I grow concerned for your craniofacial integrity

I’m going to do it again. You’re all about to facepalm once more, just as you did yesterday. By now, you should know this blog and be conscious of the need for deliberation and caution when putting your hand to your face.

I was sent this example of science proving atheism wrong. Perhaps you should gently place your hand on your forehead before you start reading, to forego the possibility of slamming your palm into your face with great force.

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So…this clever calculation is contingent on the premise that there has been 6 billion people on the earth for 3 billion years, and, tragically, that every drop everyone drinks stays in their body and disappears when they die. Hey, I’ve been visiting pubs here in England, and I’ve noticed that every pint I take in is followed a little later by a pint flowing out to, eventually, the sea. Which has led me to a complementary calculation that similarly disproves atheism.

Let’s assume that 6 billion people have been hanging out at the pub every day, and right after last call they stagger to the pisser and evacuate two liters of urine. By that calculation, there ought to be roughly 10 times as much water as we observe on the planet, and we ought to be completely submerged and swimming in pee. We are not, therefore we can conclude that there must be something wrong with my estimates, and since I am an idiot, I will assume that it can’t possibly be a failure to recognize an important concept like physiological homeostasis, and must be because one parameter, the length of time, must be fudged by 6 orders of magnitude to fit the innumerate presuppositions of bronze-age goat molesters.

New documentary about the LaClair case

A couple of years ago, a student, Matthew LaClair, exposed his teacher, David Paszkiewicz, as an evangelical creationist who was using a public school classroom as a pulpit. He did this by the simple expedient of bringing a hidden voice recorder into the room and catching Paszkiewicz preaching instead of teaching (the recording is on the web).

Now a documentary has been made about LaClair and Paszkiewicz.

The movie is going to be shown on Sunday, June 12 at 2 p.m. at the New York Ethical Culture Society at 2 West 64th Street in New York — I wish I could go. There’s also going to be a Q&A with both LaClair and Paszkiewicz in attendance. I’ve met Matt LaClair, who seems like a sensible, rational person; what I’ve seen of Paszkiewicz is that he’s a close-minded, rather dim Dominionist bigot. There could be an interesting clash.

Someone smuggle a recorder into the event!

Last day of the Dublin conference

Since I’m lazy and occupied, I’ll just link to Rorshach’s account of the last day of the event.

I’ll just say…Maryam Namazie was awesome. I am so glad she was the last speaker of the weekend, because if she’d gone first, the rest of us would have had to sit quietly and simply refer everyone to her. She made a fierce, impassioned, reasoned criticism of Islamism and it’s degradation of humanity — she was wonderfully clear and humane.

I also got into a brief argument with Hamza Andreas Tzortzis, the Muslim creationist. Picture the unholy progeny of a union between Ken Ham and William Lane Craig, brought up in a Muslim household, and you’ve got this guy: he simultaneously pushes a reactionary creationism that is as stupid and shallow as the worst of the Biblical literalists, and he sprinkles it all with longwinded philosophical bafflegab every time he gets confronted with a challenge. His main theme (besides engaging in a remarkably evasive gish gallop) was a rejection of empiricism — every time I asked him for evidence…bleeargh, philosophical boilerplate vomited all over the place.

And of course, in complete contradiction of his emphasis on why my empirical evidence was irrelevant, he kept insisting that he had evidence from the precision and accuracy of the Quran that Mohammed (pbuh) must have had a divine revelation to know all these amazing scientific phenomena, like detailed knowledge of embryology, which was bunk. I tried to explain that the ‘science’ in the Quran was nothing but warmed over rehashes of dimly understood Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen, and Tzortzis and his claque took an astonishing tack to address that: they repeatedly and with great hyperbole emphasized that Mohammed was abysmally ignorant and entirely isolated from the entirety of Western culture, having no encounters via trade or with doctors who might have given him hints of the common understanding of science of the time.

They put me in the uncomfortable position of having to argue that the Arabian culture of Mohammed’s time could not possibly be as troglodytic and benighted as they wanted it to be. There was no point, of course: they’d already declared that evidence didn’t matter.

In which creationists make me giddily, joyfully gleeful!

Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy. This is wonderful news, happy happy joy joy, gosha’mighty, I’m wiggling in my chair like a tickled puppy. What has made me so happy, you might ask?

A week from today I’m going to be speaking at the Crystal Palace in Glasgow, Scotland. I’ll be talking about the developmental evidence for evolution, and it should be great fun.

But that’s not the exciting news.

Glasgow has its very own Centre for Intelligent Design, and a fine collection of know-nothings it is. And they are being encouraged to attend my talk! So maybe there will be a contingent of critics present — and they can’t be as dumb as Rabbi Moshe Averick, can they? Yeah, they probably can be.

But that’s not the thrilling news, either.

The fun part is that the nitwits at Uncommon Descent have posted 10 + 1 Questions For Professor Myers, and are urging the Scottish creationists to show up and confront me with their stumpers.

And they’re SCREAMINGLY STUPID!

I read them with increasing disbelief: every single one of them was trivial and inane, and do nothing but reveal the ignorance and arrogance of the questioner. Every single one. Every one is built around some bizarre creationist misconception, too.

Please please please please please please, O Creationists, show up and ask me these questions. Pick any of them. Pick the one you are absolutely certain will make me squirt hot tears of frustration and despair right there on the stage. I’m begging you. Give me the opportunity to give you a public spanking. Oh, happy monkey, I will be delirious with joy if you try to make me suffer with these questions. They’re like a gift, a gift of idiocy.

Now I’m not going to answer them here just yet — I want to give the creationists a chance to slam me with ’em first. But I’ll post the answers next week, after they’ve taken their shot. If they do. I’m afraid they’ll be too cowardly to announce themselves in public like that.

Just so you can see them without going to that cloaca of creationism, Uncommon Descent, I’ve also posted the full set of questions below the fold. Go ahead and try to answer them if you’d like, but really, all of the answers to everyone of them was already tripping off my brain as I read them.

Hey, and show up in Glasgow. I can tell already it’s going to be a blast.

[Read more…]

Prime example of delusional thinking

The Creation “Museum” is 4 years old, and co-founder Mark Looy was interviewed.

“The number-one comment we get, whether it’s from a Christian or a non-Christian, is that this place exceeded their expectations,” he reports. “The quality of the exhibits, the special effects theatre, the state-of-the-art planetarium, the animatronics dinosaurs — this is a museum unlike any other in the world.”

Mark Looy (Answers in Genesis)But the museum is not just unique because it rejects evolution and proclaims creationism, says Looy, who notes it also “presents the history of the Bible in a fun and entertaining way.” Non-Christians have toured the museum, including one group that consisted of 285 atheists. That, says the spokesman, is one reason why the facility is designed to be evangelistic.

I would agree that it is a “museum” unlike any other, because it isn’t one. It’s disneyfied fundamentalism, and it’s more like a Hell House than a museum. But he noticed our visit from 2009, and misrepresented us: it did not exceed our expectations, unless you mean we expected some bullshit, and we received a mountain of bullshit and lies and paranoia and craziness.

Sure, it’s evangelistic. Everyone I know who visited that heap were further convinced that these loons are nuts. So it’s doing a fine job of evangelizing for atheism.

The Barnum principle

Johan Huibers, the owner of a construction company in the Netherlands, is way ahead of Ken Ham. He has actually begun construction of a replica of Noah’s Ark, and his even floats—although he accomplishes that by cheating, building his ark as a wooden superstructure on top of an array of bolted-together steel barges.

The revealing factoid about this crank, though, is this:

Actually, this ark is not the first that Mr. Huibers has built. He first began dreaming of an ark in 1992, shortly after a heavy storm lashed the coastal region north of Amsterdam where he lives. His wife, Bianca, a police officer, opposed the idea.

“She said no, but by 2004 I had built a smaller ark, 225 feet long, to sail through the Dutch canals,” he said. It became a minor sensation. He charged adult visitors $7 to board it.

“More than 600,000 people came, in about three years,” he said. He said he made about $3.5 million, enough to clear a profit of $1.2 million.

Crazy pays, and there is a sucker born every minute.

I am lectured in logic by a man who believes in invisible magic men in the sky

Rabbi Moshe Averick asks, “Seriously, Aren’t Atheists Embarrassed by P.Z. Myers?“

Seriously, aren’t you? What’s the matter with you people?

What prompts his outrage is his discovery of a lecture I gave some time back on the complexity argument from intelligent design creationists. He is appalled at my total lack of logic! Unfortunately for him, his misconceptions arise because he makes some unwarranted leaps about what I was saying.

He specifically objects to the fact that I showed a slide of a wall of driftwood at a beach, and that I explained that it had accumulated by chance and the properties of wind and water along the shoreline…and then I stated that it was very, very complex. And it is! Rabbi Averick is deeply incensed by this. I think you’ll spot his logical error in the second sentence of this paragraph from the rabbi’s rant:

To be honest, when I saw this lecture for the first time, I thought Myers was joking. A pile of driftwood as being analogous to the “complexity” of a living cell?! Myers is arguing that since a “complex” and “complicated” pile of driftwood can accumulate through an undirected natural process, so can a living cell. I guess if by “complexity” you mean a chaotic collection of junk, then I would have to agree; a large pile of driftwood is certainly “complex.” In any case, no self-respecting ID theorist would ever use the term “complexity.” The terms that are always used are “functional complexity” or “specified complexity.” In other words, complexity that achieves some pre-determined goal, complexity that clearly functions towards a specific purpose. The argument is that “functional complexity” and “specified complexity” clearly are the result of intelligent intervention. A pile of driftwood is immediately recognizable for exactly what it is; a random, disorganized, purposeless collection of…well, driftwood! To describe this argument as flawed logic would be misleading; we first would have to dignify it by labeling it as some form of logic in the first place. It is not flawed logic, it is simply ridiculous.

Nowhere in that talk do I claim that a pile of driftwood is analogous to a cell. I think there’s a rather huge difference between a cell and a pile of debris; one replicates and is therefore subject to iterative natural selection, and the other doesn’t. I was making a different point. I have been giving a similar talk lately, and in that I have added another slide that might help clarify the logic he’s missing. I show this:

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Recognize it? It’s only one of the most well known corporate logos in the world, the Nike swoosh. It’s very, very simple, and it’s also most definitely designed. No getting around it; a graphic designer sat down and designed that simple swooshing logo.

Is it clearer now? We have complicated things that are not designed, and we have simple things that are designed. We also have complicated things that are designed, and simple things that are not. The message you should take away from these examples is that complexity and design are independent properties of an object. One does not imply the other. You cannot determine whether something was designed by looking at whether it is complicated or not.

Yet as we see just about every time some clueless creationist, like Rabbi Averick, starts bellowing about design, we see the same blithe assumption: they look at a cell, they say “gosh, O Lord, it’s really, really complicated”, and then they start blithering about how it must have been designed. The two are not connected!

Also familiar, I’m afraid, is the usual indignant waffling about it being “specified complexity”. I have read Dembski, who uses the term. I have read Meyer, who practically spews the phrase out on every single page of his book, Signature in the Cell. I have never seen it operationally defined.

I had to read Meyer’s godawful book twice, because I couldn’t believe he failed to do something so fundamental; the second time I was looking carefully for any discussion of what “specified complexity” means, or how to measure it. Here is the closest he comes:

The term specified complexity is, therefore, a synonym for specified information or information content.

Oh, yes. That is so helpful. He equates complexity with information content, but the mystery word here is “specified” — how do we determine that? None of these clowns has a clue.

Forget about the complexity part; that’s irrelevant, and has nothing to do with whether something is designed. The problematic issue is whether something, complex or simple, was specified — which, alas, is a modifier for which you can freely substitute “designed” in all of the creationist literature, which means that all they are arguing is that designed things are designed.

To which I ask, “How do you know that is specified, or designed?”

To which they reply, “Because it’s awesomely complicated.”

Go back to line 1. Repeat endlessly.