creationism
pharyngula | November 26, 2007How can you possibly make the Creation "Museum" look sillier?
This may not be a LOL image, but I thought it was hilarious.
If you're having trouble reading the blurry print, it says:
According to God's Word, thorns came after Adam's sin, about six thousand years ago, not millions of years ago. Since we have discovered thorns in the fossil record, along with dinosaurs and other plants and animals, they all must have lived at the same time as humans, after Adam's sin.
How can you argue with logic like that that?
mikethemadbiologist | November 26, 2007I've written about creationist and convicted felon Kent Hovind's idiocy. But I had forgotten another aspect of Hovind--his ties to white supremacist groups. From the archives:
By way of Orcinus, comes a whole lot of information about creationist Kent Hovind. First, a description of his ally, Michael Marcavage, who invited Hovind to speak in Dover, PA during the trial:
Michael Marcavage, whose Philadelphia-based organization Repent America is sponsoring Hovind's visit, said the accusations of anti-Semitism and extremism are unfair.
"He believes that people are from one race, the human…
pharyngula | November 26, 2007
Those clever sleazeballs at Uncommon Descent have now used some generic animation tools at JibJab to make a pointless video of Genie Scott, Richard Dawkins, and others dancing the can-can. In a particularly tacky twist, they also claim that it was "produced by the innovators at JibJab.com studios". Uh, no. JibJab made a template; the ID loonies cut-and-paste photos into it. Special bonus sleaze points for getting the Expelled movie site to feature it.
Speaking of Ben Stein, did you know he hangs out with prostitutes and cries? Thanks, Kristine, for the celebrity gossip.
As has been…
laelaps | November 26, 2007By now I'm sure you've all heard about Ben Stein's upcoming Christian Crusade against us Devilutionists, Expelled, and as February approaches I'm sure we'll be seeing more hype about the films theatrical release. Indeed, just like movies like The Chronicles of Narnia, The Nativity Story, and the shallow Facing The Giants (I had no idea God cared so much about Friday night football) have been promoted to churches with special screenings, free clips, and other materials to get butts in the seats, I'm sure Expelled will try to create a Christian media blitz around the film, which shouldn't be…
pharyngula | November 25, 2007It's easy to forget what a repellent, sniveling little turd-speck Sal Cordova is until one is reminded by a reference on a blog worth reading (it's not as if I read Cordova's ugly little site myself, you know). The occasion this time is that Slimy Sal has just discovered that Joan Roughgarden, the evolutionary biologist who also happens to be a Christian, is a transgendered woman. Oh, the young jackanapes sees many opportunities for hilarity and amusement in this!
She was the daughter of Episcopalian Missionaries and then returned to the Christian faith after many trials in her life. It…
razib | November 25, 2007Rock of Ages, Ages of Rock:
. To the young-earth creationists, this is both unscientific and dubiously religious. "We don't subscribe to this idea of the 'God of gaps,' meaning if you can't explain something, then blame God," Whitmore told me before describing a method that hardly seemed more scientific. "Instead, we think: 'Here's what the Bible says. Now let's go to the rocks and see if we find the evidence for it.' "
The whole story is a sad tale of a few credentialed geologists making their stand with their perception of a literal Bible against the consensus of their field. In Evolution…
pharyngula | November 25, 2007The new preview for the movie Expelled looks very slick and professional — there are some deep pockets behind this effort.
You'll catch on to the major themes of the movie right away: God and paranoia. It begins with Stein setting the stage for a conflict between two worldviews: it's "Everything on earth was created by a loving god" vs. "Some think we're nothing but mud animated by lightning". It's interesting that Stein is very open about the religious underpinnings of Intelligent Design creationism, something the Discovery Institute would rather hide, while so grossly misrepresenting…
laelaps | November 25, 2007As I described in the introduction to my more poetic post "There is a grandeur in this view of life...," fossil hunting is one of the most exciting and rewarding activities I've even taken part in. It might not be easy work and it often does not bear petrified prizes, but a few scraps of bone, a tooth fragment, or a fossilized shell is still an amazing vestige of a distant past that no human has ever seen. Young Earth Creationists, on the other hand, contend that the world is only about 6,000 years old and that when the first humans were evicted from Eden they had to content with the mighty…
pharyngula | November 24, 2007Both Larry and Shalini have picked up on this most excellent comic — it's perfect.
pharyngula | November 24, 2007The NY Times sent a reporter to the First Conference on Creation Geology, and came back with a discouraging tale of creationist blindness. The two stars are Kurt Wise, old school, and Marcus Ross, new school. Ross recently recieved a Ph.D. for his paleontological work on mosasaurs — marine reptiles from 65 million years ago — yet he also goes to creationist conferences and touts his belief that the earth is less than ten thousand years old. The dissonance does not disturb him at all.
At the conference I asked Ross whether he still believes what he wrote in his graduate thesis. His answer…
pharyngula | November 23, 2007I mentioned that I should probably attend the odious John West's talk at the U of Minnesota next Friday, and Rick Schauer has stepped up to the plate and provided compelling motivation.
To help make it easier for you to attend West's talk, PZ...I'll sponsor a
Pharyngula Fellowship event at the UM Campus Club.
I'm talking free-beer and munchies to you and any other Pharyngulaites
reading this from 5:30-6:45 at the Club. We then all walk from Coffmann to
Nicholson and confront the poor sap in unison.We'll make more plans as
time passes.
Free beer? I thought this was a myth, a hoary legend…
pharyngula | November 22, 2007It is best to wait until the person you are quote-mining is dead or senile, lest they notice what you've done and make a public dismissal. Denyse O'Leary seems to have forgotten this, and tried to use a paper by Brian Leiter — Brian Leiter! — to argue for the irrelevancy of evolution. Leiter seems to be neither dead nor senile, as he has noticed.
pharyngula | November 22, 2007Sometimes the spectacle in the comments can be as fun as the articles. Here are a couple of examples loons trying to address the criticisms directed at their ideas on a couple of blogs.
Larry Moran attended a lecture by a creationist, Kirk Durston. The creationist pulled the usual stunt: cite a few of the multitude of science papers out there, and misrepresent it to support his fallacious claims. Not even Larry is able to have all those papers right there in his forebrain, which allows Durston to briefly pretend to be the voice of authority. Of course, later Larry looks it up and points out…
pharyngula | November 22, 2007As fellow Minnesotan Greg Laden warns, we're getting a visit from another dishonest hack of the Discovery Institute, John West. On Friday, 30 November, at 7:00 in Room 155, Nicholson Hall on the UM campus. I may just have to stop by. He's going to be babbling about an extended argumentum ad consequentiam: "Darwin's Dangerous Idea: The Disturbing Legacy of America's Eugenics Crusade". Yeah, once again, we're going to be told that reality is dehumanizing.
One thing that greatly peeves me is the sponsoring organization. This is a parasitic religious organization that sucks leechlike on academia…
laelaps | November 21, 2007
ID advocates continue to try and peddle an intellectual "dead parrot" as if there's nothing at all wrong with it. Hopefully Polk County citizens won't be duped, but it looks like the local school board are a bit too creationism-friendly.
At the conclusion of the PBS documentary "Judgment Day" aired only a few weeks ago, various people from both sides of the evolution/intelligent design debacle in Dover, PA said that they don't expect the decision of Judge Jones that ID is creationism (and not science, to boot) to stop other school districts of trying to weasel intelligent design into the…
pharyngula | November 21, 2007It's a little odd to find myself cited in a Polk County, Florida newspaper as evidence that their pro-ID activities have received "national attention."
Otherwise, it's an article that testifies to the inevitability of a conflict. A majority of the school board members in Polk want to insert creationism into the curriculum, and they've got a few supporters in the schools.
…an eighth-grade science teacher at Union Academy in Bartow spoke in favor of intelligent design, a belief that living organisms are so complex that they must have been created by some kind of higher force.
"When you talk…
pharyngula | November 20, 2007One of our Minneapolis Christian talk radio stations, KKMS, is organizing a trip.
Join Jeff & Lee as they travel with Heartland Tours & Travel to the Creation Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio! Jeff & Lee will be doing a live broadcast from the museum, and you can be there to see it all happen! of course, there will be other great stops along the way - Chicago (and famous Chicago pizza), the Wisconsin Dells with it's huge waterpark, shopping at the Tangier Outlet Mall and more! this is a tour that will inspire your faith and make lasting family memories.
Don't you think they could…