Creationists don’t lie all the time, and sometimes the truth can slip out. For instance, Ken Ham has recently admitted that they engage in fabrication, and have even shown pictures illustrating how good they are at fabricating “biblical truths.”
(Yes, this is an example of quote mining.)
Deja vu, man, deja vu. I remember this magazine cover—I even bought the magazine, not because I was worried about the dog, but because I always read the National Lampoon. This is supposed to be a joke, though.
So now Goosing the Antithesis leads me to the
Answers in Genesis page, and what do I see?
You have got to be kidding me. This is no joke: AiG has a a new campaign going that one-ups NatLamp and suggests that if you don’t buy in to Jesus, you will get shot.
If we evolved from lower life forms, then the Bible isn’t true and we are no more than animals. So why should we listen when it says to be fair, to be kind and to love our fellow human beings? The only thing that matters is pleasing ourselves at the cost of whomever gets in our way.
Creationists are a contemptible bunch, aren’t they? Lies and fear. That’s all they’ve got.
Look, the majority of people on this planet do not believe the Bible is true. Somehow, though, they don’t end up on shooting rampages. Isn’t it obvious Ken Ham and his fellow kooks are freaking wrong? How retarded do you have to be to swallow this nonsense?
So…Intelligent Design creationists have a research program? It’s just super-secret, because those real scientists might criticize it, lower its self-esteem, and make it wither away under our skeptical eye.
I’ve heard the same argument from astrologers, homeopaths, and reflexologists.
Since John Wilkins has already commented on Paul Hanle’s article on the declining competitiveness of Americans in science, I’ll focus my opinion on a narrower point. I think Hanle is precisely correct when he points out that ID and creationism are shackles that handicap science education in our country.
By teaching intelligent design or other variants of creationism in science classes at public schools — or by undercutting the credibility of evolution — we are greatly diminishing our chances for future scientific breakthroughs and technological innovations, and are endangering our health, safety and economic well-being as individuals and as a nation.
Earlier this week, I had a chance to talk with Randy Olson about this business of communication good science to the public. I’ve had some disagreements with his strategies before; I think we resolved them a bit. What I had interpreted as a call to dumb down science to get it to the people is really a request that we develop clear narratives, good stories, and sharp, comprehensible slogans backing evolution and science teaching. I agree completely. We are experts at efficient discourse within the community of science, but when it comes to talking to middle America, we suck. There is a good reason for that — we get all of our training in how to talk to other people who have all of our training, but not in how to educate people who don’t have the same background — but that’s no excuse. It’s something we have to change.
Randy was generous and let me have a copy of his movie, Flock of Dodos, and I finally found time to sit down and watch it this evening. It’s excellent and the overall message was one with which I agree, and I hope more scientists get a chance to see it—it accomplishes its mission of shaking us up and pointing out our flaws, and we need that. However, it doesn’t quite satisfy the criticisms I had in mind before I saw it, and there was something that bugged me throughout.
There are days when I simply cannot believe how dishonest the scoundrels at the Discovery Institute can be. This is one of them. I just read an essay by Jonathan Wells that is an appalling piece of anti-scientific propaganda, an extremely squirrely twisting of some science news. It’s called “Why Darwinism is doomed”, and trust me, if you read it, your opinion of Wells will drop another notch. And here you thought it was already in the gutter!
A reader sent along a few notes on Paul Nelson’s grand tour of Norway—I’ve got to say that his strategy and his talk sounds awfully familiar, right down to the vacuous thought-experiments and god-praising screen-saver that conveniently kicked in during the Q&A. Most significantly, the Norwegian audience of scientists had little patience for his nonsensical arguments, just like our audience of students.
I really wonder how Nelson gets these travel invitations. Did the Scandinavian creationist groups pay his expenses, or is the Discovery Institute funding his missionary work? I think I need some atheist organization sugar daddy to front my junkets to Trondheim and other exotic locales in my ancestral homeland—I’d willingly go into a Norwegian church to lecture on godless evilution and get hammered on by the fundies if it meant I got to visit some interesting people and places.
The summary of his talk (in English, you’ll be relieved to know) is below the fold.
The Pagan Prattle has an article about the infection of the UK with a rather American sounding version of creationism/ID. It sounds as if the response has ranged from dismissal to dithering avoidance, so it doesn’t seem to be a big threat (yet—these nasty little strains can expand into chronic virulence fairly easily), so the most interesting thing, I thought, was some terminology.
There is an air of superficial plausibility about this, which is apparent in four lesson plans on Irreducible Complexity (Intelligent Design’s catchphrase), the Fossil Record, Homology and Natural Selection. As a geologist I will only comment on the Fossil Record Lesson Plan, where Pupils are introduced to the three theories currently used to interpret the fossil record: Phyletic Gradualism, Punctuated Equilibrium and Phyletic Discontinuity. These three are, of course, Darwinian gradualism, PE and essentially Six Day Creation. Both scientists and theologians contend, with massive evidence that it is disingenuous to present the last as a scientific theory.
Ooooh. “Phyletic Discontinuity Theory”. It sounds so…sciencey.
