Poor Martyn Iles

Martyn Iles lost his status as Ken Ham’s successor at Answers in Genesis (there’s a story there, I’m sure, but no one is talking), and now he’s an immigrant wandering loose in the United States, which is definitely not a good position to be in. Normally, I’d be sympathetic, but Martyn Iles? The Young Earth Creationist and far right kook? Nah. Deport him.

Prayer request: | need a new visa for the USA so | can come and go freely for our new project.
The lawyer recommends going for an O-1 visa, but it’s a high bar.
I’ll need some senior political and church figures to help me out with letters that verify my past activities… essentially to confirm that | have been a national leader in political, legal and grassroots advocacy work. And trust nobody who really hates my beliefs ends up with the application on their desk.
But once it’s granted, it’s a very good visa, and very durable.
So… Pray everyone is suddenly overtaken by a desire to do me just a small favour

OK, I’ll be generous: everyone can give him all the prayers he might want. I don’t know what his “new project” is, but I’m sure it’s garbage pandering to ignorance.

Fun times at AiG!

Well, this is interesting. Answers in Genesis has had a bit of a shake-up. You may recall that Ken Ham is stepping back from the responsibility of running his money-making scam; for a long time, it looked like his successor was going to be his son-in-law, Bodie Hodge, but then Ham brought in an Australian evangelical Christian named Martyn Iles and declared him his official heir to the throne of AiG. Bodie left to start his own evangelical mission.

I’m sure there was some drama going on behind the scenes. I hope someday someone comes out with a tell-all book.

Now there’s big news. Martyn Iles is out!

Some have noticed I’ve been quiet for a while. It’s because | amin a transition to something new.
In conjunction with some wise counsel and Christian colleagues, we are in the process of prayerfully discerning what’s next, now that | am no longer at Answers in Genesis.
We do have a fantastic project which appears to be coming together well… but we are just taking it a day at a time to confirm that it is of God and we’re meant to do it.
There is plenty going on behind the scenes. | am in the USA talking to donors, partners, and suppliers. Back in Australia for Easter.
The project (should the Lord enable it) has a purpose to evangelise, educate and entertain children and young people. It’s a technologically revolutionary, integrated, accessible, and high quality Christian education platform.
I’ll post updates. See where this goes.
“Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.” (Ps 127:1)

Fascinating. I’d love to know what conflict drove him away. I’m also curious to know what “technologically revolutionary” platform he plans to build; do you think it’s as “technologically revolutionary” as building a fake wooden tourist attraction?

More fossilized soft tissue

Ken Ham is excited about another discovery of traces of collagen in dinosaur bones. Me? I’m saying ho-hum, it’s mildly interesting, but it’s not what you think it is. Kenny-boy thinks it’s evidence that the bones are only 4,000 years old. I’m just wondering what processes protected collagen from degradation.

In this new study, researchers* used advanced mass spectrometry and protein sequencing to detect bone collagen in a well-preserved hip bone from an Edmontosaurus uncovered in the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota. This unexpected find is encouraging other researchers to pull fossils out of storage and look at them with these new technologies. And why?

The popular science article explains:

Furthermore, experts could uncover the biochemical pathways that enabled the preservation of organic compounds over millions of years. “The findings inform the intriguing mystery of how these proteins have managed to persist in fossils for so long,” said Taylor.

Yes, how these proteins could remain for millions of years is a big mystery. Evolutionists, try as they might, have yet to be able to present a plausible explanation for the existence of soft tissue in supposedly ancient fossils. Now the popular science article quoted Dr. Taylor, who is a creation scientist involved with this new find, saying this research will help us understand how proteins can last for “so long”—creationists too want to know how proteins can last a few thousand years. We don’t have the problem of millions and millions of years but there’s more work to be done to understand the processes that preserved them since the flood, 4,350 years ago.

The original paper doesn’t ask the question Ken Ham thinks it does. It has a narrow, specific scope: is the collagen part of the bone, or is it a product of external contamination? They show that it really is in the fossil.

They say nothing about the age of the fossil, except to briefly acknowledge it was “excavated from the Upper Cretaceous zone of the Hell Creek Formation in Harding County, South Dakota, USA.” They don’t dwell on that fact (it’s not the focus of the paper), but I know that there’s a huge amount of data screaming that it is 70 million years old. Any explanation for the preservation of soft tissue has to include all those facts. You know, the facts that Ham ignores.

Collagen is there. I’m willing to accept that. The bones are 70 million years old. The science demonstrates that. And we have plausible explanations for its preservation.

We previously demonstrated that the treatment of extant microvascular tissue with haemoglobin, an Fe-coordinating protein, can significantly enhance stability over multi-year time frames10, in effect acting as a preserving agent. Here, we extend this experimental observation to propose that enhanced resistance to degradation is due in part to Fe-catalysed non-enzymatic crosslinking of molecules comprising structural tissues, with haemoglobin suggested as the primary source of such Fe in vessels undergoing diagenesis.

This is just another example of Answers in Genesis cherry-picking the data they like and then misinterpreting/misrepresenting it.

I get email

This email was long and particularly vapid, so I’m not going into detail on it, but I do include the whole damn thing below the fold for your entertainment. To summarize it briefly, my correspondent is a friendly Muslim who wants me to know that he accepts evolution…for other organisms, but not humans. Humans are special. To make his point, he provides Evidence of the Divine.

This evidence consists of long, practically obsessive descriptions of how beautiful Mohammed was. His eyes were large, with deep black irises and bright whites, and his eyelashes were long and how good he smelled, I never smelled ambergris or musk or anything as fragrant as the scent of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. Also, he knew that horse hooves could strike sparks when galloping over stones, but there are no stones in the desert! How can you not be convinced of the existence of god and the falsity of evolution when you learn this?

He concludes by telling me how persuasive his argument is.

I want to let you know that I’ve shown this to scientists and they were utterly convinced that God didn’t exist and that we evolved from a common ancestor with primates. But after I showed them this proof that the Quran has Divine origins. They started to rethink their whole world view regarding God and atheism.

I include the entirety of his “proof” below, despite the fact that apparently it’s going to convince all of you to leave this site and go running to your nearest mosque. After all, how can you resist when Mohammed bats his lovely eyes at you?

[Read more…]

The argument for god from consistent anatomy

Aron Ra asked me to address a novel proof for the existence of god. You see, the only way you can get a nose in the middle of your face every time, or any kind of symmetry, is if a designer made it so. If you leave it to biology, you’ll get noses in random places on your body!

He really didn’t need a developmental biologist to explain this — the problem isn’t that the old goober in the picture doesn’t understand the developmental cascade that leads to a predictable morphology, it’s that he has a gross misconception that physics and chemistry and biology lack any process that can produce predictable outcomes absent a god skewing the results.

By the way, I was doing my best to keep it simple. I know that asymmetries are common. I can see, for instance, that my right forefinger is slightly longer than my left by about a millimeter; I know that my left ear is noticeably higher than my right (I had my peers loudly pointing that out in grade school.) Are those facts evidence that a god must not exist, or at least, that the god we have is terribly sloppy?

AiG ❤️ Dawkins & Coyne

Answers in Genesis is thrilled at everything Trump promises to do. You know what else makes them happy? That Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne have embraced a Biblical worldview, finally realizing that sex is binary and simple, just like the Bible says. Skip ahead to about 7:30 if you don’t want to hear them fawning over Trump, don’t bother listening at all if you don’t want to hear their appreciation of Dawkins and Coyne (also some guy named Pinky or Pink…they knew there was “pink” in the name).

It doesn’t mean much. These are creationists, they always pick and choose which words they’ll hear. But isn’t it interesting that some New Atheists are converging on a dogmatic religious view?

Kent Hovind’s latest ‘wife’ says bye-bye

Kent Hovind must be a real asshole — he keeps driving women away. Here’s a brief history of his brief ‘marriages’:

He was married to his first wife Jo Hovind from 1973 and they stayed together until their divorce in March of 2016.

He then ‘married’ Mary Tocco in September 2016, though no sexual adultery had taken place in his former marriage, making him an adulterer. They did not get a marriage license and instead entered into a public, legally recognizable common-law marriage.

However, in Alabama at the time, the state did not recognize “common-law-divorces” that can be entered and exited willy-nilly, but rather in order to legally end the marriage, they would have to undergo a formal divorce process, the same as if entered into a traditional marriage. To quote Robert Baty “Legal common-law marriages cannot be dissolved except by legal process, not by hand-waiving.”

But that’s exactly what he did. While still legally married to Mary Tocco, Kent Hovind waived his hands and declared the marriage dissolved in 2017.

Feeling restless and on the prowl, he got ‘married’ again in 2018, this time to Cindy Lincoln. This was done in the same sort of private ceremony.

However, after his first common-law marriage, Alabama changed its laws, so that the state no longer recognized any new common-law marriages as legally binding.

Following this pattern, his new ‘marriage’ to Lincoln did not last long, and he cut ties with her in 2020 by ‘divorcing her’ ie another wave of his hand. Though they publically presented themselves as married up to this point and consummating the relationship, the law treated this basically as a boyfriend and girlfriend breaking up, given the ‘marriage’ was invalid in the first place.

It is this third ‘wife’ that took an order of protection against the disgraced creationist, claiming that he physically abused her by ‘body-slamming her’ and has engaged in a pattern of psychological torture, resulting in him being sentenced to 30 days in jail for domestic violence.

Then in September of 2021, he ‘married’ a 4th ‘wife’, Sandra Sawyer, in another private covenant/ common-law ceremony. Like the ‘marriage’ before, the state does not recognize this marriage, and so legally he is still married to his second wife.

The saga will have to be updated, because it seems that #4, Sandra Sawyer, has now left him.

I hope the women around him are waking up to this and that there is no #5.

What’s the opposite of chocolate and peanut butter?

I can imagine much worse, but I didn’t want to make you all sick

You know, the old “two great tastes that taste great together” slogan, only the opposite of that — two awful things that become even more awful when combined? I tried imagining something unpleasantly yucky, and then picturing a completely different yuk, and then mixed them up in my imagination, and only succeeded in making myself mildly nauseous.

Then I discovered that Answers in Genesis had done the exercise for me. They have announced that they are combining the idiocy of young earth creationism with the hype of AI, and then I felt extremely nauseous.

We’ve been talking about doing this project for some time now, and I’m excited to finally announce a brand-new tool to help you find answers to your questions: AI Genesis. This chat tool, an extension of our website, has been under development and testing for months, and we’ve now rolled out a beta (test) version for anyone who has an account on our website.

You can ask our AI a wide variety of questions, such as:

• What was the shape of Noah’s ark?
• What’s the best evidence for a young earth?
• Is Genesis derived from ancient myths?
• What happened to the dinosaurs?
• Are the Gospels trustworthy?
• How can I share the gospel with someone who is trans?

I don’t have an account on their website — I haven’t even tried, but Ken Ham has gone all fatwah on my butt so I doubt I’d succeed — but I’m confident that they’ve implemented a glorified chatbot to deliver highly filtered creationist messages to their audience. One thing I have to commend AiG for is that they’ve hired some competent people to manage their internet presence. Have you looked at their SEO? Try to use Google to find specific details about AiG, and instead you get page after page of fluff written by AiG proponents. It’s amazingly useless.

But then, Google pretty much sucks nowadays.

Man tracks!

Dan Olson has been soaking in the history of creationism, and has come out with an excellent YouTube documentary. It starts with the Paluxy dinosaur tracks, and leads to Clifford Burdick, The Genesis Flood, and frauds like Kent Hovind. And then Carl Baugh shows up, a true charlatan.

It’s familiar stuff, but really well presented. Well worth an hour and a half.