Not that there was a chance in Hell I’d ever vote for him for anything, but now in a rambling and dogmatic monolog, Carson explains how evolution is stupid, and exposes himself as someone who embraces ignorance.
In a
Faith & Libertyinterview posted last week, potential GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson discussed his rejection of the theory of evolution, arguing that the science of evolution is a sign of humankind’s arrogance and beliefthat they are so smart that if they can’t explain how God did something, then it didn’t happen, which of course means that they’re God. You don’t need a God if you consider yourself capable of explaining everything.
Did that make any sense to you? Scientists are open about what parts of the evolutionary story they don’t understand; it’s the creationists who are so certain that they know the entire process, and every bit of it is explained by saying GOD
. So do creationists think they’re a god? Does the fact that he thinks himself capable of explaining everything by invoking his deity mean he doesn’t need a god? That is so incoherent and wrong.
But it’s also cant. Creationists commonly accuse scientists of arrogance, of being know-it-alls. We aren’t. We just know that creationists are wrong, and have the evidence to back it up.
He claimed that
no one has the knowledgeof the age of the earthbased on the Bible,adding thatcarbon dating and all of these things really don’t mean anything to a God who has the ability to create anything at any point in time.
Actually, we do have good knowledge of the age of the earth — we have multiple lines of evidence that all converge on the fact that the Earth is very old, about 4½ billion years old, and that the idea that it is only 6,000 years old is utterly ludicrous. The notion of a young earth is also unbiblical — there is no date given in the Christian holy book, and he openly admits that. The claim that it is 600 years old comes from, in general, two sources: numerology (there are a series of nice round thousand-year-long ages that represent stages in God’s plan for humanity, and of course there are 7 of them because 7 is a magic number), and the visions of the Seventh Day Adventist prophetess, Ellen White, who claimed that Jesus personally told her how old the earth was, and showed her visions of its creation. There’s nothing biblical about it, except in the sense that the Bible is a stew of nonsense which allows anyone to read into it anything they want.
I expect a neurosurgeon to know the basics of physics, and understand that carbon isotope decay is not useful for dating the age of rocks, or any material over 50,000 years old. It’s enough to show that the young earth creationist date is untenable, but dating the earth requires other methods. It’s pathetic to argue against geology with such a complete lack of knowledge of the science.
Isn’t it convenient that, when the evidence shows that something is very, very old, the Christian fanatics simply tell us that their God created it with the illusion of age?
Carson pointed to the
complexity of the human brainas proof that evolution is a myth:Somebody says that came from a slime pit full of promiscuous biochemicals? I don’t think so.
Nothing good ever comes from a slime pit. No one claims that nervous systems arose spontaneously from promiscuous biochemicals
.
I know that in his training, Carson had to have examined the brains of other mammals (you don’t get to operate on people until you’ve practiced on at least cats). He has to know that there is a range of complexity and size within the mammals, and that we don’t claim that the human brain just poofed into existence from random pools of chemicals; it is an enlargement of a primate brain. It’s grossly dishonest for him to make this argument.
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was never exposed to the full range of animal nervous systems, which is a shame. There is all kinds of wonderful data on everything from jellyfish neurons to Aplysia ganglia which tells us that the general principles of neurobiology have deep roots. Our brains are assemblies of excitable cells, and there’s a phenomenal amount of information available on how they gradually arose.
He said evolution is unable to explain the development of an eyeball:
Give me a break. According to their scheme, it had to occur over night, it had to be there. I instead say, if you have an intelligent creator, what he does is give his creatures the ability to adapt to the environment so he doesn’t have to start over every fifty years creating all over again.
You have to listen to the whole interview to see the full inanity of his claim here. He argues that, under evolution, first a whole, fully formed rod cell would evolve, and then it would sit around waiting for millions of years for cones to evolve, and then these two cells would wait passively even longer for the retinal circuitry to appear. It’s appalling. He can only imagine modern cells of a limited type, and rather than developing as an integrated whole, they had to have evolved piece-wise. His ignorance of the science is total.
If god magicked the ability to adapt into his creations, why can’t he see that that is sufficient to spawn “endless forms most beautiful” without his kibitzer deity?
Calling someone a “brain surgeon” has long been a term of praise for high intelligence and discipline and skill. Between Michael Egnor and Ben Carson, they’ve managed to thoroughly undermine that reputation — “brain surgeon” has come to mean to me a narrowly specialized person with an inflated ego who has no depth of understanding of science, and that’s a shame. I’m sure there are intelligent neurosurgeons out there in the wide world, and it’s just too bad that two of their most prominent representatives are flaming ass-weasels.
Also, what are medical schools teaching their students? How can you go through an undergraduate education and years of medical training and be as ignorant of basic biology as Carson is?
There’s good money to be made in politics by appearing to be willfully ignorant.
1. What a lame cop out. He’s really gonna use the “fossils were put there to test our faith” excuse? C’mon, Ben. That’s so 2008 presidential elections. You gotta up your wingnut game if you wanna compete with the rest of the clowns.
2. Bertrand Russell already took care of that with the five-minute hypothesis.
3. The ability to create anything at any point in time sounds like an awesome superpower. Is that already one of Dr. Strange’s or can I try pitching that?
Well I knew he was 6000 year old earth young earth creationist so this is completely in line with that. That’s why I rejected him weeks ago when everyone was saying how great he was. I said yes but he thinks the world is 6000 years old.
The Republican presidential candidates, trying to see who can be the most stupid and ignorant. The GOP in a nutshell. Gah.
Oh my. That was quite the way to get a bit of puritanism in that mess. God this, god that, god whatever. They always use the placeholder “god”. Lots of gods have been invented on this planet.
“There’s good money to be made in politics by appearing to be willfully ignorant.”
Strangely, this isn’t so true in Europe. Anti-intellectualism and religious fundamentalism seem much stronger in the US. Thank goodness those pilgrims went off in a boat. One of them lived just round the corner from me!
Saad @ 2: Also referred to as “Last Thursdayism“. Once you go down that line of reasoning, all bets are off.
So our brains are assemblies of ‘excitable cells’ and ‘promiscuous biochemicals’!?
No wonder we’re in trouble!!!!!!
How does one study medicine without the slightest understanding of biological evolution?
If only we could harness the power of FAIL, the earth’s energy demands would have been covered for the next decade by that paragraph alone.
ranmore,
Unfortunatelly, it looks like we’re importing anti-intellectualism right back! People have gone on to study in the United States, they come back full of knowledge and success stories.. and some of them are also bigots who picked up some more unfortunate things.
I’ve noticed an influx of people who spent their formative years in US or Canada coming back and jumping straight onto the bandwagon or worst nationalism and religious dogmatism.
For the first time in my memory, it is actually discussed in my country whether children should be taught evolution from first grade on.
?!?!
That was never even a question when I was in school. Of course we were taught about evolution.
I have to laugh at pseudo intellectuals trying to pretend that god->bible->god->bible->round and round, isn’t the classic example of the fallacious circular reasoning argument. They need to break the circle, and then show each is true individually. Can’t be done.
PZ
No. The 6000 figure comes from the Hebrew calendar (current year 5775) which is in turn based on counting years of the biblical genealogy (how much Adam lived, then Seth, then Enosh, etc.) plus the post-flood years. It’s stupid, but it’s very biblical. It was formulated when the ancestors of the Ellen White where still painting their faces blue and worshiping trees.
____
Beatrice #10
Same is happening in Israel. The worst settlers are foreigners, mainly from USA. Up until recently teaching evolution was only challenged by ultra-orthodox Jews, and abortion was a non-issue. Now, suddenly, there are organizations that want to ban both.
Well, lots of gods—entire slimepits full!—have been assembled from promiscuous theomemes, anyway.
…Seriously, having started with a Wikipedia article on the new (to me) phylum for tardigrades (who are in the news this week, and good for them!), I found myself earlier this morning reading a brief Wikipedia list of fields in which cladistics has been used (or, better, cladistic algorithms applied with measures of similarity that may be far harder to justify than some of those that biologists use). Among them I remember “linguistics” and “folklore”. But it seems to me that a very natural application (modulo my earlier disclaimer) would be to gods. For starters, just to one order of magnitude, how many clades of gods would you guess there are? One? Two? More than 100?
Apparently being a brain surgeon means you can operate on a brain but you can’t operate one.
Lee @ 13:
Oh, promiscuous theomemes sounds so much better! Definitely has that sciencey thing going on.
That clashes violently with the estimates based on Genesis (so-and-so begat so-and-so ad nauseum) which all concord to an age about 6k-8k years ago. It’s nonsense of course, but it’s not recent nonsense nor is it based on numerology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism#Jewish_and_Christian_dates_for_creation
Is our neurosurgeons learning?
ranmore @ 6: I agree with your observation. After living in France for a year in the 1970’s and in England for 5 years in the 1990’s, it appears that intellectualism and intellectuals are admired and respected much more than in the US. Few politicians are ridiculed for being “elitist.” Who wants to be governed by the “also rans”?
(BTW, are you from Dorking, by any chance? A couple of references in your post suggest this to me.)
People express surprise that such gormless stupidities should issue from the mouth of a neurosurgeon. Now it’s possible Carson’s just pandering, but his fellow-neurosurgeon Egnor certainly isn’t. In fact, I don’t think medical education requires much in the way of critical thought: it’s primarily about remembering a vast amount of detailed anatomical, pohysiological and clinical information. And a surgeon primarily needs excellent ability to concentrate and hand-eye coordination.
a slime pit full of promiscuous biochemicals?
Is he bashing A Voice For Men?
Right here Carson is trying to undermine not only science, but the entire philosophical concept of an “explanation” needing to actually explain something by positing a process and breaking development down into stages. Evolution is a theory which tells us how everything got to be the way it is by starting out as something else. Supernatural labels don’t do anything like this. No method, no stages, no work. God “grants” or “gives” or “creates” in a vague, lazy sense of those terms. Everything was manifested out of a reified concept, like coming from like. Now sit back and preen.
HOW did God do something? That’s a legitimate question. Not only don’t they care, but they wave their smug lack of curiosity around like a merit badge. Look how like a little child I am! And look how you’re not acting like a child: that’s arrogance. The Creator of the universe made this playpen for us: our job is to exclaim over how obvious it is that it’s a playpen and we’re not the Daddy so we needn’t worry our pretty little heads over “how.”
You do need God if you want to get out of trying to explain anything.
Wow. I’d never heard of this guy (the mere fact that “the Donald” is in the running basically swamps my attention buffer when it comes to the U.S. Republican nomination race), but he is one messed-up individual. That someone could go through all the education required to become a surgeon, and still be that ignorant, beggars belief.
To my mind, he’s even scarier than Trump; he’s got no excuse for saying such nonsense. I see two possible alternatives:
1) Carson is a lying sot; he doesn’ t buy any of this, really, but is playing group of constituents he knows he needs to get himself elected.
2) Carson gave himself a partial lobotomy, perhaps by accident, some time ago, and so really does have this much capacity for self-delusion.
Kind of a toss-up, which is worse…
It appears that Republicans encourage ignorance because even they believe that you have to be ignorant to vote for Republicans.
But rocket scientists are still okay, right? Right?
OP
Right. Because imposing the cultural mythology of a small group of people unto the vast and complicated workings of the reality of everything whether it fits or not is so very humble and modest…
#3
Uh…. ?!WHAT!?
#22
In expressed beliefs (and utter lack of integrity) he is worse than Trump (or any other republican including Jeb Bush) but I can’t claim he is scary as he has no influence or recognition and is very low in the polls. He represents a terrifying trend of conservatives embracing mind-boggling ignorance and religious dogma and intolerance but in that he’s a symptom and not a carrier.
It’s America. He’s got to talk like that if he is to have any chance in the elections. Even the ‘not very religious’ have to pretend they are creationists at election time.
Even better, we can use science to PREDICT things, like, oh, Antibiotic Resistance. Or Pesticide Resistance. With the knowledge of how organisms develop resistance, we can come up with ways to overcome those resistances. If goddidit, then how can we combat those without blindly stumbling around?
Carsen must be a shyster, or he really is suffering from cognitive dissonance. In the biblical god’s world, there is no need for neurosurgery or any other physician:
@PZ: typo alert — “The claim that it is 600 years old comes from…”
s/600/6000
It is not like he is wrong here.
“Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là” ~ Pierre-Simon Laplace
If you can explain everything in the physical world we interact with (and a bunch of stuff we don’t), without ever resorting to the God hypothesis, then there is no need for God(s) to explain the universe and therefore it is most likely that God(s) only exist in the tales of primitive men who could not explain the world around them.
Oh, sure. Werner Von Braun was a prince among men.
/snark
” (you don’t get to operate on people until you’ve practiced on at least cats)”
Waste of time, cats are beyond our understanding unlike the Christian god.
My question to Carson is if god made us, then why did he make the eye with an anatomical structure that causes us to have a blind spot? why did he give us an appendix or a gall bladder, organs we just don’t need? I am sure the answer is “god works in mysterious ways.”
Check out this wingnut neurosurgeon:
http://old.salifeline.org/he-restoreth-my-soul-by-donald-l-hilton-jr-md/donald-l-hilton/donald-l-hilton-jr-md-what-is-pornography-addiction/
He’s a very competent neurosurgeon, but he’s a Mormon who seems to be obsessed with other people’s sex lives.
I’ve read one article that said that he has authored one of those pamphlets that attempt to scare students in Mormon colleges about sex, masturbation and pornography.
It amazes me that someone who is supposedly so well-educated can be so ignorant.
[Off topic] Posting this hilarious piece from Mitchell and Webb since both brain surgery and rocket science have now been mentioned.
Great, I never thought I’d be one of those people who spoils jokes…
Anyone out there in the horde who understands science better than me who can tackle a critique of this quote?
”
Pornography causes release of adrenaline from an area in the brain called the locus coeruleus, and this makes the heart race in those who view, or even anticipate, viewing pornography. The sexual pleasure of pornography may be partially caused by release of dopamine from the ventral tegmental area, and this stimulates the nucleus accumbens, one of the key pleasure centers of the brain. ”
― Donald L. Hilton Jr., He Restoreth my Soul
My skeptical radar says that this may be a case of someone speaking from the authority of being a neurosurgeon who simply throws around sciency words without really proving anything.
Um, masturbation leads to orgasms which are very pleasurable. The human body reacts to anticipated pleasure by by ramping up the heart and dumping happy juice into the bloodstream.
I’m not sure why that makes porn or masturbation immoral.
This isn’t just an act or pandering for Carson. Here’s an interview of him in the Adventist Review from 2004, long before his current political aspirations:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130405212141/http://www.adventistreview.org/2004-1509/story2.html
tsig won the thread at #14.
My father, early in his career, was a rocket scientist — actually, engineer — working on solid-fuel motors. So, frequently, when someone said something like “We need a rocket scientist”, I’d reply “Ok, let’s ask my dad.”
‘Atheists don’t believe in god because they think they are god.’ Is actually one of the most frustratingly common arguments I’ve encountered irl. It always ends up sounding a bit like the Who’s on first sketch.
Theist: “You don’t believe because you think you’re god!”
Me: “No, I don’t believe in any gods.”
Theist: “That’s because you think you are god!”
Moi: “No. I think I’m human.”
Theist: “Then why don’t you believe in god?”
Yours truly: “Because there’s no reason to. ”
Theist: “You’re just saying that because you think you’re god!”
Carson is the poster boy for what religion (or dogmatic ideology) can do to a smart person
I’ve heard of quite a few surgeons (also engineers, computer programmers and even mathematicians) who are creationists. One could speculate that it’s because they work with complex, highly “designed” systems and that they internalize the intuition that every facet of a system exists for a reason.
Being in CS myself though, I do think that the best thinkers in those and other fields do understand evolution and all other factors being equal, I’d rather work with one of those.
Cat Mara #7:
If God be God,
He
(she/it)
is omnipotent.
H/s/i* could create
you, me
the rocks
the stars,
with memories.
Limestone strata, granite folds.
Half-exploded stars, the wave
of light already drawn a galaxy away.
A dying beam to mark a star that never was,
a billion light-years hence.
If God be God.
H/s/i could trace out the convoluted folds, sketch
the synapse trails that are my grandma’s apple tree,
your father’s face, my gimpy knee.
H/s/i might be all there is of Plato, Kipling, Twain.
The only truth in victor’s history.
If God be God.
The death-defying swirl of DNA,
our handhold on the eco-web;
a figment. Treasured fossils? Newborn.
First editions, sprung upon the world
an nanosecond ere the latest version, maybe.
H/s/i is omnipotent.
H/s/i could have carved a niche
to fit the slice of toast I had for breakfast,
(whole-wheat, spread with home-made apple butter)
etched into my cortex. If h/s/i be God,
h/s/i could:
And who’s to say
h/s/i didn’t?
(*pronounced “she”)_
Writing from Italy, I can assure everyone that even in Europe there are plenty of politicians who act as ignoramus in order to capture votes of similar people -who happen to be a very substantial part of voters.
Sometimes it is difficult to decide if their behavior is an act, or is real.
Just because Carson doesn’t understand the evolution of the eye doesn’t mean that biologists are equally ignorant.
the conservative has to be ignorant or at the least suffering from cognitive dissonance to believe that the policies advocated that they advocate actually match the results that they say are the goals when all the evidence would tend to disagree.
maybe they are just lying to get the votes?
uncle frogy
There’s so much condensed smug stupidity in what carson said that it hurts.
That line about “not being able to imagine how god did something” has to be the most blatant case of psychological projection I’ve ever seen. The whole point of creationism is that it’s a god-of-the-gaps argument. I can’t believe that creationists don’t realize what a cop-out it is to say that, because they don’t understand how something could have occurred naturally, it had to have been done by their god using his magic powers.
Here’s what creationists should really get through their heads; creationism is not a valid scientific theory and never will be. Evolutionary biology at the very least explains the processes behind organisms evolving. It describes the types of mutations that give rise to evolutionary novelties, and it describes the processes in population genetics that determine which traits are passed on. Creationism does none of that. There’s no description of the process behind old man jehovah snapping his fingers and conjuring fully-formed multicellular organisms out of the aether, and without that, all creationism is is an appeal to unfalsifiable, ad hoc pixie magic. What is functionally different from saying that a god used divine powers to conjure living things into existence, and a fairy using a magic wand to conjure living things into existence?
The only reason christians think that scientists are arrogant for explaining the universe without god is because christianity artificially hobbles human intellect. Their religion teaches that humans are weak and stupid and need god in order to function, and they call anyone who disagrees with this “arrogant” to vilify them. I’d argue that christian dogma is actually far more arrogant:
– He’s the one who claims to get his knowledge from telepathic communication with a god.
– He’s the one who thinks that the entire universe was made by a god specifically for us.
– The christian god, in spite of christian claims otherwise, is still remarkably anthropomorphic; it has a male gender, it cares about day-to-day human behavior, it has emotions, and it has intelligence. How is it not arrogant to think that whatever produced the universe had to have these human-like traits?
quotetheunquote @22:
Oh what you’ve read is but the tip of the fucked up iceberg.
Ben Carson thinks Margaret Sanger was out to exterminate all black people.
Ben Carson thinks it might be reasonable to use drones to bomb caves that Mexican immigrants use to reach the U.S.
Ben Carson thinks the Affordable Care Act is the worst thing to happen to the U.S. since slavery.
There’s more, but that should be sufficient to horrify you.
As nobody has said it yet (or I missed it somehow), and it must be said – despite it rarely being true, as the phrase is usually too clunky or too pretentious or too “try hard” to actually use in reality – because this just has that ring to it: promiscuous biochemicals would be a great band name.
magistramarla #33
Because of this topic I have developed a very real, if irrational, fear of being operated on by a brain surgeon who is unknown to me personally. Not because of the possible lack of competency or skill, but rather because of the potential for a high level of skill combined with a high level of religiosity.
What if they decide to cut just so, impeding critical thinking, to make me stupid enough to believe bullshit, for the sake of my soul?
TTQS @49. More than sufficient, thank you very much – it appears there are no depths too deep for him to plumb.
Sigh. Makes one pines for those innocent, halcyon days when the Republican party used to have moral, sane, well-balanced individuals on its slate – like Richard M. Nixon!
The 6000 year old dating for the Earth comes from the totally worthless work of bishop Ussher, who totaled up the alleged ages of everyone back through Adam, based on the biblical fictions. https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/ussher.htm
Since religionists are so afraid of doubt that they strive for certainty without knowledge, vice-chancellor John Lightfoot actually came up with the day of the week and the time of day that Adam was allegedly created, all based on the same pious fictions of course.
https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/ussher.htm
Is it my imagination, or is the Republican Party trying to replace “Knowledge is Power” with “Ignorance is Bliss”?
@Tony #49
One more:
Ben Carson opposes same-sex marriage.
That’s too hard for their supplicants to follow: One word has more than one syllable, there are three words (exceeding attention span), magic sky faeries are not mentioned, and two of the words are not found in the Dick & Jane series of primary school readers and so are incomprehensible. Also! It! Is! Not! All! Action! Nor self-centred.
“Moar Stooopid!” still has a multisyllabic word, and probably isn’t in Dick & Jane, but otherwise seems to be heading in the correct direction…