There are spit-takes galore in this video of Stephen Meyer, but don’t worry, he’s so slow and tedious and pompous that you’ll see them coming way ahead of time.

He confesses that the “intelligent design community” (you know, that dying horse that twitches occasionally) has avoided the issue because it has become strangely toxic within Christianity, and then he meanders on about how you can come to either a young earth or an old earth conclusion just by how you look at the evidence, which is very much a Ken Ham/Answers in Genesis sort of perspective.

But don’t worry, he and Ken will still be in opposition. He later admits to being an Old Earth creationist, with the peculiar reservation that he thinks the paleontologists/anthropologists are all wrong, and that humans were spontaneously created by god much more recently than is believed.

But he thinks the age of the earth is a tertiary issue, and The first issue is the reality of god — is god real or imaginary?. I think it’s clear that they have no evidence for a god of any kind, especially the twitchy nasty Christian patriarch he believes in, but it’s strange to argue that the age of the earth is unimportant. It’s a fundamental question: do you accept physical, scientific evidence, or don’t you? The age of the earth is really a relatively simple, straightforward question which has a largely indisputable answer that is supported by multiple lines of hard evidence. If you can’t agree on a basic physical parameter of our world, measured with multiple techniques to a high degree of confidence, you aren’t even speaking the same language.

I’d also say that if you think you can argue that Homo sapiens is only tens of thousands of years old, you’re talking gibberish.

But the real lesson of this video is that Stephen Meyer is a very silly man. I had a tough time listening to all 10 minutes of it because it’s just Meyer giving a stupid answer to a stupid question, and he is unbelievably long-winded, pedantic, and full of himself (a tone he can sustain for a painfully long time, as attested by those horrid doorstops that he has written). What really annoyed me beyond his drone, though, was that when he finally gives up the microphone, he immediately takes it back to praise, of all people, Lee Fucking Strobel, one of the worst, most dishonest, most unconvincing Christian apologists out there. I know atheists who left Christianity after reading that guy’s schlock nonsense. And here’s tedious superficial Meyer claiming he’s persuasive.

Donald Trump is going to demonstrate his fitness to be president by appearing on the Dr Oz show. Real life has become confused with reality TV, just like real medicine has become confused with a medicine show. Trump and Oz deserve each other.

That’s an important question to ask if you’re about to watch a David Barton video.

Something I’ve noticed about progressives and liberals is how careless they are when throwing false claims around.

Question answered. I’m dead. Will have to continue blogging from beyond the veil, using my spirit form. He killed me with his very first sentence.

This is David Barton, god-emperor of the fabricated historical quotation, claiming that progressives make stuff up. I just…I just…sorry, can’t comment. Got an ectoplasm clog right now.

What is the “false claim” that has him riled up?

For example, I was recently on a national television network where I was introduced as having a doctorate. A progressive instantly ran stories claiming that I don’t have a doctorate. That false claim is amusing on so many levels.

Oh. It’s false? Then what I expect is that he’s about to provide some verifiable evidence that he does in fact have an earned doctorate. That’s easy to do, you know.

But no, he’s going to explain that he doesn’t have to.

First, things like health information, and tax information, and college education information are fully protected by privacy laws, so they don’t know whether I have a doctorate or not, and I’ve always chosen not to talk about it.

Uh, no. Your educational records, stuff like grades and classes attended, are protected by FERPA. But obviously, stuff like whether you graduated from a specific institution are not: if someone puts “Ph.D., Harvard” on their CV, you can contact the registrar at Harvard and ask for a degree verification, and they’ll tell you whether that was earned or not. They have to be able to do that, otherwise people like me might start slappin’ the names of prestigious bible colleges on their CVs to look fancy.

So this is just a bogus dodge.

But what does he do immediately after declaring his degree status a private matter?

Second, just for the record, I do have an earned doctorate. There it is. <waves at a couple of framed pieces of paper in the background>

Third, not only do I have an earned doctorate, I have two honorary doctorates.

No. Your degree is not a piece of paper. It’s a record of academic work. I don’t even know where my version of that certificate I got 31 years ago is located — probably buried in a box somewhere. I certainly don’t have it framed, and putting it in a frame does not add extra weight to its importance.

Here’s how you do it, David Barton: you simply state the name of the institution, and the year you got it. It’s that easy. Then anyone can verify it. For instance, I got a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1985. There’s even a service, National Student Clearinghouse, where you can get verification for $12.50. To do that, though, you need to provide the name of the institution. It would also be nice to state what field you got those degrees in. It should also be an accredited college, because those fly-by-night goofy diploma mills probably don’t submit degree information to national databases.

Good thing I’m already dead, because claiming to give us information while not giving us information is classic Barton.

Isn’t Barton devious? He says he doesn’t need to tell you about his degrees (he’s so modest!), but then he deigns to tell you anyway, except that he doesn’t give you the information he pretends to be giving you.

Some people scrutinized those blurry images, though, and got a little tentative information.

As we and others pointed out, Barton’s assertion seemed a little odd since he never actually stated where or when he “earned” his supposed doctorate and the documents in the background to which he pointed were difficult to read, though one clearly came from Pensacola Christian College, from which Barton received an honorary doctorate. The other two documents appear to have come from Ecclesia College and Life Christian University, an unaccredited Christian university that has also awarded Ph.D.s in theology to televangelists like Joyce Meyers and Benny Hinn.

Somebody needs to tell Barton that Ph.D.s from unaccredited diploma mills don’t count as “earned”.

But, like everything David Barton does, he stands by his words. Which is why Barton has taken down that video. I guess he didn’t make the framed diplomas blurry enough.

And now my spirit is going to have to spend some time finding a new corpse to reanimate. I knew there was a reason we bought a house so close to a cemetery.

I’ve been reminding everyone for 12 years now that Paul Nelson made a specific, quantifiable creationist claim and failed to deliver a promised explanation. This is not unusual. Jeffrey Shallit describes the common elements of the so-called ‘scientific’ creationist, and it’s astonishing how widespread these traits are. One of them is their eagerness to make explicit claims coupled with a reluctance to actually back them up.

The illustrious Robert J. Marks II, professor at Baylor University, is an example of this last characteristic. Back in 2014, he made the following claim: “we all agree that a picture of Mount Rushmore with the busts of four US Presidents contains more information than a picture of Mount Fuji”. I wanted to see the details of the calculation justifying this claim, so I asked Professor Marks to supply it. He did not reply.

Nor did he reply when I asked three months later.

Nor did he reply when I asked six months later.

Nor did he reply when I asked a year later.

It’s now been two years. Academics are busy people, but this is pretty silly. Who thinks the illustrious Professor Marks will ever show me a calculation justifying his claim?

That sounds so familiar. Maybe if you wait 13 years he’ll show you a calculation? Hope springs eternal!

At 9am Central, I’ll be live on AM950 for Atheist Talk radio.Tune in!

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You missed it? You can find it on the Minnesota Atheists site in a day or two. Also, my interviewer, Maddy Love, has a podcast. Check it out!

Anjuli makes a good point, one that resonates with what I’ve been saying for years. Atheism is not a loss of something; it’s not about simple disbelief. It is about acquiring a more thorough and accurate and liberating understanding of the nature of the universe.

My atheism is not a loss of any kind and even when I embraced it (at the age of twenty-two), it was most certainly a gain. I conceived of it as gaining control over my own mind, and gaining the freedom to use it as I thought best. I also saw it as an escape from a particularly damaging form of social control. It was significant to me, as a twenty-two year old still settling into my identity, that I no longer had my life parameters set by people I regarded as cruel, stupid and ignorant (though I’ve mellowed somewhat on that front).

I have heard these sentiments so many times from so many people over the years, that accepting atheism was like crawling out of a straitjacket to finally be free, and to see the world with new eyes. And then there are others who shrug and just say that it was nothing, they just stopped believing in a god…and the whole damn culture that propagates god-belief and reality-ignorance at its core? An absence of oppression is not simply something that is, it’s something you have to struggle for. And free thought is more than just the absence of something, it’s a positive in its own right.

James Croft is looking for assistance to cope with his own life choices.

• He chose to be a humanist.

• He chose to speak out loudly about that.

• He chose to join a protest against police brutality in St Louis.

• He chose to try and record an instance of police beating a protester.

• He chose to get arrested…oh, wait, no. He didn’t choose. The police chose to arrest him for daring to document their actions.

And now he’s e-begging to get money to cover his court costs and support his criminal lifestyle. Do you want to encourage that sort of thing? Then yes, you should give him cold hard cash and make yourself a co-conspirator, an accomplice, no less.