creationism
pharyngula | December 19, 2006How about leaving a message of support for Matthew LaClair on the Kearny web board, everyone? Matt is the student who exposed his history teacher's classroom preaching, and he certainly is isolated in that backwards little town…so let him know the whole world appreciates him!
pharyngula | December 18, 2006After Dembski sent out that request for more contributions to his petty flash animation, Ken Miller offers him more than he asked for: a nice assortment of the most embarrasssing moments for the creationists at the Dover trial. No response from Dembski yet; aren't you all looking forward to it?
pharyngula | December 18, 2006Brian Flemming posts an interesting quote from Sam Harris:
I think we should not underestimate the power of embarrassment. The book Freakonomics briefly discusses the way the Ku Klux Klan lost its subscribers, and the example is instructive. A man named Stetson Kennedy, almost single-handedly it seems, eroded the prestige of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s by joining them and then leaking all of their secret passwords and goofy lingo to the people who were writing "The Adventures of Superman" radio show. Week after week, there were episodes of Superman fighting the Klan, and the real Klan's…
pharyngula | December 18, 2006I am such a trendsetter. First I pick up on the Paszkiewicz story weeks before the NY Times, and now another creationist I took a shot at, Julie Haberle, is written up in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Ms Haberle is responsible for a set of anti-evolution billboards going up in the region, and she does not come off very well. Here are a few quotes from her that expose her shortcomings.
Julie Haberle, 55, said she once believed creationism "was absolutely nuts" and has over the past nine years come to the contradictory conclusion that "evolution is just silly."
"I'm just a hack."
"I'm not a…
pharyngula | December 18, 2006David Paszkiewicz, the history teacher recorded while proselytizing to his students, has made the NY Times. Here's the familiar part:
Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah's ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose family is now considering a lawsuit claiming Mr. Paszkiewicz broke the church-state boundary.
"If you reject his gift of salvation, then you know where you belong,"…
pharyngula | December 18, 2006What are they thinking? You may have heard that Bill Dembski commissioned and posted to his website for kids a very silly flash animation mocking Judge Jones and the words of his decision—it uses images of various evolution supporters to trigger Jones to recite criticisms of ID in a high-pitched voice, with grunts and fart sounds and other such classy touches. Now we learn that Dembski himself did the voice-overs. This was all absurd enough, but here's the icing on the cake: Dembski was so proud of this effort, and so convinced that it was sufficiently amusing that everyone represented in the…
pharyngula | December 17, 2006This Sternberg character, the creationist at the Smithsonian who has made a career out of his pseudo-martyrdom, has been "vindicated" in a Republican report. Well, he would have been vindicated, if the report hadn't been a thin tissue of lies.
pharyngula | December 16, 2006Most books that teach the basics of evolutionary biology are fairly genteel in their treatment of creationism—they don't endorse it, of course, but they either ignore it, or more frequently now, they segregate off a chapter to deal with the major claims. There are also whole books dedicated to combating creationist myths, of course, but they're not usually the kind of book you pick up to get a tutorial in basic biology. In my hands I have an example of a book that does both, using the errors of creationism heavily to help explain and contrast the principles of evolutionary biology—it's…
pharyngula | December 15, 2006Over on Uncommon Descent, Sal Cordova quotes Lauren Sandler from her book Righteous, in a self-congratulatory attempt to claim the Dover decision as a victory for ID (oh, my, but aren't they desperate). However, if you look at Cordova's quote, there are…ellipses. Seeing an ellipsis in a creationist quote really ought to make you automatically wonder. Fortunately, Steve Story pulled out the actual, original quote over at Antievolution.org, so you too can see what was edited out.
Sal Cordova's version
intelligent design proponents keep quiet about the idea that [Judge] Jones’s decision…
pharyngula | December 14, 2006Wow. That's got to be a record: a creationist frankenquote that contains an ellipsis spanning seven chapters. And that's only one piece of the bad scholarship Lynch demolishes.
pharyngula | December 14, 2006Didn't I tell you Casey Luskin would weigh in on the DI's take on Judge Jones' "plagiarism" in his own inimitably bumbling way? What do you know, he did, and he has already been shot down. John West has also floundered in trying to address the issue, and he too has felt Sandefur's fists of fury. Poor Discovery Institute. Isn't media management supposed to be their area of expertise? How can they be sucking so badly at it?
pharyngula | December 13, 2006Since I was just mean to the British press, here's a compensatory accolade: here's a nice, sharp editorial from James Randerson.
ID was itself designed as a Trojan horse for creationism, with its origins in the Discovery Institute, a thinktank in Seattle whose stated aim is "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God".
Even a conservative judge in Dover, Pennsylvania, saw through the sham last year when he heard a case brought by parents who objected to ID being taught in their school. "Intelligent design is a…
pharyngula | December 13, 2006Is anyone else getting a "look how stupid Americans are" vibe from all the British coverage of Ken Ham's creation 'science' museum? It's another story from the European press that politely echoes Ham's overblown claims for his grandiose edifice to ignorance, and mostly recycles the same old stuff we've heard over and over again. It really does seem to simply parrot whatever the Answers in Genesis con men say with complete credulity…for instance, I've seen this strange comment repeated multiple times in these kinds of stories.
Two-thirds of the US population lives within six hours' drive of…
evolvingthoughts | December 13, 2006If things could be created out of nothing, any kind of things could be produced from any source. In the first place, men could spring from the sea, squamous fish from the ground, and birds could be hatched from the sky; cattle and other farm animals, and every kind of wild beast, would bear young of unpredictable species, and would make their home in cultivated and barren parts without discrimination. Moreover, the same fruits would not invariably grow on the same trees, but would change: any tree could bear any fruit. Seeing that there would be no elements with the capacity to generate each…
pharyngula | December 12, 2006I am amused that now the Disco Institute is reduced to complaining that Judge Jones adopted the ACLU's findings of fact in the Dover trial. It's true that Jones didn't write a big chunk of his decision, because he literally accepted the opinion of the DI's opponents.
Apparently, this is a common judicial practice. I didn't know that, but shouldn't the DI know about it? Don't they have a lawyer or lawyers working for them (they sure have a scientist deficiency)? Couldn't they have asked someone on their staff whether this was ordinary procedure before they started complaining?
Oh, wait.
Casey…
evolvingthoughts | December 11, 2006This site, a faith-based Catholic (I think) news site, has an Op-Ed by an erstwhile science teacher on Dennett's Breaking the Spell. It's not pretty to see someone trying to take down a professional philosopher philosophically, when they are not educated in the field
Basically, Dr David Roemer tries to redefine terms that have a long history in philosophy and science in line with the talking points of the Intelligent Design crowd. He says of materialism, which Dennett correctly defines as explanation of phenomena without recourse to the immaterial, such as "soul", that it is in opposition to…
pharyngula | December 11, 2006He manages to accomplish something I cannot: Larry Moran reviews Francis Collins' book, The Language of God. It's negative, of course, but far fairer and more generous than I could have been. I was afraid the snarl I wore when I was struggling through that awful book was going to be permanently stuck on my face.
pharyngula | December 11, 2006A while back, I mentioned this essay contest by Answers in Genesis in which the prize was a $50,000 scholarship to Liberty University. If you're curious about the winner and one of the runners-up, Zeno has the story: the winner's essay is all about how anti-matter supports the Bible, and the third place winner has become the official advisor on ID to a presidential candidate (in the sense that my crazy second cousin was a presidential candidate, once upon a time). It's all rather creepy and sad—poor kids. So young and already sucked into the lunatic fringe.
pharyngula | December 10, 2006Our country, with the approval and encouragement of George W. Bush, has been carrying out a program of religious indoctrination and the unconstitutional endorsement of evangelical Christianity. Federal money has been funneled into "faith-based" programs that make religious dogmatists prosper, and have no other actual, real-world value. The clearest examples are the prisons, where con artists like Chuck Colson have been engaged in a kind of ministry that is actually religious extortion and bribery.
The cells in Unit E had real wooden doors and doorknobs, with locks. More books and computers…
pharyngula | December 10, 2006They never rest, and you know the creationists are constantly probing, trying to find the next likely inroad into the schools. Sahotra Sarkar offers some concerns about what's coming next in creationism—these seem like quite probable strategies to me.
As the physicist and astronomer Victor Stenger noted in the Skeptical Briefs newsletter last September, The Privileged Planet represents a new wedge in the creationists' arsenal. Equally importantly, the Smithsonian episode shows how this new physics-based version of creationism is being propagated with unusual stealth. Biologists may now feel…