creationism
pharyngula | April 26, 2007Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron are two of the very dumbest creationists you will find — and they were upset at the Blasphemy Challenge, so they demanded a chance to debate. And of course, since they are the dumbest, most inane, silliest creationists around, television executives jumped at the chance.
ABC loved the idea, and will host a debate in New York City on May 5, 2007. Moderated by Martin Bashir, the debate will be streamed LIVE on their website and will also be filmed for "Nightline."
It's not at all clear who they are going to debate—there's nothing about it on Brian Flemming's weblog…
pharyngula | April 25, 2007The most important battle in the history of mankind!
A bit more than a week ago, I mentioned this interview I did for a site called One Blog A Day. The comment thread on the interview has grown in a peculiar way — John A. Davison and his pet sycophantic monkey, VMartin, are babbling away in a most painfully lunatic fashion, cruelly egged on by wÒÓ†. It's hard to beat this comment for delusions of grandeur:
Martin and myself are waging a very effective war against the forces of darkness on both sides of this idiotic debate, sides which are dead wrong and always have been. Our success is…
pharyngula | April 24, 2007Did you also attend this Intelligent Design quackery talk by John Marshall? Report in, please, and let us know how stupid it was (there is no doubt that it was stupid, we're just interested in measuring the degree.)
Marshall is yet another M.D. who became a creationist because he looked objectively at the evid… oh, wait, no. None of them do that. It's because:
But Marshall began to look into what he said were holes in the theory. And after becoming a Christian, Marshall found it hard to reconcile evolutionary theory with Genesis, the biblical account of how God created the earth and…
pharyngula | April 24, 2007The core value of creation science is dishonesty. I was reminded of this yet again by an account by Todd Feeley of a RATE conference. RATE means "Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth", and they are an excuse for creationist frauds to get together and spout off misleading pseudoscientific babble to a gullible audience. There's always trouble when someone who is not gullible and actually knows something about a subject attends, as in this case. Feeley asks the organizer a question:
I asked why no recognized experts on radiometric dating were
invited to participate in the conference, given…
pharyngula | April 24, 2007Al Gore is generally a good guy, and I think his message on global warming is an important one. He's still traveling around, giving his slideshow that we've seen in An Inconvenient Truth, but apparently he has added some new material — and these aren't slides that make me very happy.
The slide I found particularly interesting/shocking/sad, was his new(?) slide containing a graph of human population growth over the past couple hundred-thousand years. It started off good. He pointed at the beginning of the graph, showing the population of humans on Earth from 200,000 years ago, and referred to…
pharyngula | April 20, 2007Awww, Kent Hovind's appeal has been denied. I feel a bit sorry for his wife, the poor dupe, but Kent will just have more time to convert "lost souls" in jail, so he can't complain. Well, except for the fact that Satan is in bunk #22. That must be awkward.
(via The Austringer)
pharyngula | April 20, 2007In addition to being a contemptible ghoul who uses a tragedy to attack an unrelated concept, evolutionary biology (we are all on the same page, right? The evidence so far is that the Virginia Tech killer was a mentally ill young man with a confused Christ complex, not a ruthless atheist proponent of evolution who was following the advice of Charles Darwin's ghost), this "full time creation evangelist" Grady McMurtry makes a revealing admission:
Therefore, he [McMurtry] asserts, people should not be surprised when mass shootings occur, such as the one on the Blacksburg university campus on…
pharyngula | April 19, 2007There's a fascinating exchange of views in the student newspaper at SMU, where the recent "Darwin vs. Design" dog and pony show was held. Leading up to the event, the Discovery Institute shills were busy trying to lay the groundwork. In particular, there was an
editorial that tried to distance ID from old-school creationism.
What's more, the authority he cites is nonexistent because the U.S. Supreme Court has never dealt with the teaching of intelligent design. The only time it did strike down a non-evolutionary theory was when it struck down the teaching of "creation science" in 1987. Even…
pharyngula | April 18, 2007Zeno makes an obvious point: creationists have no sense of humor. He singles out this tedious comic strip running on the Answers in Genesis pages, called CreationWise, and of course when anyone thinks of an unfunny religious apologist with a strip, they think of Johnny Hart. But even worse than any of these is Dan Nuckols. Seriously, if you enjoy cartoons, if you have any sense of humor or even an appreciation of the skill it takes to put together an amusing story in a few panels, don't follow that link; it's like snorting ammonia, it'll ruin the flavor of everything for a few days.
Zeno does…
pharyngula | April 17, 2007If so, how to explain this commentary by Cardinal Pell of Sydney, Australia?
I know. Every time I turn around someone tells me that nobody except a few nuts really believes that stuff.
pharyngula | April 17, 2007Zachary Moore had a casual conversation with a Discovery Institute staffer at one of their "Darwin vs. Design" conferences, and it sounds like said ID drone spoke a little bit too openly.
In fact, it was so friendly that as I was waiting in the auditorium lobby for the conference to start, I struck up a conversation with Todd Norquist, one of the Discovery Institute's employees in the Center for Science and Culture (the department that advocates for Intelligent Design). I asked him how many of these conferences were planned by the Discovery Institute, and he seemed hesitant, telling me that…
tfk | April 17, 2007Ohio IDNet's Roddy Bullock has written a novel:
If you ever wished for a fun way to learn about intelligent design, here it is . . . Written for readers of all ages, the updated second edition of The Cave Painting is particularly suitable for high school and college students desiring to understand the truth about evolution and intelligent design.
When scientists describe science, they write nonfiction. When creationists try to describe science, they write fiction. Unlike most of their material, at least this is properly labeled.
pharyngula | April 17, 2007This is an amusing (but somewhat violent) movie that is an apt metaphor for the strengths of science. It starts with a Kiai Master, one of those woo-woo martial artists who claims to have the power of knocking his opponents flat with his mystical chi—and it's awfully funny how all these martial arts students come running up and do pratfalls when he waves his hands at them. Then, in a fit of hubris, derangement, or just plain stupidity, he challenges someone to come against him with 'mere' natural, physical combat skills. The results are predictable and a little bit cringe-inducing.
The woo…
pharyngula | April 17, 2007Kentucky has Ken Ham's wretched creation "science" "museum", but now Ligonier, Indiana is getting in on the act with their own version of a pseudoscientific parade of lies in the name of Jesus. At this point, they've just begun restoring a decrepit old building to house the monstrosity, but they promise lots of stupidity to come.
The Discovery Express History and Science Museum is about relating biblical truths to current culture through history and science.
Imagine learning how to identify the trees of northern Indiana and learning about the ways they are used...and then thinking, "I wonder…
pharyngula | April 17, 2007Startling Moniker attended an Institute for Creation Research lecture — I have never been surprised at one of these sorts of things. It's always one foolish lie after another to an audience predisposed to swallow whatever crap is served up. Everyone should go to a creationist presentation (they're everywhere, trust me) just to see what kind of inanity we're struggling with.
pharyngula | April 17, 2007Along with that copy of Imprint that I was sent yesterday, someone at the Bell (Scott? Was that you?) slipped in a copy of … oh, it was horrifying … a comic book. Not just any comic book, though, a Crusader Comic, one of Jack Chick's line of full sized comic book style propaganda pamphlets (unlike the usual smaller sized tracts we usually see). This one was called "Primal Man?". Yikes. It's basically a colorized version of "Big Daddy?", only instead of an evilutionist college professor getting outsmarted by a wise Christian student, it's an evilutionist movie producer getting outsmarted by a…
pharyngula | April 16, 2007In my mail today, I received a copy of the Bell Museum's quarterly, Imprint, which contained a fine article on the Bell's strategy for addressing the creationists. After summarizing some of the museum's efforts and recent national events, it concludes this way:
Bell Museum programs are one way that University of Minnesota scientists are reaching the public--not through spin, but through thoughtful presentations about science and research, such as the lively Café Scientifique discussion held recently on the subject of evolution. To support science educators, Borrello, Lanyon, and several other…
pharyngula | April 16, 2007I'm willing to read books by Simon Conway Morris, Ken Miller, and Francis Collins. I think they're dead wrong on the religion issue, but they are smart guys who contribute positively to the debate in other ways. I will also read Behe and Dembski and <gack, hack> Wells; they are not smart people, and they're wrong all across the board, but at least they're not trying to pretend they're my friend and are trying to help me, and I think it's a good idea that we should know the enemy. One fellow who infuriates me, though, and whose point of view I find difficult to comprehend, is Michael…
pharyngula | April 16, 2007
I've finished Simon Conway Morris's Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), a book I've mentioned before and promised, with considerable misgivings, to read thoroughly. I didn't like his ideas, I thought he'd expressed them poorly before, but I'd give his book on the subject a fair shake and see if he could persuade me.
My opinion: it's dreck.
To be fair, I thought there were some improvements. I've long thought that his writing was leaden and clunky, and painful to slog through. I think that in this book he has achieved something of a more tolerable…