Creationists
stcynic | July 14, 2006From the Pensacola newspaper:
A Pensacola evangelist was arrested Thursday and indicted in federal court on 58 charges that include income tax evasion, making threats against investigators and filing false complaints against Internal Revenue Service agents.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Miles Davis handed down the indictment against Kent Hovind, who operated a creationist theme park Dinosaur Adventure Land, off Old Palafox Road.
Hovind is one of those ridiculous people who claims that he doesn't have to pay taxes. He has two grounds for that. First, he claims to be a resident of the "Republic of…
stcynic | July 10, 2006Speaking of D. James Kennedy, a reader left a link in a comment below about the time-honored practice of tracking down creationist misquotations. Anyone involved in the evolution debate has had to do this at least once. A creationist gives you some juicy quote from a famous scientist that you know just couldn't possibly be accurate, so you ask for a specific citation. On the rare occasions you actually get one, it turns out to be false. Tracking down these things can be quite annoying. It's like playing the telephone game and watching a quote get more and more distorted as it's passed along…
stcynic | December 31, 2005I have to confess to being tired of answering William Gibbons' occasional replies. It's to be expected that someone with a "PhD in creation science apologetics" (which is roughly the same as having a PhD in defending astrology) would have mastered the "Gish Gallop", but Mr. Gibbons, it appears, simply has not a shred of intellectual honesty or concern for accuracy. Rather than offering a line by line response, let me point ouf the evidence on which I rest that conclusion. To begin with, let's look at his disturbing habit of appropriating the work of others and pretending they are his own. In…
stcynic | December 28, 2005Longtime readers of my blog have likely followed the exchange between myself and William Gibbons, a young earth creationist (with a PhD in "creation science apologetics", no less). Mr. Gibbons only posts a reply once every few months, and he left his latest reply in a comment that doesn't show the context of the previous replies. So I thought I would move it up here to its own post, along with links to the previous posts and comments on the subject so those who are interested can follow the exchange chronologically. Here are the previous posts, in order. You will see Gibbons' replies…
stcynic | December 27, 2005I don't know how, but I somehow managed to get on the mailing list of the Christian Worldview Network and I get their emails regularly. Most recently, I was sent a link to this ridiculous article from Sean McDowell (Josh McDowell's son, I imagine) about evolution. It's probably not worth fisking, but there are at least a few whoppers that ought to be pointed out, beginning with this one:
As a high school student in the late 1950's Jonathan Wells was steeped in the theory of evolution. Even though he had grown up in a Christian home Jonathan abandoned his faith when he went off to college.…
stcynic | December 26, 2005I came across this comment from Lenny Flank about one of Hugh Ross' recent books and I thought I'd post it. Let me make clear up front that I have not read the book in question, so I can only go by Lenny's account of what it says. If that is accurate, I think it gives a pretty good idea of what Hugh Ross' conception of "testability" is:
Ross's recent book (co-authored with two other fundie kooks) is entitled "Lights In the Sky and Little Green Men: A Rational Christian Look at UFO's and Extraterrestrials" (NavPress, Colorado Springs CO, 2002).
Over several chapters, Ross dismisses, on…
stcynic | December 19, 2005Pat Buchanan has a blissfully ignorant essay about evolution at Human Events that isn't even worth fisking. His heart isn't really in it, he just kind of ticks off a standard laundry list of long-debunked arguments - natural selection is a tautology, there is no missing link, blah blah blah. Feel free to visit it and laugh at it yourself.
stcynic | December 16, 2005A reader sent me a link to this post by Steve Benen about an Eagle Forum article on evolution and creationism. No, Steve is not the potential O'Brien Tropy nominee, the author of the document he cites is. That author appears to be "Virginia Armstrong, PhD", the national chairman of the Eagle Forum (Phyllis Schlaffly's group). I don't know what her PhD is in or where it's from, but it sure isn't in critical thinking. Wait until you see this positively breathtaking nugget of stupidity that she drops concerning evolution:
Fact v. Fiction #2: Evolutionists claim that their battle against creation…
stcynic | September 24, 2005If PZ Myers gave out a version of the Robert O'Brien Trophy, he would no doubt award it to Timothy Birdnow, the author of a delightfully idiotic anti-evolution screed in, of all places, a webmag called The American Thinker. PZ shredded the poor sap in a post, prompting the guy to start a separate weblog for the sole purpose of defending himself against those criticisms. Now PZ has taken aim at him again, and rightfully so. In his initial post, PZ had focused particular attention on this absolutely stunning passage from Birdnow's article:
Furthermore, we don`t even see crossovers between the 5…
stcynic | August 29, 2005You might be interested in seeing this brief exchange on Culture Kitchen with William Gibbons. It's in the comments, after the author there pointed to my replies to Gibbons and called them an "ass whomping".
stcynic | August 28, 2005I had mentioned in a previous post that I was skipping William Gibbons' claims on human evolution for the time being because I was hoping that Jim Foley would weigh in with his thoughts. He has done so now and I will post it below. Jim chose not to do a line by line response, but instead to focus on the challenge he had laid out to Gibbons concerning certain specific hominid skulls. So I am posting the line by line response that I prepared, followed by Jim's response.
Human Evolution
Here Gibbons is still counting on old Lord Zuckerman to do his work for him. The problem is that Zuckerman'…
stcynic | August 25, 2005It's round 4 with our favorite PhD in creation science apologetics, William Gibbons. You can find his reply at the bottom of this post. I'm moving this all up top so it doesn't get lost in the shuffle. He begins with the issue of plagiarism. I had pointed out that his first response was almost entirely plagiarized, virtually every word of it simply cut and pasted from various creationist webpages without any attribution at all. He had a three part response. First, he invented a mythical "evolutionist" who had allegedly done the same thing and gotten away with it:
It would seem that it is…
stcynic | August 24, 2005William Gibbons has written another reply, which you can see at the bottom of this post. I don't have time to reply at the moment, but when I do I will likely move it up here to the top. The reply was actually written last night, but for some reason it was blocked by the spam software and I had to dig through over 1000 comments to find it and approve it. I'll be back home shortly and will likely have a reply up by tomorrow.
stcynic | August 20, 2005I came across this ridiculous article on evolution and intelligent design on Alan Keyes' Renew America website and I was gonna give it the fisking it so deserves. Then I saw that PZ had already done it for me. My favorite part was where the author claimed that scientists were "hiding" the "fact" that "all 9 phyla" appeared in the Cambrian. Bzzzt. Thank you for playing. We have some lovely parting gifts for you.
stcynic | August 17, 2005A commenter named Wagner posted a reply to my comments on an older thread at In the Agora, which I just noticed. The reply deals with evolution and creationism and I didn't want it to get lost, so I'm moving it up here and responding. I also think it's a good idea to give this comment its own space because it's an excellent example of the types of arguments typical of creationists. It contains lots of conclusionary rhetoric and what little substance it contains - actual discussion of the evidence - is highly inaccurate. But first, the conclusionary rhetoric:
To quote one of your own,…
stcynic | August 10, 2005Here comes Chris Buttars again, putting his rank ignorance and utter lack of critical reasoning skills on display in an op-ed piece in USA Today. Buttars has it all figured out, folks. Evolution is all about destroying God and that's that. We might as well close up the Evil Atheist Conspiracy right now; a halfwit State Senator from Utah has nailed us.
The campaign to eliminate God from the public forum has been going on for decades, having accelerated greatly since the Supreme Court's ill-advised decision in 1963 to eliminate prayer from public schools. And I believe those fighting against…
stcynic | August 3, 2005Our intrepid creationist, William Gibbons, is back again. You might remember him from a year ago when I challenged him to explain the evidence from biostratigraphy, a challenge he has still not even attempted to meet. A couple weeks ago, he was back with a long reply of plagiarized and uncredited cutting and pasting as a reply. And now he is back again. But first, he's quite tweaked that I dared to take him to task for plagiarism:
It would seem that it is quite unacceptable for a creationist to use and quote from creationist and non-creationist sources when answering critics. It is perfectly…
stcynic | July 26, 2005Back in June of 2004, I wrote an essay about the varying degrees of credibility among creationists (with people like Kurt Wise and Art Chadwick at the top and people like Kent Hovind and Karl Priest at the bottom) that included a snarky little tidbit about William Gibbons. Gibbons describes himself as holding a "Ph.D., in Creation Science Apologetics summa cum laude, Emmanuel College of Christian Studies, Springdale, Arkansas." I made a snippy comment or two about that and said:
But Gibbons' bio gets even better. Under "special achievements", he actually lists "Conducted four expeditions to…
stcynic | July 18, 2005Jerry Falwell is hosting a huge Creation Megaconference at Liberty University starting tomorrow. Reason magazine's Ronald Bailey, who has written a good deal about creationism, is going to attend and post dispatches from the conference. Should be interesting to read.
stcynic | June 13, 2005PZ Myers has an amusing takedown of Jim Pinkoski, a creationist I've had a bit of fun with in the past. Pinkoski is a cartoonist, and for many years he played Robin to Ron Wyatt's Batman. Wyatt, some of you may remember, was the rather loony nurse anesthetist from Tennessee who claimed to have discovered Noah's Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, the real Mt. Sinai, the exact place where the Red Sea was parted, and many other things. He conned thousands of people into funding his adventures, always returning with breathtaking tales of intrigue and adventure but no actual evidence. Jim Pinkoski was…