creationism
sa smith | August 12, 2009Because Christian politicians have nothing else to worry about:
Republican mayoral candidate Anna Falling said Tuesday that putting a Christian creationism display in the Tulsa Zoo is No. 1 in importance among city issues that include violent crime, budget woes and bumpy streets.
"It's first," she said to calls of "hallelujah" at a rally outside the zoo. "If we can't come to the foundation of faith in this community, those other answers will never come. We need to first of all recognize the fact that God needs to be honored in this city."
Falling, who has founded several Christian nonprofits…
pharyngula | August 12, 2009Sometimes I get nice invitations.
My name is Nikki and I am a christian. I am 15 and very involved in my youth group and last week we were on a mission trip in kentucky. We went to the creation museum a few days before you did. I was looking for the museum's website when i somehow found an article about you and your visit.. After looking at your blog i have come to the conclusion that nothing anyone says will change your mind on how you believe things work and about god.. Though being the gutsy girl i am, i am asking you to give me a chance and have a conversation with me about god and…
gregladen | August 11, 2009Hot off the presses from the NCSE:
Are state science standards worthless? Are kids learning about evolution or being spoon-fed creationist pseudoscience? What's the proper role of state science standards in American public education, anyway?
To get some answers, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) conducted an in-depth survey of 50 states and the District of Columbia.
The good news: Current state science standards cover evolution more extensively than they did 9 years ago.
According to the report, 40 states received satisfactory grades for the treatment of evolution in their…
pharyngula | August 11, 2009This is a very nicely done series of videos made at the Creation "Museum"…now you can see what it was like!
pharyngula | August 11, 2009Uh-oh, get the muzzle: Ken Ham is practically foaming at the mouth. He's upset that I pointed out that one of his displays is a relic of a racist theory of human origins. And it is! He does a bit of yelling about credentials, too.
And this professor seems to have a fixation on me--yet, our own full-time PhD scientists and many other scientists who work in the secular world provided the research for the museum scripts. But, then again, he wouldn't want to acknowledge that people with better qualifications than he holds (qualifications obtained from secular universities, including PhDs from Ivy…
pharyngula | August 11, 2009Ken Ham is spluttering in indignation. It's wonderful. He's really peeved at the ABC News report because it mentioned a detail that is thoroughly trivial, but he claims is wrong. The report describes how animals spread around the world after the Flood on floating islands of matted logs and plants.
We do have replicas of Darwin's Finches in the exhibit on Natural Selection where we discuss genetics and speciation, not God's will!!--and we do talk about floating log mats after the Flood, but certainly nothing about "mankind spread from continent by walking across the floating trunks of trees…
pharyngula | August 10, 2009I was on Rob Breakenridge's The World Tonight Redux on Calgary radio tonight (the podcast is available). Amusingly, they tried to get someone, anyone from Ham's outfit to show up on the show, and they refused…I think they're feeling stung.
There were a couple of call-ins — one was a creationist who challenge me to a debate with the crazy Bible Man. No, I don't think so.
pharyngula | August 10, 2009Awww, poor Billy Dembski. He really doesn't get it. He picked up on our mockery of his ID class assignment to go leave comments on science blogs, and he thinks we're annoyed at the trolls.
In any case, I'll make you a deal: let Darwinist, atheist, skeptic, freethinking, and infidel websites state prominently on their homepage the following disclaimer -- "Intelligent Design Supporters Strictly Prohibited" -- and I'll make sure my students don't post on your sites.
That's not it at all, Bill! We wouldn't discourage your students in any way. You have to imagine what was going through our heads…
pharyngula | August 10, 2009
You know, it wasn't just me at the horrible little creationist theme park — there were over 300 of us! In this blog entry, I intend to collect your stories about the zerg in Kentucky. E-mail links to me and I'll add them to this list. Or, if you'd rather, just leave links in the comments here and I'll promote them up top as I find the time.
I want more! Send them in to me soon.
News
We were the top story on the ABC News site for a while.
The Examiner covers the story.
Blogs
Tell us your side of the story!
No Guy in the Sky has some overall thoughts and thinks the Creation "Museum" is KY…
gregladen | August 10, 2009As you know, PZ Myers and a well behaved group of just over three hundred interested skeptics visited the Creation Museum in Kentucky last week. One result of this visit is an epic post by PZ which pretty much obviates any need to actually to go to the museum yourself.
If you are a student assigned to go to the museum and do a report on it, just use PZ's blog post, it will be much easier. Here it is!
pharyngula | August 10, 2009We visited the Creation "Museum" last Friday.
I'm careful to put the title in quotes, because it is not a museum in any respectable sense of the word. I knew this ahead of time; I had no expectation of any kind of credible presentation in this place, but what impressed me most is how far it failed to meet even my low hopes. They clearly want to ape a real museum, but they can't — their mission is the antithesis of open inquiry.
The guards are a clear example. Real museums have guards, of course: they're there to protect valuable exhibits from theft and vandalism. But real museums want their…
pharyngula | August 9, 2009Bill Dembski's Intelligent Design course at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has some interesting course requirements.
provide at least 10 posts defending ID that you've made on "hostile" websites, the posts totalling 2,000 words, along with the URLs (i.e., web links) to each post (worth 20% of your grade).
Another 20% of the grade comes from the development of a Sunday School lesson plan.
The whole course page is a rich vein of absurdity. Have fun mining it!
gregladen | August 8, 2009A group of scientists, students and secularists -- 304 in all -- visited Petersburg, Kentucky on Friday to tour exhibits on display at the Creation Museum.
The visitors are in town attending a conference of the Secular Student Alliance, a group formed "to organize, unite, educate and serve students and student communities that promote the ideals of scientific and critical inquiry, democracy, secularism, and human based ethics."
Read the rest at ABC News
Hat Tip PZ
pharyngula | August 8, 2009Our visit to the Creation "Museum" is being reported on ABC News now — not a bad report by a reporter who was actually there. You can also read Ken Ham's account, which basically backs up everything we've said about it. Ham tries hard to highlight our 'bad behavior' and their forbearance, since they only threw out one person and say they only warned a second.
One other amusing fact: Ham/Looy make disparaging remarks about a so-called reporter who only "stated that he was with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune" — that's the same reporter who authored the ABC News story.
gregladen | August 8, 2009I wish I coulda been there ... by all accounts it sounds like the Creozerg visit to the Creation Museum went well. A couple of kids were thrown out because they said things or whatever, which is good because it shows that the whole point of the creation museum is to express, secure, and protect a particular point of view and to supress others. For your entertainment, I've collected a handful of links from the event. Please visit these links, and if you are a social neworking kinda person, digg-em-up or stumbleuponthem or whatever. It would be very nice, would it not, if over the next few…
pharyngula | August 8, 2009Sean Carroll has a very interesting post on appropriate arguments — he illustrates it with this grid of disputation.
The context is the recent bloggingheads between Paul Nelson and Ron Numbers. It was a painful display, and the problem was that Nelson is an irredeemable kook, a young earth creationist well into the Red Zone of Crackpots in the diagram, yet none of his lunacy was engaged — he was treated as if he were a sensible person, with meritable ideas deserving serious consideration, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Sean makes a somewhat different point: that it is a bad…
pharyngula | August 8, 2009There is lots of video on the web from our visit to Ken Ham's Palace of Lies, but here's one of one of the rare incidents to mar the trip. This is the student who was kicked out; I was with him when he was pulled aside, and can verify that he was doing nothing but engaging in quiet conversation with a small group of us godless atheists when Mark Looy arbitrarily singled him out and took him aside to tell him stories about how unruly he had been. It was genuinely bizarre. As you can see in the clip made as we were standing outside, there was no shouting, no disruption, no rudeness at all going…
pharyngula | August 8, 2009It's a small thing, but it's representative of the bizarre pseudoscience in the world of the Creation "Museum". There was a room with a small collection of dinosaur models and skeleton casts, and they each had little panels describing the specimen…just like a real museum! Then you read them, and the weirdness sinks in.
Notice that "Diet" specifies "after the Fall" — that's because everything was a vegetarian before Adam and Eve ate the apple, since there was no death anywhere in the universe (which implies, apparently, that in their version of Christian theology, plants are dead). That's not…
gregladen | August 7, 2009The CreoZerg (and I'm not entirely sure what a Creo-Zerg is) is underway. PZ Myers and the atheists are moving in to the creation museum. Details here. Twittering here.