The Smithsonian has a traveling exhibit based on the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins. It’s going to be put up at libraries all across the country (but nowhere in Minnesota!), so lots of people will get a look at some of the evidence for human evolution. Can you guess who is not happy about this? Of course you can. Ken Ham has declared it a propaganda campaign for atheism.
This is nothing but a propaganda campaign attempting to indoctrinate people to believe they are nothing but animals evolved from ape-like ancestors! To the Smithsonian, that’s what it means to be human! And what they are doing in reality is trying to impose their religion of naturalism (atheism) on the culture. Interestingly, in complementing community events, they also plan to have some people (who come from liberal backgrounds) supposedly representing the religious community. Of course, the entire exhibit is religious—it is promoting the religion of atheism using evolutionary beliefs. And for this exhibit, there are special invitations for clergy to try to influence them!
I have my complaints about that exhibit — I saw it a few years ago. None of those complaints involve it’s excessively atheistic nature, obviously — if anything, it panders way too much to religion, and as you can see from Ham’s own words, they are specifically including religious perspectives…just not the kind of bugshitting brainless perspectives Ham’s dogmatism espouses. As I recall, there isn’t any explicit recognition of atheism anywhere in the Smithsonian exhibit, but there’s plenty of video of religious scientists making excuses for faith.
To Ken Ham, apparently every other religion in the world is atheistic, except for his peculiar and very limited views.
There’s another hilarious, irrational aside.
Note how the exhibit starts with “What Does It Mean to Be Human? Travel back 6 million years to discover how our ancestors struggled to survive dramatic climate changes and, in the process, evolved the traits that make us human.” Right at the beginning of the exhibit there is a message about climate change. By the way, if man evolved because of climate change, then why are the secularists up in arms about climate change?
You know, this was one of the liberal/secular/atheist complaints about the Koch Hall, way back when it first opened. It portrays climate change as a good thing because changes in the environment drove human evolution, which is mostly true. But evolution is not a good thing when it’s happening to your population — we don’t say malaria is a benefit to humanity because it’s driving genetic changes in human populations. Selection is not a gentle, loving phenomenon, and we at least are aware of that.
But I can tell this exhibit is pushing all of poor Mr Ham’s buttons. It acknowledges the reality of an old Earth, the reality of climate change, and the reality of evolution? How dare they slap him in the face with facts like that!
YEAH! And if we evolved because an asteroid strike wiped out the dinosaurs, why should we care about another of those?
The conflation of any people who accept evolution, secularists, atheists, moderate religious people of all sorts etc. is strong with this one.
It’s quite impressive how, in a single sentence, he manages to demonstrate his ignorance of both evolution and climate change. That’s some high-efficiency bullshit-peddling right there.
Surely Ken Ham must welcome exhibitions like this. It enables him to put the fear of god (via the fear of atheism) into his followers and thus encourage them to give him even more money than before. He probably heard about the exhibit and said to himself, “You beauty, I should be able to make a small fortune out of this.”
Quite a lot of crazy right there. It’s fractally wrong.
1. Science does not = atheism or religion. They have nothing to do with each other.
2. The true enemy of Ham’s superstition isn’t science. It’s reality itself. And no matter what he says or does, reality isn’t going away.
3. The hates of the fundie xians are legion. Oddly enough, these days, one of the up and coming hates is…other xians. Specifically progressive Mainline Protestants.
Progressive xians, atheists, and Moslems are the…new gays.
It always makes me laugh when one of the worst things religious nutters can think of to say about atheism is that it is a religion.
They insult themselves. Own goal.
So true! Also, I think everybody in the world should be given a baseball bat and encouraged to hit everyone they meet with it. This should help our offspring in the future to evolve stronger bones.
@6 Lynna, OM
No, it’s not, because Christianity is a relationship, not a religion (alternatively, it’s a philosophy, not a religion, if you ask Bill O’Reilly). Surely you’ve heard that one plenty of times before.
@Saganite #8:
We, here, have all heard it. I wonder if the IRS has?
raven wrote@5:
reminiscent of rationalWiki:
I acknowledge there are many issues with adopting this as a Philosophy (capital P, deliberate). however I do advocate as a “attitude” when discussing the R.v.S subject.
How does he mean, “nothing but” animals evolved from ape-like ancestors? That’s about the most marvelous thing one can be! Other than being squid, of course, but still I prefer it over being nothing but the puppet of an invisible puppet player.
“It’s a propaganda campaign!! I outta know!”
The Hamster’s rant reminds me of the Peanuts cartoon where Lucy is tell Charlie why his team lost all their games through a series of statistics. Charlie gets more discouraged as she reads each stat until he finally tells Lucy to “tell your statistics to shut up”.
In Hambone’s case, it’s “tell your facts to shut up.”
We aren’t just animals. We are animals that happen to be the dominant species and only high intelligence tool users on the planet.
As opposed to what? According to Ham’s mythology, we are flawed creatures due to original sin, a doctrine not found in the bible FWIW. The products of a Perfect god who is obviously a dimwit, incompetent, and monstrous. And our run as playtoys is about over with, when god who is jesus shows up 2,000 years late, kills everyone, and destroys the earth.
Ham’s god babble is BTW, a fallacy. The Fallacy of Wishful Thinking.
He wishes he was god’s special snowflake and destined to live forever in heaven doing something that no one clearly has any idea of. But wishful thinking doesn’t make ideas true!!!
… nothing but animals evolved from ape-like ancestors!
Give Ham a little credit for not saying “monkeys” here.
… in complementing community events…
And for knowing the difference between “complement” & “compliment” – lots of pro-evo folks flub that one.
… this exhibit is pushing all of poor Mr Ham’s buttons.
I missed the parts about the gay abortion porn, and about denying tax breaks to discriminators.
I wonder how they chose the stops for that tour. It seems like they’ve largely ignored the south and Midwest. (Yes, I’m complaining – there’s nowhere close enough for me to go visit any of the stops.)
Oh. He figures that since we accept evolution and say that abrupt changes in the environment drive evolution, we must therefore defend that having our species undergo abrupt changes is a desirable thing. Because yay death and starvation, right?
Speaking of learning from climate changes in the past to gain insight into the clusterfuck we are about to bring on ourselves, I was just reading this recent paper today:
Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2ºC global warming is highly dangerous
It makes for an interesting and depressing read. Bottom line: bringing about Eemian-like conditions on our 21st century civilization is not something to look forward to… and we’re probably heading for worse than that anyway.
Is there some sort of award for flaming hypocrisy? Is he trying for it?
This is an interesting argument I’ve not read elsehwere:
So, assuming humans could ever control the earth’s climate (or could accurately predict the effects of that control), your argument is that it is incumbent on the human race to stop climate change (even naturally occuring climate change) in order to stop evolution? Wholeheartedly disagree.
@ Tom Weiss
I’m going to guess that you’re equating evolution with improvement. Nope.
Evolution is not some ladder towards perfection. Natural Selection is in effect a large number of a population being killed off by adverse circumstances, and the few who survive having enough of an effect on the now relatively limited gene pool to effect genetic change.
PZ isn’t saying evolution is bad. Evolution is neutral; it’s just change. But the circumstances that lead to evolution necessarily involve adverse circumstances and death, and no one wants that happening to their own population. A population that is surviving perfectly well in the current circumstances does not evolve, and of course surviving well is a good thing.
My first paragraph implies that natural selection occurs as a result of some single, catastrophic event. I didn’t mean to imply this; of course adverse circumstances can be every day and large numbers of the population are killed off by simple attrition. “Nature, red in tooth and claw”, and all that.
@ rietplum #11
Squids is animals! Albeit superior ones.
Tom Weiss,
I’m not sure what you mean by “incumbent”. I’d say trying to avoid a catastrophe that is likely to wipe away civilization as we know it, probably killing many of us and turning the places a lot of us live in inhabitable is something we should want to do. It’s about our own survival and well-being, so it would be a bit odd for us not to care.
To borrow #1’s example: assuming humans could avoid an asteroid collision big enough to (predictably) cause a mass extinction, put us through a bottleneck event and force the survivors to struggle through a challenging aftermath, should we do it? It’s a natural event. It would surely drive evolution in unpredictable ways, impact events in the past have done so. Let’s assume we could predict the effects well enough to know our species wouldn’t go extinct, just evolve. Would you “wholeheartedly disagree” with any attempt to avoid the impact because of all the evolution it would prevent from happening?
Tom Weiss sez something dumb:
(fixed)
Yeah, totally see that you favor mass death.
Oh look, Tom Weiss the gibbertarian opposes doing anything about climate change. Surprise fucking surprise.
(And his rationale is that climate change is beneficial because it continues evolution by its killing of people!? Apparently libertarianism is indistinguishable from the misanthropic pseudoscientific philosophies of super villains. And here I thought the ridiculous combination of stupid and evil was unrealistic!)
Is Tom Weiss a sock of Deepak Chopra?
@20
So you’re in favor of it being recumbent on the human race to do anything about climate change, then? Because the only way to neutralize a threat to survival is to refuse to see the obvious.
@ chigau
No, just an idiot.