The Creation “Museum” is experiencing some dread and trepidation about our visit, and they have sent a letter to me and to the SSA expressing their concerns. These are some reasonable worries, given that there will be a huge number of us (240 and counting) showing up in one mass. Here’s what they have to say, and my comment to all of you.

Dr. Paul Myers (and the Secular Student Alliance)
Biology Dept.
University of Minnesota-Morris
600 East 4th Street
Morris, MN 56267

Re: Creation Museum Visit – Notice of Policies

Dear Dr. Paul (“P.Z.”) Myers and the SSA:

As the Security Manager for the Department of Public Safety at the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum, I am writing in regard to your planned visit to the museum, along with those associated with the group called the Secular Student Alliance, scheduled for August 7, 2009.

The purpose of this letter is to advise you of our standard policies and requirements concerning guest behavior.

Succinctly stated, and posted on signs at a number of locations at the museum premises, is the following notice:

The Creation Museum is private property, an outreach of Answers in Genesis. Guests at the museum are expected to conduct themselves in a polite, respectful manner at all times. Loud, disrespectful, destructive, obscene, or abusive behavior will not be tolerated, and may result in your removal from the premises. Please be courteous to other guests, security personnel, and our staff while you are here. Thank you!

Also, please be advised that vehicles and all packages, bags, and articles may be subject to inspection when on the premises or when entering or leaving the premises.

In reviewing your blog and website at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula, we have observed a number of hostile, crude, and profane comments that suggest that some in the SSA group may be using your visit as an opportunity to engage in demonstrations, mocking behavior, wearing offensive clothing, or in other conduct that would be offensive to our staff and to other guests. We note, for example, that you have written that you urge the group to wear “godless clothing.”

We understand that your group (which you have described as a “horde” or “mob”) will consist of over 200 persons, many of whom have posted comments on your Pharyngula blog ridiculing Ken Ham and the Creation Museum, using profane language, and some are indicating that it is their intent to conduct themselves in a manner that is provocative, overtly homosexual in behavior, or otherwise socially unacceptable for guests of this privately owned Christian facility. As I’m sure you’re aware, some of those statements reference intentions to be “loud” and also to wear “armbands” and T-shirts or other clothing with images or wording that would be considered offensive to our staff and others at the museum. Such conduct will not be tolerated.

The Creation Museum is a privately owned facility; there is no legal right to engage in demonstrations, to harass or insult other guests, staff members, or speakers, or to otherwise engage in conduct that would be disruptive or rude. Again, such actions will not be permitted.

So long as you and the SSA group are willing to abide by our policies requiring civil behavior at all times, to include being respectful of others and of our facilities, then you will be welcome as our guests; but if you do not intend to abide by these policies, then please cancel your visit to the Creation Museum.

We request your acknowledgment of receipt of this letter and your agreement to abide by these policies.

We note that, unlike the exchanges posted on the Pharyngula site, communications from Lyz Laddell of the Secular Student Alliance have generally been polite and respectful, which we appreciate.

We remain willing to host you and the SSA group, provided you assure us that your party will remain civil and abide by our policies and that you have addressed those who have expressed contrary intentions for their visit. We request the courtesy of receiving your written response prior to your arrival. If we do not receive your written assurance that your party will abide by our policies, we will have no choice but to turn your group away at the entrance.

Sincerely,

David Blaylock
Security Manager
Department of Public Safety

cc: John Pence, Esq.

Here’s what I expect: EVERYONE in our group will be firm, rational, and will not shy away from asking hard questions. You will feel free to wear some distinguishing clothing — a scarlet A, a Darwin fish, a t-shirt, something so that we can tell we are members of the same group. You will discuss the material on display with your peers, but with other visitors to the “museum” if and only if they invite it.

There are a number of things you will not do, however.

Do not show up wearing obscenities or particularly abusive articles of clothing. Dress casual, but look good — you are setting an example. Pro-science t-shirts are excellent, t-shirts with naked lesbians masturbating with bibles will give them an excuse to throw you out, so don’t do it. The SSA won’t even give you a ticket if you show up looking like you want to brawl.

You will not be disruptive. This is an information gathering mission that will make you a better informed individual to criticize bad ideas. Do not interfere with other visitors’ ability to examine the place. Ask questions only where appropriate. Collect questions that you can ask of any of the real scientists who will be in our group. Do not get into loud arguments. If a discussion starts getting angry on either side I want you to be the ones to back off.

Remember, if you are calm, civil, and well-behaved, and you tour the “museum”, we win. If you are calm, civil, and well-behaved, and the security guards throw you out because they don’t like the fact that you’re an atheist, we win. If you are angry, rude, and cause trouble that gives them a reasonable excuse to throw you out, we lose, and I will be very pissed off at you.

Before you go into the “museum”, you will have to get a ticket from the SSA staff. You will be expected to sign an agreement promising your good behavior before you get one, and we’ll lay down a few rules for good behavior. We’ll probably have several designated counselors who will be charged with keeping everyone in line, too — we will police our own (another reason we’d like to be able to tell you are one of our godless horde on site), and if you’re causing a scene that might lead to SSA’s disrepute, we’d like to ask you to leave before their security does.

After we leave their private property, it will be time to laugh and mock and vent, and we will: this trip will produce over 200 experienced people who know exactly what kind of lunacy the Creation “Museum” represents, and we will express ourselves in opinion pieces, on blogs, at school board meetings, and in gatherings with our friends. That’s where we get our payoff, not in rudeness during our visit that gets us evicted.

Our model for this visit will be my infamous expulsion from a movie theater. Remember, what made that work is that I did absolutely nothing to justify getting thrown out: I followed all of their procedures for getting tickets, I used my full name, I was respectably dressed, and I was behaving myself in line, having a quiet conversation with friends and family. That left no doubt that my ejection was arbitrary and personal and an attempt to silence me. It would not have been effective if I’d been capering about, rudely accosting people, or essentially making myself a target for justifiable removal. It’s the same situation at this event. Do not hide who you are, but also don’t give them any excuse to mistreat you, other than your identity as an atheist.

If you really want to vent about the abomination in Kentucky, register for the SSA conference. Lots of attendees will be there to talk, and I’ll be giving the keynote speech at the meeting…and my topic will be atheist activism, and I’ll be including material I’ll be gathering that Friday at the Creation “Museum”, including giving some formal rebuttals.

Everyone was so impressed with this clear-thinking Romanian woman whose video I posted last week — from that alone you might get the impression that Romania is a very rational place, full of level-headed smart people who have little truck with religious silliness.

To correct that, you should read the web page of the Romanian Humanist Association, which is fighting a tide of state-sanctioned nonsense rising in their educational system.

They have posted a brief education of some of the educational standards endorsed by the ministry of education. They are teaching creationism in the classroom and in their textbooks! For instance, one of their textbooks has a section that presents a day-age version of Genesis, illustrating each of the ‘days’ of Genesis and pretending to correlate them with the scientific evidence (they don’t line up, no matter how hard you try; the sloppy folk taxonomy of the Bible cannot be made to correspond to any pattern of evolutionary ancestry or the evidence of the fossil record).

They have two exercises described. One is to regurgitate the Genesis sequence alongside the scientific evidence, as if they have parity. The other is to have a classroom debate, splitting the class in two with one side taking the scientific view and the other the theological position.

This is very bad pedagogy. In a science class, you have to approach everything from the perspective of the material evidence, the observations and experiments that lead to a reasonable conclusion. The theologians have none, so this exercise has only two possible results: you either put half your class into the position of being humiliating failures for an hour, or you have to cripple the scientific side so much in order to give both an equal chance that you’ve compromised on the scientific instruction.

Both are bad. I’d never do such a thing to my students; my struggle has always been to give the creationist students enough shelter that they can freely express their ideas (where they can then be examined and corrected) without being eaten alive by the majority of students in the class. You do not ever elevate wrong ideas to equal status with good ones, and you also do nothing to turn students in your class into punching bags!

This is what the religious influence on the Romanian government has done, though: the theologians are cheerfully pushing superstition into the science classes, and no doubt expecting that these bad ideas will be treated deferentially. It’s good to see the Romanian Humanist Association fighting back, at least.

It’s annoying. Garbage is thriving: the Discovery Channel is running ads for the Creation “Museum”, and our very own scienceblogs is intermittently running an ad for creationist literature. There are a couple of things to know about this. One is that the economy sucks, and the media, in particular are struggling. Science media especially are suffering, so everyone is scrambling to scrape up whatever revenues they can. The other thing to notice is that in a down economy, faith-based lies and wishful thinking are cheap to produce and continue to sell, so that’s what’s happening. There isn’t much we can do other than to grab every penny we can from them.

With that in mind, here’s something I’d like you all to do. Go to that obnoxious creationist ad that keeps appearing here, and take them up on their offer of a FREE booklet. Order it, I did, and it really is free — they don’t ask for a credit card number, there are no hidden shipping fees, but they probably will stick your name and address on a mailing list of the gullible (don’t worry, though, you aren’t, so you are contaminating their list).

It says it takes two to four weeks to ship. As soon as I get mine, I’ll open up a thread here with the same title as the book, and we shall all join in a gleeful public evisceration of their crappy little booklet. If you’ve got a blog, put a critical dissection of the book there and send me the link, and I’ll add it to the post. We’ll give them publicity, all right, but it will be the harshest, nastiest, meanest publicity possible — we will do everything we can to make sure that when someone googles their organization or their booklet, all that comes back is a mountain of snarling contempt.

It’ll be fun.

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Hang on, some of you are getting this completely wrong. DO NOT HAVE THE BOOKLET SENT TO A FAKE ADDRESS. This is not a campaign to make creationists waste lots of money and generate lots of garbage in landfills—it is an exercise in informed analysis. You are supposed to have the booklet sent to yourself, so you can read it, and you can critique it. We’ll then have a discussion about its failures. You won’t be able to participate if you haven’t read the silly thing, now will you?

Also do not have it sent to random people you don’t like. They won’t bother to criticize it here, either.

Ron Numbers is a very smart fellow, a historian of science, who has done marvelous work on the history of creationism. Paul Nelson is a Discovery Institute Fellow, a young earth creationist (but an amazingly fuzzy one), and, unfortunately, very long-winded. Bloggingheads has brought Ronald Numbers and Paul Nelson together in a dialog. I can hardly believe I listened to the whole thing — I was working away at other stuff while it was playing in the background, so it wasn’t a total waste of time — but it was incredibly boring. Both parties were so determined to be nice to each other that they spent the whole time agreeing with each other, and never wrestled with their differences. It was an epic collision of titanic marshmallows; no one was bruised or dented, but afterwards, everyone involved was sticky and gooey. It just fills one with a desire to wash one’s hands and maybe take a shot of some good scotch to get back a little sharpness and bite. Conviviality is a fine thing in an appropriate social situation, but in a discussion of matters of substance, it can be a toxic sludge that obscures differences and impedes the achievement of any real understanding.

A few interesting comments managed to untangle themselves from the treacle. Numbers made the useful point that religion achieves compatibility with science when it recedes into the background and simply accepts whatever science discovers as what the gods have been doing. That’s fine with me; he didn’t come right out and say, though, that religion lacks any method to actually determine the truth of any statement about the world.

Nelson brought up a hypothetical (a common tactic of his): if an intelligent designer created and planted the very first cell in the ocean a few billion years ago, could methodological naturalism determine that? His point was that if it had actually happened — whether a deity conjured that cell into existence, or a passing alien spacecraft flushed its space toilets as it passed by — it would be undetectable to the tools of methodological naturalism, and therefore it is a flawed procedure.

Numbers had a couple of answers to that. One was to compare it to his field of history, in which everyone knows some information is always lost over time. That does not mean that history cannot work, but simply that we always acknowledge that we cannot possibly know everything. He also made the pragmatic argument that methodological naturalism has been eminently successful, and is a tool that allows even the most evangelical Christian to be a successful scientist, and that breaking that down is an expense we should be unwilling to pay.

What he failed to mention, though, is that Intelligent Design creationism does not fill the gap in our knowledge. They have no tools in place to detect a great cosmic space poof (or flush) that occurred 3 billion years ago, either. What is their way of knowing that succeeds where science fails? Where is their evidence? The failings of ID creationism were not brought up, however, perhaps because it would breach civility on the spot.

The only point where they got spiritedly critical, but not with each other (they still agreed entirely with each other) was — and you knew it had to be this — was in damning those damned damnable atheists. A major problem here was that Jerry Coyne’s book, Why Evolution Is True, was made the target, Paul Nelson glibly mischaracterized the book, and Numbers obligingly accepted his mangling. They spent a fair amount of time flogging a dead horse filled with straw, or some such unholy metaphor.

Nelson claimed that Coyne’s book is “soaked in theology”, that it was one big theological argument from beginning to end, and compared it to a hypothetical (again!) situation in which aliens landed, asked us to explain evolution, and Coyne begins by telling them the Christian myth, and how it is all wrong.

I’ve read the book. Nelson was not describing any book I’ve read.

His example was to talk about the argument from imperfections, the fact that many of the points Coyne made as evidence of evolution were from sub-optimal adaptations, or historical relics. Nelson has made this argument many times before; he says that it is an attempt to judge what a rational god would do, finding differences from our expectations, and then using those to argue against religion…a purely theological plan and conclusion.

Numbers chimed in to agree vigorously, pointing out that imperfections are no argument against creationism, because creationists believe in a flawed world as a consequence of the Fall. I know this. It is irrelevant.

The argument from biological imperfections is not theological, no matter how vociferously Nelson asserts that it is, because no biologist is simply saying what he claims they are; the interesting part about imperfections like the recurrent laryngeal nerve or the spine of bipeds or mammalian testicles isn’t simply that they seem clumsy and broken in a way no sensible god would tolerate, but that evolution provides an explanation for why they are so. We can build a case that these structures are a product of historical antecedents, and have a positive case for them as consequences of common descent. Nelson is misrepresenting the argument, and Numbers just went along with it.

Then, of course, talking about Coyne leads into some Dawkins-bashing. Coyne and Dawkins are going beyond the conventional boundaries of science, Numbers says, and he doesn’t like theological conclusions being made from empirical work; evolutionary biology doesn’t and can’t tell us much of anything about god.

Bullshit.

When you’ve got a specific theological claim, such as that the earth is only 6,000 years old (or, in Nelson’s uselessly blurry version, is simply much younger than geology says), then science certainly can weigh in on a theological claim. It can say that that specific claim is wrong. We can whittle away at virtually every material claim that religions make, and reduce them to an empirical void — the Catholic Church, for instance, officially goes along with the scientific observations of evolution, and simply adds an untestable, immaterial claim on top of it, that there was some moment of “ensoulment” that corresponds to the literary metaphor of Adam and Eve. Science can’t disprove that, but what it means is that they are diminished to making pointless claims about invisible, unobservable entities being magically added invisibly and immaterially to people at a distant time and place that they cannot name.

It was a frustrating discussion. If either of them had been having a dialog with Dawkins or Coyne, then this would have been an interesting tack to take, because then they would be arguing over differences, and maybe some reasonable arguments would have emerged (entirely from the Dawkins/Coyne camp, of course). As it is, the two simply dodged their own deep differences to find common, non-antagonistic cause in bashing positions neither understood that were not represented by anyone in their dialog.

At the end, Numbers says one thing that really made me roll my eyes: “One thing that is not welcome in the science and religion debates is people in the middle.” It’s so true. When you are debating over straightforward questions, like “evolution vs. creation” or “god vs. no god”, the position in the middle is non-existent, and people who try to waffle about, refusing to answer the question, are definitely not welcome. They’re only there to add noise and confusion.

Did I say 101 atheists were going to the Creation “Museum” four days ago? The updated number is currently at 201, and the Secular Student Alliance is keeping registration open for a while, so you can still get in. This is going to be great — be sure to wear some kind of distinguishingly godless clothing, because I think we’ll want a few photos of the place swamped with atheists.

Just the numbers alone are going to make this a great event. Join the mob!

Supposedly, the Next Big Thing in the Intelligent Design creationism movement is Stephen Meyer’s new book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}. Meyer is wandering about the country, peddling absurd op-eds and flogging his book in bad talks. Here’s a good summary of one of his presentations in Seattle:

To sum up, Meyer’s argument is as follows:

(1) According to Bill Gates, DNA is like a computer program.
(2) Because I am unfamiliar with the field known as genetic programming, every computer program I’ve ever heard of has had a developer.
(3) Charles Darwin once used the principle of Inference To The Best Explanation.
(4) Even though Darwin was a wicked, wicked man, I’m going to use that same principle to refute him. It will be, you know, irony.
(5) I say that intelligent design is the best explanation for the computer-program-like-ness of DNA.
(6) Therefore, by Darwin’s own reasoning, intelligent design must be true.
(7) Please buy my book.

I’ve read excerpts of this book. I’ve seen reviews and summaries of its argument. I’ve seen the freaking title. I know what is in this book — “ooooh, it’s so complex, it must have been…DESIGNED!!11!” — and I know that Stephen Meyer lies and makes up pseudoscientific babble, so I have very poor expectations of this book: I anticipate bad biology and even worse information theory, and a mangled pretense of science by a contemptible poseur. I do have a review copy on the way, though, and I will read it from beginning to end, taking notes and snorting in derisive laughter all the way, and I will take David Klinghoffer’s ridiculous challenge to make a serious response. I won’t win, though: my review will be too long for him, and unless there’s some magic ju-ju that will completely reverse my opinion of ID creationism hidden in the text (which, strangely, none of the favorable reviews have bothered to highlight), it will most likely not be the kind of positive cheerleading for creationism that Klinghoffer favors.

Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute has published an opinion piece in the Boston Globe in which he makes a rather anachronistic argument for ID: Thomas Jefferson was a supporter. I knew the creationists were sloppy scholars and had a poor grasp of history and science, but this is getting ridiculous.

Here, I have to help them out.

Date	Jefferson	Darwin
1743	born	–
1776	Writes the Declaration of Independence	–
1809	Ends his term as President of the US	born
1823	Writes the quote Stephen Meyer will find so appealing: I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition.	14 years old.
1826	Dies.	Darwin is a student at the University of Edinburgh.
1831	Dead.	Voyage of the Beagle
1859	Still dead.	Publishes the Origin.
1882	Still very dead.	Darwin dies, too.

They do overlap a bit in time, but Jefferson was 33 years in the grave before Darwin got around to explaining how we don’t need a designer to explain the living universe. I rather suspect that no ship was dispatched from Virginia to Shropshire to get young Charlie Darwin’s rebuttal of the 1823 claim, either. It’s even less likely that Jefferson’s zombie rose up in 1859 to take a quick gander at these new ideas spreading through biology and decided, nah, he likes intelligent design better.

I could be wrong. Maybe the Biologic Institute has been holding seances and has received Jefferson’s imprimatur — I wouldn’t put it past them. Otherwise, though, Meyer is making a ludicrously stupid argument.

By the way, even if the DI had Jefferson’s revivified head in a jar, and it was making anti-evolutionary pronouncements, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to evolutionary biologists. Doctors might be excited, though.

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Blake is even more succinct.

And following the lead of all past hires by that eminent institute of advanced ideology, Ann Gauger doesn’t understand biology or logic. She does have a Ph.D. in a relevant field, but it just goes to show that having a degree doesn’t mean you necessarily understand science. I will look forward to further examples of poor reasoning from yet another incompetent in Seattle.

By the way, she also hails from my old hometown of Kent, Washington…a completely meaningless coincidence that still manages to embarrass me.