pharyngula

Man, he is annoying. He is making a number of assertions about the age of the earth that are patently ridiculous: he claims 90% of all dating methods contradict the idea that the earth is millions of years old. This is simply not true. The key point in acceptance of the age of the earth is the…

Watch this video: 50 rabbis are circling Israel, chanting and singing and blowing horns to ward off the swine flu. The scene is one of pure madness.

Jerry Coyne shows Mooney and Kirshenbaum the door. It's a nice, succinct dismissal. He makes the empirical argument that their strategy is nothing new and has been in operation for many years, and hasn't worked — but I think just the fact that the scientists they most want to get to change their…

Guess who is going to be on our local evangelical Christian radio station, KKMS, between 3 and 6 Central time? Ken Ham! You can call in at 651-289-4499 or 888-332-5169. I sort of suspect that the odds of me getting past their screeners is somewhere between "No way!" and "Hell no!", so I'll just…

Sometimes I get nice invitations. My name is Nikki and I am a christian. I am 15 and very involved in my youth group and last week we were on a mission trip in kentucky. We went to the creation museum a few days before you did. I was looking for the museum's website when i somehow found an article…

Wouldn't you know it, even the omniscient lord of the cosmos can't spell my name right. There may be an upside to this, though: when St Peter at the gates goes flipping through his big book of naughty deeds, he won't be able to find me, and will just wave me on through to continue my rabble rousing.

Our trip to the Creation "Museum" was sponsored and organized by the Secular Student Alliance, a wonderful organization that helps build and support freethought on college campuses all across the country. The meeting this past weekend, for instance, was for training student representatives in how…

This is a very nicely done series of videos made at the Creation "Museum"…now you can see what it was like!

Uh-oh, get the muzzle: Ken Ham is practically foaming at the mouth. He's upset that I pointed out that one of his displays is a relic of a racist theory of human origins. And it is! He does a bit of yelling about credentials, too. And this professor seems to have a fixation on me--yet, our own full…

Ken Ham is spluttering in indignation. It's wonderful. He's really peeved at the ABC News report because it mentioned a detail that is thoroughly trivial, but he claims is wrong. The report describes how animals spread around the world after the Flood on floating islands of matted logs and plants.…

Oh, no. Mooney and Kirshenbaum have written another loopy op-ed. I'm reading it in complete bafflement: what is their argument? What are they trying to do? Because none of it makes sense. It's confusing, right from the beginning, in which they sneer at Richard Dawkins for publishing a new book…

You know, I think communicating science is an extremely important enterprise, one that I think scientists need to work at more. That interface with the general public is poorly cobbled together and we often seem to be working in completely different directions, producing a lot of, well, chafing,…

And it feels good! Ben Stein, that old fraud, was recently fired from his gig as a columnist for the New York Times because he crossed an ethical line: he was shilling for one of those 'free credit report' scammers. Well, that's what the NYT said, but he has written a long whine in which he…

I was on Rob Breakenridge's The World Tonight Redux on Calgary radio tonight (the podcast is available). Amusingly, they tried to get someone, anyone from Ham's outfit to show up on the show, and they refused…I think they're feeling stung. There were a couple of call-ins — one was a creationist who…

Awww, poor Billy Dembski. He really doesn't get it. He picked up on our mockery of his ID class assignment to go leave comments on science blogs, and he thinks we're annoyed at the trolls. In any case, I'll make you a deal: let Darwinist, atheist, skeptic, freethinking, and infidel websites state…

You know, it wasn't just me at the horrible little creationist theme park — there were over 300 of us! In this blog entry, I intend to collect your stories about the zerg in Kentucky. E-mail links to me and I'll add them to this list. Or, if you'd rather, just leave links in the comments here and…

We visited the Creation "Museum" last Friday. I'm careful to put the title in quotes, because it is not a museum in any respectable sense of the word. I knew this ahead of time; I had no expectation of any kind of credible presentation in this place, but what impressed me most is how far it failed…

Bill Dembski's Intelligent Design course at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has some interesting course requirements. provide at least 10 posts defending ID that you've made on "hostile" websites, the posts totalling 2,000 words, along with the URLs (i.e., web links) to each post (worth…

I'll be departing the Secular Student Alliance conference shortly, to spend most of my day traveling back home. I have to say a few things about it, though: This was a good meeting! What the student attendees get is some excellent training in how to organize and maintain an active student group,…

Our visit to the Creation "Museum" is being reported on ABC News now — not a bad report by a reporter who was actually there. You can also read Ken Ham's account, which basically backs up everything we've said about it. Ham tries hard to highlight our 'bad behavior' and their forbearance, since…

Sean Carroll has a very interesting post on appropriate arguments — he illustrates it with this grid of disputation. The context is the recent bloggingheads between Paul Nelson and Ron Numbers. It was a painful display, and the problem was that Nelson is an irredeemable kook, a young earth…

There is lots of video on the web from our visit to Ken Ham's Palace of Lies, but here's one of one of the rare incidents to mar the trip. This is the student who was kicked out; I was with him when he was pulled aside, and can verify that he was doing nothing but engaging in quiet conversation…

It's a small thing, but it's representative of the bizarre pseudoscience in the world of the Creation "Museum". There was a room with a small collection of dinosaur models and skeleton casts, and they each had little panels describing the specimen…just like a real museum! Then you read them, and…

(Click for larger image) Details to follow later.

I'm currently at Edwin and Helen Kagin's house, 15 minutes from the Creation "Museum" — we'll be heading off to the event around 9am, but first we have to be fed, and the Kagins are infamous for stuffing their guests. I may have to waddle through the theme park. We have 285 people signed up so far…

Octopus mototi Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.

I griped before about those sleazy credit report ads with Ben Stein that were appearing all over the site. Well, they seem to have had one fortunate effect: they got Ben Stein fired for ethics violations from his gig at the New York Times. The NYT has yet to explain why they thought Stein could…

Jerry Coyne has published his review of Unscientific America in Science. It begins this way: In Unscientific America, a book slight in both length and substance, science writers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum argue that America's future is deeply endangered by the scientific illiteracy of its…

Against my advice, the Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers ran an incredibly offensive ad on city buses in De Moines featuring naked lesbians masturbating with Bibles. No, wait, that wasn't it. It was an ad announcing that god hated Christians and they were all going to burn in hell. No, I don't think…