Someday…
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
We’re in big trouble on our trip to the Creation “Museum”, people. We’re going on 7 August, and on that very same day, they are planning to present…
THE ULTIMATE PROOF OF CREATION!!!
What is the Ultimate Proof of Creation, you might ask?
There is a defense for creation that is powerful, conclusive, and has no true rebuttal. As such, it is an irrefutable argument–an “ultimate proof” of the Christian worldview. This presentation will equip you to engage an unbeliever, even a staunch atheist, using proven techniques.
Holy crap! It’s a trap! I’m going to be bringing along a whole mob of young atheists from the Secular Student Alliance, and this speaker, Jason Lisle, is going to be like Darth Vader among the younglings. I might be able to put up a fight against Emperor Ham, just like Samuel Jackson, but then his apprentice will show up and zap, blam, zowee, I’ll be chopped up and blown out a window. We’re doomed. DOOOOOOOMED.
At least I insist on being informed before going to my ignominious fate. The first chapter of the Ultimate Proof of Creation is available online, so I read it cautiously, fearing that I would see science demolished with an irrefutable argument.
Wait a minute.
This thing is complete garbage. It’s the same old routine that Answers in Genesis always trots out: “We’re using the same evidence,” they say, “only we’re just interpreting it differently. We’re just as sciencey as you are!” Only they aren’t. They’re leaving out all the evidence that contradicts their views, and twisting the bits they want in inappropriate ways. And then they make stuff up! Here’s an approach I’ve been seeing a lot from creationists lately: they invent scientific “laws” and then declare that evolution is unscientific because it violates those “laws”. The most common one is the so-called “law of biogenesis” that dictates that life can only come from other life, but here’s a pair that Lisle pulls out of his butt:
There is no known law of nature, no known process, and no
known sequence of events that can cause information to originate by itself in matter.When its progress along the chain of transmission events is
traced backward, every piece of information leads to a mental
source, the mind of the sender.
These are quite simply false. Chance can generate new information in genetics, so we know the first law is bogus, and since we can trace a useful piece of genetic information back to unguided mutations, we know the second is yet more baloney.
I don’t think I’m too worried about the Ultimate Proof of Creation anymore. I suspect it is going to be more like this.
There are intelligent true believers, deluded as they are, but there also a few of them out there who will simply take your breath away with statements of such pretentious stupidity that you wonder how they manage to tie their shoes in the morning. Case in point: David Klinghoffer. If you’re already familiar with him, you won’t be surprised at this. He’s written an essay in which he takes to task the concept of convergent evolution, as espoused by Ken Miller and Simon Conway Morris. I don’t care much for the way Miller and Conway Morris use the idea myself, but Klinghoffer’s argument…man. You’d think it was a parody if you didn’t know Klinghoffer.
His argument against convergence is that if it were true, then evolution could have led to something truly repulsive, like Cthulhu.
Literally Cthulhu. He quotes a lot of H.P. Lovecraft, “Darwinism’s visionary storyteller,” and cites me linking to the “Unholy Bible”, and claims that “Darwinists love him”. Apparently, we aren’t just unbelievers, or even merely Satan-worshippers anymore — we’ve moved on to worshipping inimical alien beings beyond space and time that intend to remorselessly destroy us. Ken Miller (!) is naively promoting the adoration of monsters when he suggests that maybe his god wasn’t so specific in his mechanisms as to demand mammalian bipeds as the recipients of ensoulment.
Ken Miller hasn’t publicly expressed any known fondness for Lovecraft, and I don’t think his idea of evolution as a natural process undetectably adjusted by a benign deity would accommodate itself well to a Cthulhu-dominated universe. As for the rest of us, and me personally, H.P. Lovecraft’s stories are clearly fiction: we don’t see them as a portrayal of our universe at all. I find them entertaining because the descriptions are so flamboyantly over the top, and because, well, tentacles. There’s also the factor that, as an atheist, I find the similarities between a hostile anti-human monster and the Christian religion’s petty, cosmic tyrant amusing. Really, my shrine to the Elder Gods is very tiny, only taking up one of the smaller wings of my mansion. (Uh-oh, it’s Klinghoffer—he might think I mean that for real.)
Besides, if we rewound the tape of life and ran it forward again, and evolution led to intelligent cephalopods, an anthropocentric bigot like Klinghoffer might well regard them as “grotesque, obnoxious, loathsome, abhorrent, ghastly”, but I’d think them pretty cool…and most importantly, these beings would consider their own forms beautiful, and us strangely twisted chordates as hideous.
Oh, by the way: nobody should tell him how Pharyngula appears in some dusty corners of Cthulhu lore.
I’m just going to have to get this shirt, to make Klinghoffer tremble.
The good news: Cynthia Dunbar will not be heading the state board of education.
The bad news: the governor picked Gail Lowe, a Christianist sheep, who will probably do whatever Dunbar tells her to do, anyway.
Don’t bother cheering, a few faint moans and groans before you Texans buckle up and head back to the front lines to battle the forces of ignorance will do.
Dunbar is the creationist, anti-education kook that Governor Perry of Texas is considering putting in charge of the state board of education. Slacktivist explains the problem with this — putting someone who wants to destroy the public education system in charge of the public education system is like making an arsonist the fire chief.
And actually, it’s not as much a criticism of Dunbar — she’s an out lunatic — but of the system in general, that a leading politician would think this kind of appointment is at all appropriate.
And that’s not good. John Lynch rips into Dembski’s views on Alfred Russell Wallace, and Dembski’s mistakes are legion and major. Wallace is an interesting guy, and it’s always a shame when Discovery Institute propagandists start mangling yet another aspect of history, philosophy, and science.
Sure, you’re jealous that I won a prize off of all your back-breaking mouse clicking. So here’s your chance to win $100 for just clicking a few keys in the right order. It’s a creative writing contest, in which you have to come up with the most original and amusing creation myth. Just think — you could be the creator of the next Flying Spaghetti Monster!
Look what came in the mail today:
It’s an iPod Touch from Eric Hovind! It’s impossible to read in this photo, but it has a nice engraving on the back: the Creation Minute logo, and this message.
To PZ Myers
In hopes that your quest for TRUTH will end with God.
The CSE Team
Isn’t that nice? I’d been hoping they’d add some little distinguishing touch like that to it — it makes for a splendid victory trophy.
I’m going to be speaking at the Secular Student Alliance conference on 8 August, and before that, you may recall, I announced that we were going on a little field trip to Ken Ham’s bunco joint in Kentucky, on Friday, 7 August. We’re trying to organize a bit, so SSA sent me the notice below. Preregister and get a big discount on the entry fee, and SSA is also looking for more people to help with coordinating travel.
Register to get the $10 entry fee at https://secularstudents.wufoo.com/forms/creation-museum-with-pz-myers-registration/. You have to pay in advance but you get the $10 entrance rate, rather than the $22 that you’d have to pay at the door. People have to register by 7/23 to get this rate.
We’re arranging carpools through www.rideshare.us using lookup code PZ2Creation. Anyone coming to the Museum and/or heading up to Columbus afterwards for the conference is strongly encouraged to post their rides if they’d be willing to take a student along with them. Students can also post ads for rides if they need to get from one place to the other.
We also have some (free!) housing available in Columbus for Thurs night for any students from out of town who need a place to crash before heading down to the museum. Interested parties should contact Jon the Intern In Charge of Housing at [email protected].
Sign up now!
This is so stupid it hurts. Check out the Missing Universe Creation Museum: it’s got all the usual creationist jabber. No transitional fossils, all mutations are harmful, and my favorite, prominently quoted, “If you don’t believe God created all living things, male and female, in 6 days…How many millions of years was it between the first male and the first female?” How about no time at all, they coevolved? And you must take their evolution test — it will definitely make you laugh.
After you’ve browsed the site for a bit, they also have a poll. They want to know how effective they are at convincing you. Maybe you should tell them.
Evolution, and now only Evolution
46.1%
Evolution, and now only Creation
6.15%
Evolution, and now Both
3.07%
Creation, and now only Creation
29.2%
Creation, and now only Evolution
9.23%
Creation, and now Both
0%
Both, and now only Creation
0%
Both, and now only Evolution
1.53%
Both, and now Both
4.61%
