Even here in Minnesota, we get creationists ranting in the newspapers. This one is in the Brainerd Dispatch.

In response to a previous writer’s statement ” … modern neo-Darwinian synthesis of organic evolution is supported by more compelling and intellectually satisfying empirical evidence that any other idea ever advanced by the world’s scientific community … “

The retort to this statement is simple: hogwash! Remember, the neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is not “change over time” or “modifications through natural selection within an existing species”, nor dynamics of cellular metamorphosis. These kinds of actions are simply workings of the natural order and have been observed and recorded for centuries.

I could tell exactly what the writer is about to do at this point. Note that he is responding to a statement of fact, that there is a great deal of empirical evidence in support of evolution. He has announced that that is “hogwash”, but is he going to rebut any of the evidence? No, he’s going to do a little dance over the word “evolution” and tell us what it isn’t. And he’s going to get it wrong. Neo-Darwinian theory includes all of the things he just listed (well, except for “dynamics of cellular metamorphosis” — I don’t even know what that means, and the writer certainly doesn’t, either).

It’s nice of him to coopt elements of the theory and claim that we’ve known it all along, though. It’s one small step forward.

So, science is not synonymous with neo-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinism is in reality a very recent construct. In fact, it was and is being continually cobbled together long after Darwin himself died. Neo-Darwinism in effect says – since there is no pre-planned design behind it – every thing is random and undirected-nothing is planned. There is no purposeful form of life. So human beings, like everything else, is in effect just one of the many possible resulting accidents of an unconscious blind cosmic dice shake. Everything that is came into being as an accident and will disappear someday the same way. Consequently, there is no reason for being, nor any purpose for the natural world, or behavioral norms, and surely there is no rational for a future hope in anything.

No one claims that science is synonymous with neo-Darwinian theory — the physicists and chemists and geologists would be very surprised to learn that they needed to be biologists to be called scientists.

The neo-Darwinian synthesis is less than a hundred years old. No one has been arguing otherwise about that, either. It’s also an active theory which is being continually tested, revised, and re-assessed. This is a good thing: we like to modify our ideas to fit the facts, not vice versa.

So far, nothing he’s said contradicts the claim that evolution is a well-supported theory.

But now we get to the nub of his objections: evolution is unplanned and lacks a long-term purpose. This is both a premise and an inference from the science. We always assume chance is behind variation; that is the null hypothesis. One could charge in, I suppose, and hypothesize that a particular pattern of change is the result of directed meddling, but the best way to test that would be to directly address the mechanism of the intervention. It’s not a very productive approach, we’ve found. We’d have to deduce some of the properties of the agent behind the change, you see, and if we try that, advocates of teleology always back away quickly from any testable proposals. It’s been a much more promising approach to postulate an absence of design, make predictions from that, and test them.

And voila, it almost always seems to work out well. Predictions that leave out angels, demigods, demons, and magic spells seem to work out quite nicely, so we are left with a powerful theory sans deities, which implies that deities are at least superfluous. That’s all the ateleology of biology means.

Ah, but notice again: none of his railings have any relevance to the claim of empirical evidence for evolution, that which he calls “hogwash”. This isn’t an argument, it’s an emotional appeal. Many people are uncomfortable with the idea of an absence of guidance, so he’s announcing that evolution doesn’t include a god, and gee everyone, shouldn’t that make you dislike it? But whether we dislike an idea or not has no bearing on its truth.

Especially not when our Minnesotan critic then goes on to demonstrate his ignorance.

Neo-Darwinism’s top proponents-Dawkins, Huxley, Weiner, Gould and Dobzhansky are all convinced atheists. For the person who is interested in the subject, but does not want to wade through pages of polemic, or get into deep esoteric scientific reading, might simply go to the video store and ask for Ben Stein’s “Expelled” or get a hold of the book “Icons of Evolution” by molecular biologist Jonathan Wells. It might stun you on just how neo-Darwinism is pure fraud.

Ron Lindner

East Gull Lake

OK, let’s see. The top proponents are:

• Dawkins: Definitely a top proponent, definitely an atheist. Good start!
• Huxley: Well, he was a top proponent, but he’s dead now. Long dead. He also wasn’t an atheist. He was the fellow who coined the word “agnostic”!
• Weiner: Who? It took me a moment to figure out who he’s talking about, but it must be Jonathan Weiner, the excellent writer behind Beak of the Finch and other science books. He’s more of a science journalist though, a good one. If he’s an atheist, he doesn’t write about it, and it doesn’t come through at all in his books.
• Gould: Another top proponent, also an atheist, but also dead.
• Dobzhansky: Dobzhansky? One of the most important architects of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, sure, but an atheist? He was Russian Orthodox, and by all accounts, rather devout! He was author of the essay, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”, which phrase irks many creationists, but if you actually read the essay, one of its central assertions is that science is not in conflict with his own sincerely held Christianity! This is the guy our writer wants to argue was a nefarious atheist?

I do have to give Mr Lindner points for unintentional irony. If you don’t like polemics, go watch Expelled? Right. Don’t want to read that science stuff? Then go read Wells. At least I can agree with that last point, since there isn’t so much as a scrap of science in that book.

I’m feeling dissatisfied, though. His starting premise was that the body of empirical evidence for evolution was “hogwash”, and he seems to have forgotten to actually address the point. Typical.

We only have a month or two left. I have been reminded of a prediction made in the July/August 2004 issue of Touchstone magazine. Brace yourselves.

Where is the ID movement going in the next ten years? What new issues will it be exploring, and what new challenges will it be offering Darwinism?

Dembski: In the next five years, molecular Darwinism—the idea that Darwinian processes can produce complex molecular structures at the subcellular level—will be dead. When that happens, evolutionary biology will experience a crisis of confidence because evolutionary biology hinges on the evolution of the right molecules. I therefore foresee a Taliban-style collapse of Darwinism in the next ten years. Intelligent design will of course profit greatly from this. For ID to win the day, however, will require talented new researchers able to move this research program forward, showing how intelligent design provides better insights into biological systems than the dying Darwinian paradigm.

Man, I’m glad I’ll be on sabbatical. It’ll give me a year to patch up the radical changes I’ll have to make in all of my courses after the ID revolution comes. The rest of you are going to be coming back to rubble in September.

Although, I should also mention that the very next paragraph in that article is the one credible paragraph Paul Nelson ever wrote.

Nelson: Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don’t have such a theory right now, and that’s a real problem. Without a theory, it’s very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we’ve got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions such as “irreducible complexity” and “specified complexity”–but, as yet, no general theory of biological design.

Almost five years on, still no theory.

I don’t understand what this guy is saying.

As we all know to our great shame, Ken Ham has this Creation “Museum” in Kentucky. As has been reported before, it’s a thoroughly bogus bit of bunco, with dinosaurs wearing saddles and all the ills of the world laid at the feet of Charles Darwin.

There are a few things you might not know. Like that it’s rolling in dough, with almost $18 million in revenue and $14 million in assets. It’s entirely tax free, which helps, and Ham is a relentless self-promoter.

This one may shock you: public schools are sending kids on field trips to the museum. It’s usually under the guise of an extra-curricular activity by a religion club, the loophole David Paszkiewicz (remember him?) used to take kids from Kearny High School in New Jersey there. But get this remark from an education official in Kentucky:

Kentucky Department of Education spokeswoman Lisa Gross said nothing in state law would bar public schools from visiting, if it were part of “a lesson” on “how some perceived the world’s beginnings.”

You know Ham has friends in high places, and they are warming up to open his brand of nonsense and lies to the schools in that area. More minds, more souls, more money for Ken.

And of course, what is Ken Ham’s big, bold, explicit message? That the only tenable belief is in fundamentalist Christianity and a literal interpretation of Genesis. The crew at Answers in Genesis really detests theistic evolution — you know, that compromise position the accommodationists want us to bow down before. To these creationists, anything less than abject capitulation to Biblical literalism will lead to the collapse of Christian America.

Oh, but wait — I know what you are thinking. You’re thinking that this is insane. This is “stupid and crazy and wrong”. You might even be thinking, as I do, that this is dangerous and represents a corruption of education that is doing great harm to our country. You might also feel as I do, that we should not hold back in denouncing this blight of poisonous ignorance in our midst.

You’d be bad if you thought that.

Well, at least according to Michael Ruse, the Discovery Institute’s favorite evilutionist philosopher. You see, Ruse has recently visited the museum, as he wrote to Andrew Brown, and he tried to understand how the creationists feel.

Just for one moment about half way through the exhibit …I got that Kuhnian flash that it could all be true — it was only a flash (rather like thinking that Freudianism is true or that the Republicans are right on anything whatsoever) but it was interesting nevertheless to get a sense of how much sense this whole display and paradigm can make to people

Oh, right. Forget all that stuff about the earth being 6,000 years old, all the diversity of life on earth being packed into a boat for a year, and the adamant belief that atheists, agnostics, and theistic evolutionists are trying to destroy the nation for Satan…we’re supposed to feel for them, and try to understand their psychology. Ruse continues:

It is silly just to dismiss this stuff as false — that eating turds is good for you is [also] false but generally people don’t want to [whereas] a lot of people believe Creationism so we on the other side need to get a feeling not just for the ideas but for the psychology too.

This is what is so awful about the “New Atheists”: they are such horrible, insensitive louts. They can’t overlook the teeny tiny little demand of biblical literalism to see that creationism isn’t quite so wicked. That, at least, is what Andrew Brown dislikes about us.

This is, I think one of the key differences between the new, or militant, atheists and Darwinians like Ruse, just as atheist as they but a lot less anti-religious. The new atheists recoil instinctively from the idea that they should get a feeling for the ideas and psychology of creationists. To them the essential point about believers is that they are stupid and crazy and wrong. So why waste your one life trying to inhabit a mind smaller and more twisted than your own?

See? If only we’d try to see the world through their eyes, we would understand that their beliefs aren’t stupid and crazy and wrong. Or something. I’m not quite sure what. I guess we’re supposed to sympathize with them, and be less critical.

Well, guess what, Andrew and Michael? I do talk with creationists, and I do understand where they’re coming from, and I do sympathize with them greatly. Your assumption that I and other “New Atheists” do not care about the psychology of creationists is false, and I think, counter-productive.

I understand that many creationists are intelligent and sane — they share a lot of values with me, like wanting to be able to think as they please, to raise happy, healthy families, and they are very concerned about their children: they are sure that if their kids aren’t Christian, they’ll be miserable, wretched, and damned to hell for all eternity. I do sympathize with them. I feel great sympathy and sorrow for the fact that they’ve been lied to by deluded con men like Ken Ham, and that they’re living lives driven by an irrational fear…a fear that is reinforced every day by evangelists and fundamentalists and the whole petty shuck-and-jive of religious belief.

I sympathize with their kids, too. These are blameless innocents who are going to be brought up in ignorance, reassured constantly that their foolishness is a virtue, and that learning about this wonderful, beautiful, dangerous, and uncaring universe we live in will lead them to hell. No child should be brought up in fear and darkness.

I sympathize with their fate, because they’re going to grow up just like their parents and spread the fear and ignorance even further. They will want the best for their kids, too, and instead, under the guidance of pious liars, they will wreck those kids’ minds, too. And the cycle will go on and on.

I sympathize with all their secular neighbors most of all. What will happen? They will live in a country where their schools are third-rate, because the creationists will suppress education not just for their own kids, but for everyone else’s, too. They will see their school boards populated with the products of such fare as the Creation “Museum”, and they will get to vote in elections where their options are Insane-Fundie-Wackjob vs. Slightly-Less-Crazy-God-Botherer. And the lesser-of-two-evils won’t always win, because their neighbors all think the fundier, the better.

I sympathize because they are all missing the awesomeness of reality for the awfulness of some narrow Bronze Age theocratic bullshit.

But there are also some for whom I have no sympathy at all.

I have zero sympathy for intelligent people who stand before a grandiose monument to lies, an institution that is anti-scientific, anti-rational, and ultimately anti-human, in a place where children are being actively miseducated, an edifice dedicated to an abiding intellectual evil, and choose to complain about how those ghastly atheists are ruining everything.

Those people can just fuck off.

So right away, you know not to trust it. No details are given, we are simply told that “a major study he commissioned by a respected researcher unveils for the first time in a scientific fashion the startling reasons behind statistics that show two-thirds of young people in evangelical churches will leave when they move into their 20s”. That’s actually a nice result from my perspective…so it’s too bad that I can’t believe what he claims.

Also, since it is Ken Ham, he knows exactly what the problem is and what we need to do to keep more kids in the faith.

The book explores a number of reasons for the findings, but Ham sees one overarching problem that is related to how churches and parents have taught youth to understand the Genesis account of creation.

Ham — who believes in a literal six-day creation that happened 6,000 to 10,000 years ago — says the church opened a door for the exodus of youth, beginning in the 19th century, when it began teaching that “the age of the Earth is not an issue as long as you trust in Jesus and believe in the resurrection and the Gospel accounts.”

I get it. His “study” is actually propaganda for his “museum”.

I’m warning you. It’s a disaster waiting to build: when the newspapers start reporting creationist versions of stories without questioning them, without providing explanations of the fallacies, and without even bringing in authoritative scientific voices to knock their claims down, all you do is feed the confidence of the creationists. It’s even worse than “he said she said” journalism. That’s exactly what the BBC has done, though, with a piss poor story about attendees at Ken Ham’s preposterous creationist “museum”.

I’m going to be charitable and assume the author intended to hang the creationists with their own words; the quotes from the people going to the “museum” do make them sound like ignorant hicks. In particular, one pull quote — Why is Darwin buried with kings at Westminster Abbey? He’s not a king. — is a great big flashing idiot light, and will be especially noticeable in the UK (hint: they don’t just bury kings in Westminster…unless, of course, Isaac Newton and Herschel and Lyell and many other scientists were crowned when I wasn’t looking).

But still, look at the article as a creationist would. It’s going to go in a scrapbook or on a wall of reviews at the “museum”, and the gomers will stroll through, read it, and nod approvingly. Those quotes affirm their own beliefs; all they’ll see is that the BBC approvingly quoted sentiments they share. And there will be readers in England, even, who will be oblivious to the very understated sarcasm, and will be cheered further in their support of creationism. And other reporters will see that as a perfectly reasonable way to write a news story, and the plague of bland reporting will spread.

This part was simply disingenuous.

President and founder Ken Ham stayed resolutely silent about the fossil, called Darwinius masillae, which scientists believe was linked to an early human ancestor.

I’m sorry, but if you go to the Answers in Genesis web site, Darwinius masillae is featured top center in a big full color banner. To claim that Ham was resolute or silent is false: he’s been lying noisily and frantically about the fossil record.

Trust me, it’s been happening over here. Every article about creationism needs to eschew the subtleties and pound hard on the obvious, that creationism is bunk and its proponents are ignorant, because the creationists don’t get subtlety.

Ray has always been good for hours of hilarity — he writes amazingly stupid stuff. But now Ray has competition: Eric Hovind has a blog! It’s not quite as insane as Ray’s, but it does have more evil and stupidity.

For example, Eric likes a poem that he quotes — it’s a crude racist ditty that, I’m told, you can also find on the Stormfront web site. It’s written as if by some caricature of an immigrant, and ends like this:

We think America darn good place!
Too darn good for the white man race.
If they no like us, they can scram,
Got lots of room in Pakistan ..

Hovind has been shown that some of the statistics he used to justify vilifying immigrants were wrong, he’s admitted it, but he still likes the poem. That tells you a lot about him, right there.

On the evil side, he has a post called “The Evoluiton Hypothisis” [sic, sic]. He uses a diagram of what he calls the scientific method to argue against evolution’s status as a scientific theory.

I don’t much care for the diagram — it’s too rigid in its simplistic model of how science works, and it perpetuates the misleading idea that hypotheses gradually become theories (usually, theories emerge to explain large bodies of information already accumulated, and don’t slowly expand up out of single hypotheses) and that theories become laws if they’re confirmed enough. But I’ll let it slide… you’ll find many similar diagrams in introductory biology texts.

Where Hovind is stupidly wrong is that he looks at that diagram, and baldly claims that the “concept of evolution has never gotten passed the Hypothesis stage”. Ridiculous. All those papers being constantly published in the scientific literature are tests of the theory. The primary research literature is crammed full of tests of evolution, and more keep coming. You have to be profoundly ignorant of the state of biology to be able to make such a ludicrous claim. Oh, wait…he’s a Hovind. Of course he’s deeply ignorant!

Oh, if any of you decide to hang about and laugh at Eric Hovind’s goofy claims, would you mind reminding him now and then that I’m waiting for my iPod Touch?

Regular readers here may be familiar with WhoIsYourCreator, a creationist who blows through here and The Panda’s Thumb now and then to dump a load of creationist cut-and-paste in the comments. WhoIsYourCreator is actually Julie Haberle, a deranged creationist whose chief accomplishment to date has been to erect foolish billboards all over the place. To date — but now she can take credit for another accomplishment. Her billboards and organization prompted a Christian to dig deeper into this evolution stuff, and what he discovered was that Haberle and others in the creationist movement have been lying all along, which led him to this simple conclusion, which he shared with Ms. Haberle.

I’m simply writing to say ‘Thank You’ and let you know by sharing with you the information I’ve discovered, your organization more than any other entity has been the primary factor in the shedding my faith. Keep up the good work as there is no doubt countless others have and will continue to do the same based on your efforts.

Dishonesty has consequences, and creationists are fundamentally distorting the evidence to fit their desired conclusion. That hurts them when people take a moment to actually examine what they are claiming.