creationism
pharyngula | March 31, 2011Ken Ham was asked what Answers in Genesis would do next, after building a gigantic wooden boat on dry land in Kentucky, and now Mark Looy has confirmed it: they have big dreams. They want to build a copy of Solomon's Temple. Don't panic, though, they promise "it's not going to be some kind of secular temple where all sorts of weird religious ceremonies are held." That's a relief. I thought they were going to build a place for pagan orgies.
But wait! That's not all! They also want to build a full-scale copy of the Tower of Babel!
Uh, hang on there…haven't they read their bible? Building a…
pharyngula | March 31, 2011This year's Upchucky award, which is "bestowed upon that person or organization who persists in denying evolution despite a blizzard of empirical evidence," has gone to a particularly deserving entity: Answers in Genesis. Their plan to build a giant "life-sized" model of a fictitious boat and use it to miseducate children is a brilliant example of upchuckiness.
gregladen | March 30, 2011For that special organization or person that makes you throw up a little in your mouth when you hear about their latest aggravating attack on our children's education, by way of making fun of something that is not really all that funny, DontDissDarwn Central annually awards the highly alliterated angs-ridden accolade: The Upchucky. And this year's award is bestowed, nay, foisted on Answers in Genesis, for their latest dumb-ass venture, the Noah's Ark Park.
"rooted in outright opposition to science...[this] hostility to science, knowledge and education does little to attract the kind of…
pharyngula | March 29, 2011We occasionally get threads full of deconversion stories here: atheists arrive at their conclusions by some very different paths, where sometimes it was an easy and natural transition, and sometimes it was painful, agonizing, and there are still deep wounds left from parting the ways with religion. Today, though, I'd like to ask a narrower question: How did you come to accept evolution?
Some of you will find the problem odd, because you've never believed in anything else. I know when I was growing up, despite going to Sunday School and all that nonsense, my church never mentioned the subject…
pharyngula | March 26, 2011I'm pleased to see that the Intelligent Design creationists do actually occasionally challenge themselves — it's just too bad that they trip and fall flat every time they do. Over at Uncommon Descent, that hotbed of hot air hosted by William Dembski, one poster slipped the leash and asked an uncomfortable question: how do we calculate Dembski's measure of 'complexity', CSI, or Complex Specified Information? She didn't know. It turns out that almost 300 comments in the subsequent thread are spinning their wheels — they don't know either.
Doesn't this sound just like Ontogenetic Depth, the…
pharyngula | March 24, 2011The fine folks at Answers in Genesis are working themselves into a good lather over the fact that they were expelled from homeschool conferences for being too obnoxious and intolerant. Recall that the the Christians doing the banning are also young earth creationist/evangelical/fundamentalist crazies when you read this characterization by Nathan Ham, Ken's son:
Some Christians today are like the hippies of 50 years ago who used the word "love" to justify their fornications and sins against the word of God. The hippie culture is often pictured as a group of drug-addicted, fornicating drunks…
pharyngula | March 24, 2011Mother Jones recently interviewed Texas legislator Bill Zedler, the fellow who has authored a bill that would outlaw discrimination against creationists. I read the whole thing, and now my head hurts (partly due to the fact that I was up to the wee hours last night and I'm already functioning on a pool of fatigued neurons). Zedler really is an idiot; the entire interview is a series of non sequiturs as Zedler blindly recites from the creationist script. Here's an example:
Mother Jones: Are you a creationist?
Bill Zedler: Evolutionists will go "Oh, it just happened by chance." Today we know…
pharyngula | March 23, 2011Something nasty seems to get passed on with the name "Hovind", anyway. Eric Hovind's latest stunt: He's 'taking back' Earth Day with a silly, misguided campaign to replace tree-planting with Christian evangelism, and with selling t-shirts to benefit his lunatic ministry. There's nothing in his plans about conservation or protecting endangered habitats or species — he's only hijacking the holiday as a pretext for more god-babbling.
His father, Kent Hovind, gets out of prison in 2015. Then there will be two of these scumbags fleecing the public and lying in the name of their god.
pharyngula | March 22, 2011Amazingly, a gang of ignorant young-earth creationist crazies who are running fundamentalist home-schooling conferences decided that Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis were just too crazy even for them, and they have formally banned AiG from appearing at any of their conferences. This wasn't a dictate from irate scientists or atheists, either: this decree has come down from his own people, fellow creationists who also believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old and that God shuffled every kind of animal on the planet into a big boat before drowning everyone else. Here's the official letter…
pharyngula | March 22, 2011I really should stop linking to these bozos, since they don't ever bother to link to any sites outside their incestuous coterie of jebus-wanking apologetics sites, but I cannot resist. Ken Ham is bragging about his web traffic, and it's rather pathetic.
• In 2010, the Answers in Genesis main website had more than 10 million visits for the first time (10,225,465 visits, previously 8,726,503--a 17% growth) from more than 5 million unique visitors (5,445,617 unique visitors, previously 4,650,206--a 17% growth).
• The Creation Museum website had more than 1 million visits for the first time (1,…
pharyngula | March 21, 2011Creationists make some crazy claims about fossils — Ken Ham, for instance, is adamant that T. rex was a vegetarian before the Fall. So let's all laugh together.
pharyngula | March 18, 2011Those fun-loving folks at Answers in Genesis have been revealing some of their spectacular plans for the Ark Encounter theme park. Would you believe that one of them is a ride celebrating the ten plagues of Egypt?
Oh, yeah, come on down! Nothing says fun like blood, boils, gnats, cholera, and dead children!
It was true in the Creation "Museum", and it's going to be true in this theme park: these creationists worship death and suffering.
mikethemadbiologist | March 18, 2011By way of John Sides, we come across this analysis of some data from the General Social Survey:
(the five categories of educational status are, from left to right: didn't graduate from high school, high school graduate, some college, college graduate, post-graduate degree)
While connecting the dots in a line is a little misleading (there's no reason to think that a college graduate is twice as educated as a high school graduate), there are two interesting things here:
1) Conservatives with a lot of education rank the same as liberals with a high school education. If supporters of evolution…
pharyngula | March 17, 2011Texas, you are a wonder. You don't have any protections against workplace discrimination on the basis of sex or gender — that might hurt bidness, you know — but you're considering a bill to protect creationists from discrimination.
HB 2454
Sec.A51.979.A A PROHIBITION OF DISCRIMINATION BASED ON RESEARCH RELATED TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN. An institution of higher education may not discriminate against or penalize in any manner, especially with regard to employment or academic support, a faculty member or student based on the faculty member's or student's conduct of research relating to the theory…
tfk | March 16, 2011Folks are talking about the problem of evil. John Wilkins takes on the problem of the problem of evil and Darwin, arguing that, for theologies where the problem of evil is a problem, evolution probably does less to exacerbate the issue than basic physics, or physiology, or first principles of ecology. And he's right.
But one sentence setting up this argument doesn't work for me:
Evil exists, so if you believe in a âtri-omniâ deity (omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent), you had better find a reconciliation.
This idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god is pretty common, but…
pharyngula | March 11, 2011A while back, I had a guest post here by Amy Peters; in it, she described taking her son to the zoo and being awed and choking up at the similarities between us and chimpanzees — it's a nice moment of transcendance, when a person sees a deeper connection.
One of the creationist dim-bulbs at Answers in Genesis, Georgia Purdom, read that story (by the way, it's kind of sweet that the creationists so regularly read Pharyngula — Hi, Georgia! Hi, Ken!) and took away a very different message, one that reflects a tiresome reflexive trope among those of very little brain, and also shows that for all…
pharyngula | March 9, 2011Ken Ham really hates those weasely Christians who accept the phrase "millions of years" more than he does us atheists, I think. He really gets worked up over Biologos, but I only got as far as this paragraph:
If there was not one man Adam and one woman Eve, and a literal event of the one man Adam taking the fruit in rebellion and thus bringing sin and death into world, then one may as well throw the rest of the Bible away. It would mean what God wrote through Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5 for instance is plain wrong. If we are not all descendants of one man who sinned, then who are we…
pharyngula | March 8, 2011Why do you torture me so? For the past week, the number one request in my mailbox hasn't been this nonsense about bacteria in meteorites, it's been people asking me to address Rabbi Adam Jacobs' stupid article on the Huffington Post.
I have a problem with that. I despise the Huffington Post and the fact that some liberals who ought to know better take it seriously as a leftist voice, instead of the lowbrow, pandering, honking noise of stupidity that it is. And in particular, I cannot support Arianna Huffington's contempt for labor and her privileged pretentiousness. So I cannot link to her…
tfk | March 7, 2011BCSE reports, via the Independent:
A prominent British imam has been forced to retract his claims that Islam is compatible with Darwin's theory of evolution after receiving death threats from fundamentalists.
Dr Usama Hasan, a physics lecturer at Middlesex University and a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, was intending yesterday to return to Masjid al-Tawhid, a mosque in Leyton, East London, for the first time since he delivered a lecture there entitled "Islam and the theory of evolution".
But according to his sister, police advised him not to attend after becoming concerned for his…
pharyngula | March 6, 2011It's too bad, too, since I would have learned weeks ago who our ascended master was.
It's Stephen Hawking, of course: "Most of you know who Stephen Hawking is, right? He talks through a computer and that makes him even more bizarre. People sit with their mouths open, taking it all in like this is the gospel from the ascended master. That's demonic!"
It's also a surprise to learn that creationists are also trying to build a 'life'-sized copy of Noah's Ark in the Pacific Northwest. This is the first I've heard of that…anyone know anything more?