creationism
pharyngula | May 30, 2007There is a must-read article at Edge by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg—it's an attempt to explain why people resist scientific knowledge that takes a psychological view of the phenomenon. The premise is that our brains have in-built simplifications and assumptions about how the world works that often conflict with how it really works—there is, for instance, an intuitive physics and a real physics that are not entirely in agreement, and that we bring our understanding into alignment with reality through education and experience. The naive assumptions of the young brain contribute to…
evolvingthoughts | May 29, 2007
A while back, I wrote a series of posts (listed at the end) on whether or not creationists were in fact being rational in their choices of who to believe about science, based on what information they had available to them as they were growing up.
Now, a paper has been published in The Edge by psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg, which is a revised version of a paper in Science, May 18, 2007, which argues pretty much the same thing. I only wish the paper I have forthcoming in Synthese had got published earlier, but they have data, something philosophers must avoid according…
evolvingthoughts | May 29, 2007
Creationists and literalists like to talk about the book of Genesis as if it were a science textbook, which they can interpret to find anything that science has independently discovered unless they don't like it, such as evolution.
A while back, I got to thinking, "What sort of world would it be if Genesis were right?" And so I started casually reading it from time to time as if the final editor of Genesis actually meant the things he allows the text to say. This is the first in an intermittent and occasional series.
Now it is clear that Genesis is a redaction (a fancy word for edited…
pharyngula | May 29, 2007Wilkins reveals that our good ol' US military is planning to use a major fossil site as a bombing range. This is a brilliant move by the evangelicals who are exercising greater and greater dominance of the armed forces. The obvious result is that rare, one-of-a-kind fossils will be pulverized and lost forever—a direct and positive result.
Realistically, though, the bombs won't destroy that many fossils. The real gain will come when persistent, pesky evolutionists insist on some future date on trying to find the heretical material testimonies against our Lord and Savior, and discover instead…
pharyngula | May 29, 2007I knew the internet would come through with just the right clip and the relevant extracted words, so I wouldn't have to sit through the wretched miasma of the whole O'Reilly Factor to see Krauss vs. Ham, and here it is.
Jason has a transcript, if you'd prefer to read text rather than watch some guys talk.
Krauss did OK: he was assertive, like you have to be on these shows, and he got in one or two strong sentences (ahh, for a television show that permitted people to express whole paragraphs of ideas…but I dream). I'm not a big fan of Krauss's strategy of conceding too much credibility to…
pharyngula | May 28, 2007The delusional creationists are everywhere, and the funny thing is how many of them consider themselves brilliant, well-informed, and objective, when what you discover on examining their claims is that they are foolish, ignorant, and blinded by religious bias — and obviously, they don't even know it. Take, for instance, this high school teacher who issued a debate challenge.
Ritter, 59, has taught chemistry and physics at Annville-Cleona High School since 1997.
Ritter says he has no religious motivations, and he was not arguing for intelligent design or creationism.
He said he was barely…
pharyngula | May 27, 2007DefCon Blog has their own "Creation Museum" page, and amusingly, they hired a pilot to buzz the opening ceremonies with a banner that read "DefCon says thou shalt not lie". You can also download a short 4-page pdf by Lawrence Krauss that debunks the whole young earth nonsense — very handy!
clock | May 27, 2007First, as I reported earlier, Archy persuaded PZ Myers to host a one-time carnival about the opening of the Creation Museum - and here is the carnival - a lot of good stuff to read.
I especially liked the only (so far) on-the-scene report by Martha Heil.
I also tend to prefer posts that try to take in a Big Picture and place stuff in broader historical and/or geographical context, thus, I really liked contributions by Laelaps and Greg Laden. They are optimistic, though. The view from outside, from Europe, can be much more pessimistic.
Also, some of the comments on this post remind me of my…
pharyngula | May 27, 2007
This week, the creationist Ken Ham and his organization, Answers in Genesis, are practicing the Big Lie. They have spent tens of millions of dollars to create a glossy simulacrum of a museum, a slick imitation of a scientific enterprise veneered over long disproved religious fables, and they are gathering crowds and world-wide attention to the grand opening of their edifice of deceit. You can now take a photographic tour of the exhibits and see for yourself—it's not science at all, but merely a series of Bible stories dolled up in dioramas.
The blogosphere is also giving them some attention…
evolvingthoughts | May 25, 2007
The recent "What kind of Atheist" posts have led to a discussion on Larry Moran's Sandwalk blog. Go read it, because I'm being as clear there as I'll ever likely be...
pharyngula | May 25, 2007
Even the webcomics are making fun of him. Click on the panel to read the rest—it's pretty good. It also points out why we shouldn't be displeased that he's been imprisoned: one of his 'accomplishments' has always been to make the scientific and rational thinkers of all ages feel ostracized by an ignorant majority. He's a sad little man, but he's also done a lot of evil.
pharyngula | May 24, 2007There are new epistles from convicted swindler and evangelical Christian — but I repeat myself — Kent Hovind. The first is an account of his transfers within the prison system, and although I don't feel even a twinge of sympathy for Hovind, I do feel for the other prisoners who experience the impersonal neglect and arbitrary abstention from human contact that is imposed by they system. I can't feel much for Hovind, because his accounts are loaded with increasing amounts of frantic piety—he's praying, praying, praying and proselytizing, proselytizing, proselytizing as if he's desperated for…
pharyngula | May 24, 2007Hector Avalos himself, the target of a Discovery Institute smear campaign, left a comment here, replying to some of the DI's many falsehoods. It's worth promoting up top.
The Discovery Institute has mounted the latest in a long string of creationist smear campaigns against me in Iowa. While I have never called for Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez to be fired, or even to be denied tenure, there are plenty of creationists who blatantly direct our university to fire me.
All such efforts have failed because they clearly distort the facts and my academic record. Here are some of the most significant…
pharyngula | May 23, 2007It's becoming a trend: Evangelical Christian institutions that try to do science inevitably demonstrate breathtaking inanity of their own. The latest victim is the Pawleys Island Christian Academy. Take a gander at the first place winner in biology.
Brian Benson, an eighth-grade student who won first place in the Life Science/Biology category for his project "Creation Wins!!!," says he disproved part of the theory of evolution. Using a rolled-up paper towel suspended between two glasses of water with Epsom Salts, the paper towel formed stalactites. He states that the theory that they take…
pharyngula | May 23, 2007This week's Nature has a short report on the Gonzalez tenure affair. It has an interesting admission from Gonzalez.
Gonzalez, who has been at Iowa State in Ames since 2001, was denied tenure on 9 March. He is now appealing the decision on the grounds that his religious belief, not the quality of his science, was the basis for turning down his application. "I'm concerned my views on intelligent design were a factor," he says.
His "views on intelligent design" were his "religious belief"? OK, that's good enough for me. No tenure.
It also includes comments from Bob Park, which reflect my own…
pharyngula | May 23, 2007An article titled "Darwin misconceptions in textbooks slammed in biology journal" sure sounds like it ought to be a hard-hitting criticism—we ought to look into that. Larry Moran did, and wow, what a bust. It's pathetic. It's a list of seven "errors" made in discussions of Darwin's biography in textbooks, which is little more than a lot of nit-picking over details that are not so important to a biologist, but are more a matter of historical accuracy. Some of them are trivial matters of emphasis—saying that Darwin published the Origin after he returned to England is quite correct, and unless…
pharyngula | May 23, 2007We're up to a round two dozen submissions for the Ham Roast or Creation Museum Carnival or whatever we're going to call it — keep 'em coming in, I'm planning on posting it early Sunday morning. At this rate, it's going to be big, and it's going to be good.
evolvingthoughts | May 22, 2007An oldie but a goodie:
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.-- I am bewildered.-- I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae symbol with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.…
pharyngula | May 22, 2007Oh, dear. John West of the Disco Institute is in a furious snit because, after refusing to grant tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, Iowa State University did promote Hector Avalos, of the Religious Studies department, to full professor. You can just tell that West is spitting mad that Iowa would dare to keep Avalos around, and thinks it a grave injustice that one scholar would be accepted, while their pet astronomer gets the axe. So now they're going to do a hatchet job on Avalos.
Never mind that the two are in completely different departments, with very different standards. Never mind that the…
evolvingthoughts | May 22, 2007
A Reformed Dropout, who was in the audience of a talk Paul Griffiths and I gave on Dawkins' The God Delusion at UQ, writes a nice review. It was a fun night. I am glad that some of the attenders thought so too.