I’m getting a flood of email from Israel. As one correspondent explains, Israel maintains three kinds of state-supported schools: one kind for the ultra-orthodox, because the state has always fostered freakishly fanatical ignorance among the lunatic subset, and these schools teach no science at all; a fully secular system, particularly in higher education, because Jews have also had a strong scholarly tradition, and Israel depends on material strategies for its survival, and these schools teach science very well; and a general intermediate kind of school where religion may be taught but science is also taught. That situation may be in peril now. Gavriel Avital, the chief scientist in the education ministry, has made a few statements that show he is a lunatic.

“If textbooks state explicitly that human beings’ origins are to be found with monkeys, I would want students to pursue and grapple with other opinions. There are many people who don’t believe the evolutionary account is correct,” Avital said yesterday.

“There are those for whom evolution is a religion and are unwilling to hear about anything else. Part of my responsibility, in light of my position with the Education Ministry, is to examine textbooks and curricula,” he said. “If they keep writing in textbooks that the Earth is growing warmer because of carbon dioxide emissions, I’ll insist that isn’t the case.”

Nobody has explained to me yet how such a putz got appointed in the first place, but this isn’t a good sign. The man is a freakin’ incompetent.

Prior to his appointment, Avital said in a video interview with Machon Meir, a religious-Zionist Jewish studies institute, “Another scientific field that is problematic is biology, or life and environmental sciences. When your doctrine is based on Darwin’s theory of evolution and its implications, you are standing on unreliable foundations – that is, there is no God, there was only something primeval, and then there are certain random developments which led to the apex of all creation, the human being.

“Today I am pleased that more and more scientists engaged in pure science, rather than being employed in the name of an ideology, are reaching the conclusion that the world must have a master. Nothing is given to chance,” he said. “These are my opinions and I won’t deny them just because I was appointed to an Education Ministry position.”

The chorus of outrage is already building among sensible scientists in Israel.

Yehoshua Kolodny, a professor emeritus at Hebrew University who won the Israel Prize for his contributions to the study of earth science, responded furiously to these statements yesterday.

“Denying evolution is like denying science itself,” Kolodny said.

“Evolution is not a theory, but an observation point that anyone can see. Perhaps Dr. Avital did not notice that throughout history, various species existed and then became extinct. In 2009, the entire world celebrated 200 years since the birth of Darwin and 150 years since the publication of his book ‘The Origin of the Species,'” he added.

“When a top scientist ignores these things, it’s a cultural calamity,” Kolodny said. “There are no disagreements among scientists regarding evolution. Catholics and Protestants long ago ended their war against evolution, and Avital is for all intents and purposes joining the radical fringe of evangelicals in the United States.”

I have to disagree with Dr Kolodny on one thing: Catholics and Protestants are still fighting over evolution in the US. Apparently some Jews are simply joining them now, parroting the same drivel that had its origins in fundamentalist/evangelical Protestantism.

Still, let’s add a few international voices to that chorus. Write to [email protected] and politely suggest that Gavriel Avital is clearly not the right man for the job.

The freethought community is grieving at the loss of Helen Kagin, and Ken Ham, petty whiner that he is, has decided to complain about her obituary.

We found it unfortunate that someone took this sad time as an opportunity to take a shot at the Creation Museum in an obituary. And sad, too, that some of the information was not correct. There were not hundreds at the protest rally outside the gates of the Creation Museum when it opened–we counted perhaps 70 people. Also it was not so “peaceful,” considering that the protestors brought in a loud rock band to disrupt our opening day, and also rented a plane to circle and buzz the museum for a few hours, dragging a banner stating: “Thou shalt not lie.”

She was one of Ken Ham’s many enemies, so I could understand a little fist-shaking…but this is so piously hypocritical. He finds it unfortunate that someone would snipe at the idiocy of his “museum” in an obituary, but doesn’t seem to find it at all unfortunate that he has chosen to snipe at the deceased.

And that’s without even the standard Christian snideness of opening up his complaint by pointing out how sad it is when someone dies…but at least Christians get to live forever in the “arms of the Lord and Savior”! I’ve run into more than a few Christians like that, who find their joy in the misfortune of others amplifed by the fact that not only are they dead, but they’re burning in hell, unlike his or her prospects.

Although I do find some personal satisfaction that Ken Ham is seething in this life over the contempt the Kagins have frequently expressed for Ham’s follies.

Without hesitation, I can tell you who the most contemptible, repulsive creationist I know is: he tops even Ray Comfort and Ken Ham in the pantheon of creationist liars for Jesus. It’s the otherwise negligible Sal Cordova, a whiny little nobody with no talent and no reputation other than his ability to cobble up some of the most disgusting innuendo. His latest achievement is to tie the murders by Amy Bishop to evolution; he’s found that Bishop is named in the list of supporters of the Clergy Letter Project, which means he gets to sneer a bit.

Amy Bishop was charged in the murder of several people recently. Now, there are some very fine Darwinists like Francis Collins, and I don’t mean to say Amy Bishop is representative of all Darwinists. But I’d recommend that if the Clergy Letter Project wishes to put on a good face for Darwinism, they might consider disassociating themselves from Amy Bishop.

They may not want to promote “survival of the fittest” in their sermons today. That would be kind of poor taste in light of the fact a presumed societal degenerate (Bishop) is the “fittest” survivor while 3 (possibly 4) innocent victims are the “unfit” dead.

As if the preachers were going to endorse Bishop’s actions from the pulpit; as if evolutionary biologists anywhere promote the kind of simplistic ruthless extermination that Cordova fantasizes over as the only possible fitness strategy. All we learn from his nasty little dig at evolution is that he doesn’t understand it — he does have some competition from Ray Comfort in the stupidity department — and that he’s willing to capitalize on a tragedy to make a fallacious argument against science.

And, as usual, he loves to make the out-of-context quote from Charles Darwin, in this case, the phrase “How I did enjoy shooting,” taken from
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. As if Charles liked to open fire on his rivals and climb to eminence on the corpses of his competitors. Here, by the way, is the full quote in context; he was an enthusiastic sportsman who liked hunting game, and would have been sick with disgust at the thought of shooting people.

I kept an exact record of every bird which I shot throughout the whole season. One day when shooting at Woodhouse with Captain Owen, the eldest son, and Major Hill, his cousin, afterwards Lord Berwick, both of whom I liked very much, I thought myself shamefully used, for every time after I had fired and thought that I had killed a bird, one of the two acted as if loading his gun, and cried out, “You must not count that bird, for I fired at the same time,” and the gamekeeper, perceiving the joke, backed them up. After some hours they told me the joke, but it was no joke to me, for I had shot a large number of birds, but did not know how many, and could not add them to my list, which I used to do by making a knot in a piece of string tied to a button-hole. This my wicked friends had perceived.

How I did enjoy shooting! But I think that I must have been half-consciously ashamed of my zeal, for I tried to persuade myself that shooting was almost an intellectual employment; it required so much skill to judge where to find most game and to hunt the dogs well.

Slimy Sal repels me, so I’ll leave it to Allen MacNeill to take his post apart.

Sal, what precisely is the point of this post? It seems to me you are making the following assertions:

A1) Amy Bishop is a member of the consultant group for the Clergy Letter Project

A2) Amy Bishop is alleged to have murdered three of her colleagues and seriously injured three others by shooting them

A3) Charles Darwin indicated that he enjoyed shooting (target unspecified)

There appears to be considerable evidence in support of these assertions. However, it is also clear that your intention in making these assertions is the following:

I1) Amy Bishop is an evolutionary biologist

I2) Evolutionary biologists enjoy shooting

I3) Some evolutionary biologists enjoy shooting their colleagues to death

And from this you appear to be strongly suggesting the following conclusion:

C1) The practice of the science of evolutionary biology predisposes people to commit murder by shooting their colleagues to death.

It is a matter of simple historical record that many of the regular commentators at this website agree with something very similar to C1. Indeed, they waste no opportunity to state it as an incontrovertible fact, and cite this “fact” as a reason to reject the methodology, conclusions, and (by implication) the character of the practitioners of evolutionary biology, and especially Charles Darwin.

Let me therefore construct an exactly equivalent line of “reasoning”:

A4) Andrea Yates was a member of a Christian worship group led by the itinerant Christian preacher, Michael Peter Woroniecki

A5) Andrea Yates was convicted of murdering her five children by drowning them in a bathtub

A6) John the Baptist indicated that he enjoyed submerging sinners in water

Again, there appears to be considerable evidence in support of these assertions. Using the line of reasoning you seem to be promoting here, it would be equally “reasonable” to make the following inferences:

I3) Andrea Yates is a Christian

I4) Christians enjoy submerging people in water

I5) Some Christians enjoy murdering their children by drowning them

You should therefore be very willing to accept the following conclusion:

C2) Christianity predisposes people to murder their children by drowning them.

Please correct me if I have somehow misconstrued your intentions here. Also, please explain how your training in science and scientific reasoning leads you to make arguments of this form.

And,while you’re at it, please let me know how you can look at your own reflection in the mirror after making arguments like this.

We can always play the guilt by association game…in this case, the nastiest person I know is Sal Cordova, a creationist, therefore creationists are all people with no sense of common decency.

Shorter Ken Ham: Other museums have dinosaur models with saddles, so why does everyone pick on my “museum”?. Ham seems to have been scrambling to save face by finding a few other places that put out exhibits of dinosaurs with saddles, but he, as usual, misses the point.

Yes, other places will display dinosaurs as fun exhibits for the kids, and I have no problem with that. The natural history museum at the University of Utah had a talking dinosaur out front — throw a coin in its mouth, and it would roar and thank you for your donation, and my kids were always pestering me for my spare change. That’s fine; they knew it was for fun, and when you went upstairs, you saw serious displays of real fossils with accurate ages and relationships posted by them, and no one argued that they could talk, or that people coexisted with them, or that they could be saddled and ridden.

Ken Ham doesn’t do that. Right after he blubbers that he is being unfairly mocked, this is what he has to say:

By the way, we do believe that dinosaurs and humans have co-existed; I am only pointing out here how these evolutionists can be inconsistent–and also misrepresent what is in our Creation Museum. The Minnesota professor we mentioned above knows that our saddled dinosaur is in a children’s play area and is not a museum exhibit. Even though there is a sign next to the sculpted dinosaur that says it is only for children to get on (“wear and tear” is lessened that way), this atheist professor–consistent with his belief that he lives in a universe without purpose and standards of any kind–felt that he could disregard the child-only sign (even after he signed an agreement–drafted by the tour leader of his atheist group–that he would obey the museum’s policies rules).

Kenny baby. That’s the thing: your “museum” pretends, in defiance of all the credible evidence, that dinosaurs and humans co-existed. That’s what makes your whole preposterous edifice a great big joke — not that you have kiddie rides, but that the dinosaur with a saddle is so perfectly emblematic of the whole Creation “Museum” experience. That’s what makes this picture funny.

(Thanks to Steve O’Kane for the cleaned-up, polished version of this image)

We aren’t laughing at the dinosaur with a saddle, Ken. We’re laughing at you, and the fact that you are so oblivious to the absurdity.

That sad creationist, Professor Dendy, has been banned from this site, but he still rails against us in prolific obsession from his website. His latest diatribe is irresistible — he claims that atheists can’t handle the truth, and you’ll be surprised to learn that the “truth” is that Charles Darwin denied the efficacy of natural selection. “Oh, really,” you might ask, “He’s not going to trot out the hoariest old quote mine in the universe to back that up, is he?” And the answer is that yes, he certainly is. I had to laugh aloud. This is only second in the list of ridiculous but common claims made by creationists (first, of course, being “if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?”).

He thinks he’s got us up against the wall with the terrifying truth of the complexity of the eye.

The truth of the matter is that even Charles Darwin himself said it would be absurd to think that the complex eye could been formed by natural selection.

Then he lists a few eyeball facts just to make us squirm. I’m sorry, Professor Dendy, but someone else has done this with far more detail and style than you ever had. I give you the inestimable William Paley, who made the same argument 208 years ago.

Were there no example in the world, of contrivance, except that of the eye, it would be alone sufficient to support the conclusion which we draw from it, as to the necessity of an intelligent Creator. It could never be got rid of; because it could not be accounted for by any other supposition, which did not contradict all the principles we possess of knowledge; the principles, according to which, things do, as often as they can be brought to the test of experience, turn out to be true or false. Its coats and humours, constructed, as the lenses of a telescope are constructed, for the refraction of rays of light to a point, which forms the proper action of the organ; the provision in its muscular tendons for turning its pupil to the object, similar to that which is given to the telescope by screws, and upon which power of direction in the eye, the exercise of its office as an optical instrument depends; the further provision for its defence, for its constant lubricity and moisture, which we see in its socket and its lids, in its gland for the secretion of the matter of tears, its outlet or communication with the nose for carrying off the liquid after the eye is washed with it; these provisions compose altogether an apparatus, a system of parts, a preparation of means, so manifest in their design, so exquisite in their contrivance, so successful in their issue, so precious, and so infinitely beneficial in their use, as, in my opinion, to bear down all doubt that can be raised upon the subject.

William Paley, Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, 1802

Oh, gosh…Paley and Dendy, double-teaming us with two-century-old opinions. However shall we cope?

This really is an old and moldy argument. Charles Darwin dealt with it effectively 150 years ago, and I strongly urge Dendy to read beyond the first sentence he quoted, since from the second sentence on he shows that the supposition is false.

Just to be sure no one misses it, I’ve included the entirety of the section from Chapter VI, “Difficulties of the Theory: Organs of extreme Perfection and Complication” below the fold. The point of his argument is not, “Oh, no, selection fails!” but “Oh, look — selection can explain even these organs that seem absurdly complex.”

[Read more…]

Would you believe that Answers in Genesis has an iPhone app? Yes, they do, and as you might expect, it’s really, really bad. Not bad as in poorly programmed, that looks fine; bad as in now you can get the dishonest trash Ken Ham peddles streamed straight to your phone.

The only reason to download it is so you can give it a bad review. And you have to wonder about Apple’s quality control on iPhone apps—they classified it as educational? Seriously?