creationism
sa smith | October 20, 2010I dont think I really need to add much commentary to this.
A brief conversation with Mary Fallin
Q: Creation or evolution?
A: I believe in creation.
Q: Science or religion?
A: I am a woman of faith, and my faith is very important to me. It's a daily part of my life. So religion and preserving our freedom of religion is a very important value to me as a public official. That's standing up for our Constitution.
A brief conversation with Jari Askins (Dem)
Q: Creation or evolution?
A: Creation. That's just the way I was raised. When I was in school, the lessons in school did not conflict with the…
tfk | October 18, 2010Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, considers the confrontationalist/accommodationalist disagreement:
Hereâs the difference between the two sides: You know that courtroom phrase, âtell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truthâ?
Both Mooney and PZ want to tell the truth about science and evolution.
Only PZ is willing to tell the whole truth â that the logical conclusion of accepting science fully is that you must dismiss any notion of gods, miracles, and the supernatural.
Mooney thinks itâs bad PR for us to admit that â and he may be right â but itâs wrong to let Christians keep…
tfk | October 14, 2010Attention conservation notice: 3200 words attempting to correct what may be a fatally flawed analogy between New Atheism and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s approach to the civil rights movement.
In replying to Jason's post the other day, I skipped over some important issues that were peripheral to my main point. But I want to double back on a comment he made that I've seen New/Affirmative/Extreme/gnu atheists toss out rather too often. The claim is that they are, in some sense, analogous to Martin Luther King, Jr. Jason, being sophisticated and smart, and knowing that using analogies on the…
tfk | October 14, 2010Shorter former Census Bureau director and current Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman (author of a book with this blog post's title) â The Futility of Polling:
Numbers are stupid.
Slightly longer:
It's better to predict the outcome of elections based on conversations with some guy on the street, rather than through statistically validated models parameterized with stratified random samples.
Actual concluding line:
Relying on polls is like an intelligence agency resting its judgment on data intercepts rather than "Humint", the human intelligence gathered by old fashioned spies. We don'…
sa smith | October 14, 2010A few months ago, Kathryn Applegate wrote a couple posts on the adaptive immune system. Its relatively inoffensive. Just the bland 'science' Im used to hearing from theists, flavored with dull gender normative stories and analogies containing her husband and toddlers and clothes/shoes.
And then at random points within the sterile descriptions of science, Applegate insists her personal choice of deity has something to do with said sterile science. No evidence or explanation why she is talking about her deity. Hysterically, her posts could be summed up as "Look at all these totally natural…
pharyngula | October 14, 2010Scotland now has its very own outpost of inanity, the Centre for Intelligent Design. It's wonderfully revealing. The Discovery Institute takes great pains to hide their roots in evangelical Christianity — they want you to believe that their ideas are objective and secular, unwarped by religious ideology — but as soon as they leave the nest in Seattle, the mask seems to get lost at the airport and what emerges is simply Old Time Religion. This happened in Dover, where the creationists on the ground were simply using the rationalizations of Intelligent Design creationism to cover their…
tfk | October 13, 2010Jason Rosenhouse has a long post up claiming I missed the point in my post a few days ago about the lessons communication science can teach us about the accommodationism spat. The two things I came away from his post thinking were: 1) wow, did he miss my point! and 2) we're talking about very different things.
First, to the question of whether I "missed the point," the question posed by Jerry Coyne was not about how to promote atheism. The question I was answering was about whether emphasizing spirituality could help more people accept evolution. At least, that's what I take Coyne's "come…
tfk | October 11, 2010Last weekend, Chris Mooney and Genie Scott squared off against PZ Myers and Vic Stenger at the Council for Secular Humanism's 30th anniversary bash. The question was something to do with whether accommodationism is teh awsum or teh lamez0rs. You know my opinion, and from what I saw of the discussion, I don't think anyone emerged the undisputed victor, and thus the internet will never run out of flamewars.
Anyway, in reading the L.A. Times report on the event, Jerry Coyne wonders:
How can Mooney, The Great Communicator, think that if atheist accommodationists and atheist non-accommodationists…
pharyngula | October 10, 2010Nathan Moran wrote to chastise me. I feel bad for him…I get these things all the time and the stream-of-consciousness reaction I have to them is never flattering to my correspondents. Maybe they should stop.
Kent Hovind & Your Point of View/Opinion
I would extremely promote you to debate Dr. Kent Hovind, when he is accessible [When he gets out of prison?]. I guarantee you, afterwards you won't look very smart [Yeah, what would I be thinking, debating a lunatic ex-con with a mail-order degree?] PROFESSOR [Is there a salary raise with my promotion to ALL-CAPS PROFESSOR?] PZ Myers [He…
pharyngula | October 7, 2010He's come out: Behe's son has abandoned Catholicism and is an atheist.
It's actually a bit sad: he comes right out and says that he's an anti-theist, but that he's never told his parents (I guess the news is out now!). It also sounds like he's a bit estranged from his father, saying "I really dislike my father". He's still living with them, but is "quarantined" in the basement so he doesn't contaminate his brothers and sisters with his weird godless ideas.
It's a very interesting discussion, but I just have to say that seeing fathers and sons unreconciled, even if the father is a bit…
tfk | October 6, 2010Via This Is Not Helpful, a review of creationist movie Dragons or Dinosaurs: Creation or Evolution. The reviewer is concerned that teachers presenting the view that dragons are really dinosaurs might get fired from public schools, "loosing 4-8 years of collage."
My greatest fear is that this blog cataloging unhelpful Netflix reviews will turn out to be a work of sockpuppetry and be withdrawn from the intertubes in disgrace.
Whether those reviews would still be unhelpful if that transpired is left as an exercise for the reader.
pharyngula | October 6, 2010Now you know who not to vote for: Bill Brady. Brady favors teaching creationism in the schools.
It's always helpful when the ninnies declare themselves like that. Although, it's also true that he declares himself a Republican, which nowadays is also grounds for voting against him.
However, I also take exception to the newspaper article. This is not right:
"My knowledge and my faith leads me to believe in both evolution and creationism," he said. "I believe God created the earth, and it evolved."
Creationism generally teaches that the Bible is historically and scientifically accurate, and…
pharyngula | October 5, 2010Some people are in the news that I've covered before. Let's do a quick update.
We've encountered that very silly man, Barney Zwartz, a few times before. He's an Australian columnist who whined incompetently about the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, and thinks "militant atheist" literally means they are coming in jackboots to crush believers (he also comments in that thread). He's kind of a clueless dingleberry.
He's also getting dumber. He's now credulously reporting that a fundagelical kook is going about raising the dead. It's not just any kook, either, it's Danny Nalliah, an…
gregladen | October 1, 2010By now you've heard of the Pew research poll testing American's knowledge of religion. You may not have learned about the poll's evolution and creationism questions, as they've gotten much less press. In the poll...
[r]espondents were asked, "Which of these people developed the theory of evolution by natural selection?" and offered the choice of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Clarence Darrow. Seventy-one percent of respondents selected the correct answer of Darwin, 6% selected Freud, 3% selected Darrow, and 20% said that they didn't know. (In a 2009 survey conducted by the British…
tfk | September 29, 2010My post yesterday about Pew's religion poll has generated a certain amount of discussion, though mostly about a point that I phrased poorly and ought to rework to clarify. I'm getting general pushback on my suggestion that atheists did better on this survey because they are book smart about religion, but lack experiential or emotional knowledge about religion. I haven't been dissuaded by the arguments, but look forward to seeing what else emerges.
The thing that shakes me most is the fact that paleocon Daniel Larison made the same point at American Conservative magazine. I assume that…
tfk | September 27, 2010Disco. club owner Bruce Chapman is upset. He saw a report from Saturday which claimed that the UN had someone in charge of meeting aliens if they landed. Two days later, he therefore launched a breathless critique of the obviously Darwinian influence on this decision, a blog post he titled Evidence of Mindless Evolution at the U.N.:
the U.N. now wants to establish a liaison with these unknown creatures, even if there is no evidence for their existence at all--just speculation. A Malaysian astrophysicist is to be the first ambassador of the world to little green men on Mars, or wherever they…
tfk | September 27, 2010The more I watch Christine O'Donnell's riff on evolution, the more sure I am that Christine McDonnell would, had she not been interrupted, have told Bill Maher, "even Darwin himself renounced evolution on his deathbed." Alas, she only got through "even Darwin himself…," but I think we'd all have been treated to the Lady Hope Story had Maher just waited a second. Then she got distracted and issued a different canard.
pharyngula | September 27, 2010First, read this parody of science journalism. It's the template for just about every science story you'll find in a newspaper, and it's so depressing.
Second, imagine something even worse. Hint: it's the media's coverage of every scientific "controversy" you might think of. It takes a few of the tropes mentioned in the parody, like "shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist" and "quotes from some fringe special interest group of people who, though having no apparent understanding of the…
pharyngula | September 27, 2010A few people took advantage of the Creation Research Society's open house to take a peek inside the asylum, and sent back pictures.
Eric Youngstrom found signs of their evidence-based reasoning.
Ooooh, numbers! It must be real then. Just like the 64.8 meter long giant squid I keep in the 4.3 million cubic meter tank in my basement.
Because, as we all know, all you have to do is refer to Hitler's evil using sciencey sounding phrases like "Darwinian" and "natural selection" — phrases he didn't use or didn't like — to make Darwin guilty of Hitler.
Jason Frye…well, I don't know what he found.…