(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

This year’s International Blasphemy Day was on September 30. As the (no longer active) website created to propagate this said:

International Blasphemy Day is not just a day. It is a movement to dismantle the wall which exists between religion and criticism.
…
The objective of International Blasphemy Day is to open up all religious beliefs to the same level of free inquiry, discussion and criticism to which all other areas of academic interest are subjected.
…
International Blasphemy Day is a movement, not just a day, to remind the world that religion should never again be beyond open and honest discussion or reproach.

As usual with anniversaries and other commemorations, I forgot all about it until it was too late. But today’s post can be considered my belated contribution to that celebration.

The idea of free speech is something that everyone approves of, or at least gives lip service to. But when they hear speech that criticizes something that they personally cherish, then some people become willing to chip away at that right. That is a big mistake. The best way to combat speech that you disapprove of is not to abridge that right but to use more speech.

No rights are strictly absolute. All rights, however noble in concept, have inherent limitations as soon as one is part of any social community, because one person’s right should not be allowed to encroach on the rights of others, and free speech is no exception. As far as I can tell, the only restriction that the US Supreme Court has placed on free speech is when it creates a clear and present danger to other people’s safety, that threatens their rights to life and liberty. The classic example is the one that denies one the right to falsely shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

But there are always people who want to try and restrict free speech even in cases where there is no danger of immediate harm to others. For example, governments love to invoke ‘national security’ as an exception to free speech because that allows them to prevent the reporting of all their lies and mistakes and crimes.

Other attempts at restricting of free speech come in the form of seductive concerns about civility, arguing that speech should be restricted even if it merely offends people, simply because it expresses ideas that some or even most people find abhorrent. Hate speech legislation that restricts the rights of people to say despicable things against those they dislike is one such example. People who indulge in anti-gay, anti-women, and anti-minority rhetoric may be saying things that we despise and find positively hateful but that is not, by itself, sufficient to suppress their right to do so.

It becomes trickier when speech is used to actively incite violence against the people. People should not have the right to create an imminent danger to others, but defining ‘imminent danger’ and drawing the line between that and hateful, but legitimate, speech is not easy.

But of all the attempts at restricting free speech, are there any more obviously fatuous than the attempts to stifle criticisms of religion by creating laws against blasphemy? After all, blasphemy is aimed against god, the allegedly supreme being, the master of the universe, king of kings, lord of lords, the almighty who knows everything and can do anything. If his feelings are so sensitive, why on earth would he need our puny laws to protect them? He can just smite us with his preferred smiting weapons like floods and earthquakes and hurricanes.

The United States can be justly proud of the fact that unique among countries (I think) its constitution guarantees the right of free speech to everyone. And yet, in an appalling move, the Obama administration is supporting a UN movement backed by conservative Muslim countries to pass an international blasphemy law. George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley writes about the growth and use of such laws around the world:

Around the world, free speech is being sacrificed on the altar of religion. Whether defined as hate speech, discrimination or simple blasphemy, governments are declaring unlimited free speech as the enemy of freedom of religion. This growing movement has reached the United Nations, where religiously conservative countries received a boost in their campaign to pass an international blasphemy law. It came from the most unlikely of places: the United States.

While attracting surprisingly little attention, the Obama administration supported the effort of largely Muslim nations in the U.N. Human Rights Council to recognize exceptions to free speech for any “negative racial and religious stereotyping.”
…
In the resolution, the administration aligned itself with Egypt, which has long been criticized for prosecuting artists, activists and journalists for insulting Islam.
…
The public and private curtailment on religious criticism threatens religious and secular speakers alike. However, the fear is that, when speech becomes sacrilegious, only the religious will have true free speech.

Muslims in particular seem to think that their religion and their prophet should be protected from anything that they consider insulting, and they often threaten or even carry out violent attacks against those who are alleged to have offended their religion. But Muslims have no more right to be protected from statements they dislike than any other group. They can revere their prophet and their god as much as they want but it is absurd for them to expect the rest of us to do so or to not make fun of them for their irrational beliefs. Their running amok in 2006 when the Danish newspapers published cartoons of Mohammed is an example of what happens when people become too accustomed to thinking that their particular sacred cows should also be sacred to everyone. (I wrote about the cartoon controversy and the hypocrisy on all sides of that issue here and here.)

The true intent of blasphemy laws is to pander to the dominant religious bloc in a country and to preserve the protected status of at least some religious beliefs because people know deep down that religious beliefs have no rational basis and that if they are exposed to sustained criticism, the whole structure will fall apart.

POST SCRIPT: CNN and Christopher Hitchens on the UN move

You have to sit through Lou Dobbs’ anti-UN rant, his nativism, and xenophobia though. This report was back in February, before the Obama administration’s support for the move was announced in October.

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

Some time ago, I had a detailed critique of Francis Collins’s book The Language of God. Collins is a distinguished biologist who has done very good scientific work and successfully headed the massive Human Genome Project. However his book revealed the power of religion to turn its followers’ brains into mush when they discuss god and religion. It was an appalling exercise in logical fallacies and question-begging, using the common bait-and-switch argument style of arguing that since we have not yet explained how the world began, that meant that believing in the whole Jesus-god story was rational.
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

Some of the most powerful evidence for evolution comes from the geographic distribution of species, because we find the widest range and the strangest species in Australia, Madagascar, the Galapagos, and other isolated landmasses, some of them quite small islands.

Small but isolated regions turn out to be good breeding grounds for producing new species. When some members of a species get isolated from other members and their gene pools cease to mingle, then they start to diverge from each other. This is why one sees new species proliferating on islands or other forms of isolated areas due to separations caused by mountains or lakes or deserts. The appearance of the new species in these isolated areas is explained by requiring specimens of the ancestral species somehow making it to the remote location and reproducing there. The pattern that emerges is of the new species being different from, but sharing common features with, the parent species from which they originated.
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

In the previous post, I examined some of the ways in which young Earth creationists try to deal with the scientific evidence arrayed against them. In this post, I will look at how they deal with geology, which poses the biggest challenge to their belief that the Earth is 6,000 years old.

For example, they know that they have to deal with vast amounts of scientific data that puts the age of the Earth and the universe in the billions of years. For example, the rings of trees, the slow rates of sedimentation and erosion, the layering of soils, radiometric techniques that depend on the many different half-lives of radioactive elements, the rate of mutations in DNA, rate of continental drift, the switching of the magnetic fields at the undersea geologic faults due to continental drift, and fossils are all used to build a network of clocks that can date even very old events. All these clocks are constructed by calibrating them using known events and other clocks, once again showing the interconnectedness of science.

It is with the age of the Earth that the young Earth creationists face their biggest challenge because apart from the true believers, nowadays everyone else takes an old Earth for granted. Even the media, always solicitous of the sensitivities of their religious viewers when it comes to evolution, do not bother putting on a phony balancing act by suggesting that some people disagree with the scientific consensus of an Earth that is billions of years old.

But the creationists try to provide their followers with at least some reason to defy science. When it comes to challenging the ages of things as established by science, what the creationists do is seek out anomalies here and there in the radiometric results (and these can always be found because there are often confounding factors that prevent clean analysis in some cases) and then argue that all the dates for things and events cannot be trusted. They are using the same bogus argumentation as ‘Where is the missing link?’, where they pick on something they think is a weakness (whether it is or not) and then argue for throwing out the entire theory. So be prepared when talking to a creationist for them to quote some obscure result where, for example, radiometric dating suggests that something whose age is known was found to be wildly off.

As for geologic evidence, in the early days people could see that things like the creation of mountains and valleys and gorges and cliffs required some explaining, unless one assumed that they always existed. The popular scientific view of that time was that they were due to a series of large scale catastrophic events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the like, that caused massive changes to occur rapidly. This model had the generic title of ‘catastrophism’. People like paleontologist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) who advocated this model were not necessarily religious and the age they arrived at for the Earth was in the millions of years, which was quite an achievement, given how inconceivable such large time scales must have been to them, and that religious beliefs of that time pinned the value in the thousands of years.

In the early nineteenth century, during the time just prior to Darwin going on his famous voyage of discovery, catastrophism went into decline and the idea of ‘uniformitarianism’ took hold, which held that most of the major geological features could be explained by the slow and steady accumulation of very small changes. Of course this meant that the Earth must be much older than previously thought and new estimates by people like Charles Lyell ranged in the hundreds of millions of years. This advance had a major impact on evolutionary thinking in general and Darwin’s in particular. It helped him develop his idea that, just as major geological changes came about by incremental growth, small changes in organisms could, over a long time, also lead to major changes such as the creation of new species. And the much older Earth meant that there was enough time for those changes to have occurred. So again we see the interconnectedness of science, advances in geology leading to advances in biology, and the two needing to fit together.

To counteract this, what the young Earth creationists try to do is resurrect an extreme form of catastrophism, in which there was just one major event, Noah’s flood, that was responsible for pretty much everything that we see in the Earth’s features.

The creationists have been forced to concede some points. For example, they have been forced to accept that there was originally just one big land mass and that plate tectonics caused the break up and drifting apart of what we now call continents. (This raises the interesting question of why the Bible makes no mention of such a major event.) In order to make continental drift consistent with a 6,000 year old Earth, they have to argue that the speed of the moving continents reached orders of tens of miles per day or feet per second (i.e., at the rate of a brisk human walker), rather than the accepted range of 2-10 cm/year. Of course, this ‘continental sprint’ theory conveniently happened a long time ago, during Noah’s flood, and the continents then slowed down to their present slow rate, which is why we (conveniently) cannot detect these high speeds now.

They also need to assert that the reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field had to occur rapidly as well, flipping multiple times within the forty days. Though they are coy about how frequently it switched, a back-of-the-envelope calculation gives about once every hour! Of course sprinting continentals and magnetic fields run amok require that they try to construct a wholly different model of the Earth’s core to try and deal with all these problems, resulting in them further losing contact with mainstream science (and reality).

For the acceptance of these alternative realities by their followers, they have to depend on two things: Their ability to create faux-scientific theories that look and sound impressive enough to fool the naïve, and the ‘no one was around to see it then so how can we know for sure which theory is true’ fallacious argument to cast doubt on accepted scientific theories.

Next: The worldwide distribution of species

POST SCRIPT: Cherry picking health care comparisons

The health industry and its supporters know that if comparisons are made on the basis of aggregated data, the US compares terribly with other countries in the developed world. So what they do is try and divert the discussion by picking on one or two items in which the US looks relatively good and fixate on it. It is like the tactics used by creationists in opposing evolution, with their “Where are the missing links?” red herrings.

When a health industry shill tries this tactic on Al Franken at a Senate hearing, he knows exactly how to respond.

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

In the previous post I wrote about how Banana Man wants to make sure that you realize that you are a loathsome being because of your repeated sinning. On page 43 of his introduction to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Banana Man relentlessly pursues his theme that because god is just you cannot escape from god’s wrath. “To say that there will be no consequences for breaking God’s Law is to say that God is unjust, that he is evil.” It is clearly important to him that god be a macho god, a Rambo among gods, who invariably doles out righteous justice, and is nothing like the wimpy loving and merciful god propagated by those wussy liberal Christians.

To try to prove that point, Banana Man then tells us a tragic and true story:

On February 24, 2005, a nine-year-old girl was reported missing from her home in Homosassa, Florida. Three weeks later, police discovered that she had been kidnapped, brutally raped, and then buried alive. Little Jessica Lunsford was found tied up, in a kneeling position, clutching a stuffed toy.

So how does this incredibly sad story prove his point? Here’s what he says immediately following:

How do you feel toward the man who murdered that helpless little girl in such an unspeakably cruel way? Are you angered? I hope so. I hope you are outraged. If you were completely indifferent to her fate, it would reveal something horrible about your character.

Do you think that God is indifferent to such acts of evil? You can bet your precious soul he is not. He is outraged by them.

The fury of Almighty God against evil is evidence of his goodness. If He wasn’t angered, He wouldn’t be good. We cannot separate God’s goodness from His anger. Again, if God is good by nature, He must be unspeakably angry at wickedness.

So what does his mighty, righteous, and just god do in his fury to avenge this monstrous crime? Apart from being outraged, nothing at all as far as we can see, because Banana Man abruptly drops this topic and moves on to discuss other things. Even by the low standards of Banana Man, this ‘argument’ seems like a complete non sequitur. As far as I can figure, the point of this story is that Banana Man is saying his BFF god must be outraged because otherwise he wouldn’t be good. If he is good, he cannot be evil. But if god is not just, he would be evil. Since he is not evil, he must be just.

I think it is always interesting how religious people like Banana Man are always so sure that they know how god feels about things and what he will do to us after we die, while at the same time claiming total ignorance of why it is that we see absolutely no evidence at all while we are alive that god does anything at all.

But gratuitously introducing the sad story of Jessica actually works against him. If god is always just, then surely that must mean that in his eyes the little girl died a horrible death because she deserved it? If justice is that important to god, and she did not deserve to die, then god should have prevented her death. What’s the use in god being outraged by injustice if he doesn’t do anything about it? It would be like someone shouting at the TV when he sees something he dislikes. But unlike humans, Banana Man’s god supposedly has the power to change the programming. In fact, he writes the script for all the shows. So he is in a unique position to prevent the outrage in the first place rather than raging about it impotently afterwards. Why did he write a script in which Jessica died if he was going to be outraged by her death?

Banana Man does not even try to address this question because it is the age-old and insurmountable problem of theodicy, of why god allows evil if he is omnipotent and omniscient. The best that religious people can come up with is that god has some mysterious plan that we are not privy to now but will (conveniently) learn later, after we die or when the Rapture comes. In other words, we have the predictable reappearance of the ‘mysterious ways clause’ that religious believers have to keep invoking whenever they are trapped in a corner from which there is no escape.

The reason that Banana Man does not proffer even this pathetic excuse but simply ignores the issue is that if the death of Jessica was part of this grand and secret plan, then god should not be outraged, which undermines his argument for god being always just and unmerciful. In addition, up until that point he had given the impression that he is like Jeeves to Bertie Wooster’s god: He knows his master’s likes and dislikes, his moods, and his policies, maybe even his favorite brand of breakfast cereal. Creating that impression of intimacy is what he thinks gives him authority to make sweeping pronouncements about what god thinks of us and wants from us. To suddenly use ignorance of god as a defense would weaken his entire argument.

Next: Fear and loathing in the service of Jesus.

POST SCRIPT: Mr. Deity on why he doesn’t do anything to prevent suffering

A great description of all the problems of theodicy and the banal excuses people proffer for god when tragedies strike.

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

As we saw in the previous post, Banana Man goes to great lengths to make the case that everyone has broken all (or almost all) the ten commandments and thus we are all loathsome sinners and surely going to hell. The idea is to make people very, very scared.

In his attempt to scare the daylights out of people, Banana Man is not only fighting unbelieving evolutionists, he also has to combat the pernicious influence of liberal Christians who are undermining his spreading of fear by claiming that god is loving and merciful and won’t really send people to hell for eternity because that would be cruel.
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

In the first post in this series, I wrote about Banana Man’s arguments against evolution which, together with a short biography of Darwin, constitutes about 40 pages of his introduction to Origins. But even Banana Man must know that there was nothing new there. It was clear to me that this was just an excuse to gain attention and on the final pages 39-50, he gets down to the real issue that concerns him, which is to get you to come to Jesus.

Banana Man has a bigger challenge than the sophisticated religious intellectuals who are content to argue for the existence of merely a Slacker God. Such people like Karen Armstrong, Robert Wright, and H. E. Baber only wish to believe in the existence of something, anything at all, however small or inconsequential, that is outside the reach of scientific investigation. They then give that the name ‘god’ and move on. The existence of their god leads to no practical consequences whatsoever and the world would be indistinguishable whether their god existed or not, but this does not seem to bother them. For this reason I call such people ‘religious atheists‘.

Banana Man, however, believes in the literal truth of the Bible, in Jesus’ virgin birth and resurrection, in other words the whole Christian ball of wax. So he has a bigger task than the religious atheists. He not only has to argue for the existence of a supergod who intervenes in the universe all the time, he has to argue for existence of one and only one very specific god, the Jesus-god that he happens to believe in.

In order to achieve this you would think that, at the very least, he would try to show that the god of Christianity is the true god and all the other gods are false. But religious people cannot really argue for the falsity of other people’s gods because those same arguments can be used against their own god. So instead of true and false, Banana Man argues that Christianity offers goodies and rewards that the others don’t, which makes it preferable to believe in. It is like a store that competes against other stores in sales for the identical item by offering sale prices or throwing in a free toaster, and then suggesting that the resulting higher sales means that they are selling the genuine article while their competitors are selling counterfeit. The argument makes no sense.

So using a long and complicated metaphor involving what would be most useful if one were forced to jump out of a plane (seemingly inspired by seeing the Disney film Up), he tries to justify why it is better to be a Christian than to be a Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist.

Interestingly, he does not include Judaism in his list of loser religions. If you think about it, in his eyes Judaism should be an even bigger loser than Islam. At least Islam recognizes Jesus as a great prophet and is even willing to concede that god gave him a virgin birth and the power to do miracles, although not conceding that he is god incarnate. As far as Jews ago, Jesus was just an ordinary Jew of his time, if he existed at all.

But Christians in the US have come a long way since the days when they despised Jews as Christ-killers. While antipathy towards Jews may exist among individual Christians, a political alliance has been cemented between right wing Christians and right wing Jews. It is now Christianist policy to talk of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ heritage of the US and of ‘Judeo-Christian’ values and be nice to Jews and not say any bad things about them (at least publicly) even though they believe that when the Rapture comes, Jews who haven’t seen the light and come to Jesus are going to slaughtered by god, just like all the other unbelievers.

So how does Banana Man try to persuade the reader that Jesus is the only god they should believe in? Those familiar with Banana Man’s schtick know what to expect. He basically does the same thing that he and Crocoduck do when they are out evangelizing in the streets, which is that they accost random people and go through all the ten commandments, one by one, asking people which ones they’ve broken.

Just to be sure that you realize you have broken a lot and get a perfect or almost perfect score of 10, he takes liberties with the wording of the commandments. He says that any use of the word god other than in prayer constitutes taking god’s name in vain and is thus a violation of the third commandment. He expands the word ‘murder’ to include hate, justifying the modification by using some quote from Jesus. So if you’ve ever hated anyone, then you’ve broken the sixth commandment against committing murder. Again roping in Jesus, he expands the meaning of the word ‘adultery’ to include sex before marriage and even simple lust, just to make sure you have broken the seventh commandment.

Basically, the idea is to present you with a list of rules that he says that god insists that you follow but which are impossible to obey. The point of all this effort is so that he can then pass judgment on you and say that because you have violated all or almost all of the commandments, you are a disgusting sinner and thus doomed to spending eternity in hell.

So what’s the point? In the next post, we’ll see why he goes to all this trouble.

POST SCRIPT: Stephen Colbert interviews Richard Dawkins

Look closely and you will see that Dawkins is wearing a crocoduck tie.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Richard Dawkins

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Michael Moore

By the way, I found a nice image of the crocoduck.

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

A week or so ago, I wrote about Banana Man and Crocoduck’s excellent new adventure where, on November 19, they are going to give away 50,000 copies of Charles Darwin’s classic book On the Origin of Species on various college campuses (not sure if ours is one of the lucky ones) but with the added bonus of a 50 page introduction by Banana Man.

The Banana Man claims that in those 50 pages he will, using his demonstrated powerful reasoning powers and rhetorical skills that I described in that previous post, demolish the theory of evolution by natural selection that has, for the last century, been the foundation of biology. And who is better able to provide an introduction to one of the greatest works of science than someone whose understanding of evolutionary theory is so deep that he thinks the banana could not have evolved to be so perfectly suited to being eaten by humans and thus had to be directly made by god?

For those who cannot wait until November 19 to see what delights are in store in Banana Man’s introduction, you can see read it here. Oddly, the link to the introduction no longer works, although it was live for more than a week. I don’t know if it is a temporary server glitch or it has been pulled from the site for some reason. I had downloaded the introduction earlier and still have it but you will have to take my word for it about what it contains until the book appears or the link is restored.

For those others who cannot spare the time to read all fifty pages, I have decided to take one for the team and devote some time to prepare a CliffsNotes version of Banana Man’s thesis (with my own commentary added of course) and these will form the topic of posts for this week. The reason I am devoting so much time to this is partly in response to commenter Derek’s point some time ago that I should not devote all my attention on refuting only the sophisticated religious apologists who don’t believe in anything remotely resembling what the average believer thinks, but also examine the views of more traditional believers. The Banana Man is as unlike the sophisticated apologists as one can get. Derek had in mind people like Albert Mohler and Cornelius Van Til who are somewhere in between those two extremes but one has to start somewhere so I will start at the bottom with Banana Man and work myself up from there. Furthermore, a case can be made that the kinds of views expressed by Banana Man have a greater following than those of the others.

Anyway, here is what Banana Man says in his introduction:

Pages 1-4: Short biography of Darwin. Banana Man ends this section with “At the age of seventy-three, Charles Darwin went to meet his Maker at Down house on April 19, 1882, with his wife, Emma, by his side.”

When I first read this, I thought that Banana Man was saying that god lived at Down house and that was where Charles went after he died and that Emma went along with him, and thus must have died at the same time as Charles. Of course, this is not true but is the kind of misunderstanding that can arise when you use soothing religious euphemisms like ‘went to meet his Maker’ instead of the straightforward ‘died’.

Since Darwin was an unrepentant agnostic right to the end, we have to assume that the Maker scolded him and sent the naughty boy to his room without dessert.

Pages 4-8: Timeline of Darwin’s life.

It is after this that the ‘attack’ on the theory of evolution begins in earnest. Given the level of Banana Man’s understanding of the theory, his attack on Darwin is like (to use the late Molly Ivins’ memorable phrase) being gummed by a newt.

Pages 9-15: Shorter version:

“Wow! Isn’t DNA amazing? It contains such a lot of information! It couldn’t have occurred by chance. Hence god exists.”

In other words, we get an argument from personal incredulity, based on the willful misrepresentation that evolution by natural selection occurs by pure chance.

Pages 15-22: Shorter version:

“There are no transitional forms. Hence evolution is wrong. Hence god exists.”

Sadly, Banana Man disses his faithful sidekick Kirk Cameron by not including the latter’s ingenious crocoduck argument. Why the omission? Does he also think Cameron’s argument is ludicrous? Et tu, Brute?

Pages 22- 28: Shorter version:

“I don’t understand how the blood circulatory system or the eye came about. Hence god exists.”

In other words, another argument from personal incredulity. Oddly enough, Banana Man does not include as another example the very banana that he had earlier described as providing irrefutable proof of god’s existence because it was so perfectly suited for human eating and impossible to conceive of as having evolved. Given that he will be forever after permanently associated with that fruit, the omission is inexplicable.

Page 29: Shorter version:

“Some vestigial organs may have some purpose. Hence god exists.”

Pages 30-36: Shorter version:

“Darwin was a racist and misogynist. Hitler was evil and an evolutionist. Hence Darwin was evil like Hitler. Hence the theory of evolution is bad. Hence god exists.”

Pages 36-39: Shorter version:

“Darwin and Albert Einstein and some other well-known figures in scientific history were not atheists. Richard Dawkins and Francis Crick cannot prove that god does not exist. Hence god exists.”

This was pretty much it as far as arguing against the theory of evolution went. Frankly, I was disappointed. Given all the money and resources that Banana Man was pouring into this venture, I had expected better arguments or at least a mention of those golden oldies, the banana and the crocoduck.

As one can see, these are the same old arguments against evolution that have been thoroughly refuted over and over again. Biologist Jerry Coyne makes a clinical dissection of these arguments against evolution here.

I think that Herbert Spencer’s response in 1891 is still the best: “Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution as not being adequately supported by facts, seem to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.”

Next: The last ten pages where Banana Man gets to the point of the exercise.

POST SCRIPT: Mr. Deity explains how baptism by water came about

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(My new book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from the publishers Rowman & Littlefield for $34.95, from Amazon for $31.65, from Barnes and Noble for $26.21 ($23.58 for members), and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

Those two mighty warriors for Jesus, evangelist Ray Comfort and his trusty sidekick the aging Boy Wonder Kirk Cameron, have come up with a new scheme for fighting the evil theory of evolution which they, along with many religious people, think is threatening to bring about the end of civilization as we know it. Two days before the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species on November 21, they plan to distribute 50,000 free copies of the book at 50 prominent universities. The catch? They have added a 50-page introduction where Comfort will point out all the flaws in the theory. They can do this because the copyright has expired on Darwin’s book.
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