Perhaps you thought Lisa Nowak, the pampers-wearing jealous lover, was enough of a stain on the reputation of astronauts. Here’s another one, though, to give you more excuses to kick them off their pedestal: There’s going to be a “Back to Genesis” conference sponsored by the Institute for Creation Research in Colorado Springs, and among the luminaries in attendance will be Russell Humphreys, Henry Morris III, and this fellow:
Col. Jeffrey Williams, U.S. Army, is a NASA astronaut with graduate degrees in aeronautical engineering and strategic studies. Col. Williams has been with NASA since 1987 and has served twice on the International Space Station, including the recent Expedition 13 project in conjunction with Russian cosmonauts.
The ICR is a Young Earth Creationist institution that preaches an absolutely literal interpretation of the Bible. How nice that one astronaut is trading on his association with NASA to support such nonsense — I don’t think there’s any doubt that Nowak was deranged, and it seems to me that Williams is equally looney. This hasn’t been a good couple of months for NASA’s image.
… what is it with engineers and ID/creationist nonsense? I’m not a biologist, I didn’t finish my computer engineering degree, but went ahead and finished my IT degree… and yet at my uni I’m known informally as the “atheist creationist/ID basher”. I was under the impression that the “critical thinking” espoused at reasonable institutions teaching Engineering involved actual…
… y’know – thinking. Evidence and its analysis. Gosh. Silly me.
Well, the movement bagged a brain surgeon with Egnor. Williams is obviously the rocket scientist. Now, all they need is a Philadelphia lawyer and the trinity is complete. Darwinism will fall!
Am I the only one who feels sympathy for Lisa Nowak? If she has a mental illness then it might not be so funny.
It would seem that Nowak’s loss of rationality was most likely caused by a temporary chemical imbalance in her brain and therefore treatable. Alas Idiocy appears to be a permanent condition, the prognosis, sadly, is not good. This nimwit is at NASA?! Talk about dragging the mule to the fountain of knowledge but not being able to force it to drink.
Re #3
Re mental illness I lambasted a post over at sciam a while back on exactly that point, I most certainly didn’t find it funny and made that very clear!
I wonder what Colonel Williams’ opinion is regarding the literal truth of this excerpt from Joshua 10:13 –
“So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.”
Having been on the ISS, what does he believe regarding heliocentrism – the literal words of the Bible, or his lyin’ eyes?
Goodness, how quickly people learn to repeat politically-convenient nonsense. One begins to understand how the IDists manage.
It would be far more accurate to say that Nowak was temporarily overcome by a truly bad idea, but Williams has been overcome permanently.
There’s a bit of a history with NASA astronauts and fundamentalism. One of the moon guys spent his later years looking for Noah’s Ark and I’ll never forget the day ex-Skylab astronaut Bill Pogue came to speak at my school in Scotland as part of an evangelical tour.
Mr. Williams Bio at
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/williamsj.html
does not list one degree in biology, geology or any other science that would lend credulity to his support of a young earth. He is simply an astronaut/test pilot with degrees in applied science and engineering and aeronautical engineering.
BTW, Astronaut does not necessarily equate to Rocket Scientist.
And then there was that whole embarrassing James Irwin looking for Noah’s Ark episode.
BTW, Astronaut does not necessarily equate to Rocket Scientist.
Of course not. You know that, and I know that, and Carlson knows that – but it’s not you or me or Carlson they’re after. After all, in the eyes of the target audience, “Astronaut” adds a patina of scientific legitimacy (not to mention an aura of courage and heroism) to the whole project.
Maybe the Colonel will run into a “the moon landing was faked” loon and they can live happily ever after.
No, Christian, you’re not. Although I can’t help laughing at some of the jokes some people have made about the situation, I have resisted the temptation to repeat them or add my own.
I will tell you something that I do think is funny though. The day after Ms. Nowak was arrested there was a news story about how NASA was re-examining its screening procedures, as if they could tell, years in advance, that someone was going to have an episode like this.
Besides, don’t you think you have to be a little bit crazy to sit on top of a rocket and get blasted into orbit in the unforgiving vacuum of space, where your only hope of survival lies in a fiery re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere? Would you do that job for about $40 grand/year? If they screened out everyone who wasn’t completely rational, they’d lose all the people willing to do the work of being an astronaut.
I think this also might explain why some of them are predisposed to religious and other superstitious beliefs.
I wonder if he saw God up in the sky?
Phil must be having seizures over this.
‘Astronaut’ is to ‘scientist’ as ‘fireman’ is to ‘public service’.
I like SAT analogies.
… what is it with engineers and ID/creationist nonsense?
The phenomenon doesn’t have it’s own name (“The Salem Hypothesis”) for no reason.
Seriously?
“Search Image”. The tendency to see what you are trained to see. There’s a lovely passage in The Hominid Gang where S J Gould is walking over the Turkana fossil beds and picking up snail fossils. Everyone else had been looking at and for mammal fossils, they literally hadn’t noticed the snails. “Snails” were part of Dr Gould’s search image.
Engineers look at designs and designed stuff all day, they are trained to look at design. “Design” is their search image. A lot of them are tempted by “false positives”, especially if it supports some other agenda. You also find a goodly number of engineers involved in various “woo” schemes of other sorts (“alternate” history, UFO crud, pyramidiocy, etc)
One the ther hand, I know a number of them that are religious that don’t buy into this malarky, either.
Just for the record, I have an M.S. in Electrical Engineering, and I’m the most atheistic person I know. In fact, everyone in my research group is atheist. There’s still hope for some of us!
Sanford was once a productive researcher. More recently, he has testified before the Kansas Board of Education that he believes the Earth to be less than 10,000 years old, and does not accept common descent in general, or specifically common descent between humans and other apes.
Well, the movement bagged a brain surgeon with Egnor. Williams is obviously the rocket scientist.
Nope, the rocket scientist is Mark Psiaki professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University, and faculty advisor to the IDEA Club at Cornell. Here is some of his more embarrassing babble.
“Besides, don’t you think you have to be a little bit crazy to sit on top of a rocket and get blasted into orbit in the unforgiving vacuum of space, where your only hope of survival lies in a fiery re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere?”
Someone made a similar if less persuasively worded comment at Ed’s place when this story broke, and I had to disagree. It’s space! People take huge risks all the time for far less than becoming one of the few people ever to see both poles at the same time.
Here is an Intriguing quote from the ICR website explaining their “beliefs”:
“Each of the major kinds of plants and animals was created functionally complete from the beginning and did not evolve from some other kind of organism. Changes in basic kinds since their first creation are limited to “horizontal” changes (variations) within the kinds, or “downward” changes (e.g., harmful mutations, extinctions).” Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. They just don’t like forward thinking.
shuttles don’t go high enough to see both poles at the same time.
I think only the Apollo astronauts who went to/around the moon ever were far enough away to be able to see both poles at the same time.
Diameter of the earth is around 12700 km, manned space travel in orbit is between 100 and 400 km or so.
Yes, people do, but not completely sane people. I’m a little bit crazy myself. I like to drive fast, I rewire electrical circuits with the current turned on, and in my youth I was a surfer, skier and snowboarder, but ride a rocket? No way!
Perhaps you’re too young to remember the early days of the space program, but rockets used to blow up on the pad or shortly after launch all the time. More recently there were those unpleasant incidents with the Challenger and then the Columbia.
I mean, I saw guys get beat up really bad surfing too, and I’ve seen some horrendous car crashes, but when you’re doing those things you at least have the illusion that your life is in your own hands, but on a rocket?
You have to be a whole different kind of crazy to put your life in the hands of a ground control crew and a bunch of engineers who designed the vehicle you’re riding on to meet a deadline. I can see how this kind of mindset would also incline people to put their lives in the hands of imaginary omnipotent beings. It’s one way to rationalize the risks you’re taking.
Don’t forget that the rockets NASA launches are made by the lowest bidder and astronauts get in them voluntarily. Talk about brave to the point of insanity!
cheers,
Ray
“Col. Jeffrey Williams, U.S. Army, is a NASA astronaut with graduate degrees in aeronautical engineering…”
I wonder if he can explain how angels fly with those tiny wings and no engines? Or does he just conveniently forget about little mysteries like that?
And speaking of looney astronauts, remember the secret ESP experiments performed by Edgar Mitchell on Apollo 14? He’s still into that kind of wacko stuff today.
http://www.edmitchellapollo14.com/edmbio.htm
The same logic can be applied to a large portion of science graduate
programs, to one extent or another.
A couple weeks ago I had lunch with Russell Humphries. He came to speak in my northern Colorado town, Fort Collins. I didn’t go to his day-long seminar at the sponsoring church, but I did go to his evening lecture at Colorado State University. He covered so much material, there wasn’t any way to make sense of it. He only allowed one question per person afterwards, so he always got the last word.
However, since I have a Ph.D. in physics myself, I wrote to the church before his visit to see if he would be available for a more technical discussion. The pastor took us out to lunch and we talked about general relativity and cosmology for an hour. It was quite a nice time, and it opened what I think is a valuable line of communication between me (a skeptic public high school teacher) and the pastor, who I had previously been worried about as a potential source of headache for science teachers. I’m hoping that communication like this can help prevent a Dover-like debacles in our town.
I won’t bother to explain Humphries’ model or my concerns about it, except to observe that he has some rather unconventional ideas about the role of coordinate systems in understanding spherically symmetric solutions.
I don’t think I’ll make it down to Colorado Springs to see him again.
I am sick of hearing, “What is it with Engineers?”
Is Behe an engineer? “What is it with all of those biochemists?”
Is Dumbski an engineer? “What is it with all of those mathematicians?”
Is Denton an engineer?
Wait a minute… another biochemist??? Oh, I see a pattern!
OK… bottom line, you do not have to be stupid to be religious. Irrational, yes – subjective, you bet – superstitious, unfortunately. One can be brilliant and still believe that he will not actually die, but will ascend into eternal bliss. The smarter he is, the more skillful he is at rationalizing his delusion.
I’ve been an atheist before most who are reading this were born, (40 years – and before that I was an alter boy… go figure).
I’ll have no more spurious inferences about engineers, or I will have to go out and find me a biochemist and mock him until he cries. (and we ALL know how easily biochemists cry!)
Can I donate money to ICR?Can I donate stock to ICR?Please take my money and stock…..PLEASE!
I will. It’s pure horseshit. His idea that the distribution of matter throughout the universe could distort spacetime so severely as to cause time to move so slowly near earth that distant light would get here in a mere 5,000 years is flawed to the core. For starters, it flatly contradicts the Einstein field equation. You know that little g thing in that equation? You should if you have a PhD in physics. Why don’t you take the time to figure out what it would need to be for his idea to work. Now, look carefully at that answer and ask yourself: “Am I inside my own Swartzchild radius?” That’s about as big of a contradiction as you’ll ever get.
Then there’s the problem of the amount of light we’re getting. Is it consistent with billions of years-worth of light being dumped into our eyes over the course of the last 5,000 years? Obviously: No. And that time distortion brings with it a whole set of problems. If we’re so severely distorted as to be recieving billions of years of light over so small a time frame, then why is everything out there standing still? How much stellar galactic evolution can you actually watch? None directly. We have to sample different galaxies at different distances to get that kind of information but, if Humphries was right, we’d be able to watch quasars stabilize into quiet barred spirals right before our eyes.
And then there’s another problem: He’s right here on my doorstep, and he runs away every time I confront him. I wonder why that might be? Here’s a clue: He’s batshit insane, and dead wrong.
To take these creatures on, you have to fight them on their ground; they will never recognize any argument you make from the safety of yours.
His idea that the distribution of matter throughout the universe could distort spacetime so severely as to cause time to move so slowly near earth that distant light would get here in a mere 5,000 years is flawed to the core
Not just flawed, but (depending on how theological you want to be) it presupposes or at least hints at a God who is willing to arrange things in such a way as to fool the astronomers (a similar argument is made with regard to the fossil record having been ‘planted’ to make idiots of the paleontologists).
Such a God would in effect be bearing false witness as to the true nature of the universe; i.e. He would be breaking one of the ten commandments. Seeing as the Christian religion holds that it is in fact Satan who is the liar and hypocrite, this pre-supposition of God ‘faking the evidence’ must be false.
The Creationists’ argument is nonsense both scientifically and theologically. Every decent Christian knows when Genesis was written, how little was known about the true state of affairs back then, and with how many grains (or tons) of salt the first few chapters need to be taken. Politically motivated claptrap like ID is not only unscientific, it is essentially sinful, and its implications concerning the nature of God are blasphemous.