John Price sent me some scans from another Pinkoski masterpiece, titled Discovered: The True! Genesis Story of Creation. A Presentation of Ron Wyatt’s Material. It’s clear that Pinkoski has completely swallowed all of Ron Wyatt’s pseudo-archaeological hokum—Wyatt was an outrageous fraud, and even devout Christians and creationists back away from him.
Can you stomach a little more Jim Pinkoski? He’s ranting in the comments most amusingly.
You guys LIE about Java man, you LIE about Lucy, you LIE about the horse ancestary chart, you LIE about fetuses mimicking evolution stages, you LIE about upright trees sticking through different geology layers, you LIE when you ignore the arguments about the earth’s magnetic field, you LIE when you respond to the rotation of the moon orbiting the earth — SO WHY SHOULD I EVER CONCLUDE THAT ANY OF YOU ARE ACTUALLY “RIGHT” ABOUT ANYTHING? All I see is repeated pathological LYING done by evolutionists in the evolution vs. poor old Kent Hovind’s Creationism!
I’ve been having some fun with a bizarrely didactic creationist comic book by one Jim Pinkoski that purports to explain all the flaws in evolutionary biology. What it really is is the most astounding collection of bad creationist arguments I’ve ever seen gathered in one place. I’ve been trying to slog through rebuttals, but unfortunately, it’s like every word and phrase is so far off kilter that it’s going to take me forever to get through it. One putative “problem” that I’ve already dealt with is that we only use 10% of our brains, and so scientists are stupid and untrustworthy, but here’s another one: evolution requires that everything be extraordinarily brilliant. Or in comic book speak,
Evolutionists are saying that “teeny-tiny” life forms somehow willed themselves to “evolve,” which means that we must credit
MICROBES
with being smarter than Albert Einstein!!!
I promised to show you some more of Pinkoski’s A Creationist’s View of Dinosaurs and the Theory of Evolution, so here we go.
Pinkoski’s book is actually reasonably representative of the majority opinion held by creationists; the arguments in this book aren’t what you see openly presented by most of the Intelligent Design creationists, but do reflect what you’ll see in most of your small town church meetings and your big city mega-church revivals. Informed Christians are, of course, a bit embarrassed by the foolishness and don’t endorse this stuff, but unfortunately the kind of nonsense peddled by Gish and Hovind and Ham and Pinkoski is exactly what drives the creationist activists to get out and poison our public schools.
Which brings up a problem…if these are the people we want to persuade, we face a near-impossible task. Pinkoski’s book is 56 pages long, and every page contains a shocking array of falsehoods and outright stupid crap. There’s no point in pussy-footing around it; creationism in all of its forms is nothing but ignorance, misconceptions, dishonesty, credulity, and sloppy logic. I don’t think it helps the cause of reason to be gentle with fools, nor should we be trying to persuade creationist activists—all we can do is dissuade, by showing others the bankruptcy of their position.
And wow, but is A Creationist’s View of Dinosaurs and the Theory of Evolution an example of a foolish position.
How nice—having an open thread overnight provided me with some entertaining reading this morning!
Henrik Aasted Sørensen mentioned this fascinating description of a creationist comic book—it has an account of evil angels leading the dinosaurs on a last-minute assault on Noah’s Ark, and announces that ‘THIS EVENT IS NOT A FABLE AND IS NOT A “MYTH”…IT IS VERIFIABLE SCIENTIFIC FACT!‘ It looks like a fun story, but what might the evidence for this be?
Zeno has this quote from an acolyte of D. James Kennedy, Dr. Paul Jehle, and I have to shake my head in disbelief.
I was taking calculus. I was a mathematics major and I was at a Christian college that was called Christian, but was not Christian….
I asked a question to my calculus professor: “What makes this course distinctly Christian?” He stopped. He said no one has ever asked that question before…
He said, “Okay, I’m a Christian you’re a Christian.”
I said, “That’s not what I asked! What makes this calculus course distinctly Christian? What makes this different from the local secular university. Are we using the same text? Yes. Are you teaching it the same way? Yes. Then why is this called a Christian college and that one a non-Christian college?”
So the fact that taking a derivative isn’t accompanied by a few hallelujahs mean it isn’t Christian? Would it help if they wrote out “dχ / d†”? Maybe he needed to take this course, a calculus with bible verses, instead.
Or just maybe, that mathematics stuff is hellbound anyway.
The good Christian should beware the mathematician and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of hell.
St Augustine
So what’s a professing Christian doing going to school as a math major, hmmm?
Collins has another published interview in Salon. It’s sad, actually—in every new interview, he says pretty much the same thing, but he digs himself in a little deeper. I ordered his book the other day, and now I’m beginning to regret it; it’s beginning to sound like trite Christian apologetics with no depth, no self-reflection, no insight…just compound anecdotes intended to rationalize a conclusion he has arrived at with no evidence. It’s distressingly anti-scientific.
For instance, we get an expansion of his hiking anecdote:
As a public service, I provide here an extremely rigorous and intense test of your irony meters. Please set your resistance values to at least one gigOhm, make sure all shielding is in place, and please have a fire extinguisher and first aid kit handy. If you are using some cheap off-brand meter, do not click to read anything below the fold. You have been warned, and I will not be liable for any mishaps.
I’ve visited Boulder, Colorado a few times—it’s a wonderful place, and at least so far it’s got Gary—but usually when I hear about the state it’s all about lunatics like Dobson and Coors and about megachurches and our air war for Jesus, and now…some overendowed Christian charity based in Colorado plunks ONE MILLION DOLLARS into Ken Ham’s collection plate, donating all that money to his fake museum.
One million dollars to fund disinformation and fraud, and this from a charitable institution that claims their “vision is to glorify Jesus Christ by inspiring and enabling personal commitment of time, talent, and treasure to the expansion of the Kingdom of God.” Glorious lies, inspiring fraud, well-funded delusions…that’s the gift this Christianity brings to us.
Oh, great. Nelson is at it again. You know the DI is sweating bullets when Paul Nelson emerges to state his lugubrious ‘truths’, make his unfulfilled promises, and start citing mysterious, unnamed ‘senior scientists’ with profound insights into Intelligent Design’s promising destiny. He’s kind of the Thomas Friedman of the Discovery Institute, and just as trustworthy.
