How about selling off Kansas?
It seems a little harsh to me. How about if we give it in trust to Josh and Pat until everyone comes to their senses?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
How about selling off Kansas?
It seems a little harsh to me. How about if we give it in trust to Josh and Pat until everyone comes to their senses?
Lots of people have been emailing me with this story of yet another Ark expedition. It’s a routine lunacy that comes up all the time—probably the most irritating part of it all is the way MSNBC filed it under their tech/science section. It’s nothing of the kind: it’s mere pareidolia, the product of a loon biased by a desire to confirm a silly story from the Bible, a misplaced myth that claims a big boat landed on Mt Ararat, and a willingness to stare at satellite photos of rock and ice formations until one convinces oneself that a piece looks like a big boat. It also helps if one is willing to draw the shape of a boat in big red crayon on top of the random rock formation.
I wrote about this before, with the same dismissive tone of disgust. These people are fools; this is practically a yearly ritual with a series of indistinguishable fundamentalist kooks trotting off to Turkey, wandering about cluelessly on some hills, and coming home with handwaving testimonials to sell to the faithful and raise more money to troop off to the same sere brown mountains the next year.
Just read archy. He summarizes the whole crazy nonsense well enough. The ark story is one of those things that is so painfully stupid that it makes me lose all hope in humanity.
I’m wondering how the Sarkar-Nelson debate in Austin went down—any attendees want to let me know? I ask because I just now read the discussion paper by Nelson that supposedly represents his side of the argument, and rarely have I seen such a shallow and pointless position advanced with any seriousness, by anyone other than the most fatuous sort of creationist.
The paper goes on much too long for what is actually a trivial point—but then, that’s what BS artists do when they don’t have anything of substance: they go on and on. Here, though, is one key paragraph and figure that basically sums up his main point.
Take a look at Figure 2. Yes, that’s your puny fund of physical knowledge, circa
March 2006, to which both the naturalist and the design theorist have equal access. But
notice that the design side has a distinct epistemological advantage. The ID theorist
possesses a richer possible ontology of causes. It doesn’t matter if, at the end of time,
there never was anything corresponding to ‘intelligence’ as an ontologically distinct type
of cause. In that case, the design theorist would simply have carried around a useless
notion. Since the design theorist has free access to every physical cause for which there’s
any good evidence, however, he’s not losing anything by allowing for the possibility of
design.
This is just so silly, both misrepresenting the status of the argument and playing pointless hypothetical games. He’s basically claiming that because ID includes an explanation that is not part of the scientific toolkit, it has a chance of encompassing some unidentified phenomena that will not be explained by science, and is therefore superior. To which I say, baloney.
Sahotra Sarkar is trained in philosophy as well as biology. I have to wonder how he responded to such inane and superficial pseudo-philosophical noise…it’s the kind of thing that could make for an awfully boring debate.
Barbara Forrest is one of the big guns of anti-creationism, and she’s interviewed on Daily Kos today.
John Pieret quotes a religious apologist, about which I am rather conflicted:
For a Christian, when science is allowed to be neutral on the subject of God, science can only bolster faith. In contrast, and I imagine without realizing it, ID proponents have become professional Doubting Thomases, funded by Doubting Thomas Institutes. When advocates of ID use the vocabulary of science to argue for God’s presence in cellular machinery or in the fossil record, they too poke their fingers through Jesus’ hands. In so doing, ID vitiates faith.
This is the conundrum we face when we get a thoughtful Christian on our side, more or less. It’s great to see them criticizing ID advocates, and pointing out their bad theology; I wouldn’t mind seeing the Discovery Institute’s influence diminish. The problem, though, is that the paragraph above says good things about ID to my mind. Doubt is a wonderful thing, skepticism is a useful tool, and I think the story of Doubting Thomas is a great example, not a caution—if a guy I’d seen die in some grisly fashion showed up at my house, I wouldn’t stop with just checking his wounds, I’d be quizzing him to find out if he really was who he claimed to be while I was driving him to the hospital for a much more thorough examination. And if he tried to tell me, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”, I’d just reply “Blessed are the chumps? No way, pal, I want blood samples and an MRI.”
The real problem with the ID advocates is that they aren’t actually Doubting Thomases: they go through the motions, putting on a show of skepticism, while believing without question. If they poked a finger into the wound and found spirit gum and stage blood, they’d announce that they had scientific proof of a resurrection.
So when people claim that ID is conceding the inferiority of faith, I agree completely with them. When they act as if this is an unfortunate outcome, they lose me. ID’s failing is that it hasn’t gone far enough, and I won’t be praising or encouraging people who take a step further back and retreat into the acceptance of ignorance as a virtue. The story of Doubting Thomas makes clear that “faith” is nothing but a synonym for credulity and the avoidance of knowledge.
There’s another John with an interesting post on religion that is a bit weird from my perspective. Wilkins makes a series of suggestions on how conflicted Christian parents should raise their kids. It’s very subversive, I’m afraid, because it’s exactly how this confident atheist raised his kids, and I suspect it’s how that incorrigible agnostic raises his kids—it’s a recipe for undermining religiosity. It’s great! Even if it doesn’t produce atheists and agnostics, at worst it’s going to produce sensible Christians who don’t treat their faith as a tool for magical thinking, indoctrination, and eradicating thought.
That also means it’s a doomed strategy. The people who need John’s suggestions most, the Bible-thumpers and lunatics of the Religious Right, are going to rightly see that it teaches tolerance as a tool of the godless. Sorry, John, your prescription is far too optimistic—it’s only going to appeal to the ones who already practice it. It needs more dire threats, scapegoats, and self-righteousness if it’s going to become popular.
Part two of his masturbation session is up; it makes me a little queasy, so I’m not going to link to it directly, but you can get to it via Stranger Fruit. This one begins with The Pompous One redefining science (these guys know ID doesn’t meet the standards of science, so their strategy is to redefine everything else, to lower it far enough that they can clear the bar. In other words, they’re digging a very deep hole) to exclude biology and to make mathematics the One True Science.
And then it gets worse.
In an interview with Michael Specter in the New Yorker, we get to be really depressed at the way the Bush administration is politicizing science to an unheard-of degree. Bush is bowing and scraping before the twin gods of the Religiously Ridiculous and the Myopic Mullahs of Big Business, and letting science diminish. As a patriotic (isn’t it sad that that word is fast becoming synonymous with stupid and selfish?) American, this bothers me:
Are we losing ground in science as a nation? Are other countries doing better science, and doing more of it? Are there economic as well as medical costs?
We are still immensely powerful, successful, and full of talent. Yet the sense that we are invincible as a nation of scientists is starting to fade. If the investments that China, South Korea, India, and the European Union make in research and education continue to grow at such a rapid rate, then it is hard to see how the result can be anything but a loss of prominence, innovation, and prestige.
However, there is some good news. Even as we sink into the mire of ignorance, we’ll still be able to kick England’s butt!
Creationist theories about how the world was made are to be debated in GCSE science lessons in mainstream secondary schools in England.
The subject has been included in a new syllabus for biology produced by the OCR exam board, due out in September.
Isn’t that just so special? It’s exactly like the excuses we get here in the US, right down to the mealy-mouthed rationalizations that they’re just exploring “different views”.
The schools standards minister, Jacqui Smith, said in a parliamentary answer that pupils were encouraged to explore different views, theories and beliefs in many different subjects, including science.
“Creationism is one of many differing beliefs which pupils might discuss and consider, perhaps when they learn about another aspect of science: ‘ways in which scientific work may be affected by the contexts in which it takes place…and how these contexts may affect whether or not ideas are accepted’,” she said.
There are a great many beliefs out there—if we’re going to use this old excuse of merely exposing kids to the wide range of different beliefs, then anything goes. Any old claptrap should be admissable in the science class, since they certainly aren’t going to be restricting topics to just science. What this is is simply the usual creationist routine of trying to get arbitrary myths validated by the authorities and treated as “theories”, a status they have not earned. This is not about improving the teaching of science, it’s all about legitimizing craptacular pseudoscience.
And they know it. Who is in favor of peddling creationism in British schools? The creationists.
The chairman of the Creation Science Movement, David Rosevear, told the Times Educational Supplement: “There is nothing wrong with presenting a different point of view to promote debate. It does not mean a student is going to say ‘I believe in Genesis chapter one’ any more than they are going to say evolution is fact.”
Yeah, they’ll just equate the validity of the scientific theory of evolution with the validity of Genesis chapter one—and the equality of ignorance and knowledge is exactly the end the creationists desire.
Oh, well. We will at least have each other to kick around while we’re down there in the cesspit.
I feel a bit like a cat with a fat mouse between its paddy paws—although the temptation is there to bite its little head off and crunch on its itty-bitty bones, I think I’ll bat it around a bit and extrude a single needle-like claw and stick it in somewhere non-vital and twist, and maybe pluck out something pink and stringy and wet, and elicit a few squeaks for the sadistic fun of it all.
Yes, Fred Hutchison has replied to my challenge. We’ve swapped some email back and forth. I’ll see how long I can keep him on the hook—I’m hoping that he’ll try to turn this into another triumphal column. My email to him will appear here sometime after I’ve finished playing with him.
It’ll be rather like the cat who drops the bloody bits and pieces of his prey on his master’s carpet, thinking he’s done something so nice…but you won’t mind, will you?
That strange raspy rumbly sound you hear is the frozen earth shifting as Minnesota edges away from that deranged state to our west.
There’s a bizarre “interview” with David Berlinski at one of the ID blogs. What’s bizarre about it, and the reason I have to put “interview” in quotes, is that the interviewer and interviewee are both David Berlinski. It is nothing more than a pompous exercise in preening his ego; he arrogantly babbles on, saying nothing much except to sneer at anyone who has pricked that colossal ego.
I’m pleased to say that I’m one of them, and again find myself in good company.
