It’s getting to be a regular feature—every year, the NY Times must do a story on that bizarre miseducation monument, the Creation “Museum”. This time around, the story isn’t too awful — it focuses on the recent NAPC meeting, in which several professional paleontologists paid a visit to the creationist carnival to be alternately appalled and amused.

Several people have asked when I’m going to visit Ken Ham’s temple. It’s been settled! It’s all arranged, but no thanks at all to Ham. Here’s the deal: I’m going to be speaking at the Secular Student Alliance conference in August, which is being held in Columbus, Ohio…only two hours away from the museum! Sharp-eyed and chronologically aware Phil Ferguson noticed this interesting conjunction, and suggested that I adjust my travel schedule a tiny bit and come down a day early, and we’d take a little side trip. The SSA was amenable and tweaked my flight dates, and it is all happening!

On Friday, 7 August, a small group of godless people, including yours truly, will be at the “museum” when it opens at 10am on Friday, 7 August. Everyone is welcome to join in—we’ll pack the joint with quietly chortling science-minded people. When I get back from Lindau, I’ll also write to Ken Ham and request the pleasure of an audience, inviting him to come on out and evangelize to secular students.

It should be great fun. I’ve got a long list of questions to ask the docents…so long that I’m going to have to prune it down a lot. Come on out and join the party! And as long as you are, you might want to think about signing up for the SSA conference, which should be more informative.

Actually, a half-hour at a nearby sewage treatment plant would be more informative. The SSA meeting will be even better than that!

They’re doing it again. There’s a new movie being released, The Voyage That Shook the World, that you can tell from the tagline — “One man, one voyage, one book ignited a controversy that still rages today” — is creationist trash (hint: there is no scientific controversy anymore on this matter). Look a little further, and you’ll find it’s produce by Creation Ministries International, which tells you right there what their agenda is: to tell lies for Jesus.

Here’s where the parallel to Expelled lies…in the lies. They got several Darwin experts (Peter Bowler, Sandra Herbert, and Janet Browne) to appear in the “documentary” by concealing their motives. And then they admit to cherry-picking the interviews to put together their story.

You know, if they actually had an honest message, if they could be trusted to present the opinions of the experts accurately, they wouldn’t need to deceive to get people to contribute to their projects. As it is, all we can trust them on is their ability to mangle the facts. Doesn’t this tell you something about the credibility of the creationist movement?

At least they didn’t hire Ben Stein as a frontman.

The list of winners of iPods of various flavors from Creation Science Evangelism:

Third place: Kirby Hobley, who created a post on the atheist sub-group of Reddit.

Second place: Richard Haynes, of Atheist Nexus.

First place: PZ Myers of you know where.

Good grief, the atheists won a clean sweep! It’s brilliant marketing, reaching deep into the very community that will most fiercely mock his message.

Thanks to all of your helpful clicking, I have just received this message from Eric Hovind of Creation Science Evangelism:

Congratulations, you logged the most clicks to CreationMinute.com and won an Apple iPod Touch complements of Creation Science Evangelism.

Good work, gang! I hope it’s full of creationist videos. I’ll have to bring it with me on my trip to the Creation “Museum” in August (I’ll fill you in on more details on that development later, when they’ve firmed up a bit more.)

He seems a bit peevish. He now has a blog post up complaining about me and my “inaccuracies”. His complaints are amusingly petty.

I object to the lies at the very heart of his “museum”, and he thinks he is rebutting me by whining over petty details.

For instance, he quotes me as regarding the idea of “Noah’s ark being built to carry off members of every species on earth”, and then he primly informs his readers that that isn’t true: it only carried every kind of “land-dwelling, air-breathing animal”. Oh, well, that fixes the logistical problems of the ark right up, doesn’t it? Here we have a great big flood that turns the globe into Waterworld, and he doesn’t have to worry about the effects of salinity changes on aquatic organisms, doesn’t have to think about the plants, and the birds can just stay airborne for a year until the flood recedes. I don’t care what fraction of life on earth the poop-shovelin’, travelin’ family of Noah squeezed onto their big imaginary boat — the whole story is ludicrous and unsupported by the evidence or by sense.

Then he complains that I mentioned his “dinosaurs with saddles”. He’s only got one, he says, and it’s out for repairs, and it wasn’t out in the exhibits anyway. But again, this is his whole schtick behind the museum: that like the Flintstones, humans and dinosaurs coexisted! He’s got exhibits with kids playing with carnivorous dinosaurs, and he specifically claims that dinosaurs existed within the last 10,000 years. The point is that the founding premise of his scammy little “museum” is false.

He also complains that he doesn’t make any direct accusations of “malice and dishonesty” against biologists in general, but again, that’s the implication he makes by calling evolution a lie and the work of Satan. He says he doesn’t blame Darwin for the world’s problems — that’s caused by sin, of course — but again, it’s pretending that a major focus of his “museum” is on how godless Darwinism leads people away from the true faith and into depravity.

He thinks the numbers I cited are wrong. Well, take it up with the source I cited, which tracks charitable organizations to give potential donors information on what the institution is doing. Mr Ham can always provide them with up-to-date information, and I’m sure they’ll make the numbers more current.

Finally, the most pathetic whimper of all: I called it “Ken Ham’s ‘museum'”. It’s not his museum, he says, it’s the Lord’s. Yeah, right.

Since Mr Ham is so concerned about my accuracy or lack thereof, and is obviously stressed at the poor publicity I’m giving his little monument to ignorance, I’ll make him an offer. I’ll give him a whole day of my time if he’ll fly me in and give me a personal tour, during which he can point out all the things I’ve gotten wrong about Creation, and I will dutifully write them down and post a complete report of his various rebuttals. Thorough coverage for the price of a plane ticket. How can he possibly turn down such an offer?

If he was really confident of the legitimacy of his museum, I could probably even gather a small group of mouthy, obnoxious, and culturally prominent godless scientists who’d also take advantage of such an offer, and he could shepherd us all through at once, evangelizing as much as he wanted. It would be great! Come on, Mr Ham, put a little bit of your money where your mouth is.

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.