Well, I thought I was done with Mike S. Adams, but I keep getting sucked back in. I was asked by the University Register, our weekly campus newspaper, to submit an editorial on Adams’ talk last week. “Sure,” I said, and whipped out eleven hundred words. You can read them in situ in the online edition of the Register, or you can look below the fold.
If you’re a fan of mangled philosophy and patent falsehoods, you really must read the Biblical view of science. It’s crazily disconnected from anything close to describing how science actually works.
What then is the Biblical view of science? Science enables us to fulfill the mandate of Genesis 1:28: “Then God blessed them [Adam and Eve], and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the Earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the Earth.’ ” Science gives us directions for doing things, or “operating,” in this world. It does not explain how the laws of nature work, nor does it accurately define or describe things. Science does not discover truth; it is a method for dominating and utilizing nature; it is merely a practical discipline that helps us live in God’s universe and subdue it.
What follows are a set of explanations that contain a kernel of truth, based on scientists’ own recognition of difficulties in science, but they’re all turned up to 11. The problem of induction becomes the fallacy of induction, for instance, and he asserts that science can never give true statements. The unreliability of observation becomes a suggestion that one should never trust observations. There’s a blanket statement that all scientific laws are based on fallacious arguments. Reasonable reservations taken from poorly understood philosophy of science articles become absolutist declarations, all with the intent of showing science to be completely bogus.
Basically, the author has taken valid concerns about the degree of certainty we can have about the world around us and amplified them into absolute rejections of scientific knowledge. It’s a caricature gone so far overboard that it has become a completely dishonest representation of that which it seeks to describe—there is no vestige of science visible in this concatenation of foolishness.
Well, you might wonder, if science is all wrong, if it’s just a tool for increasing crop yields and building tanks, if we’re not even supposed to believe the evidence of the world around us, how are we supposed to obtain knowledge?
Did you even have to ask?
Science has its place in a Christian philosophy, an important place. But science is never to be seen as a means of learning truth. Truth is found in the Scriptures alone; the Bible has a monopoly on truth. It is God’s Word that must be believed, not the experiments of men. As Robbins has said: “Science is false, and must always be false. Scripture is true and must always be true. The issue is as clear, and as simple, as that.”
Ah, yes. We must replace the uncertainties and difficulties of science with the Absolute Truth of an old and confusing book jobbed together by committees of priests…and questioning it is not allowed! It’s always true! Always, always, always!
Be afraid. There are millions of Americans who believe that, who would like to see that open, skeptical, continually tested model of scientific endeavor replaced with the complete certainty of their interpretation of the Bible. There are millions more who think we shouldn’t argue with these lies, because it annoys moderate Christians.
Mike Adams latest column is all about his UMM visit…although, actually, it’s more of a whine about me.
Dr. P.Z. Myer did, in fact, make my talk Thursday night and something very strange happened: He, too, experienced a sudden and dramatic change in his level of courage during the course of the speech.
During the question and answer session, Professor Myer simply leaned against a door post with his arms crossed and said nothing. He just stared at me blankly and stood motionless in the same place where he was standing for the last twenty minutes of the speech. During the “Q & A”, I looked directly at him and asked “Are there any other questions?”
He looked directly at me? How was I supposed to tell? He is correct that there was a big crowd there, and a spillover into the hallway. I arrived late, and there were 3 or 4 people in front of me before the entrance…as they trickled away at the end, I worked my way farther forward. I only got as far as the door by the halfway point in the Q&A.
I’d be flattered that he noticed my presence if he weren’t such a pathetic gomer.
More important than what the video will show is what it will not show. Specifically, there will be no image of Dr. Myer mustering the courage to ask a question of Dr. Adams. Instead, he simply cowered away, and then ran back to his home computer in order to blog a fictitious account of a wonderful event — probably while sitting in his pajamas.
But it is a shame that Dr. Myer lacked the courage to ask me a single question. I certainly had a couple to ask of him. And I’ll bet the audience would have liked to hear him explain how an evolutionist who deems the universe to be accidental can be so full of moral superiority. Or perhaps how the accidental moralist can be an atheist and yet so angry at God.
It takes courage for a man to admit that he is sometimes afraid. But that courage is not a gift of random mutation. It is a gift from a God who loves even the most hardened atheist.
“Cowered away”? Or stood (apparently, prominently) at the door listening?
It wasn’t a lack of courage, I have to say. I have a personal policy at these sorts of talks of always giving the students first crack at speakers, no matter whether I approve of them or not. I’ve been at events where a professor and a speaker get into a little dialog at the end, and entertaining as it might be, it’s not as instructive as getting the students involved. While the students were readily raising their hands, even if they were college Republicans, I wasn’t going to interrupt. And the questions were still coming fast when the organizer peremptorily ended the session.
Since he had questions for me, I suppose he could have asked them directly, since he seems to have noticed me there; I think he’d reply rightly that he wouldn’t do that as long as he was getting questions from his audience. In this column, he could have replied to my complaints about the unlikelihood of his stories—a guy who claims he converted to being a far right wing Republican because of his revulsion at the unprincipled abuses of their immense power by feminists has some explainin’ to do—but whining that I didn’t ask a question at his talk is mighty feeble stuff.
And speaking of courage—complaining on the web about a criticism while not giving a link and misspelling the critic’s name, let alone neglecting to address any of the points, is at best discourteous, and more likely a reluctance to let his happy audience of cheerleaders actually see the substance of the complaints.
But here’s a deal. Since Dr. Mike S. Adams is such an avid proponent of seeing alternative points of view expressed on college campuses, and since he has so much clout at the UNC as a beloved professor, he can always get one of the campus organizations there to invite me out to his university (I expect the same honorarium he got here, of course) to give a talk on evolution and creationism, and then he can ask me his questions. I’ll even make sure to keep a seat in the front row open for him.
His readers apparently are smart enough to figure out my email address despite Adams’ coy misdirection. I’ve got lots of messages calling me a “liberal pussy” this morning—why are they calling me that which Mike S. Adams fears the most?
I did manage to get to Mike S. Adams’ talk here at UMM. It was a packed room (not our biggest lecture room here, but it was filled to capacity) and I arrived late, so I had to stand outside the door to listen in. Kudos to our students, who were polite and attentive, and let him blather on without interruption.
Adams is a slick, fast-talking, folksy guy, and he made the audience laugh quite a bit. He had to talk fast, though, to keep his story from sinking beneath the weight of its improbabilities, and I do wonder how many of our students actually caught on to his inconsistencies.
A candidate for state superintendent of eduction in Oklahoma has finally figured out what those things called “textbooks” are for: they’re good body armor. His solution to school violence is to explain to kids how they can use a supply of old textbooks to stop bullets.
He is a Republican, of course.
He has a video of himself firing an arsenal at various books. It’s brilliant: he’s going to appeal to all the gun-nut voters, all the voters who hate books, and every idiot in Oklahoma. That’s a big slice of the population.
One flaw: true Republican patriots might wonder why he isn’t shipping all his excess bullet-stopping books to Iraq to protect our troops.
Did the internet get stupider while I was away this past week? I mean, it’s gratifying to my ego to imagine the average IQ of the virtual collective plummeting when I take some time off, but I really can’t believe I personally have this much influence. Maybe the kooks crept out in my absence, or maybe it was just the accumulation of a week’s worth of insanity that I saw in one painful blort when I was catching up.
What triggers such cynicism is the combination of Deepak Chopra, Oliver Curry, and now,
William Tucker. Tucker wrote a remarkably silly piece in the American Spectator in which he drew deeply faulty conclusions from human genetics to support a thesis rife with misogyny and foolish chauvinism on human evolution. It was like a piece on evolutionary psychology written by someone who didn’t know any genetics at all.
Hang on to your hats—we’re going to see a factoid from one magazine article balloon up into a declaration of the superiority of the male species (I use “species” here both ironically and mockingly).
Steve Sailer, of course.
While I’m out of town, my introductory biology students are getting a lecture on species concepts and systematics from one of my colleagues, and it fits in perfectly with that link, too. In my absence even, freshman college students are smarter and better informed than Sailer.
Deepak Chopra really is an embarrassment. I’ve tussled with his weird arguments before, and now he’s flounced onto the Huffington Post with another article (prompted by an article on human genetics in Time, but bearing almost no relationship to it) in which he reveals his profound ignorance of biology, in something titled The Trouble With Genes. Chopra is a doctor, supposedly, but every time I read something by him that touches on biology, he sounds as ignorant as your average creationist. He also writes incredibly poorly, bumbling his way forward with a succession of unlikely and indefensible claims. This latest article is one in which I think he’s trying to criticize the very idea of genes, but it’s more like he’s criticizing his own lack of knowledge.
The Twin Cities were
infested with a rather noxious parasite this week: Dobson and his crew of holy bible-thumpers. I know the Minnesota Atheists were out protesting, but Eva and Avidor actually attended the event, and came back with videos. So, if you really want to see Gary Bauer again, or watch the crowds swoon over James Dobson, Lloyletta has the YouTube links.
Why do we put up with these insane people? This is painful to listen to: it’s an NPR interview with John Hagee, and he goes on and on about his weird biblical prophecies that soon (maybe in the next hour!) the Rapture is going to occur, war will break out with Russia and Islam against Israel, and God will make an abrupt magical appearance that will prove his existence. It’s got excerpts from his looney-tunes sermons. We get to hear that “All Moslems have a mandate to kill Christians and Jews.” And what about Hurricane Katrina? “New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God…all of the city was punished for the sin that was in that city.”
Terry Gross is much, much too nice to this raving lunatic.
