As I was told last night, it’s one of the rare times “reason” got some representation in that section. You can read it here — I’ve been on Calgary radio and newspapers this week, so I’m hoping it will draw out some opposition to my talk this afternoon — it would be great to get some argument going in the Q&A.
Awww, I’ve been challenged by Ray Comfort. It’s hard to take the little man too seriously, though: last time we were supposed to debate on the radio, it ended up with a change of plans, and he instead weebled absurdly without me. At this point, though, his only challenge to me seems to be to explain this post more carefully to him, and I really don’t feel much incentive to use even littler words to go over the same old ground that atheists are smart enough to grasp.
The comments over there seem to answer most of his complaints already, anyway. Is there anybody who agrees with Comfort who reads his blog?
The latest news: in a vote on whether to keep the silly “strengths and weaknesses” phrasing in the Texas state science standards, the forces of light on the board of education have defeated the goblins of the darkness by a one vote margin. There are more votes to come, though, so the battle isn’t over yet.
Ray Comfort has a new site, Pull the plug on atheism. It’s a series of short pages which consist mainly of plugs for some bad books he is peddling, with a few paragraphs in which he announces a few of his misconceptions about atheism, with the air of one who has trounced every objection. It really is as bad as his pathetic blog.
For instance, the first thing he does is define what he means by atheist.
An atheist is someone who believes that nothing made everything.
Then he goes on and on with fallacious analogies: “Imagine if I said my latest book came from nothing.” Imagine if I say that I don’t believe a builder build my house.” It’s quite sad.
His analogies are foolish. We know how houses and books are made, so he’s peddling a counterfactual claim. We don’t know all the processes that went into the appearance of the universe — and that “we” includes Ray Comfort — so it is an open question. I’m quite sure it wasn’t his imaginary Christian god, since there is no reason to consider the accounts of his faith to be accurate.
He’s also relying on trickery with the language. When we say “made”, it implies an active event by an agent, so what he is doing is setting up a linguistic conflict between a word that implies agency and an event that scientists are saying was not necessarily caused. The conflict isn’t real, but is only a consequence of a limitation of language and the way our brains work.
And of course, he doesn’t bother with this problem: who made god? I can guess how he’d respond: there was no “who”, and god wasn’t “made”. At which time we do a little judo move and point out that the universe wasn’t “made” by a “who”, either.
He also continues to harp on a very silly argument, the claim that evolution is impossible because both sexes need to evolve simultaneously.
If any species came into existence without a mature female present (with complimentary female components), that one male would have remained alone and in time died. The species could not have survived without a female. Why did hundreds of thousands of animals, fish, reptiles and birds (over millions of years) evolve a female partner (that coincidentally matured at just the right time) with each species?
Curiously, he seems to think that a species is defined by the first male of the kind that appears, and females have to follow along. Weird. Sexist much?
Of course, it’s no problem at all. Species do not poof into existence as individuals without parents, siblings, cousins, or other distant relatives. Populations evolve — populations consisting of both sexes. If the population of the state of Minnesota got on board their rocketships and migrated en masse to underground colonies on the moon, and then had no further contact with the rest of humanity for a hundred thousand years, the two populations would diverge by drift and selection into different species. The population in each location would be continually interbreeding; at no point (except in the isolation mechanism) would there be a sudden transition where one group found itself consisting solely of one reproductively isolated male or female, waiting for a member of the other sex to pop into existence and give them something fun to do. Nor would anyone be able to look back and say precisely when their biology became incompatible — it would be fuzzy shifts among large numbers of people at all times.
But that’s Ray: deluded and confused and ignorant, but still plugging away obstinately with the certainty of tightly closed eyes.
It’s hard to beat the spectacle of Dinesh D’Souza defending a god for absurdity, but the Twin Cities Creation Science Association will leaven their idiocy with pathos: it will be time for the Twin Cities Creation Science Fair on 14-15 February. I’ve got at least one person promising to send me a report on it, although this is one I won’t be able to attend…I’m arranging a trip to speak in Columbus, Ohio that weekend. And as we all know, there are no creationists in Ohio. Right?
The state of Louisiana has passed an unfortunate law that allows teachers to toss in any ol’ garbage into their science curricula. For most teachers, this will make no difference at all in their classrooms; this is a law that specifically caters to irresponsible instructors who want to smuggle in questionable content. All you have to know to see that this is a bad bill is to look at the backers: conservative groups that want to see more religion in the schools, old-school fundamentalist creationists, and the Discovery Institute.
People are telling me that my blog entries are getting sprinkled with creationist ads in the RSS feeds, like this:
Heh. I think it’s great. This is an old and familiar game that has been played for years, where creationists buy up lots and lots of ad placement on searches for topics in evolutionary biology, and I think they should continue to throw their money down that sinkhole. It seems like an entirely ineffective tactic, to try and dun people who are already willing to look at the evidence with appeals to their dogma.
Shall I start taking out ads in the local church bulletins, perhaps?
Aren’t letters to the editor fun? They publish some of the craziest stuff.
One of the many problems with Darwin’s theory of evolution pertaining to mankind is that neither Charles Darwin nor his worshippers take into account extra-terrestrial life.
It’s pretty hard for someone to draw conclusions on mankind when Darwin had never seen nor heard of UFOs. That’s kind of like teaching math but not understanding trigonometry.
Most of us in the Niagara Region live on a lake bed (Lake Iroquois). The Indians cannot be blamed for having an effect on this major geographical landscape change anymore than modern man can be blamed for the weather patterns we see today. There is such a thing as pole shifting, and according to people who have studied Mayan culture we are quite possibly in the midst of a pole change — which many people believe will be in 2012.
In his letter, Keith Wigzell ironically contradicts himself when he says that man as part of the animal kingdom is one of the last to appear.
Does this mean evolution stopped at man, or that God stopped creating his creatures?
I certainly believe that all life evolves consciously and spiritually; however, to suggest that man evolved from a monkey is simply silly.
John Kocsis
Beamsville
I have heard many arguments against evolution before, but to disqualify Darwin because he hadn’t seen a UFO is a new one to me. How about Bigfoot? Do you also have to score a Sasquatch sighting in order to be credible?
It’s not good news for Texas children in the public school system.
A new survey released by the nonprofit group Texans Care for Children shows that one out of every three Texas students may not make their way across the graduation stage to receive their diploma.
The survey reveals that Texas is ranked last in high school graduation rates and also found that more children in Texas had to retake kindergarten.
How are we going to fix this?
I know! Put a creationist dentist in charge of the educational system! Are you feeling reassured yet?
And seriously, this is a cruel trick to play on children. People sometimes throw out the idea that colleges ought to just smack down these states with poor science standards and a tradition of misrule by not allowing them admission — that would teach those states, but good — but let’s not lose sight of the victims. Those kids get one chance at a decent education, and they are not to be blamed for the short-sightedness and stupidity of their parents and their politicians.
When we are fighting against creationism, we aren’t just working for the future advantage of abstract scientific principle, we are fighting for children right now whose brains are being crippled and twisted and poisoned.
The Brunswick school district is still arguing about teaching creationism. As is typical, the usual clueless ideologues from the community are getting up there in front of the board and babbling. Look at this argument:
The topic came up after county resident Joel Fanti told the board he thought it was unfair for evolution to be taught as fact, saying it should be taught as a theory because there’s no tangible proof it’s true.
“I wasn’t here 2 million years ago,” Fanti said. “If evolution is so slow, why don’t we see anything evolving now?”
That statement makes no sense. The slower evolution is, the more difficult it is to see the slow changes within the brief period of recent time. He has answered his own question! The second clause is simply raw ignorance, though, since we do see organisms evolving now. Bacteria, insects, lizards, birds…we’ve got lots of examples in organisms with shorter generation times than ours, and we even have molecular evidence of genetic changes in humans in the last 10,000 years. Is Fanti Italian for “Fool”?
Worse, though, is the fact that members of the school board are buying into this nonsense. They want to stuff creationism into the curriculum, somehow.
Board attorney Joseph Causey said it might be possible for the board to add creationism to the curriculum if it doesn’t replace the teaching of evolution.
Schools’ Superintendent Katie McGee said her staff would do research.
Babson said the board must look at the law to see what it says about teaching creationism, but that “if we can do it, I think we ought to do it.”
WHY? This is idiotic.
I think the square root of 9 is 27. I think that idea ought to be shared with the students in arithmetic class. As long as it doesn’t replace the teaching of the dogmatic opinion that the square root of 9 is 3, I think we ought to do it.
I think Moby Dick was written by Herman Shakespeare. I’m pretty sure we can find lots of Ph.D. experts in literature who will tell you that Shakespeare was the most important writer in our language, so I see no harm in promoting his importance further. If discussing Shakespeare’s extensive temporal contributions to American literature doesn’t replace a few a few American authors, it ought to be possible for the board to add my theory to the curriculum.
Creationism does not belong in the curriculum because it is wrong. Teaching is not a process of pouring random noise into the brains of young people and allowing them to pick and choose what they want to believe — it’s about giving kids a solid rational foundation for learning. Teach them lies and you’ve poisoned their minds for a lifetime, and here is a school board actively promoting harm to their charges.
For another take on teaching both sides, read some advocacy for teaching the controversy from a biblical point of view. Detailed dissection of the different claims of the book of Genesis will sow doubt in the minds of the students.
However, I disagree in one way — that doesn’t belong in science class. Spending more time teaching the garbage of chapter 1 of Genesis, and more, adding instruction in the garbage of chapter 2 of Genesis, is still teaching garbage, and giving too much time to nonsense. It’s useful for teaching that the Bible is an untrustworthy source, but that should not be part of the agenda of a science curriculum.
I’d like to see the kiddies learning that the Bible is incoherent trash in Sunday School.
