Some conversations don’t deserve to be furthered

Oh, christ. It’s the philosopher’s version of the Courtier’s Reply. There’s been some back and forth about Christopher Hitchens on Salon, with the first hack at Hitchens by Curtis White (and a ghastly bafflegab it was), followed by a defense by Dellora, and now Joe Winkler charges in, arguing that Hitchens wasn’t a philosopher.

All right, stipulated. He was not a philosopher. Much as I may respect some philosophy, you know that it’s no insult to state that someone is not a philosopher, and when someone uses philosophy as a clumsy bludgeon as does this Winkler fellow, it’s actually a compliment.

It’s another terrible effort at religious apologetics through confusion. This one paragraph ought to be enough to indict him on charges of sowing doubt and discord through dissembling noise.

Religion itself, especially the avant garde thought of religion, has been grappling with the issue of historicity in an honest manner for decades. What’s worse is that Hitch doesn’t really do justice to the systems of countless of thinkers (Wittgenstein, Jung, Heschel and Niebuhr) who discuss the nature of religious claims and their relationship to truth. At no point does Hitch think to ask himself in this respect, what kind of truth are we talking about, historical truth, experiential truth, or maybe symbolic truth?

Jebus. I throw up my hands and throw up my lunch.

So what is, for instance, the claim of an afterlife? Historical? Nope. No one has died and come back to credibly summarize the event for us. Experiential? Have you died lately? Symbolic? Symbolic of what? We can play this game for every single contrivance of religion — it’s authority in morality, the power of prayer, transubstantiation, salvation, whatever. I don’t give a good god damn what label you give it or whether somebody believes in it fervently — it doesn’t make it true in any reasonable sense of the word.

And I mean true in the good old practical, pragmatic sense of being repeatable or verifiable, having some material evidence for its reality, or having verifiable consequences that cannot be explained by mundane, plausible phenomena.

How about true in the sense of it actually happened, or the process actually works?

You know, in the kinds of masturbatory games some philosophers and theologians play with the truth, they could just as well argue that Harry Potter is “true”, in the same sense as Jesus. Winkler tries to argue that what he calls “polemics”, or what I call cutting through the pretense, are “interesting, enlightening and often compelling, [but] rarely further the conversation.” That’s true, but only because he seems to regard spewing more bullshit as “conversation”. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is shut down the stupid conversation by tearing apart its counterproductive premises, and simply ending the circle jerk.

Sing it, Carl

Blake Stacey has a good quote quoted at Science after Sunclipse:

The business of skepticism is to be dangerous. Skepticism challenges established institutions. If we teach everybody, including, say, high school students, habits of skeptical thought, they will probably not restrict their skepticism to UFOs, aspirin commercials, and 35,000-year-old channelees. Maybe they’ll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Perhaps they’ll challenge the opinions of those in power. Then where would we be?
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, Chapter 24.

–

Who needs science when you’ve got technology?

When we last encountered Virginia Heffernan, she was upset that hatefest science blogs had journalistic integrity, and encouraged everyone to read science denialist blogs instead; then the usual gang of anti-science frauds joined in, with Rod Dreher and various Catholics chiming in. It was all over the Pepsico debacle, in which the Scienceblogs management gave advertorial space to Pepsi without marking it as an ad, prompting a whole bunch of science journalists to promptly decamp…but Heffernan exposed herself as just generally anti-science in her reaction.

Now she’s back, declaring that she loves technology and dislikes science, and that she’s openly a creationist.

I assume that other people love science and technology, since the fields are often lumped together, but I rarely meet people like that. Technology people are trippy; our minds are blown by the romance of telecom. At the same time, the people I know who consider themselves scientists by nature seem to be super-skeptical types who can be counted on to denigrate religion, fear climate change and think most people—most Americans—are dopey sheep who believe in angels and know nothing about all the gross carbon they trail, like “Pig-Pen.”

Did I mention she’s a raving climate change denialist? Yeah, she’s a raving climate change denialist and a creationist, but she loves her little smart phone. And her entire argument against science is that she doesn’t understand it, it’s complicated enough to contain internal debates, and she has this bigoted stereotype of what scientists are like. Oh, and science stories are impersonal, while Bible stories are fun and amusing.

She also mentions that the just-so stories of evolutionary psychology are inconsistent BS, but she’s such a delusional twit that I can’t even agree with her there, just on principle, much as I’d like to.

You know, I don’t assume most Americans are dopey sheep. It takes a little evidence to convince me. But at least I can say that Virginia Heffernan has persuaded me that she, at least, is a dopey sheep. Maybe that’s her problem; every time she meets a scientist she opens her mouth and says something stupid, and they react appropriately.

So what else is new?

Now, not only has Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter boondoggle been delayed and delayed and delayed, but it has also shrunk. Cincinnati news reports money problems and that they’ve cut back on the grander version they proposed. You know, the big project that would create 900 jobs for the area, and got tax breaks from the state on that promise? Not going to happen. It’s been scaled down to almost a third of what was initially planned.

Answers in Genesis hoped to break ground on its "Ark Encounter" project nearly two years ago. Since then, the 172-million dollar project has been scaled back, redesigned and slowed down by a sluggish economy.

The Williamstown on the property the Ark will rest on doesn’t look much differently than it did in February of 2012. That was a few months after the original groundbreaking date. Planners insist it will be built, but they can’t say when.

…Ark Encounter’s project manager, Mike Zovath says they are working every day on the design for displays and content. They hope to get all the necessary permits for drainage and underground utilities by the end of November. But even if they had them today … "Right now we don’t have the money for construction, yet."

The Ark project has enough money to continue moving forward with the design and architecture work — but not enough to build it. They’ve raised between $12 and $15-million. " We need about $45-million to break escrow and start construction for a $60-million end project," Zovath says.

The scaled-down $60-million dollar project would include parking lots , a ticketing area and the Ark. The walled city and other features would come later. Zovath has faith in the project and points to the Creation Museum as something critics said would never be built. "I’m absolutely positive it’s going to happen."

We all know what faith is worth. Nothing at all.

Give it a few more years, and they’ll deliver a toy boat in a rubber tub with some plastic animals scattered around.

American Atheists talks to Ray Comfort

Not that he’ll listen — if there’s anything I’m sure of, it’s that Ray Comfort’s mind is a rigidly solid block of matter absolutely resistant to knowledge. Still, they tried to explain what was wrong with his video. This part is most important, I think.

If you want to make a respectable documentary, let the experts speak! Do not edit their interviews to 4-second clips every 2 minutes with 4-second clips of undergraduates filling the time between. Sit down with an evolutionary biologist and have her explain to you what evolution means, give you some examples of observed instances of it, and why understanding the implications of this shows that we have no need of a god to explain speciation. Don’t interrupt and don’t redefine what she’s trying to tell you.

Even if Comfort had a valid point, even if he had discovered a weak point in evolutionary theory, this tactic he used completely undermines his efforts. I explained to him why his version of evolution was nothing like the scientific theory; I told him why his arguments were fallacious; I explained that the evidence I gave was exactly what was predicted by evolution. None of that made it to his movie. He chopped the interview into fragments and allowed no one to actually address his claims.

American Atheists speaks the truth about the movie; if you want the counter view, Ken Ham has also reviewed it. I think it says something that the atheists demand honesty, while the good Christians praise dishonesty.

Atheist agenda exposed at last

It’s always a boost to the self-esteem to hear how super-powerful-scary-awesome atheists are becoming. We have, apparently, been taking over the government, despite it being almost impossible to get an atheist elected to office.

Yet another theory that has been gaining traction and deserves serious consideration is that America’s massive science-industrial complex is attempting a most dangerous experiment. Since Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, we have seen a grave movement towards science-based strategic thinking in all forms of national policy. Whole swathes of government have been taken over by academic PhDs with an intense obsession with scientism. From the National Science Board to the Department of Education, from NASA to the National Institute of Standards, a powerful cadre of elite intellectuals is seizing control. A common thread amongst these activist bureaucrats is a love of science over God.

Fuck yeah, man, we have the National Institute of Standards!

You may be asking yourself what we’re doing with this immense power. It was a secret, but this site has seen through to the awful truth and exposed us all. You know about the usual agenda:

President George W. Bush famously fought against the scientists entrenched in his administration. At many points they promoted evolution “theory” and “global warming” over good old-fashioned common sense. They tried to uproot Christianity in our schools through activist judges. And while President Bush fought the good fight, he ultimately did not win the battle. The long line of anti-theists ruling the inner halls of power since Lyndon Johnson remained in control.

Evolution and global warming are just the obvious distractions. Red herrings. Devious ploys to keep your eyes off the real assault by atheists on the American way of life.

That top secret mission, now revealed, is…chemtrails. We atheists are sending planes into the sky to spray a slimy haze all around the planet.

The American public has never quite grasped the purpose of all this spraying. Officials in the Obama administration have long refused to even talk about these efforts, though some have suggested that super spy Edward Snowden may leak details of this widespread project if forced against the wall by the international community. As we have seen with other government programs, the ultimate result here is not likely to be a beneficial one.

In various online communities there has been vigorous debate about what chemtrails actually mean. Some believe they spread barium as a highly-sensitive electromagnetic missile defense system. Others postulate they contain compounds that attack our blood cells and ultimately reduce populations, much like the fluoridation of our water supplies. The rise in disease and other unexplained medical phenomena does strangely coincide with the popularization of chemtrails.

Now you are asking, why would atheists be interested in hosing chemicals into the sky? You’re probably an atheist yourself, so you may find this difficult to grasp, but the goal is to poison all the angels.

Get the t-shirt!

Get the t-shirt!

So what is at the heart of this secret society of globalist atheism? One of their most significant concerns is the power of Faith. They despise the Glory of Jesus and the hope that He brings to countless Americans. The atheists are so insanely dedicated to their obscene cult they will try just about anything to destroy every remnant of Christian Love on this earth. As this sickening obsession was wed to advances in aerial spraying technology in the last century, one can surmise the evil compound that resulted. In this formula, it seems quite logical that the atheist’s next step would be to attempt the widespread murder of Jesus’s very Heavenly Agents of Love.

Angels. They are much more than a Christian bedtime story. They are much more than the sweet flutterings in the ears of believers. Angels are quite literally the factory workers of faith. They are tireless and everywhere. They accomplish innumerable feats, from minor pangs of guilt to the throbbing passions of love. The angels are there to guide us, to inspire us and, ultimately, to remind us of our obligation to Jesus. The fly through the air at His beckoning. They are gentle and ever willing. We would be far less human and humane were it not for the angels. And that is exactly why atheists fear the power of angels.

Atheists shake with contempt at the thought of love and decency. Their whole lives are dedicated to nothingness, to the gaping void of pain that nihilism defines. Indeed, atheists love pain. They love pain in their sexual rituals, in their drug addictions and in their secret globalist power schemes. Why do we have war? It’s the atheists who spread contempt of God and invite such reckless notions of communism and Islam.

Will Atheistic Science Annihilate Love and Prayer?

As secret atheist scientists in government pursue their goals of undermining Jesus in America, it only stands to reason that they would take their battle to the skies. The aerial dogfight is likely a vicious one. Who knows what advances they have made since the days of DDT and Agent Orange. Yet fight on they do, every single day! Our heavens are coated in a thick aerosol haze of spiritual hate and this nation’s faith is sinking.

I know some of you are going to browse that site and suggest that it’s a poe — that Hard Dawn is satirizing the far right wing. But think about it: that’s exactly what they want you to believe. And doesn’t that explanation make a heck of a lot of sense?

I can’t believe I watched the whole thing

Here’s Ray Comfort’s “movie”, all 40+ blah, repetitive minutes of it. It’s the standard schtick: Comfort sticks a microphone in somebody’s face, asks a leading question, and then edits their answers and splices them into an appalling gemische of Smug Ray vs. Ambushed Folk.



He loves to go after students — he can get lots of confusion and uncertainty from them that he can assemble into a long litany of doubt. And when he got four professors, who are confident and know their stuff, and he edits the heck out of them. He pretends here that we have no examples of evidence for evolution, but as you’ll see if you bother to watch the piece of crap, every time we offered strong evidence, he rejects it by assertion, insisting that we have to show him evidence that one “kind” transformed into another “kind”, where he gets to define whether something is a new “kind” or not. And if we mention the fossil evidence, he rejects that, too, because he wants evidence of a transformation he can see right in front of his eyes, and all that dead stuff was millions of years ago (we say).

The last bit of this monstrosity is a long commercial for Way of the Master and the Creation Museum, plus lots of Jesusy nonsense. It really isn’t a movie by any stretch of the imagination — it’s an overlong infomercial for Comfort’s clownish apologetics act.

Skip it unless you’re feeling deeply masochistic.

Mormon evolution

Mormonism had its origins in the 19th century equivalent of science-fiction fandom — there was a real craze for dressing up religion in the lab coat of science even then — so it’s not surprising that Mormons love to mingle evolution, dinosaurs and faith (it helps to be living on a giant fossil bed, too). That ol’ charlatan Joseph Smith loved to squeeze his self-serving dogma into a package draped with the latest (and entirely erroneous) theories about Indian origins, for instance, to give it an aura of authority.

This article in the Deseret News explains how they teach evolution at BYU…and it’s the usual superficial phenomenological approach that annoys me so much. It’s not just Mormons that do this, but every well-meaning Christian who wants to make the data fit his or her preconceptions.

As Whiting’s lab lets out, the model skulls on every desk are lined up chronologically. Whiting said that although some students have trouble accepting human evolution, the students in his lab typically do not have any problems. He said many of his students come to see evolution not as a theory that threatens their beliefs, but as a tool God uses to "accomplish his design."

"They leave the class thinking, ‘Isn’t this cool? Isn’t the creator so clever?’" he said.

Blech. Whiting leaves out the most important parts of evolutionary biology. Sure, you can line up a bunch of skulls and make up a story about how they came to be, and that can include gods, elves, or aliens, but evolutionary biology is also about the mechanism: the changes in gene frequency brought about by selection, drift, etc.

Nowhere in evolutionary theory is there any mention of a creator. We have no need of that hypothesis. A chronological array of bones is not evidence of magic.

But the Mormons have more. They have Church Authority, so their version must be true.

The controversy died down in 1992, when the university released a packet with comments from the LDS Church’s First Presidency and the Encyclopedia of Mormonism.

"The scriptures tell why man was created, but they do not tell how, though the Lord has promised that he will tell that when he comes again," William Evenson said in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, a statement reprinted in the packet for BYU professors and students.

Oh, yes, that old fallback. Science says how, religion says why. The problem with that, though, is that while spokespeople for religion can say any damn fool reason they want, there’s no reason to think they’re right. They also don’t consider the possibility that there is no “why”: we are the product of happenstance and necessity, not planning, and human populations have simply been buffeted by the exigencies of local events that did not occur with people in mind: climate, shifts in game, competition from other species, disasters, warfare, all these sorts of things and many others happened to us, and biology responded, but none of it was with intent of any kind to cause an evolutionary response. There was no “why”.

The LDS church, an organization with no scientific credibility at all, loves to make statements about science. These should be treated with all the respect they deserve.

Whiting said the packet and statements have helped reduce the stigma that evolution is something that contradicts religion. Today, he said, many students view evolution as a logical explanation for biological diversity and that it’s compatible with their faith.

Scott Trotter, spokesman for the LDS Church, offered further clarification:

“Science and religion are not at odds in our faith. We accept truth wherever it is found and take the pragmatic view that where religion and science seem to clash, it is simply because there is insufficient data to reconcile the two.”

You know what really reduces the stigma? Recognizing that religion has no special authority in the first place, so contradicting it is a fine thing to do.

That last statement is so typical, though. Their religion is true by definition, so the default assumption is that science is in error, and further data will support the faith. Their belief is untestable, then: they will cheerfully accept the evidence that supports their preconceptions, and any evidence that falsifies the goofy myths of Mormonism will be ignored as “insufficient data”.