Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Feedback

This afternoon Creationist Idiocy had a visit from an anonymous reader who left half a dozen comments on various posts. Whoever it was, they apparently took objection to my Creationists That Look Like Apes series, calling it:
stupid and unscientific

They appear to have missed the point of those posts by quite a wide margin:
i can make evolutionist monkeys too

The reader was also upset by my blog's sub-heading, which they countered with:

I think this blog is clear evidence that you can't spell "evolutionist" without "insolent".

...which would almost be clever if not for the fact that there's only one n in evolutionist. Anyways, I much prefer "You can't spell evolutionist without i love u".

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Hovind Junior: Still Confused

Hovind Junior's latest (and final?) creation minute video is out:


Chemical evolution is the origin of all the elements we have today.

Wrong. That's nucleosynthesis.
Stellar evolution is the origin of stars and planets.

Wrong. Stellar evolution describes how the properties of individual stars change during their lifetimes.
Organic evolution is the origin of life from non-life.

Wrong. That's abiogenesis.

You might wonder why Hovind seems to have decided to attack other branches of science unrelated to Darwinian evolution. Take stellar evolution, for example. The processes by which stars alter in their structure and luminosity might not seem at first to pose any problems to creationists. Not true. Cosmologists have found (through observation and study, Eric) that stars go through very distinct stages throughout their lifetimes and depending on their type. There are logical and testable theories that describe and explain this stellar evolution in detail, and these are fully consistent with other areas of science such as nuclear physics and thermodynamics. These theories, however, prove that the universe must be much older than 6000 years (to make an understatement). Here lies a big problem for creationists. It's not just Darwinian evolution that debunks their creation myth, it's pretty much every field of science. And heck, not just science, but history too. So if creationists get their way and Darwinian evolution is banned from school science classes, which subject will they go after next?

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Flood Geology?

I've just returned from a two week vacation, so I'll be posting here more regularly from now on. During our trip, my wife and I visited Bar Harbor, Maine, where I snapped this photo:


It's a large boulder sitting on the side of a mountain looking rather out of place. How did it get there? It's near the top, so it can't have fallen from somewhere higher up. The answer is that it was carried there by a glacier. Anyone who has seen a glacier will know that they move very slowly, so glacial action/transport can become a problem for young-Earth creationists since these pesky ice ages appear to have occurred over much longer timeframes than 6000 years. The "solution" that creationists have come up with is "flood geology". Creationists will talk about this as if it's a fully developed theory with true explanatory power, but really it's as vaccuous as their "God did it" explanation of how the universe was created:

Q: How are mountains formed?
Geologist: Upheaval caused by colliding tectonic plates.
Creationist: Noah's flood did it.

Q: How did sedimentary rocks form?
Geologist: Layer by layer deposition and high pressures over many years.
Creationist: Noah's flood did it.

Q: How is it that large boulders that don't match surrounding rocks can appear on top of mountains?
Geologist: They were carried there by glaciers.
Creationist: Noah's flood did it.

The problem with that, of course, is that rocks don't float. But flood geologists don't tend to let something so trivial as logic get in their way. Check out Hovind Junior's latest creation minute:



A handful of creationists have tried to expand upon "the flood did it" and have come up with some seriously bizarre theories and models. I'll be posting some of these soon, so watch this space.