Fairness and Balance

As well as Creation, there's a second movie about Charles Darwin being released this year. It's called The Voyage That Shook The World, and is funded by Creation Ministries International, so expect nothing less than some hardcore creationist propaganda. According to PZ Myers:

They got several Darwin experts (Peter Bowler, Sandra Herbert, and Janet Browne) to appear in the "documentary" by concealing their motives. And then they admit to cherry-picking the interviews to put together their story.

The movie's website has a page entitled Digging Deeper, which promises "more information about origins from leading sources of both viewpoints". Sounds reasonable, right? Wrong. The page offers two links, one for creation and one for evolution. The creation link leads to the pretty, expensive-looking Creation Ministries website:


...while the evolution link leads to this:

When Idiots Collide...

Hovind Junior's blog is attracting some real intellectuals. Check out the comment left by this geological genius:

The continents move an estimated 0.75 inches (19 millimeters) annually. When India "collided" with Asian, would the impact really have been hard enough to cause the formation of a mountain range?

John "Wrong"

At least the guy chose an accurate username.

Feedback

So your entire website is based on childish mockery in which you seek to ridicule someone else's beliefs? Wow.

Oh noes, nasty internet man is cruels to us.

There is so much on here, I actually question your employment status.

What? I post two or three times a week, it's hardly a full-time job.

I for one do not question all of evolutionary theory, some of it is very viable.

Unhelpful. Tell me which bits you do question and we might make some progress.

I will say though as a Christian, that not all of us believe in the book of Genesis as a true history and that not all creationists beleive that the world in less than 6000 years old.

If you don't subscribe to biblical literalism, there are many prominent creationists (Ham, Comfort, Sarfarti) who would question your faith and even your right to call yourself a Christian.

I do see that your website is based on hate of differing views other then your own.

No, but it is partly based on my hatred of creationist lies and propaganda.

In the end, Creationists are usually happier people, who base their lives around community and understanding while evolutionists are usually just hateful, selfish people who end up with nothing out of life.

Sure. Right.

Even if an afterlife does not exist, nothing is lost to anyone, but if there is.....

I'm happy to take my chances, thanks.

Anyway, we all need to live a meaningful life and stop trying to make people feel stupid for their beliefs.

If everyone was willing to keep their groundless beliefs to themselves, that would be fine.

BTW, I hold a Masters of evolutionary studies and a Masters of Div.

Not impressed, sorry.

Its rewarding for any intelligent person to study both sides of an argument.

I've probably read more creationist literature than pro-evolution. I've found it invariably to be either stupid or plain dishonest.

In the end, neither group can claim to have the one answer of how the beginning started.

But there are true answers out there, and those offered by religious texts have been long disproven.

Moron of the Month: Sean McDowell

Sean McDowell runs Worldview Ministries, whose mission statement is "Teaching Truth to Transform Lives". Despite the ninth Christian commandment, it's clear that Sean is quite happy with a pretty loose definition of the word truth. He co-authored a book on intelligent design with William Dembski, describing ID as a "scientific endeavor" that is "revolutionizing science", and he has a whole bunch of moronic essays online here. Let's start with his article "Is the Chimp-Mauling Darwin's Fault?":

This week we received the sobering news that a 55-year old woman was nearly killed by a 200 pound chimp. [...] How is it that we live in a culture where people think it's safe to have a chimpanzee as a pet? [...] In fact, there is one culprit for the idea that human beings and chimps are really not that different and should be treated that way: Darwinism. [...] If humans and chimps are really not that different, then why not expect chimps to act civilly?

You only have to walk through a city centre on a Friday night (or watch Cops) to understand that it's not just chimps that are wild, dangerous animals, but people too. Darwin's ideas can provide explanations for this behaviour, while the Genesis account (Eve robbed a piece of fruit, so nobody's perfect) is at best... unsatisfactory. The bible's notion that we are made in the image of God also poses further questions, like why would God need toenails? Do they grow? Does he have to cut them? And does God look anything like this:


Elsewhere, Sean gets confused between HIV (a virus) and AIDS (a disease):

Probably no challenge is raised more frequently than the seemingly "evil designs" in nature, such as the AIDS virus or the Great White Shark.

...and comes up with the worst definition of evil I've ever heard:

Simply put, evil is when things are not as they are supposed to be or are they way they are not supposed to be.

It does annoy me when my wife leaves too many pairs of shoes in the hallway instead of putting them in the closet where they belong, but I wouldn't say she was evil. That's harsh.

Next, Sean demostrates his intimate knowledge of particle physics:

If protons were 0.2 percent more massive than they actually are, they would be unstable and would decay into simpler protons.

Simpler protons? I sometimes feel a pang of jealousy that creationists can spew out this kind of bullshit like a fountain and be safe in the knowledge that their target audience doesn't know the first thing about science, and likely doesn't even care, whereas scientists like me have to constantly strive for accuracy and clarity when communicating with our peers, for fear of looking like a dumbass.

Lastly, Sean criticises Obama's views on creationism:

Obama directly contradicts himself. In one instance, Obama says that religion is merely an act of "faith." Yet at the end of his statement he says that opposition to evolution does not hold up to scientific inquiry.

No contradiction so far.

Which is it? Is evolutionary-opposition merely a private matter of faith, or is it based upon empirical claims about the world? If such opposition is merely based upon faith, then Obama (and other secularists) cannot claim that such views have been disproved by science.

Why not? There are plenty of religious beliefs that are entirely based on faith and that have been disproved by science.

Obama (and secularists) can't have it both ways. Either opposition to evolution is scientific or not. If it is scientific, then it may have a claim on the scientific curriculum. If it's not scientific, then they need to stop making the claim that it doesn't "hold up to scientific inquiry."

Sean seems to think that only scientific principles can be scientifically tested. What utter crap. Any crazy idiot can invent some half-baked idea right off the top of his head with no evidence to support it. Here's a good example, recently discussed on Pharyngula. Some wacko comes up with a theory about biological development based on deformation of donut-shaped balloons, writes a book about it, then gets upset when a real biologist points out that the theory is contradicted by even the most basic observations.

This brings us back to the root of the problem. There are many people out there, like Sean McDowell, who have already made up their minds based on blind faith and simply aren't interested in the evidence.

Creation: The Movie

I'm really unsure how I should feel about the upcoming movie "Creation". That title is clunkingly inappropriate and seems to be little more than a gimmick to stir up controversy for publicity's sake. On the other hand, it has a great cast and the trailer shows promise. I just hope it does a decent job of putting the science across. I don't really care if it takes an accommodationist approach with religion as long as Darwin's theories are presented accurately. Is that too much to hope for?

Check out the trailer and tell me what you think.

A Horribly Lame Attempt at Apologetics

Francis Collins, renowned geneticist and Christian apologist, included this image in his presentation at a recent conference on the compatibility of science and religion:


Now, he's not a creationist in the usual sense, but I just found this image to be so utterly contrived and pathetic that I thought I'd post it here. You can read a full transcript of his talk here, if you can stomach it.

Veggiesaurus

The recently discovered crocoduck fossil dealt a serious blow to the creation camp. Unfortunately this newly unearthed specimen could provide them some ammo - a new species of vegetarian dinosaur:

The dinosaur, now named Psittacosaurus gobiensis, was a ceratopsian, a group of "bird-hipped" dinosaurs, such as Triceratops, that are thought to have ground up tough vegetation with their prolific teeth. The fossil remains were found in the Gobi Desert of Inner Mongolia in 2001.

Paleontologists recently studied the specimen and found skull evidence that the dinosaur ate nuts and seeds.

We'll have to file this one alongside Tyrannosaurus Herbivorus:


Image from LOL god.

Krazy Kent Hovind

If evolution is true, you could not know that it's true because your brain is nothing but chemicals. Think about that.

Kent Hovind

Hovind Junior: Confusionism

Eric Hovind's blog is going to be a great source of stupidity for me to mine, I hope he manages to provide updates more regularly than I do! Take this post for example, in which he tries to defend his use of the term "evolutionism" by, first, posting a wikipedia definition, second, posting a contradictory dictionary definition, and third, providing his own definition which is different to both of them. Then he makes this boob:

It is an ...ism because it is a religion.

Right. Just like electromagnetism, the belief that Nikola Tesla will one day return to Earth and create world peace through the power of alternating current.

In another post, Eric is trying to hawk his Dad's latest book, the cover of which made me LOL:

Noah's Arse

We all know the story of Noah's ark, when God singled out Noah for the job of saving all life on Earth. Hard to imagine a more daunting task, but nonetheless Noah got the job done without a hitch. Well, this is one of two events in Noah's life that God deemed worthy of being recorded in the history book of the universe for all future generations to contemplate. The second event was, to be frank, regrettable, and one has to wonder why God decided to embarrass Noah by including it. Here's what happened:

Some time after the Flood, Noah was enjoying a well-earned glass of wine that he'd fermented from his own personal vinyard. It's not certain just how much he drank, but it must have been a hot evening because he ended up falling asleep in his tent stark bollock naked. Unfortunately, one of his three sons, Ham, discovered his dad in this state and went and informed his brothers, Shem and Japheth, who came back with a blanket and covered Noah while he slept. The next morning, presumably a little hungover, Noah saw the blanket and put two and two together. Feeling embarassed and probably more than a little grumpy, he called on God to... curse and enslave Ham's son, Canaan, who wasn't even involved. Ham's opinion of this harsh punishment isn't known.

So it would be great if any Christians who read this post could suggest why Noah acted like this, or even why this event was deemed worthy of entry in The Holy Bible. And if you think I'm just making this all up, go read Genesis 9:18-27.

All Hail Time-God

Wow, this page is going to keep me busy for quite a while. It claims to show ten scientific facts that disprove evolution. I'll probably go through some of these in future posts, but for now here are a few amusing quotes from the introductory section:

If natural selection were true, humans in the tropics would have silver, reflective skin to help them keep cool, but they don't. They have black skin, just the opposite of what the theory of natural selection would predict.

Evolution is a Religion - the Worship of a Make-Believe Time-god. Time is the god of evolutionists. The evolutionists' claim their time-god is very slow but infinitely powerful. The time-god is credited with the ability to accomplish anything and everything given enough time. It simply takes the time-god millions or billions of years to accomplish it. Scientifically impossible events are credited to the time-god. Evolutionists keep their time-god close at hand where they can watch their god's hands move around slowly, slowly, slowly trying to evolve new species but never succeeding.

Are left-wing, liberal professors mentally nuts? Well, yes. An eminent psychiatrist claims those who possess a liberal ideology are suffering from a clinical mental disorder.

Here is the book he's referring to, by the way. Now, please ensure that your irony detector is turned down to its lowest setting before you read the last one:

The human mind has a very detrimental character weakness. Humans would rather believe an error for the rest of their lives than admit they had been wrong. People who believe in evolution have been brainwashed. Their main problem is not the arguments for and against evolution and creation. Their problem is they can't bring themselves to reject evolution, because they have already rejected God. Humans have a big mental fault. They are not able to admit they were wrong. Therefore, they are trapped in their previous decision to reject God.

KABOOM!!

Creationists That Look Like Apes: Kevin Wirth

Thanks to Ron Britton of Bay of Fundie for the suggestion.

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".

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?

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.

Creationism and Intelligent Design: Which is more Scientific?

Fool.
UK journo Melanie Phillips has made a fool of herself with this article, in which she whines that intelligent design is different to creationism. It is different, actually, but she gets the reason why completely ass-backwards. Here's what she says:

[Ken Miller said] that Intelligent Design was nothing more than an attempt to repackage good old-fashioned Creationism and make it more palatable. But this is totally untrue. Miller referred to a landmark US court case in 2005, Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District, which did indeed uphold the argument that Intelligent Design was a form of Creationism in its ruling that teaching Intelligent Design violated the constitutional ban against teaching religion in public schools. But the court was simply wrong, doubtless because it had heard muddled testimony from the likes of Prof Miller.

The court heard from a wide variety of experts on both sides of the controversy, including Professor Miller, an evolutionary biologist and Christian who has written several books on the subject. During the court case it was established that the main intelligent design textbook was a carbon copy of an older book on creationism, with the word "creationists" sloppily replaced with "design proponents" throughout. But according to Melanie, intelligent design is real science, and has nothing to do with religion:

The fact is that Intelligent Design not only does not come out of Creationism but stands against it. This is because Creationism comes out of religion while Intelligent Design comes out of science. Creationism, whose proponents are Bible literalists, is a specific doctrine which holds that the earth was literally created in six days. Intelligent Design, whose proponents are mainly scientists, holds that the complexity of science suggests that there must have been a governing intelligence behind the origin of matter, which could not have developed spontaneously from nothing.

Actually, Melanie, biblical creationism is far more scientific than intelligent design. Let me explain why.

Like real science, biblical creationism is based on evidence*. Intelligent design is based purely on the gaps in our knowledge, gaps that are constantly shrinking. Thus the amount of information "supporting" intelligent design is actually decreasing with time.

Like real science, biblical creationism makes very specific predictions**. Intelligent design does postulate the existence of objects that couldn't have evolved by natural means, but it offers no theoretical framework that could be used to predict what these might be, or where they might be found.

Like real science, biblical creationism is falsifiable***. Since intelligent design makes no positive assertions, no piece of evidence can be envisaged that could refute it.

None of this means that creationism is good science, of course. The failing of creationism as a science is ultimately the same failing of intelligent design; that is they are both founded on immovable religious ideas which themselves have no scientific basis.

And it takes some gall to deny that intelligent design is religion in disguise. Please. Intelligent design advocates may go to great pains to assert that the designer could be an alien, but when they wrap up their case they'll almost always finish by saying something like "...and we believe that this intelligent designer is the Christian God. Praise Jesus!".

At least biblical creationists have the self-confidence to stick to their founding beliefs (no matter how crazy those beliefs are) instead of cowardly dressing them up as something else entirely.


*The evidence being the Bible. I didn't say it was reliable evidence.
**Predictions like "the Earth is six thousand years old". I didn't say the predictions had to turn out to be true.
***And indeed it has been falsified countless times.

Hovind Junior: Confused

The latest batch of (mercifully brief) creationist propaganda videos are already gaining notoriety across the blogosphere. They're presented by Eric Hovind, son of "Krazy" Kent. I would have thought that Eric would want to avoid the spotlight after his dad's antics. I mean, everyone finds their dad embarassing once in a while but Hovind senior is considered a real fruit-cake by most creationists. I've even deemed him worthy of his own category here at Creationist Idiocy. But judging by this video, the apple doesn't fall very far from the tree:



So according to Eric, there's an "evolution formula" which states that the universe created itself out of "nothing + time". Hang on though, evolution isn't about how the universe came into existence, is it? That's the big bang theory. And a little googling into that subject will show that (a) there's no consensus on what came before the singularity (certainly there is no evidence to suggest there was "nothing"), and (b) the expansion of the universe from the singularity that preceded it was extremely rapid, thus not requiring a whole lot of time at all. What hope for creationists if Eric can't distinguish between such radically different scientific theories as the big bang theory and evolution by natural selection?

I also struggle to see the point that this video is trying to make:



It's something like "God is roughly the same size as Arcturus", or possibly "Wow. God is really, really... big. Wow.". Still, impressive production values. It seems you really can polish a turd.

It's Competition Time Again

Your task is to write a limerick about creationism. The funniest one wins. Here are some possible ideas for the first two lines, or you can come up with your own:

In the Christian Bible we’re told
That the Earth is six thousand years old

In the Genesis book is a tale
Of a man who lived inside a whale

Some people today still believe
In the story of Adam and Eve

Moron of the Month - David Klinghoffer

The Discovery Institute's David Klinghoffer recently posted a couple of articles that, in essence, blame the Columbine high school massacre on Charles Darwin. You heard me right. Let's see what he has to say:

On April 20, 1999, two boys at Columbine High School in Colorado massacred 12 fellow students and a teacher, wounding 23 as well before shooting themselves. The 10th anniversary with its morbid recollections is upon us, but there's one aspect of the horrible memory that you can be sure you will not hear much about.

When one of the assailants, Eric Harris, was autopsied, the medical examiner found that under his black trench coat the boy had on a white t-shirt emblazoned with a peculiar slogan. The slogan was "Natural Selection." It was later reported but little commented upon that, on his website, Harris had written, among other paeans to the Darwinian mechanism, "Natural SELECTION!!!!!! God damn it's the best thing that ever happened to the earth. Getting rid of all the stupid and weak organisms...but it's all natural!!! YES!"

In this way, Klinghoffer seems to be claiming that these boys were simply following Darwin's ideas to their logical conclusions. One of the most obvious flaws in this theory is that gunning down random people is by definition neither natural nor selective, and dying a virgin as these boys undoubtedly did is clearly not the way to go in passing on your own traits to future generations. Given that the attack was carefully planned in advance by the pair, the massacre would be better described as having been intelligently designed.

Darwinism's modern day advocates prefer to forget that ideas have consequences. Yet even a scientific idea may have disastrous consequences, as Darwin's earliest critics foresaw. One such prophet was Darwin's own professor of natural science when he was at Cambridge, Adam Sedgwick.

In a letter to Darwin dated December 24, 1859, just after the Origin of Species had been published, Sedgwick warned that if the new book were successful in making its case, then "humanity, in my mind, would suffer a damage that might brutalize it, and sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history."

Ideas can have consequences, but not inevitable consequences. Just because I can doesn't imply that I must, or even that I should. And in any case, consequences have no possible bearing on the truth value of the ideas they spring from. What we do with the knowledge we gain from science is up to us, and is a result of human behaviour, not the facts themselves.

A commenter, GHitch, posts:

Darwin predicted the slaughter of blacks and 'savages' by whites. His prediction was based entirely upon the logical conclusions of his theory. [Darwin stated that] "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated."

But this never happened, it was one of Darwin's predictions that turned out to be false. Does it therefore refute his theory of evolution by natural selection? No. It refutes the creationist's idea that Social Darwinism is an inevitable consequence. Yet Klinghoffer is insistent on this:

Ideas have consequences.

Now does that mean that the Darwinian idea is false as a scientific description of how life developed? No, obviously it doesn't mean that. As I've argued all along, Darwinism's social record is simply and nothing more than a good reason to take a second look at the science behind it.

So, the science may be true but let's pretend it's not? I don't really know how to reply to this bizarre concept. It's like saying that we should reconsider nuclear physics because of the terrible destructive power of the atomic bomb. "Let's invent a new model of atomic theory in which nuclear fission is impossible! Then we won't have to worry about nukes any more!".

Commenter Damien puts it another way:

What are you going to suggest in you next column? "That the theory for light and colour is the cause of racism?!"

If you've got a strong stomach and want to probe further into Klinghoffer's mindset, check out davidklinghoffer.org, which is mostly about his latest book "How Would God Vote? Why the Bible Commands you to be a Conservative".

I often write about materialism, a spreading, corrosive belief that material stuff is the only reality in the universe, that people are just an aspect of nature, more highly evolved versions of a fish or an ape.

That’s just a nice way of saying the end of Judaism, Christianity, and any sense that moral truths bear the stamp of divine authority – which in turn means the end of any really powerful argument for moral behavior.

It makes it much harder for all of us to be good, sapping our will to make hard moral choices.

Oh, boo hoo, we'll have to think for ourselves and take our own responsibilities. Grow up, David.

Richard Dawkins: Intricate and Beautiful

I don't know if I'm the right person to be doing jokes about religion. In the last few months I've become religious, I've started believing in God and creationism and intelligent design, and the reason that I now believe in God and creationism and intelligent design is because of Professor Richard Dawkins. Because when I look at something as complex and intricate and beautiful as Professor Richard Dawkins, I don't think that could have just evolved by chance. Professor Richard Dawkins was put there by God to test us. Like fossils. And facts.

Stewart Lee

You can watch Lee's show about religion here.