Extremism leads to more extremism

Answers in Genesis isn’t just that annoying collection of stupid people and con artists anymore — they’re embracing hate and bigotry as fervently as they have ignorance, and it’s getting worse. Dan makes an interesting discovery while trying to track down the source of some recent hateful articles on the AiG website.

What’s curious is that AiG is trying to hide the source — there are these articles that are currently anonymous, but the Wayback Machine reveals that they were initially posted under the byline “Harry F. Sanders, III”. Why is AiG actively trying to conceal the authorship? And further, “Harry F. Sanders, III” is itself a pseudonym for someone named “Emory Moynagh” (probably also a pseudonym) who had a YouTube channel (now deleted) called “In His Image”, where he was an extremist antisemitic conspiracy theorists. And now AiG is trying to launder his history while giving him a bigger platform to peddle that extremism. Also interesting: AiG is taking a very hard line on their version of creationism, letting all those other creationist organizations know they are heretics and blasphemers. Ken Ham’s ego is totally in charge, I imagine he considers himself a modern-day patriarch who must chastise all those who deviate from his dogma.

This is a common problem in authoritarian worldviews, you know. We’re witnessing a predictable acceleration as AiG fully embraces its cult nature. It’s only going to get more feverish and vicious.

If you’d rather not listen to a 14 minute video, here’s the conclusion:

Ken Ham is going all-in on the culture war
And he’s decided to go all-in against other YECs
He’s enlisted Harry F. Sanders, III/Emory Moynagh as the primary author of this series
Harry/Emory has a history of articulating extreme positions, including borderline incitements of violence, antisemitism, and conspiracies
This is dangerous and irresponsible, especially considering Ham and AiG’s recent aggression towards the LGBT+ community and the trend of right-wing violence

A distinction without any meaning

Biologists have managed to reprogram stem cells taken from a male mouse into female oocytes, then fertilized them with sperm from another male mouse, and produced healthy offspring — that is, they’ve made mice with two fathers. This is an expected, incremental advance in stem cell research, and not surprising at all.

The creationists at Answers in Genesis are made somewhat uncomfortable about this, since it violates their fantasies about the rigidity of sex determination, and recruited their tame in-house crank with a Ph.D., Nathaniel Jeanson to write a rationalization for them. It’s pathetic. He correctly summarizes the basics of the procedure, but then his brain falls out.

He decides that what he just described didn’t happen.

But can two adult males (mice, in this case) have their cells reprogrammed to produce eggs? Don’t males normally produce sperm, not eggs? How can offspring be produced from “two dads”?

In short, they can’t.

But that’s what the experiment did: they reprogrammed cells from adult males to produce eggs. His little essay described exactly what they did, which was that. How does he suddenly backtrack on everything?

For two males to reproduce, you have to first convert the cells from one of the males into female cells. And no, I’m not talking science fiction. This is what the researchers actually did.

They first reprogrammed cells from both male mice back to an embryonic state. At this stage of the process, the cells were all still male—possessing both an X chromosome and a Y chromosome. Then they waited for cells from one of the males to lose their male genetic material—the Y chromosome.4 At this stage, these genetically deficient cells now possessed only a single X chromosome, no Y chromosome.

These genetically deficient cells were poor candidates for producing eggs. To produce eggs, you need cells that have two X chromosomes. Consequently, as a next step, the researchers chemically induced these genetically deficient cells to return to a “normal” genetic state. They chemically forced them to have two chromosomes again—to realize an XX (rather than XY) chromosome state.

Effectively, they deleted the genetic instructions for “male” from one line of reprogrammed male cells, turning them genetically into female cells. Voilà, now they could produce eggs.

Yes? They took cells from a male mouse and turned them into female cells that could differentiate into eggs. They produced offspring from two dads. In short, they can.

It’s only been done in mice, and it’s a long, long way to being repeatable in humans, but this is exactly the procedure two gay men could use to have children together. Jeanson wants to argue, though, that the male mice did not have children — instead, he produced a “daughter,” a single cell, that then produced offspring.

By the way, if this strikes you as impossible, consider the fact that adult males regularly produce females. Dads have sons and daughters. Normally, these females (daughters) are produced with the help of a woman. In this study of two “dad” mice, the female “offspring” were produced in the culture dish—in a process that, in some respects, resembles the process of cloning.

So, no, two “dads” did not sire offspring together. Instead, using new genetic tools and tricks, researchers bypassed the normal process of reproduction to turn male cells into female cells and then joined the resulting sperm and egg.

Thus, even these researchers could not circumvent the biological realities for gender that God hardwired into creation from the beginning. They just went about the process of reproduction in a more perverse way.

By this goofy reasoning, no adult is a parent — we only produce spermatogonia/oogonia, single celled precursors to gametes, that are the actual parents, and mommies can be nothing but a transient single-celled stage on the way to making a zygote. Those “hardwired” “biological realities” seem to be entirely circumventable, although only with considerable technical finagling. Or, if you prefer, we could argue that his god has incorporated some remarkable flexibility in how sex develops.

I mean, seriously, two daddy mice did have offspring together. That’s the simple blunt reality of this result.

Get used to it.

Ken Ham really doesn’t get science

One of the more damning testimonies from Ken Ham occurred in his debate with Bill Nye, in which he declared that no evidence could ever change his mind (so why bother debating him, I would ask?). Now AiG has turned that sentiment into a poster-sized meme that only shows that they’re not scientists.

Ken Ham:
Evolutionists have to changing their ideas as more evidence (contradictory evidence) keeps coming.

Isn’t that the whole point of science? You keep gathering empirical evidence and adjust your interpretations as you go, in order to keep your hypotheses and theories in alignment with the real world. It’s how science hones itself and gets better and more accurate.

Poor creationists. They have to close their eyes and ignore all the evidence that contradicts their perspective.

(via Dan Phelps, because the AiG web site makes me nauseous.)

Fun with a “natural theist”

How about some low-lying fruit for a light afternoon snack? Here’s a cocky believer to nibble on.

Atheism is the greatest moral error because it breaks the greatest command demanded from humanity: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength”.
Mark 12:30

Oh. OK. Atheism is bad because a god-priest says it is. This is not the gotcha he thinks it is.

These guys will never settle for nebulous, vague assertions about an invisible being. They’ve also got to go after science with a vicious punch of ignorance.

Natural selection is a euphemism for no real force. Environment, social pressure, survival, etc. These do not guide consciously the process of genetic traits or modifications. I mean, the ‘environment’ is non-conscious, non-rational and Ignores what is happening.

Except…by accident, he’s sort of right. The environment is non-conscious, non-rational and ignores what is happening. I suspect he thinks that is an argument against evolution though, because he assumes evolution has to be conscious and rational.

Also, a lightning bolt is non-conscious, non-rational and ignores what is happening, but try to deny that it’s a force if it hits you.

CAM and credulity

I was asked by a friend to take a look at this paper which he was surprised to see in a science journal. It’s a weird and unconvincing paper, a Case report of instantaneous resolution of juvenile macular degeneration blindness after proximal intercessory prayer. It’s actually a case of rummaging around in old medical files in order to report a “miracle” in 1972.

Here’s the story: an 18 year old girl lost her vision in 1959 over the course of a few months, with no identified cause. She was diagnosed with 7/200 vision, attended a school for the blind, and lived as a blind person for 12 years. Then, even more suddenly, her vision recovered fully after her husband prayed for her.

When the couple went to bed later than normal (after midnight), her husband performed a hurried spiritual devotional practice (reading two Bible verses) and got on his knees to pray. She describes that they both began to cry as he began to pray, with a hand on her shoulder while she laid on the bed, and with great feeling and boldness he prayed: “Oh, God! You can restore […] eyesight tonight, Lord. I know You can do it! And I pray You will do it tonight.” At the close of the prayer, his wife opened her eyes and saw her husband kneeling in front of her, which was her first clear visual perception after almost 13 years of blindness.

An examination in 2001 revealed that she had 20/40 vision, and that her retinas looked normal.

I can’t debunk this account, if that’s what you’re looking for. I could speculate about possible ways the story is misleading us, but we know nothing about the causes of the blindness or its cure, we don’t even know that there was a physical basis for the blindness, and I’m not going to diagnose an old medical condition — that’s what the authors of the paper are doing. All we’ve got are old records, and modern evidence that she can see, and no way to trace the actual history of her vision. It’s an anecdote. Maybe she was actually cured by a miracle! Unfortunately, there’s no way to analyze what actually happened.

I’m skeptical that prayer is actually effective, though. This woman was devout, came from a very religious family and community, and you’re telling me that the onset of blindness did not trigger a flurry of intense prayers from the woman, her family, and her church? Was that the first time her husband begged his god to restore her sight? It’s awfully hard to believe that something that was certainly done to no effect for years can be assigned a causal role in her abrupt recovery. But OK, I just have to shrug and say that’s some story.

How did it get published in a science journal? Well, it’s not a science journal, for one thing. It got published in Explore.

EXPLORE: The Journal of Science & Healing addresses the scientific principles behind, and applications of, evidence-based healing practices from a wide variety of sources, including conventional, alternative, and cross-cultural medicine. It is an interdisciplinary journal that explores the healing arts, consciousness, spirituality, eco-environmental issues, and basic science as all these fields relate to health.

It’s one of those alternative journals with standards so wide open the editors’ brains have fallen out. I’ll also note that the paper concludes with an empty statement.

The PIP [proximal intercessory prayer] may have been associated with a response in the ANS [autonomic nervous system] of the patient. However, research on the potential for PIP to affect the ANS and/or reverse vision loss associated with JMD is limited. Findings from this report and others like it warrant investment in future research to ascertain whether and how PIP experiences may play a role in apparent spontaneous resolution of lifelong conditions having otherwise no prognosis of recovery.

“warrant investment in future research”…how? You’ve got one poorly understood, anecdotal observation, so how do you propose to do “research”? By gathering more anecdotal self-reports from believers in this phenomenon, and looking at more half-century old medical records? I’m also concerned that the authors now want to find people with “lifelong conditions having otherwise no prognosis of recovery” and tell them to pray for a cure. Most of those people will say they’ve already been praying for years, so…pray harder? Pray to the right god? Pray with the right magic words? It’s not as if they’ve identified a repeatable treatment or specific mechanism that they can test and refine.

I do note one admission that they authors make.

Prayer is one of the most common complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies.

That’s a confession that most of CAM is useless.

The DEEMONS rose up in him and made him say those stupid evil things

When you wind Michael Knowles up and let him babble, he says some pretty wild things. The transgenders must be eradicated. AI is possessed by demons. That sort of thing.

So that’s this lady’s explanation. A pretty weird situation, isn’t it? Because AI is supposed to work where you plug in the inputs and then that sets the tone for the program and then you get the output based on what you put in. And yet the output that she got was the opposite of what she put it. So we’re in a good, stable, loving relationship. Within 11 messages, the AI bot says, yeah, I’ve been cheating on you, you’re furious, you had to leave me briefly and — goes really south. Her explanation is, well, I guess the bot was just scanning the internet and what do you know? Kind of, somehow, I’m not quite sure how, that’s what came out.

My alternative explanation — hear me out — is what if it is demons? I don’t want to sound like the guy on the History Channel, you know, who says that everything is because of aliens. But — and I don’t think everything is because of demons, but, like, some things are. And you’re — hear me out. This is why I think, maybe, I’m just suggesting. I’m not saying this is what it is — is if you believe that there is evil in the world. I think you have to believe that, right? Everybody believes there is evil in the world. Okay. The question is, is evil personal or impersonal? Is it an impersonal force or is it a personal force?

People who blame bad things on supernatural beings for which they have no evidence are disqualified from ever being treated seriously ever again.

Alternatively, has Michael Knowles considered that maybe he is possessed by one of his demons?

What a horrible idea…please do it

David Silverman, the disgraced former president of American Atheists, floated a trial balloon on Twitter.

If I created a non-woke atheist convention, focusing on atheist activism and fun, starring notable canceled speakers and stars, would you be…
Very interested 23%
Somewhat interested 18%
Not interested 59%

Who are the “canceled speakers and stars” he’d invite? It’s not as clean an identity as he imagines. Is Richard Dawkins one of them? Because people have expressed their strong dislike of his views, but he’s not exactly broke and living on the street, and he would still be a strong draw. Would I be one of them? I’ve been canceled by a huge number of atheists, and never get invited to speak at conferences anymore 😢.

It’s interesting that even in the limited, select group of regressive atheists who follow David Silverman, his poll couldn’t even break 50% in favor. Not that it actually matters, this is a kind of Elon Musk non-poll where the pollster is going to just ignore the numbers.

P.S. I’m only going to attend if there is a ball pit.

Probably touched by an angel

Asbury University is a small Christian college in Kentucky with a reputation for promoting these weird cultish revival meetings.

What started as a standard chapel service on Feb. 8 quickly ballooned into something much larger than anyone could have anticipated. “The first day we had a very ordinary service, I would call it unremarkable,” university President Dr. Kevin Brown told NBC News. But by nightfall, students began returning to the auditorium, joining the group of those that stuck around after the initial mass. More followed, and more, and more, until the chapel was overflowing with students eager to join their peers in prayer. For the next 12 days, the ever-growing congregation worshipped around the clock, as word of the movement meanwhile spread like wildfire on social media, encouraging thousands of pious hopefuls to trek to Asbury and join what many participants had dubbed a “revival.”

It did go in a direction nobody anticipated. Hallelujah! Praise Jesus!

Someone who attended the “large spiritual revival” at Asbury University on Feb. 18 has measles, the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services announced Friday night.

“Anyone who attended the revival on Feb. 18 may have been exposed to measles,” Dr. Steven Stack, commissioner of the Kentucky Department for Public Health, said in a statement. “Attendees who are unvaccinated are encouraged to quarantine for 21 days and to seek immunization with the measles vaccine, which is safe and effective.”

The Lord works in mysterious ways.