Beale vs. Plait

Now the odious Vox Day is ranting about how the discovery of dark matter and dark energy refute “rational materialist philosophy,” because somehow it ties into the inapplicability of naturalism to “justice, equality, and freedom”. Phil Plait quite rightly slams him back.

I have to give Blake Stacey the prize for the most succinct rebuttal, however.

I don’t understand how people can use the discoveries of science to argue that science is broken. It’s bass ackwards, that’s what it is.

Not surprising, though; Theodore Beale aka Vox Day is a notorious loon, well known for making the most absurd claims as if they were just ordinary common sense.

It’s a conspiracy!

So a guy gets a little older, and what happens? All these people try to draw attention to my age, largely with a collection of photoshopped pictures of yours truly. Don’t they know I’m funny-looking enough that no photoshop is necessary?

By the way, I got a nice present from my family: a new, ergonomic Cephalopod Throne. You’ll be reassured to know that now, when I fling thunderbolts of furious vituperation about the web, I shall be doing so with excellent posture.

Why do newspapers continue to publish Discovery Institute press releases?

A reader brought to my attention this outrageously dishonest mangling of a quote by that creationist, Casey Luskin. He writes:

In January, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences weighed in on this debate, declaring that “[t]here is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution,”1 because neo-Darwinism is “so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter“2 it. As an undergraduate and graduate student taking multiple courses covering evolutionary biology at the University of California San Diego, that is what I was told as well. My science courses rarely, if ever, allowed students to seriously entertain the possibility that Darwin’s theory might be fundamentally flawed.

First rule of reading creationist literature: never trust an ellipsis. They always leave something significant out to change the meaning. Second rule of reading creationist literature: if they don’t use an ellipsis, they’re still going to distort a quote. Basically, you can’t trust anything these guys say. Luskin is claiming to be quoting something from the National Academy of Sciences booklet, Science, Evolution, and Creationism. How honest is his scholarship?

The first part of the quote is from page 52, near the end of the book. Here it is in context:

1There is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution. In this sense the intelligent design movement’s call to “teach the controversy” is unwarranted. Of course, there remain many interesting questions about evolution, such as the evolutionary origin of sex or different mechanisms of speciation, and discussion of these questions is fully warranted in science classes.

Where do you think we’ll find the second half of his quote? Page 53, maybe? Page 54? No. You’ll have to thumb backwards through the book, to a place near the beginning: page 16.

2Many scientific theories are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them substantially. For example, no new evidence will demonstrate that the Earth does not orbit around the Sun (heliocentric theory), or that living things are not made of cells (cell theory), that matter is not composed of atoms, or that the surface of the Earth is not divided into solid plates that have moved over geological timescales (the theory of plate tectonics).

So what Casey Luskin has done is to flip through the book and manufacture quotes by splicing together clauses from scattered sentences. Students who tried to pull this kind of unethical crap in a term paper would get an automatic “F” from me…yet Luskin reportedly has a law degree.

Aren’t journalists supposed to have some kind of ethical standards about this sort of thing? Do they simply suspend any regard for reasonable journalistic values when some right-wing think-tank like the Discovery Institute mails in some PR pablum?

Sunday events

Important news!

  • Daylight Saving TIme begins at 2am on Sunday, 8 March. Remember to set your clocks ahead one hour.

  • You better set those clocks correctly so you can catch Atheists Talk radio at 9am. This week, it’s interviews with some of the bigwigs of American Atheists.

  • Yeah, it’s my birthday on Sunday. I’ll be of the age that means I have three 17 year olds yammering at each other in my cranium, and I’m going to celebrate it with a quiet day spent getting some writing done.

Godawful academic mess

Several people have asked me to dig into this and post something on Pharyngula, but I really don’t want to — the more I look at it, the more I recoil in baffled disgust. Cedarville University, one of those bizarre Christian colleges that just makes me want to gag in the first place, has terminated the contracts of two tenured faculty, David Hoffeditz and David Mappes, in their biblical studies department. Right away, I oppose the action of the university on general principles: short of engaging in some kind of criminal behavior, it’s a key part of academic freedom that tenure means the freedom to explore any intellectual path, no matter how weird. I even support Michael Behe’s tenure at Lehigh, and you all know how looney I think he is.

So what did Hoffeditz and Mappes do to earn revocation of tenure? Rob a bank, seduce a student, make death threats to Howard Stern? None of the above: they chose sides in an extremely abstract and utterly useless theological debate.

A theological impasse dividing Cedarville’s campus has also played a role in the controversy. Known as the “truth and certainty debate,” the dispute involves a somewhat rarefied but hotly contested question of faith: Can Christians enjoy certainty of Biblical truth, or do they merely have the assurance of their faith that the Bible is factual?

It is a question that folds into a still larger debate over how much Christianity should reconcile with the intellectual context of postmodernity. Those who hold to a belief in certainty, Mr. Hoffeditz and Mr. Mappes among them, tend to consider themselves more theologically conservative.

Those theological themes figured prominently in the open letter written this January to the faculty, administration, and trustees of Cedarville by a group of 14 current and emeritus Cedarville faculty members–a group calling itself the “Coalition of the Concerned.”

That letter refers to Mr. Mappes and Mr. Hoffeditz–and also to three other professors who either resigned or were denied tenure in the 2006-7 academic year–as “theologically conservative” members of the Bible department. “There is fear that other theologically conservative members within the department and the general faculty may be terminated,” the letter says.

It’s like watching two groups of clowns arguing over the brand of cream pie filling they should use, only less substantial. It just confirms my opinion that any parent who sends a child to Cedarville is doing them a criminal disservice — please send them to a real college, OK?

However, it also looks like Cedarville doesn’t really have academic freedom — the point of academic freedom is that you don’t get to fire professors for holding views that you find objectionable, and that’s exactly what is going on here. On top of all that, the American Association of University Professors is investigating the case, and they’ve said flat out that it’s problematic because church-related institutions have “explicit limitations on academic freedom” … which is to my mind grounds for denying them the privilege of being called an institution of higher education in the first place.

Roland Emmerich: the upscale Uwe Boll

I’ve been seeing all the ads for this new movie, 10,000 BC, but I haven’t even been tempted to want to think about going to see it. Come on, people: One Million Years B.C., while even more grossly inaccurate, at least had Raquel Welch in that adorable bikini, and Quest for Fire had the invention of the missionary position. This movie has nothing but nicely modeled woolly mammoths, and I don’t see any teenagers stampeding the head shops for that poster to hang on their bedroom walls.

Anyway, here’s a review of the latest dreck from Emmerich. That’s as close as I’m getting to it.