I had this terrible debate with Jerry Bergman years ago, and a video was hosted on YouTube by someone else (thank you very much!), and I just put a copy on my own channel. Here it is. You may have already seen it, and I summarized it long ago. This is the debate where Bergman announced that carbon was irreducibly complex, and therefore proved that the universe was designed, and that atheists have been protesting and getting removed from schools the periodic table of the elements, a persecution that he documented in his rambling, awful book, The Slaughter of the Dissidents.

Also, by the way, lots of credit to Mark Borrello, the moderator of the debate, who I thought did an exemplary job of giving both sides fair and equal time.

But this debate was also critical in defining my antipathy to debate, and it’s in those words, “both sides”. There are not two sides here. They are not equal. There is a reasonable, evidence-based side (in this case, mine) and there is a whining man-child side where “facts” can be made up as you go, and debate is a scheme designed to elevate nonsense to the same level as science. This is not sour grapes; I think, by any estimation, I “won” this debate to the point where creationists in the audience came up to me afterwards to admit it, although usually with the excuse that Bergman was bad and a smarter Christian debater would have clobbered me. I also don’t think it was my talent that won out, though — I don’t think I’m a particularly good debater — but just that even in a format contrived to give the weakest arguments every benefit, science is hard to overcome.

I got name-dropped as the bad guy in an article titled “Are miracles outside the realm of science?” You see, this guy, Carl Drews, published an article in PLoS One that made up a convoluted scenario to explain how Moses could have parted the Red Sea, taking advantage of some unlikely wind patterns. I objected to it. I guess that still burns Mr Drews.

The biggest threat to scientific inquiry came from the New Atheists. The New Atheists are a small group of militant atheists who have taken it upon themselves to attack religious beliefs using science. A blogger named PZ Myers stated that he would reject the published paper out of hand if he were selected as a peer reviewer. The comments on his blog were similar to the hostility endured by climate scientists in publishing their research. The journal PLoS ONE came under pressure to retract the paper. Fortunately for me and for science in general, the executive editor, Damian Pattinson, held firm. I wrote about these events in my book “Between Migdol and the Sea.”

Except that my objection wasn’t because I’m an atheist — it’s because this article was bad science. Here’s my article that so annoyed Drews, and this was my conclusion that led Drews to feel that atheists were oppressing him:

And how is this garbage getting published in PLoS One? If a paper like this were plopped on my desk for review, I’d be calling the editor to ask if it was a joke. If it wasn’t, I’d laugh and reject it — there is no scientific question of any significance being addressed anywhere in the work. Is this representative of the direction PLoS is going to be taking, with low standards for acceptance and what had to have been nonexistent review?

A suggestion for Mr Drews, the author, who sounds like he is a software developer affiliated with a research institution: you aren’t a scientist, stop pretending to be one. I’ll also say the same thing I tell every creationist pseudoscientist who tries to resolve their mythical stories with unconvincing handwaving about science: it doesn’t work. We see right through you. Bad, overstretched technical justifications for miraculous events are even less persuasive than simply declaring “My omnipotent god did it with magic”.

His article was nothing but some contrived jiggery-pokery to rationalize a miraculous event described in his holy book that we don’t know even actually happened. This is not an interesting question. As I said then, “It should have been rejected for asking an imaginary question and answering it with a fantasy scenario.”

My atheism gives me the privilege of being able to look at his arguments from outside the Christian bubble, but I didn’t say it shouldn’t have been published because God doesn’t exist. I even pointed out that his rationale doesn’t work from an honest Christian perspective.

It doesn’t even make sense from the perspective of a believer. So one of the great miracles of the Bible is being reduced to a meteorological fluke with an entirely natural explanation? It makes bible stories compatible with science by making the supernatural elements of the story completely irrelevant, which is nice if you’re an atheist, but only if you’re an atheist who is very gullible and willing to accept other elaborate prior premises.

I said “honest Christian”, although I sometimes doubt their existence. I think Mr Drews is playing games.

I approached the Biblical story of Moses crossing the Red Sea respectfully, knowing that this epic event is very important to many religious people — myself included. I recognized the limits of what science can and cannot conclude. We can state that the narrative is plausible, but we cannot state that God was or was not involved. In particular, I avoided the use of the word “explain,” because to many people that term means to “explain away.” Exodus portrays the crossing of the Red Sea as a mighty work of God, and the hydrodynamic details of the crossing do not take away from that faith-based view. Most readers could understand that idea, whether they were religious or not.

Let’s cut through the crap. Drews believes a super-powerful, omnipotent being purposefully parted the Red Sea for Moses, and he wants to simultaneously argue that mundane, natural processes could have separated the waters, which makes his magical explanation superfluous. He uses the mundane explanation as an excuse to get his religious story published in a scientific journal. You shouldn’t have to be an atheist to be able to see right through that.

Also, by the way, note what he did there: he says his work makes the Bible story “plausible”. That’s not true. If you read the PLoS article, you’ll learn that it is actually an implausible and unlikely event, requiring a “particular circumstance of topography and wind direction”. Bad science is bad science, whether you’re an atheist or a theist.

Drews does answer the question in the recent article’s title.

By its very nature, that miracle — the resurrection — is outside the realm of science. I define a miracle as God’s temporary suspension of natural laws in response to human need.

Yep. But that won’t stop him from trying to publish religious apologetics in science journals.

We were supposed to have waffles on 7 April, but instead I was off at the Secular Social Justice conference, and completely forgot about Paul Nelson Day.

It is rather forgettable, so, to recap: in 2004, Paul Nelson presented a poster at the Society for Developmental Biology meetings in which he unveiled his sciencey super-concept, Ontogenetic Depth. This was, supposedly, a method by which you could measure the developmental complexity of organisms, and he claimed to have been working on doing just that, although his poster was nothing but hand-wavey claims of the concept. I asked him to give me details on the method, that it would be interesting to try on my zebrafish. He said he’d send me a manuscript explaining how to measure it, later. I pestered him a bit for the documentation, and it was always “later”. He finally committed and said he’d post something on 7 April, 2004.

He didn’t.

For a while it was because he was prepping a new version, Ontogenetic Depth 2.0, but since we haven’t seen either 1.0 or 2.0, and since “ontogenetic depth” is a phrase which hasn’t even caught on among creationists, I think it’s safe to say it’s dead. It’s yet another bit of rotting detritus in the pointlessly continuous reinvention and relabeling of creationism.

But it’s still useful to poke at them and remind them how useless and bad their version of ‘science’ is. And, apparently, how forgettable.

Uh-oh.

On the evening of Saturday, April 7, 2018, the American Atheists Board of Directors received a complaint regarding David Silverman, the President of American Atheists. The Board takes very seriously the concerns expressed and, in accordance with organization policies, the Board has placed Mr. Silverman on leave while an independent investigation is conducted. Mr. Silverman has pledged his full cooperation with the investigation.

The Board, led by Vice President Kathleen Johnson and myself, will fulfill the duties of the President while Mr. Silverman is on leave. National Program Director Nick Fish will oversee the day-to-day operations of the organization.

While Mr. Silverman is on leave, American Atheists will continue our work protecting the separation of religion and government, elevating the voices of atheists in our nation’s public discourse, and supporting our members and atheist communities across the country.

We are committed to transparency and openness about this process and will release more information as it becomes available.

I know what’s going on, and it’s been building for a while. It’s not just AA that’s investigating some allegations, but another organization as well, and the atheist movement is about to get another well-deserved battering.

Go about your business, citizens. Ignore the chaos.

A geologist gives 21 evidence-based reasons why Noah’s Flood never happened. It’s nice, short, succinct, and clear, and is going to be useful in future discussions about creationism. It’s also all really obvious — we have a few hundred years of observations by geologists, who were mostly Christian, that made it irrefutable that, in the most charitable interpretation, the book of Genesis was a metaphorical fable.

You’ll never guess who is very sad about the article, though. Poor Ken Ham and his crew at Answers in Genesis. They can’t address the arguments, so they resort to indignation.

“Now, we’re used to hearing false claims like that. What made me sad was that Collins was specifically writing this article to give Skeptical Inquirer magazine readers counter-arguments to use against Christians. And who are the readers of this magazine? Most are skeptics and atheists!” Ham continued.

“A professing believer (who claims on his website that he has ‘sought to bring people to Christ’) is trying to equip unbelievers to tear down the faith of believers! Ultimately, he is helping atheists attack God’s Word and the Christian faith. I would not want to be in his shoes standing before our holy God — he will give an account one day,” he added.

Yeah, the author of the article is a Christian. I definitely do not think he’s trying to tear down people’s faith. It seems he is a living example that you can simultaneously accept the science (Yay!) and still believe in God and Jesus (unfortunately, from the perspective of this atheist — but I’ll accept the progress). There are Christians like Ham who demand that you accept their every absurd interpretation of the Bible, refusing to recognize just how idiosyncratic their beliefs are, and then there are Christians like Lorence Collins, who recognize that their understanding of their religion is imperfect and incomplete and must be tempered with an accommodation to reality. If you must be a Christian, be like Collins, not Ham.

Oh, and AiG has one other well-worn argument. Andrew Snelling asks, “Were you there?”

“We don’t see a global flood happening today, so we would have never seen one in the past. Well, how do they know? They weren’t there in the past,” the AiG geologist continues.

“We need an eye-witness who was there to tell (the story), and a reliable witness,” Snelling says, noting that Collins’ authority should be God’s Word.

Sheesh. Everyone knows that material evidence trumps eye-witness testimony.

You just have to think about it.