creationism
laelaps | January 24, 2009
From The Log of the Ark.
Young earth creationists love to talk about how there really was a global Deluge and that there were dinosaurs aboard the Ark, but rarely do you see any attempt on their part to visualize what life was like on Noah's ship. What did Noah and his family do to while away the hours? How did they manage to feed all the animals (and make sure the animals didn't feed on each other)? What happened when an animal got sick? These are absurd questions because there is no evidence for a global Flood or that a man named Noah commanded a ship full of two of every species, but…
pharyngula | January 23, 2009Awww, I've been challenged by Ray Comfort. It's hard to take the little man too seriously, though: last time we were supposed to debate on the radio, it ended up with a change of plans, and he instead weebled absurdly without me. At this point, though, his only challenge to me seems to be to explain this post more carefully to him, and I really don't feel much incentive to use even littler words to go over the same old ground that atheists are smart enough to grasp.
The comments over there seem to answer most of his complaints already, anyway. Is there anybody who agrees with Comfort who…
pharyngula | January 22, 2009The latest news: in a vote on whether to keep the silly "strengths and weaknesses" phrasing in the Texas state science standards, the forces of light on the board of education have defeated the goblins of the darkness by a one vote margin. There are more votes to come, though, so the battle isn't over yet.
pharyngula | January 21, 2009Ray Comfort has a new site, Pull the plug on atheism. It's a series of short pages which consist mainly of plugs for some bad books he is peddling, with a few paragraphs in which he announces a few of his misconceptions about atheism, with the air of one who has trounced every objection. It really is as bad as his pathetic blog.
For instance, the first thing he does is define what he means by atheist.
An atheist is someone who believes that nothing made everything.
Then he goes on and on with fallacious analogies: "Imagine if I said my latest book came from nothing." Imagine if I say that I…
tfk | January 21, 2009In November, the Texas Board of Education met to consider their new science standards. As I've mentioned a major point of contention is a reference in the current standards to "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific explanations, a concept only ever applied to evolution, and without any clear explanation of what it means.
In the course of 6 hours of testimony, witnesses constantly asked what these "weaknesses" were, and got no clarity. Finally, at an ungodly hour, Cynthia Dunbar (the one who thinks public schools are evil and that President Obama is a s3kr1t Mussulman) gave her explanation…
sa smith | January 18, 2009In case of the Apocalypse, Id like to be in Oklahoma. We make our own food, weve got our own oil, nice climate, everybody has guns, and we have a bountiful supply of Young Earth Creationists!
In the late 1960's, G. Thomas Sharp, who was at that time already an experienced science educator as well as a pastor of a medium sized Bible church in Alabama, came face to face with staggering domestic problems in the lives of his church members and students...
The first task Dr. Sharp had to do was to positively identify the root cause of this attack. The research process extended over a twelve year…
pharyngula | January 18, 2009It's hard to beat the spectacle of Dinesh D'Souza defending a god for absurdity, but the Twin Cities Creation Science Association will leaven their idiocy with pathos: it will be time for the Twin Cities Creation Science Fair on 14-15 February. I've got at least one person promising to send me a report on it, although this is one I won't be able to attend…I'm arranging a trip to speak in Columbus, Ohio that weekend. And as we all know, there are no creationists in Ohio. Right?
pharyngula | January 17, 2009The state of Louisiana has passed an unfortunate law that allows teachers to toss in any ol' garbage into their science curricula. For most teachers, this will make no difference at all in their classrooms; this is a law that specifically caters to irresponsible instructors who want to smuggle in questionable content. All you have to know to see that this is a bad bill is to look at the backers: conservative groups that want to see more religion in the schools, old-school fundamentalist creationists, and the Discovery Institute.
evolvingthoughts | January 16, 2009Larry Moran points us to the following video on what science is and why pseudoscience is not to be taught or accepted without serious evidence (which makes it science). My only comment to add is that emotional appeals are information and evidence, but they are information and evidence about the speaker, and not about the things that are being spoken of.
There are a number of people trying to give short definitions of science on the blogs right now (see here). I have a one line definition that I think captures everything I want it to, and nothing else:
Science is the process of saying as much…
pharyngula | January 14, 2009People are telling me that my blog entries are getting sprinkled with creationist ads in the RSS feeds, like this:
Heh. I think it's great. This is an old and familiar game that has been played for years, where creationists buy up lots and lots of ad placement on searches for topics in evolutionary biology, and I think they should continue to throw their money down that sinkhole. It seems like an entirely ineffective tactic, to try and dun people who are already willing to look at the evidence with appeals to their dogma.
Shall I start taking out ads in the local church bulletins, perhaps?
pharyngula | January 13, 2009Aren't letters to the editor fun? They publish some of the craziest stuff.
One of the many problems with Darwin's theory of evolution pertaining to mankind is that neither Charles Darwin nor his worshippers take into account extra-terrestrial life.
It's pretty hard for someone to draw conclusions on mankind when Darwin had never seen nor heard of UFOs. That's kind of like teaching math but not understanding trigonometry.
Most of us in the Niagara Region live on a lake bed (Lake Iroquois). The Indians cannot be blamed for having an effect on this major geographical landscape change anymore…
gregladen | January 13, 2009Meet Don McLeroy
Doesn't Don look happy? He should. He's accomplished a great many things. He has an engineering degree, is a practicing dentist, has served in the U.S. Army, and has even helped out with his local Boy Scouts of America chapter, or congragation, or whatever they're called. On top of that, he's a Sunday-school teacher!
And he's a creationist and he's the head of the Texas Schoolboard.
The gory, awful details are HERE.
Texans, please don't make me tell you that you are all a bunch of slack jawed morons again! I know you don't like it. But you keep doing this shit.
tfk | January 13, 2009At the home of top IDolator Bill Dembski, some other IDolator writes a post best summarized as:
Exaptation proves ID.
No, really. Actual quote:
While the article does not directly address the implications for Darwinism of the existence of “latent” or “preexisting” evolutionary potential, the impossibility of fitting this concept into the standard neo-Darwinian paradigm is obvious.
If only someone had come up with a term like exaptation to describe the situation in which selection acts on features which originally evolved in a very different context in response to new challenges.
pharyngula | January 13, 2009It's not good news for Texas children in the public school system.
A new survey released by the nonprofit group Texans Care for Children shows that one out of every three Texas students may not make their way across the graduation stage to receive their diploma.
The survey reveals that Texas is ranked last in high school graduation rates and also found that more children in Texas had to retake kindergarten.
How are we going to fix this?
I know! Put a creationist dentist in charge of the educational system! Are you feeling reassured yet?
And seriously, this is a cruel trick to play on…
evolvingthoughts | January 12, 2009The website www.talkorigins.org is now back up, although links to the temporary archive www.toarchive.org/ still work for now. The story is roughly this - the company (joker.com) we bought the domain name from reassigned the IP number for the site as part of changing their data centre. They apparently sent an email notification to the administrator - Wesley Elsberry- but that went (you guessed it) to the email at the domain name. Since the domain no longer was active at the IP#, Wesley never got the email, and because we couldn't use the registered email address to contact joker.com, they…
gregladen | January 12, 2009Homeschool Showcase (Formerly The Carnival of Cool Homeschoolers) #15 is up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers. I've got an item listed in the carnival, which is typical (I often send potentially useful science content material to the homeschooling carnivals.)
While you're studying Earth science, you may want to check out Nature's Evolutionary Gems posted by Greg Laden at Greg Laden's Blog. It's up to you whether you use it to teach evolution as fact or as a teachable moment as you discuss God's creation. I know how we'll be using it. ;-)
Wink wink indeed!
pharyngula | January 11, 2009The Brunswick school district is still arguing about teaching creationism. As is typical, the usual clueless ideologues from the community are getting up there in front of the board and babbling. Look at this argument:
The topic came up after county resident Joel Fanti told the board he thought it was unfair for evolution to be taught as fact, saying it should be taught as a theory because there's no tangible proof it's true.
"I wasn't here 2 million years ago," Fanti said. "If evolution is so slow, why don't we see anything evolving now?"
That statement makes no sense. The slower…
gregladen | January 11, 2009And Public School Administrators, too.
There is a message being sent out, by the Discovery Institute (a non profit creationist 'think' tank) encouraging creationist students and teachers to "Suit Up, Sign Up, Show UP, Act Up and Start Up" (whatever that all means) on February 12, which of course, is Charles Darwin's 200th birthday.
As my friend and colleague Mike Haubrich says, "Fight for your right to be ignorant!"
The Discovery Institute is, obnoxiously, calling Darwin's Birthday "Academic Freedom Day," and encouraging a general uprising in life science classes throughout the country.…
pharyngula | January 8, 2009Our efforts in squelching the Cincinnati Zoo/Creation "Museum" connection have yielded extra dividends. Ken Ham is weeping over the after-effects.
As a result of all this flak and the ending of the joint promotion after only two days, a prominent national travel group ended its conversations with our museum staff last month about a possible arrangement where our Creation Museum would be given a higher profile in one of its travel guides, along with a museum discount if a visitor presents their membership card. Here is what we heard from this particular travel organization:
From: KXXXXX
To:…
pharyngula | January 8, 2009The fine state of Mississippi is about to be led astray by the cretins they've elected to congress. They have introduced yet another textbook disclaimer bill, which will require that all school books that mention "evolution" be slapped with this sticker:
The word 'theory' has many meanings, including: systematically organized knowledge; abstract reasoning; a speculative idea or plan; or a systematic statement of principles. Scientific theories are based on both observations of the natural world and assumptions about the natural world. They are always subject to change in view of new and…