Some people are planning to make a sequel, another 13 part series, to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. This may be a greater heresy than giving Star Trek a reboot with a time-travel movie, or turning Star Wars into Jar Jar Binks land, but there is one glimmer of sunshine: it’s going to star Neil deGrasse Tyson. He’s our only hope.
(Also on Sb)
Those secular Europeans…they’re almost there. Klass Hendrikse is a Dutch minister who is apparently reasonably typical of the breed. He doesn’t believe in gods.
“Personally I have no talent for believing in life after death,” Mr Hendrikse says. “No, for me our life, our task, is before death.”
Nor does Klaas Hendrikse believe that God exists at all as a supernatural thing.
“When it happens, it happens down to earth, between you and me, between people, that’s where it can happen. God is not a being at all… it’s a word for experience, or human experience.”
Oh, yes, god as blithering bafflegab. It’s mostly harmless, it’s entirely pointless, and you might as well change the name of his church to the Gorinchem Social Club and be honest about it all. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a social club.
So finish it, and do one more thing: read that Bible you keep waving around.
Mr Hendrikse describes the Bible’s account of Jesus’s life as a mythological story about a man who may never have existed, even if it is a valuable source of wisdom about how to lead a good life.
I’ve read the Bible; I think most Christian’s eyes must glaze over before they hit the second chapter of Genesis, and then they skip ahead to Revelation. This version of Jesus as the loving wise man isn’t in there. Instead, he’s a patriarchal rabbi with an apocalyptic vision who wanders the land, doing cheesy magic tricks and making extravagant claims about himself. I certainly don’t think he modeled a good life, and the nice humanist bits in some of his purported sermons you can get just as well by reading some of the Greek philosophers.
So the Dutch have a little bit further to go, but at least they’re further down the road of reason than the typical American preacher.
Warning: Scooter has invited me to appear on InnerSide Radio, KPFT Houston 90.1, to talk about Texas, tonight at 9:30-10:00 Central (in about an hour). This could be dangerous.
I have a terrible confession to make. I have never in my life been to Texas, except for brief visits to an airport on my way to somewhere else. So Texas has a weirdly hellish fantasy quality to it…although I do know some people from Texas who are decent human beings. The good people have to be horribly outnumbered by the lunatics, though, to have elected Governor Perry and those ghastly board of education members.
Some of you Texans might have to tune in and call in to correct my terrible slanders.
I’ve got a lovely crocoduck tie, but maybe I need a new pigbird tie. Look! Evolution is impossible! It’s like a flying pig!
This is some
new awful short video from Answers in Genesis. It’s slick and fast and just babbles rapid-fire lies at the viewer — don’t stop, don’t think, you might catch on to the nonsense!
It makes precisely two discrete claims that it claims disprove evolution. All you have to do is watch this video and yay, you’re done, you can forget that science stuff and move on to loving Jesus. Here are the arguments:
There is no known observable process by which new genetic information can be added to an organism’s genetic code.
Except mutations and gene transfer, of course. Oh, hey, they forgot those! That does sort of scuttle their whole point. I’m afraid we do know of observable processes that add measurable, quantitative genetic information to an organism (not to its code, though: that’s stupid. Whoever created this thing is one of those common ignoramuses who can’t tell the difference between a genome and a genetic code). Geneticists have seen this happen: look at copy number variants in humans, for instance, and geneticists have seen novel mutants in flies in which a segment of the genome is duplicated; parents don’t have it, progeny does. We also have evidence from gene families. We have five α globin genes and six β globin genes (some of which are dead pseudogenes), for instance, and they’re clearly derived by duplication and divergence.
So sorry, guys, this one is simply a lie. I’d be happy to be confronted by a creationist peddling this bit of misinformation, since it is so patently bogus.
Life has never been observed to come from non-life.
Ooh, better. This claim is literally true and not a flat-out lie. It’s also irrelevant. One of the things you’ll discover as you get deeper and deeper into biology is that it’s chemistry all the way down. There are no vital agents working away inside a cell, adding intelligent guidance: it’s all stoichiometry and reaction kinetics and thermodynamics. In a sense, all life is built of non-life and denying it is like seeing the Lego Millennium Falcon and arguing that it couldn’t possibly be made of little tiny plastic bricks. Yeah, it is.
But it’s true that we haven’t seen life re-evolving from simple chemicals now, and there’s a good reason for that: this planet is now crawling with life everywhere, and life’s building blocks that form nowadays don’t last long — they’re lunch. We also have only rudimentary ideas of what prebiotic chemicals were reacting in ancient seas, so we can’t even simulate early chemistry in an organism-free test tube, yet. Scientists are busily tinkering, though, and we do have protocols that spontaneously produced complex organic chemicals from inorganic sources, we just haven’t found the formula for a chemical replicator yet.
But it’s an irrelevant objection, anyway. Nobody has shown me god conjuring people out of mud, either. Creationists have their own problem of demonstrating origins, and they aren’t even trying to puzzle it out — goddidit, they’re done.
The conclusion is, of course, to claim that they have now disproven evolution (they haven’t), and therefore…Jesus. Faulty premises and ludicrous leaps of logic make this one a pathetic foray into addressing evolution. It’s slick, though — maybe they should have used a picture of a greased pig as their header image.
(Also on FtB)
I’ve got a lovely crocoduck tie, but maybe I need a new pigbird tie. Look! Evolution is impossible! It’s like a flying pig!
This is some new awful short video from Answers in Genesis. It’s slick and fast and just babbles rapid-fire lies at the viewer — don’t stop, don’t think, you might catch on to the nonsense!
(Ugh, sorry, but WordPress thinks it is smarter than I am and refuses to let me imbed the video here. You’ll have to watch it at this link.)
It makes precisely two discrete claims that it claims disprove evolution. All you have to do is watch this video and yay, you’re done, you can forget that science stuff and move on to loving Jesus. Here are the arguments:
There is no known observable process by which new genetic information can be added to an organism’s genetic code.
Except mutations and gene transfer, of course. Oh, hey, they forgot those! That does sort of scuttle their whole point. I’m afraid we do know of observable processes that add measurable, quantitative genetic information to an organism (not to its code, though: that’s stupid. Whoever created this thing is one of those common ignoramuses who can’t tell the difference between a genome and a genetic code). Geneticists have seen this happen: look at copy number variants in humans, for instance, and geneticists have seen novel mutants in flies in which a segment of the genome is duplicated; parents don’t have it, progeny does. We also have evidence from gene families. We have five α globin genes and six β globin genes (some of which are dead pseudogenes), for instance, and they’re clearly derived by duplication and divergence.
So sorry, guys, this one is simply a lie. I’d be happy to be confronted by a creationist peddling this bit of misinformation, since it is so patently bogus.
Life has never been observed to come from non-life.
Ooh, better. This claim is literally true and not a flat-out lie. It’s also irrelevant. One of the things you’ll discover as you get deeper and deeper into biology is that it’s chemistry all the way down. There are no vital agents working away inside a cell, adding intelligent guidance: it’s all stoichiometry and reaction kinetics and thermodynamics. In a sense, all life is built of non-life and denying it is like seeing the Lego Millennium Falcon and arguing that it couldn’t possibly be made of little tiny plastic bricks. Yeah, it is.
But it’s true that we haven’t seen life re-evolving from simple chemicals now, and there’s a good reason for that: this planet is now crawling with life everywhere, and life’s building blocks that form nowadays don’t last long — they’re lunch. We also have only rudimentary ideas of what prebiotic chemicals were reacting in ancient seas, so we can’t even simulate early chemistry in an organism-free test tube, yet. Scientists are busily tinkering, though, and we do have protocols that spontaneously produced complex organic chemicals from inorganic sources, we just haven’t found the formula for a chemical replicator yet.
But it’s an irrelevant objection, anyway. Nobody has shown me god conjuring people out of mud, either. Creationists have their own problem of demonstrating origins, and they aren’t even trying to puzzle it out — goddidit, they’re done.
The conclusion is, of course, to claim that they have now disproven evolution (they haven’t), and therefore…Jesus. Faulty premises and ludicrous leaps of logic make this one a pathetic foray into addressing evolution. It’s slick, though — maybe they should have used a picture of a greased pig as their header image.
(Also on Sb)
This is an excellent comic at Abstruse Goose that illustrates the depth of our evolutionary history. The ending is a downer, though; shouldn’t the protagonist have been enlightened and encouraged by this information?
This is an excellent comic at Abstruse Goose that illustrates the depth of our evolutionary history. The ending is a downer, though; shouldn’t the protagonist have been enlightened and encouraged by this information?
Daniel Loxton is an annoying fellow. He does good work for the skeptic movement, and he’s got an excellent record of working for the cause, but he’s also prone to flop into simpering, pandering mode at the first sign someone disagrees with him (not in my case, though, but then I’m particularly annoying myself). This time, what prompts my mixed feelings is his summary of the diversity panel at TAM. This was a panel moderated by Desiree Schell, and containing a group of people who actually were diverse: D.J. Grothe, Debbie Goddard, Greta Christina, Jamila Bey, and Hemant Mehta. It’s a sign of good things in the skeptic movement that we did actually have some different backgrounds represented on a prominent panel, and not a collection of old white guys.
This has long been an issue with the skeptical movement. I used to subscribe to the Skeptical Inquirer, a very good magazine with well-written and substantive articles on skeptical issues, but I let my subscription lapse. It was a strange thing that prompted it; several years ago, there was an issue lauding the leaders of the skeptical movement, and it had a nice line drawing of four or five of these Big Names on the cover: and every one was white, male, and over 70 years old. I looked at it, and I wasn’t mad or outraged — every one of them was a smart guy who deserved recognition — but I saw it, sighed, and felt that not only was this incredibly boring, but that organized skepticism was dead if it was going to turn into a gerontocracy. I didn’t let my subscription lapse in protest, but out of lack of motivation.
