You mean the accommodationist debates aren’t over yet?

I bumped into Chris Mooney a couple of times this past weekend at ScienceOnline 2010. I tried to talk to him — I honestly don’t have any personal animosity to the guy — but he was mostly rather dour, and the most I got out of him was a claim that the arguments will start up again soon, when the paperback edition of his book comes out. I tried not to roll my eyes and say that no, we’re pretty much through with his book now (see how nice I am in person?). Anyway, he didn’t seem to be very happy any time I saw him, but maybe he was much more cheerful when I wasn’t in the same room.

He’s still trying to stir up the same foolish dead accommodationist debate, though, and while I don’t want to waste any more time on it, since I was the target of much of the complaint before, I thought I’d at least point you to Larry Moran and Sean Carroll and Jerry Coyne. I agree with their take on it. Battle it out on their blogs, just for fun.

Looking for grant money for your research?

Times are tight. It’s tough getting grants from NIH and NSF, but the government has heard your plight and has responded by opening up new avenues to request support: apply for an NCMHD Innovative Faith-Based Approaches to Health Disparities Research grant!

Purpose. The purpose of the NCMHD Innovative Faith-Based Approaches to Health Disparities Research (R21) is to solicit applications that propose translational and transdisciplinary interventions on health disparities, social determinants of health, health behavior and promotion and disease prevention, especially those jointly conducted with faith-based organizations or faith-motivated programs and the research community.  The ultimate goal is to foster empirical, formative, evaluative and intervention research on effective faith-motivated initiatives, concepts and theories that have played an important role in addressing health disparities.  Funding is also intended to provide support for early and conceptual stages of exploratory and developmental research projects.  This focus will allow studies to evaluate the impact of faith-based initiatives and programs in health disparity populations, formulate hypotheses about the role and unique characteristics of faith communities in addressing health disparities, design targeted interventions and track the efficacy of faith-motivated efforts that result from a participatory approach to research in the community. These studies may involve considerable risk but may lead to a breakthrough in addressing health disparities or the development of a model or application that could have a major impact on the field of health disparities research.

It’s not quite as vile as it sounds — they aren’t endorsing the efficacy of faith-based approaches to health, they’re just saying that there are all these churches around and people go to them more easily than they do to clinics, so explore that and see if you can sneak in some science to go with their superstition. Probably. It’s all imbedded in typical murky NIHese, and it does involve forming partnerships with faith-based institutions, so some of your $275,000 direct funds will end up supporting the nonsense we ought to be working against.

Vanity Fair reviews the Creation Museum

A good take-down is a thing of beauty. A.A. Gill visited the “museum” in Kentucky, and gets right to the heart of the matter: it’s not a museum, it’s a national embarrassment.

The Creation Museum isn’t really a museum at all. It’s an argument. It’s not even an argument. It’s the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism. This whole building is devoted to the literal veracity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis: God created the world in six days, and the whole thing is no more than 6,000 years old. Everything came at once, so Tyrannosaurus rex and Noah shared a cabin. That’s an awful lot of explaining to do. This place doesn’t just take on evolution–it squares off with geology, anthropology, paleontology, history, chemistry, astronomy, zoology, biology, and good taste. It directly and boldly contradicts most -onomies and all -ologies, including most theology.

It’s also ugly, cheesy, and stupid. People often try to excuse faith by claiming it inspired a lot of great art…but here is the evidence that god is dead. All his rotting corpse seems to inspire any more is cartoon kitsch. And Christian rock.

I spent a lot of time in the Eden picnic area, trying to wrest some sort of spiritual buzz, a sense of the majesty and the mystery, but it’s conspicuously absent. Literally beaten to death. This is Ripley’s Believe-It. It is irredeemably kitsch. In fact, it may be the biggest collection of kitsch in God’s entire world. This is the profound represented by the banal, a divine irony. (The penchant for kitsch is something that gay men and born-again Christians share.) This tacky, risible, and rational tableau defies belief, beggars faith. Compare it to the creation story in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Masaccio’s expulsion from Eden, or any of the thousands of flickering images, icons, and installations based on faith rather than literalist realism. It truly makes you wonder, Is all this righteous ire, all this money, all this Pentecostal flame-throwing the best they can come up with? This cheap county-fair sideshow–this is their best shot? It may be more replete with proof than a Soviet show trial, but this creation is bereft of any soul.

We’ve criticized Ham a lot for the inanities of his museum, but I wonder if the accusation that he’s a cheap, tasteless rube will sting a little more than harping on the fact that he’s ignorant and irrational (which he considers virtues). We’ll have to see if a response appears on his blog.

By the way, Ken Ham reads Pharyngula, even if he never links to us or mentions us by name. He has a blog post that quotes me and commenters here, to show how evil we are. You should check it out to see if he found you worthy of damnation.

Poll needs more godless input

And this is just the place to muster it! I can see one problem in it, though: the creators of this ridiculous poll have cunningly split the good answers into two, so we have a double challenge: we should run up both the first and fourth answers to outnumber the other two.

The Bible: God’s Word or pious myth?

9% The Bible is a book of myth and is of human origin

77% The Bible is inspired by God in all its parts

5% The Bible is partially inspired by God and partially uninspired

2% The Bible is untrustworthy and irrelevant

6% Don’t know

I wish they’d done a little consolidation. The bible is a book of pious myths created by humans, and is untrustworthy and irrelevant. Ready, set, pharyngulate!

If it’s Thursday, it must be UC Davis

We had a good crowd, lots of questions, and an interesting group of student skeptics at UCSB this evening. Next up is a little sleep, then a plane hop to Sacramento, and a talk at UC Davis at 6:30, in 194 Chemistry. I also think I’ll break up my next talk a bit more; this one bounced about over some fairly dense sciencey stuff, and a little more variety and more opportunities to discuss should be more fun.

Polling for truth about the afterlife

Apparently, polls are now the proper way to settle metaphysical issues. This guy claims to have evidence of life after death, based on claims about near-death experiences (NDEs), which are so convincing…not. People experiencing trauma and physiological shock, whose brains have received a nasty jar and have had the continuity of experience abruptly terminated, are not the best people to accurately describe the objective nature of the phenomenon; also, the mind is pretty darned good at filling in gaps in our experience with confabulations.

It’s an untrustworthy basis for believing in magical post-death transformations, but this guy has made it even worse. How does he test for life after death? He collects anecdotes on a web site — a kind of glorified pointless poll. So I suppose it is only natural that the article about the collection of tripe would put up a pointless poll of its own.

Do you believe in the afterlife?

82.2%
Yes.

7.7%
No.

10%
I’m not sure.

Using the methodology of these loons, I think that if we get a majority saying “No” it will mean that there is no life after death.