Dutch poll needs a little help

Dutch creationists have put up a foolish little poll — surprise them with a little adjustment.

Hoe is het leven op aarde ontstaan? (How did life arise on Earth?)

God schiep het leven in zes dagen (God created life in six days)
69.4%
Door Evolutie (By Evolution)
20.7%
Door Spontane Generatie (By Spontaneous Generation)
5%
God stuurde de evolutie (By god-directed evolution)
4.1%

God schiep het leven in langere tijd (God created life some time)
0.8%

Er is een intelligente ontwerper maar onbekend wie (There is an unknown intelligent designer)
0%

It isn’t an exclusionary filter, it’s a standard of quality

In my week long visit to Ireland, I only had one encounter that left a bad taste in my mouth. Everyone I talked to was forthright and willing to state their views clearly, even if I thought they were dead wrong and rather stupid (my radio interview with Tom McGurk comes to mind — he was an unpleasant person more interested in barking loudly than having a conversation, but his views were plain), and most of my conversations were fun and interesting. The one exception was with a creationist in Belfast.

After my talk, this one furtive fellow who hadn’t had the nerve, apparently, to ask me anything in the public Q&A, came down front to confront me with his, errm, ‘irrefutable’ argument, which came straight from Answers in Genesis. I later learned that he’s one of the leaders of a creationist organization on campus.

He first declared that creationists and evolutionists all use the same evidence, we just differ in our presuppositions. AiG makes this claim all the time, and it’s complete nonsense. The creationists deny almost all of the evidence, using their catch-all excuse: if it contradicts the Bible, it is false. It’s not just a difference in starting premises, but a willingness on the part of the faith-based crowd to stick their fingers in their ears and shout “LA-LA-LA” at the majority of the reality-based evidence.

The only way to call it merely a difference in presuppositions is if they’re willing to admit that their fundamental presupposition is an unthinking obtusity.

That was just his prelude, though. His real goal was to try and trap me. He asked me if I admitted that the scientific position demands that we reject all alternative explanations — whether we can consider supernatural causes. I’ve thought about this before, and I told him no. I am willing to consider other possibilities, if someone provides a useful, testable, confirmable means for evaluating truth claims.

Then I asked him what alternative method to science he was suggesting.

He didn’t give me one — he simply announced with a grin that he was just confirming that I automatically rejected alternative explanations, and as I repeated my simple statement, that no, I did not, but that he was obligated to explain what his alternative might be — after all, I reject tarot cards and entrails-reading as methods for interpreting the world, and it’s a bit silly to pretend that I should have blanket acceptance of just any alternative method without telling me what it is — he thanked me for confirming his opinion and the sneaky little git scuttled away.

That’s what I detest most. Lying weasels who won’t listen honestly, and especially won’t even speak honestly.

Anyway, what brought up this recollection was an interesting post on Sandwalk on methodological naturalism. It nicely points out that there is a convention in the scientific community that treats methodological naturalism as a straitjacket that arbitrarily binds us. I don’t think that’s true at all.

The principle of MN is often conceived of as an intrinsic and self-imposed limitation of science, as something that is part and parcel of the scientific enterprise by definition. According to this view (Intrinsic MN or IMN) – which is defended by people like Eugenie Scott, Michael Ruse and Robert Pennock and has been adopted in the ruling of Judge John E. Jones III in the Kitzmiller vs. Dover case – science is simply not equipped to deal with the supernatural and therefore has no authority on the issue. It is clear that this depiction of science and MN offers some perspectives for reconciling science and religion. Not surprisingly, IMN is often embraced by those sympathetic to religion, or by those who wish to alleviate the sometimes heated opposition between the two.

However, we will argue that this view of MN does not offer a sound rationale for the rejection of supernatural explanations. Alternatively, we will defend MN as a provisory and empirically grounded commitment of scientists to naturalistic causes and explanations, which is in principle revocable by future scientific findings (Qualified MN or QMN). In this view, MN is justified as a methodological guideline by virtue of the dividends of naturalistic explanation and the consistent failure of supernatural explanations in the history of science.

I think science is primarily a pragmatic approach that takes whatever tools work to build a better (as evaluated by testing against real-world observations) understanding of how the universe works. My major objection to creationism isn’t that it violates a set of dogmatic rules established by scientists playing a formal game, but that it provides no working alternative that I can use. The creationists mistake a series of assertions about history for a bank of operational methods for creating and answering new questions about the world.

Exclusion isn’t quite the right word for what we’re doing. Science’s job is to fill up the silos of the world with the grain of useful information, and we’ve found that applying the principles of the scientific method and operating under the guidelines of methodological naturalism means we’re productive: we can keep trundling up with wagonloads of corn and wheat and rice. The creationists are showing up with broken-down, essentially empty carts, containing nothing but chaff, a few dirt clods, and some fragrant manure, and they’re being turned away because they have nothing to contribute. You’re not being excluded if you have nothing to offer.

I imagine that Belfast creationist went back to his clique of ignorant pissants with a sense of triumph, and proudly announced that I had dogmaticly refused to include his offering of hot air and dust as nutritious and fit for a feast, and therefore was yet another tool of the establishment who unfairly discriminated against their way of knowing. Sorry, guy; a wealth of ignorance is no substitute for even a grain of knowledge.

Oh, cool: somebody standing there actually recorded the conversation in question.

Word salad lunacy Bible babble blah blah blah

I’ve often noticed a tendency for some people to host a whole gnarly syndrome of denialist symptoms: some people are creationists+HIV denialists+global warming denialists+ant-vaxers+whatever. They stand out in the crowd as hyper-intense paragons of idiocy; I often wonder how they get around at all, since the power of their disbelief is so strong that they probably deny their shoelaces as soon as they get up in the morning, yet at the same time they believe a magic man in the sky will soon make them float up into the air to a rapturous eternal congress of their fellow reality deniers.

I’ve found an amazing example of this syndrome. You’ll be able to recognize the problem from just the title of his blog post: Christendom Preachers Pastors Christian Lay People Asleep Wheel Ignore Darwinian Attacks Veracity Genesis Scriptural Inerrancy Not Defended Historical Account Torah Doubted Treated Lightly Quaint Fairie Tales Believers Story Adam Jesus Revelation When Will Evangelists Pulpits America Wake Up Academic Intellectual Onslaught Christian Holy Writ? The post is ostensibly a defense of Young Earth Creationism, but somehow includes rants about Obama’s “shadow government,” gays, Egyptian history, teabaggers, birth certificates, yadda yadda yadda. Have you ever had a conversation with a schizophrenic? Read that long, long post and you’ll get a slight feel for that.

Unfortunately, he claims to be done with blogging.

So I think I’ll be cutting back on my blogging, tired of so very few inquiries and expressions of interest, none from pastors, can you believe it?

No, really?

Teach both sides!

I’d recommend that every school board member who proposes that we teach both sides of the evolution “controversy” view this movie, except they’re usually such delicate prudes who get outraged at tone that they’d probably have a heart attack at the profanity in this clip.

Wait…maybe that’s an additional reason they should watch it!

West Bend, Wisconsin: aspiring to be the next Texas?

There is a nest of creationist fruit loops scattered across Wisconsin, and they do try to get on school boards. The latest is David Weigand, a candidate for the board of education in the West Bend school district. Seriously, do not vote for this kook. Here’s his statement on evolution.

WITH REGARD TO TEACHING EVOLUTION OR CREATION IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

In a nutshell, this is what I believe:

1. Origin studies, (whether Creation or evolution) and the idea of “millions of years” does not belong in the science classroom because these are not testable, repeatable or observable; they are philosophical and accepted by faith.

2. If evolution is taught in school, students should be taught the truth about it and the scientific data surrounding it. Ideas that were once championed by evolutionists are no longer valid, much like the false science behind man-made global warming. Students deserve the truth.

You can spot an acolyte of Answers in Genesis from a mile away — that mantra of “millions of years” is a theme they recite over and over in their “museum” and website. They regard the phrase as a dead giveaway that one is not a true Christian out to destroy America.

The relativism is also AiG baloney. They love to whine that all ideas are equal, that it’s all just opinion, so their clown circus values are just as valid as science. It’s not true. The age of the earth has been repeatedly tested and observed using multiple methods, and it always comes up old, old, old…no faith required, and the science actually crosses the boundaries of individual faiths. Their young earth dogma, though, is built on nothing but faith, and has been actively refuted by experiment and observation.

That last paragraph is just kook-sign, a symptom of religious derangement syndrome. I’ve found that people who reject the science of evolution also have a tendency to be avid denialists of all kinds of other science, from climate change to the HIV cause of AIDS.

David Wiegand. Your wingnut ignoramus candidate. Vote for him if you hate science and education, too.

Wheels within wheels

Ben Stein wins another honor. He has been declared the Rosa Parks of Darwin skeptics on the Rosa Parks of Rosa Parks Blogs, which points out amusing and offensive instances of rhetorical hyperbole. The amusing bit here, though, is that he got named this on the basis of an old post by creationist Kevin Wirth which does literally say Ben Stein is the Rosa Parks of Darwin Skeptics, right in the title. I’d seen this before, way back in the old days of the Expelled hoo-ha, but this time I noticed an interesting connection. At the bottom of the article, it has this brief biographical note:

Seattle area writer and Darwin skeptic Kevin Wirth is the publisher and editor of the new book “Slaughter of the Dissidents: The Shocking Truth About Killing the Careers of Darwin Doubters” by Dr. Jerry Bergman. He has investigated and researched issues related to the persecution of Darwin Doubters since 1982.

Wait, what? Jerry Bergman? That Jerry Bergman, the carbon-is-irreducibly-complex and chemistry-is-a-religion-so-you’ll-get-fired-for-posting-the-periodic-table Jerry Bergman? The crazy Jerry Bergman I debated back in November?

Wow. Kevin Wirth really knows how to pick ’em.

It also reminds me…that debate was recorded by the local creationists, and they said a DVD would be made available; it would have been nice if they’d sent me a copy. They haven’t. The existence of any recording seems to have faded away from their site. I wonder why?

It can’t be embarrassment, because they actually host a pdf by Bergman arguing his bizarre version of irreducible complexity.

…the only way to refute the concept of irreducible complexity is to demonstrate that all objects can be reduced to a fundamental particle and still function properly. If a radio, a functional eye or ear, can be achieved, for example, by a single quark (the particle scientists now believe is irreducible)–or all, of the functions of an intelligent human, including the ability to reproduce with other humans, can be produced by a single quark, they are not irreducibly complex.

Yeah, he’s that nuts. He doesn’t demand that evolutionists produce a mere crocoduck to prove evolution, he wants us to produce a porn film starring talking quarks.

Poor science standard in Minnesota

Our state science standards are being patched up right now, and while they’re mostly just fine, one sneaky provision is still on the books.

“The student will be able to explain how scientific and technological innovations as well as new evidence can challenge portions of or entire accepted theories and models including but not limited to cell theory, atomic theory, theory of evolution, plate tectonic theory, germ theory of disease and big bang theory.”

It’s the old ‘teach the controversy’ argument. While it seems innocuous, and we actually should teach kids how to address established theories critically, it’s really just a backdoor for teachers who sympathize with creationism to smuggle in instruction in intelligent design creationism. It’s also more difficult than it sounds. Even this article, which is sympathetic to good science education, gets the idea wrong. Here’s an example given of a ‘challenge’ to evolutionary theory.

The National Geographic article reports that the fossil, called Ardi, challenges portions of the theory of evolution that say the missing link between humans and apes would look something like a chimpanzee. For example, Ardi is changing our way of thinking about how hominids moved about. Its big toe splays out from the foot to better to grasp tree limbs. However, its foot contains an extra bone that keeps the toe rigid to help the hominid walk bipedally on the ground. The extra bone is not found in the lineages of chimps and gorillas. Also, the upper pelvis is “positioned so that Ardi could walk on two legs without lurching from side to side like a chimp,” researchers say, while the lower pelvis was built like an ape’s to accommodate huge hind limb muscles used in climbing.

No, no, no, no, no. There is absolutely nothing in the discovery of Ardipithecus that challenges any portion of the theory of evolution. It’s an observation of a historical quirk, a detail of the pattern of changes in one lineage. It’s the equivalent of finding an apple tree, watching the fruit fall, and noticing that one apple bounced left, and another bounced to the right — if you’re really, really interested in the distribution of apple bounces (in the way we’re personally interested in human evolution), it may be interesting…but it does not in any way challenge Newton’s laws of gravity.

See the problem? A lot of people misunderstand the concept of a theory; we’re going to get a crop of teachers who don’t know what they’re talking about who will intentionally try to sow doubt in students’ minds by putting forward claims that miscellaneous facts challenge evolutionary theory when they do no such thing.

The only way this standard could be at all useful is if the teacher actually understands deeply that the theories listed can not be currently challenged, except by inventing weird science-fictional ideas that are unsupported by evidence…like intelligent design creationism. I can think of observations that would contradict evolution, easy, but guess what? There are no alternatives, and the creationists certainly have not provided any evidence against evolution.

Vanity Fair reviews the Creation Museum

A good take-down is a thing of beauty. A.A. Gill visited the “museum” in Kentucky, and gets right to the heart of the matter: it’s not a museum, it’s a national embarrassment.

The Creation Museum isn’t really a museum at all. It’s an argument. It’s not even an argument. It’s the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism. This whole building is devoted to the literal veracity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis: God created the world in six days, and the whole thing is no more than 6,000 years old. Everything came at once, so Tyrannosaurus rex and Noah shared a cabin. That’s an awful lot of explaining to do. This place doesn’t just take on evolution–it squares off with geology, anthropology, paleontology, history, chemistry, astronomy, zoology, biology, and good taste. It directly and boldly contradicts most -onomies and all -ologies, including most theology.

It’s also ugly, cheesy, and stupid. People often try to excuse faith by claiming it inspired a lot of great art…but here is the evidence that god is dead. All his rotting corpse seems to inspire any more is cartoon kitsch. And Christian rock.

I spent a lot of time in the Eden picnic area, trying to wrest some sort of spiritual buzz, a sense of the majesty and the mystery, but it’s conspicuously absent. Literally beaten to death. This is Ripley’s Believe-It. It is irredeemably kitsch. In fact, it may be the biggest collection of kitsch in God’s entire world. This is the profound represented by the banal, a divine irony. (The penchant for kitsch is something that gay men and born-again Christians share.) This tacky, risible, and rational tableau defies belief, beggars faith. Compare it to the creation story in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Masaccio’s expulsion from Eden, or any of the thousands of flickering images, icons, and installations based on faith rather than literalist realism. It truly makes you wonder, Is all this righteous ire, all this money, all this Pentecostal flame-throwing the best they can come up with? This cheap county-fair sideshow–this is their best shot? It may be more replete with proof than a Soviet show trial, but this creation is bereft of any soul.

We’ve criticized Ham a lot for the inanities of his museum, but I wonder if the accusation that he’s a cheap, tasteless rube will sting a little more than harping on the fact that he’s ignorant and irrational (which he considers virtues). We’ll have to see if a response appears on his blog.

By the way, Ken Ham reads Pharyngula, even if he never links to us or mentions us by name. He has a blog post that quotes me and commenters here, to show how evil we are. You should check it out to see if he found you worthy of damnation.

There’s an app for that

If you ever argue with creationists, you know that the Index to Creationist Claims is an incredibly useful site, as is the book version, The Counter Creationism Handbook. Life just got a little sweeter: it is now available as a smartphone app for the blackberry and iPhone (just get into the App Store and search for ‘creationist’). Well, sweeter for us; creationists will find themselves a little more readily refuted now.

Ken Ham, baffled

Crazy Ken Ham has learned about the Atheist Convention in Melbourne, and he has written his confused, garbled version of what it’s all about. He’s also done his typical cowardly routine of complaining about the convention and also, by the way, about me, but refusing to mention any of us by name, let alone linking to us. He can’t have his readers actually seeing what the other side has to say, after all; the world must be filtered through the benevolent and opaque lens of the Maximum Leader, you know.

At least it’s fascinating to watch a weak mind struggle to grasp something he doesn’t understand…mainly because what he accomplishes is to reveal his own ignorance and bias.

Imagine–listening to a meaningless talk at a meaningless conference held on a meaningless planet in a meaningless universe! Now, that would be an uplifting conference!

From their worldview, wouldn’t atheists see this meeting as a meaningless waste of time? Of course, they would claim they have some purpose and meaning–but it would be all constructed subjectively according to their own determinations! All because they shake their fist at God–but why?

Yes, it is a meaningless universe; the universe doesn’t care about us, doesn’t love us, and is mindless and indifferent. That’s simple reality. What we human beings do is wrest meaning for ourselves from a pitiless, uncaring background, and I think that’s wonderful, grand and glorious — it’s the process of finding purpose that is our accomplishment, not the imposition of an inhuman goal by a cosmic tyrant. This meeting will be a small part of everyone’s ongoing struggle to learn and grow — so yes, it will be uplifting. It will also be fun and constructive.

Shouldn’t it be obvious to Ham that his caricature of atheists is false? After all, we aren’t all just gloomily digging our graves, lying down in them, and waiting for death, so it should be clear that we aren’t a bunch of despondent nihilists. We’re living and active. What could possibly be driving us?

The Scripture tells us they “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1). Basically it comes down to the fact that they don’t want to have to answer to anyone–they want to set their own rules. They generally want to abort babies if they want or make marriage whatever they want to make it to be (or reject it altogether). They want to do what is “right” in their own eyes! Thus, a Creator who owns them, to whom they owe their existence, and against whom they have rebelled, is anathema to them!

Ah, that must be it. Atheists are just out to murder babies and mate with anything that moves. Or stops moving. Or something.

Again, since most atheists are productive and cooperative citizens of their communities, it should be obvious that we aren’t self-indulgent anarchists, either. We do think there have to be rules, a social contract, that helps tie together the diverse people of our culture and permits civilized interactions between us. The difference is that we believe those rules should be developed by humane principles that recognize the equality and interdependence of all people, rather than being rules contrived by priests to perpetuate their power by inventing arbitrary ultimatums from imaginary superbeings.

We don’t believe in a creator god, so we reject the notion that we are ‘owned’ by one, but you can’t say that we find such a creator anathema — we don’t believe it exists! What’s repellent are self-styled prophets and priests (who are real) demanding that we follow their antiquated dogma.

It baffles the mind as to why these atheists even bother to try to aggressively convert people to their meaningless religion–after all, what’s the point? The only reason they would even bother is if they are engaged in a spiritual battle. Otherwise they wouldn’t care. They know in their hearts there is a God, and they are deliberately suppressing that, as the Scripture so clearly tells us.

Man, we can’t win an argument with a person that stupid. We don’t believe in gods, plain and simple. Ham says we do. How does he know? Because he has an old book that says we do. That’s the problem right there: that rather than actually paying attention to the evidence, talking to people and recognizing what they actually say, the devoted relidjit would rather trust a book written a few thousand years ago that claims to be able to read the minds of 21st century people.

Don’t worry. We’ll have a fabulous time in Australia. I know that some small part of the conference will be spent laughing at Ken Ham.

Oh, yeah, that part where he talks about me. Of course he doesn’t refer to me by name, or mention the blog, or include a link to the article he found objectionable, he just talks about that atheist professor in Minnesota who hates Christians and mocked Kent Hovind. Here’s what I wrote about Hovind’s recent online writings:

By the way, Kent Hovind is still putting up bizarre dialogs on his CSE blogs. He’s been having conversations with God, dead Egyptian priests, and Christian saints, who all reassure him about how clever and smart and good he is, despite being in prison for tax evasion. It’s pathetic and sad. There has to be a word for this: it’s a kind of mega-sockpuppetry, in which it isn’t just random strangers on the internet mysteriously popping up to back him up — it’s God and the saints and heroes of history who are all appearing as voices in his head to validate him.

Now brace yourselves and aim a fire extinguisher at your irony meters, because what Ham wants to argue is that I didn’t realize Hovind’s conversations with saints and deities was metaphorical.

Basically, Hovind created an imaginary dialogue with Potipherah (Genesis 41:45, 50) to point out that modern America has the same problem the Egyptians had when Joseph oversaw the years of plenty and famine. It’s pretty obvious this post is designed to be understood as metaphor. The same is so for the posting with the dialogue between God, Stephen (Christian saint), and Hovind. Any Christian reading Kent Hovind’s post would understand what he’s doing with these writings. The atheist blogger would also have to say that C.S. Lewis talked with the devil and his fellow demons in order for Lewis to write the Screwtape Letters, if he follows the same logic! Is this atheist that ignorant of literary techniques or just deliberating suppressing the truth?

Uh, what? So Ham is accusing me of believing that these phantasms of Hovind’s mind literally appeared to him in his jail cell? This is weird. I’m an atheist — I don’t believe in gods or long-dead people manifesting in living conversations. Of course I see Hovind as playing a game — he’s revealing nothing but his own sad perception of himself as a hero in these imaginary conversations, and that’s precisely what is so pathetic about it.

The funniest part of it all, though, is Ken Ham lecturing me on how I ought to recognize that a religious man writing down what he claims are the words of God is so clearly just a metaphor and a literary exercise…when he refuses to recognize the same status of the books of the Bible that he insists are literally and absolutely true and of divine origin.

It’s pretty obvious the book of Genesis is designed to be understood as metaphor. It’s Ken Ham who demands that it be regarded as the product of a conversation between ancient scribes and his god.