Boston, land of…creationists?

Here’s a little secret about getting a graduate degree: it helps to be a little bit crazy. You are dedicating a good chunk of your life to the pursuit of some very abstract knowledge after all, and as a reward, you get faint hopes of landing a low-paying job in your field. A bigger secret: you can even be a lot crazy and still manage to land that degree (you, in the back: stop pointing and snickering at me!)

So it means precisely nothing when someone brags about finding a Ph.D. willing to espouse utter nonsense. It happens all the time — the degree in itself is not an indicator of credibility. It always amuses me to see the creationists getting so excited at finding someone with a doctorate willing to stand up and disavow everything he supposedly learned so that he can praise Jesus and declare the earth to be only 6,000 years old.

For example, right now a creationist with a Harvard science degree is lecturing in Boston on Evolution: Bankrupt Science; Creationism: Science You Can Bank On. Obviously, Dr Nathaniel Jeanson is one of the fruit loops who plodded through a graduate program.

The good news is that the Boston Skeptics are on his tail and will be reporting on the event. I’ll be looking forward to the dissection.

No apologies

Some very persnickety people have been demanding that I apologize for riding a fiberglas dinosaur at the Creation “Museum”, because it had a sign saying it was intended only for those under the age of 12. I’ve thought about it. There is that sign, after all, and if I’d looked a little more carefully, I might have noticed it.

But then, I realized that I still would have clambered aboard. There isn’t the slightest twinge of repentance in my heart. I’ll even encourage everyone else to jump on, if you go there — it’s irresistibly ludicrous, and is a good way to thumb your nose at the goofballs running that show. Of course, now they’re going to have a guard hovering around it all the time, so it may be a little trickier. You may also get tased.

If you absolutely must have an excuse, though, it’s easy. Ken Ham claims that the world, which by all objective, scientific measures is 4.5 billion years old, is actually only 6,000 years old. Scaling ages by this metric, that means that greying 52 year old geezers like me are only 36 minutes old — obviously, I was created with the appearance of age. 36 minutes is much, much less than 12 years, so I was clearly within the allowed range. What that sign really means is that you must be under 90 million scientific years to ride the dinosaur.

Creepy ol’ Ken Ham

Ken Ham is whining about me again — this time, I am “this atheist professor”. He really chokes over my name, doesn’t he?

Anyway, that’s not interesting. What is bizarre is this photo and question:

Where were these taken?

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Answer: In the AiG parking lot when the 285 atheists visited.  As one looks at the messages on these bumper stickers, we need to pray for these very lost people who so desperately need the Lord.  Actually, I believe some of these messages really do reflect what the devil offered Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, “you shall become as gods…”

This is creepy on two levels: that Ken Ham sent his goons out to photograph the cars of visitors, which speaks of a very deep paranoia, and that he finds these simple bumper stickers to be satanic. He needs to pray for people who voted for Obama? People who value ethics and doing good are desperate need of the lord?

He’s a sick, warped man.

We’re still beating Turkey!

When we Americans need a little reassurance that we aren’t Number Last (or reminders that it could get worse), all we have to do is look to Turkey. A Turkish television show had a ‘debate’ that attempted to disprove evolution, in which the audience was treated to some serious intellectual problems.

They called in the question which evolution created angel and daemon, how felicities in the heaven evolved, how the snake came into existence out of the baton as well as the bird out of mud. The creationists tried to disprove evolution theory with these questions.

I give up. They’re right. Evolution cannot explain the origin of angels and demons. And that talking snake? It’s a complete mystery to the world of science.

The next big thing from the creationist movie community

Kevin Miller, screenwriter for the propaganda film Expelled, has a new project in the works that follows in the Christian movie tradition.

Creation, Resurrection Pictures’ first original film project—a humorous and tearful story of a high school biology teacher’s struggle to expose the lie of evolution, based on the life of creation evangelist Dr. Kent Hovind and written by Kevin Miller the writer of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is scheduled for production in 2010.

I was rolling my eyes, nothing more, as I read that, until I hit those magic words, “Dr Kent Hovind”…then I had to smirk. Seriously? Tax cheat and fraud and recipient of an advanced degree from an unaccredited split-level diploma mill in Colorado, with a dissertation that begins “Hello, my name is Kent Hovind”, and that is little more than a collection of magazine articles snipped out and pasted in a scrap book…and that is Kevin Miller’s hero?

I predict that there will be a wee bit of truth-stretching in that screenplay.

But will they come when you do call for them?

Peter Irons wrote a letter to Murray Gell-Mann.

Dear Dr. Gell-Mann,

You may (or may not) know that Stuart Pivar has included on the jacket and promotional materials for his new book, On the Origin of Form, a purported endorsement by you of the book, which reads: “This is the discovery of the connection between the laws of physics and the complexity of life.”

Mr. Pivar used the same quote, attributed to you, in promoting his previous book, Life Code.

I have learned that this quote is drawn from promotional material written by the publicist for your book, The Quark and the Jaguar, which reads: “This is Gell-Mann’s own story of finding the connections between the basic laws of physics and the complexity and diversity of the natural world.”

I have raised with Mr. Pivar and Jon Goodspeed, editorial director of North Atlantic Books, the distributor of On the Origin of Form, the question of whether you in fact have authorized Mr. Pivar and Mr. Goodspeed to use the above quote in promoting the book. Neither has yet replied, which prompts this message to you.

In a comment posted on August 14 on the science blog Pharyngula, Mr. Pivar has written, in response to my questions, that “Murray Gell Man (sic) has visited my lab three or four times in the past year, has read the book and compared it to the statement on the cover of his own book….” He seems to be asserting that you havee given him verbal authorization to use the above quote in promoting his book.

However, most reputable publishers have a standard practice of requiring that authors provide them with written authorization from potential “blurbers” of quotes attributed to them. I’m sure you will agree this is a reasonable practice, to protect publishers from possible complaints or even lawsuits from persons whose words are used without authorization.

By way of background, I understand that North Atlantic Books has already held up distribution of Mr. Pivar’s book after receiving a complaint from Dr. Robert Hazen, an eminent geologist at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, that Mr. Pivar intended to use excerpts from private communications between him and Dr. Hazen in promoting the book, selecting only those few favorable comments about the theory proposed by Mr. Pivar, and deleting the more numerous critical comments. This is a practice known as “cherry-picking” or “quote-mining,” to which Dr. Hazen understandably objected. Mr. Pivar has threatened to sue Dr. Hazen for demanding that his largely negative review be used in its entirely, or not at all.

I have a simple question: have you authorized either Mr. Pivar or Mr. Goodspeed, in writing, to use the quote attributed to you in promoting Mr. Pivar’s book? You may have done so, or will do so in response to this message, in which case this issue will become moot.

I would very much appreciate a response to this message.

Sincerely,

Peter Irons, Ph.D., J.D.
Professor of Political Science, Emeritus
University of California, San Diego

And what do you know, he replies out of the vasty deep!

Dear Professor Irons,

The answer is No. I never authorized using any endorsement by me of
Stuart Pivar’s book. I did hear that something of the sort might
happen and called to prevent it, but I was too late.

Murray Gell-Mann

I smell another lawsuit on the horizon.

Now I’m a “firebrand”!

Cool, I’ll accept the title. One of the reporters who joined us in Kentucky has a nice article on the Creation “Museum” trip in the Star Tribune. One thing I appreciate about it is that he actually quotes us on the scientific flaws in the exhibits.

There is a very silly quote from Ken Ham, of course.

“Our own, full-time Ph.D. scientists and many other scientists who work in the secular world provided the research for the museum scripts,” replied Ham. “This man is obviously very angry at God and relishes in mocking Christianity — spending a lot of his time fighting against someone he doesn’t believe exists!”

No, repeating a lie does not make it true. There is no research backing up the “museum” — there is ideology and religion and a crack team of highly educated crackpots.

And he repeats his desperate ad hominem — yes, I’m an atheist, and yes, I dislike religion. So? That has nothing to do with the validity of those ghastly ignorant exhibits.