscrupulous sea captain and modern day creationists—excellent stuff!
Hurtling1 down the road in my black Chevy2, I laugh maniacally3. “Time to kick creationist butt4,” I say, “and test the mettle of the Cheeseheads.5“
I’m heading off to the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point to minister to the heathen today, so my online presence may be limited. I’ve got a lecture to give in their Evolution Sunday series. Here’s a copy of the PowerPoint file6, just so I have an online backup.
I’m racing right back early Monday morning, though. I’ve got a hellish week or two of grading and exams and classes and more travel, and I’ve got to get an early start on it all.
1Never exceeding the speed limit, though—the highway out of Morris is a notorious speed trap.
2With a few dents and dangling bits of scrap. Yeah, Connlann, thanks for dinging up the EvolutionMobile every time you come home.
3Or titter gratingly…it’s a matter of perspective.
4In front of a friendly crowd of godless freethinkers.
5They aren’t going to be mad about being called cheeseheads, are they?
6Don’t peek, Stevens Pointers! You’ll learn all the punchlines.7
7Actually, probably not. My PowerPoint files tend to be a little on the cryptic side, so you may not learn too much from it.
After sitting through Hovind’s talk, I have seen the light. I’ve always been awfully hard on Christianity and Christians here, despising their beliefs and making mock of their nonsensical ideas and backwards social agenda. But this evangelist really reached out and grabbed me.
I now feel a great pity for them.
Hovind is one of the leading lights of fundamentalist Christianity in this country; the large auditorium was packed full, and they had to put up folding seats on the stage behind him to handle the crowd. They were enthusiastic and laughing and cheering and shouting “Amen!” throughout his talk. All I could think through it all was sorrow and sympathy for all the Christians who have willingly afflicted themselves with this clown, who have gullibly swallowed his lies. I am so sorry, Christians. I’m very embarrassed for you.
On a purely objective level, evaluating the presentation and the skill of the speaker, I was surprised: it was an exceptionally bad talk. You will often hear these creationist speakers praised for their rhetorical ability, if not their grasp of science, but I’m afraid Hovind was awful. We have weekly student seminars at my university, and sometimes students do a less than stellar job at this public speaking business…but I have never heard a speaker as incompetent as Hovind.
Yes, he spits out words fast with little fumbling, and he lards his talk with well-practiced folksy jokes, but it’s all so poorly organized and clumsily presented that it has no persuasive power at all. He is doing nothing but affirming the prejudices of his audience—he’s effective at that—but he’s not communicating any information at all effectively. I imagined him giving this talk to an informed audience, rather than the bussed-in church groups that were here, and his schtick would fall flat, and fall hard. Scientists have this expectation that they will learn something from a talk, you see, and that they’ll be able to evaluate the process by which the conclusions were arrived at; there was nothing like that here.
Even if you are sympathetic to Hovind’s claims, here is an indicator of what a poor speaker he is. This was scheduled to be a one hour talk. He showed up with a power point presentation containing over 700 slides. My personal rule of thumb for a good hour presentation is that if you’re a bit lazy and fill it chock-a-block with bullet points and text slides, 30 or 40 is about right; better talks pare it down to 20 or fewer data-rich slides and spend some time discussing each one. 700+ is practically criminal; it’s a declaration of rapid-fire superficiality, that you intend to steamroller the audience with no consideration for thought. Hovind is the anti-Tufte.
He also went over his allotted time—he talked for almost 2 hours. He knew it, too; at the hour mark, he mentioned that he was going to say just a few more things quickly, and then instead he went on and on, going all the way to the end of his list of power point slides. It was agonizingly bad. Again, though, his audience was predisposed to favor him, so nobody showed up with a hook.
What about his style? It was nothing but corn-pone jokes. He warmed up the audience beforehand with a continuous display of ‘witticisms’ projected on the big screen. Things like “Why is the third hand on a watch called a second hand?” and “Where does the light go when it goes out?” It was calculated, I’m sure, to rot the brains of the audience before the ringmaster came on. The audience actually laughed at these things. I was ready to leave, and he hadn’t even started talking.
That was the tone in the talk, too. He’d rant a bit about the awful lies scientists pack into textbooks, and then he’d trot out some tired old joke. It was like watching Hee Haw—I half-expected Junior Samples to show up.
(Hovind seems completely incapable of changing his tone. In the beginning, he was introducing his family in this same jokey way, when he pointed to a picture of his son-in-law in one picture and mentioned that he’d died of cancer just a few weeks ago. One serious and sad mention, then zip, right back to the jokes. It was very jarring, and brought one word to my mind: psychopath.)
In addition to dropping a joke everytime his brain lost its train of thought, he was incessantly plugging his videos—they were on sale in the lobby. Money was a constant theme, which is also not something I’ve seen at science talks. Maybe we need to start. I didn’t buy any of his videos, of course—this one lecture convinced me I don’t need to hear any more Hovind, especially not a Hovind babbling on for several hours in each of a dozen tapes. I really don’t know how Matt survived his experience with them.
As for the content of his talk: that wasn’t the point. This was an mutual backslapping session for creationists, not an evening of substance. The talk itself was irony-rich garbage. His message was that science textbooks, yea, even the ones in use at SCSU, were full of lies, and he, lover of science that he was, only wanted to see those lies removed. In order to do this, he gave a talk that was full of lies. About 700 of them, actually.
In those 700 slides, he raced through an incredible number of creationist canards: polystrate trees disprove gradualism, non-existence of the geologic column, fossils date the rocks and rocks date the fossils, the Grand Canyon is young, microevolution, not macroevolution, humans don’t have gill slits, mutations only destroy information, yadda yadda yadda. Seriously. They were all dead arguments presented at such a rapid clip that there was no time to think about them, let alone rebut them. And the lies were just so painfully blatant: as an example, he claimed that trilobites weren’t old and they weren’t extinct, and to ‘prove’ his claim, he showed a picture of an arctic isopod and announced that there it was, alive and crawling, proof that the biology professors have all been lying to you.
It was almost too much to take: Hovind was inciting the audience to tear pages out of biology books, to protest to the university about the lyin’ professors there, and he was doing it by lying non-stop.
I didn’t ask any questions. Once he shut up, I left; I don’t think there would have been any point to trying to rebut him, any more than there is any point to trying to rebut Hee Haw.
Oh, and one more thing: St Cloud State should feel a little shamefaced. We had a creationist visit UMM, and he was politely but forcefully out-argued by our students, and even though at least one church group was brought in, they were totally outclassed by the students. This event was more heavily stacked with family and church attendees, but the SCSU students seemed to be heavily pro-creationist. That’s not a good sign for a healthy university, unless they’re cynically aiming to recruit from the poorly educated pool. It might make economic sense, in the short run, but it’s very unfortunate to see my son’s degree cheapened that way just as he’s ready to graduate.
Be amused. The malevolent clown at Billy Dembski’s blog has joined the blithering clown at Telic Thoughts in calling for my head, because I’ve admitted that I will vote on matters of substance and scientific validity in tenure decisions. This will not do! Why, if college professors hinder the advancement of fools in academia, creationists will have more difficulty pretending to be credentialed scientists! What can they do?
My thoughts are that the University of Minnesota needs to censure Associate Professor Paul Myers and assure the public that he will not be allowed to participate in tenure decisions.
He also wonders if anyone wants to sue my university.
One does have to wonder how we’re supposed to make tenure decisions if the clown team has their way, and judging our science colleagues on the basis of their ideas about science isn’t allowed?
P.S. Sorry, I’m not linking to them, either. Don’t give ’em tenure, don’t give ’em links…it’s like I’m strangling the poor sad fellows.
