Ken Ham was asked what Answers in Genesis would do next, after building a gigantic wooden boat on dry land in Kentucky, and now Mark Looy has confirmed it: they have big dreams. They want to build a copy of Solomon’s Temple. Don’t panic, though, they promise “it’s not going to be some kind of secular temple where all sorts of weird religious ceremonies are held.” That’s a relief. I thought they were going to build a place for pagan orgies.

But wait! That’s not all! They also want to build a full-scale copy of the Tower of Babel!

Uh, hang on there…haven’t they read their bible? Building a tower to heaven was what triggered the wrath of their god!

This year’s Upchucky award, which is “bestowed upon that person or organization who persists in denying evolution despite a blizzard of empirical evidence,” has gone to a particularly deserving entity: Answers in Genesis. Their plan to build a giant “life-sized” model of a fictitious boat and use it to miseducate children is a brilliant example of upchuckiness.

We occasionally get threads full of deconversion stories here: atheists arrive at their conclusions by some very different paths, where sometimes it was an easy and natural transition, and sometimes it was painful, agonizing, and there are still deep wounds left from parting the ways with religion. Today, though, I’d like to ask a narrower question: How did you come to accept evolution?

Some of you will find the problem odd, because you’ve never believed in anything else. I know when I was growing up, despite going to Sunday School and all that nonsense, my church never mentioned the subject of evolution, either to approve or disapprove; my public school classes never discussed it, either, to their disgrace. I grew up devouring books on natural history at my local library, and absorbed the evolutionary explanations within them, only getting formal training when I entered college. It was quite a shock to me to discover what kind of absurd twaddle other people thought was real science!

But others may have been instructed early on in creationism as part of their religious upbringing, and the process of learning had to involve a lot of unlearning as well. Where were you on the continuum? Was your childhood science untainted by religious dogma, or were you a full-on bible-thumping young earth creationist, or something in between? How did you wrestle the myth to the ground and drop-kick it into the local lake?

Ken MacLeod was a youthful creationist who got better, if you need an example. He brings up another interesting point, a perspective that I share: once you recognize the fallacies behind creationism, you also realize that creationism’s promoters are not simply deluded folk — they are monsters of malice who are intentionally trying to undermine science education because it conflicts with their religious values, and they are perfectly willing to lie and slander to achieve their goals.

What quote-mining shows is that some people who produce creationist material are conscious liars. Behind these pseudo-science hacks are worse people yet. These are theologians who have the education to understand the conflict precisely. It’s not one between ‘science and the Bible’. It’s a lot more stark than that. It’s a conflict between a particular way of reading the Bible (what is loosely called ‘literalism’) and normal scientific method. There would be a certain integrity in acknowledging the conflict, admitting that there was no obvious resolution, and pointing out that we are not always given to comprehend the intent of the Ancient of Days. That at least would allow young people from these traditions to study biology and geology and astronomy without the constant arguments at home interrupting their thoughts like a buzz of static across their brains.

There’s one further ironic revenge visited on all this. A frequent complaint against the New Atheists is that they’re only arguing against fundamentalism, and ignoring the broader and more accommodating forms of religious belief. This isn’t exactly true, but to the extent that it is, they’ve hit a sweet spot in the market. When I rejected fundamentalism I didn’t turn to broader and more accommodating forms of religious belief. I didn’t start wondering if maybe there was something to be said for Anglicanism. I just went straight over to atheism. If this is typical, and I think it is, then there must be many for whom the New Atheist books are like water in the desert. We need no condescension from those who have already found an oasis.

I’ve interacted with a lot of creationists over the years, and one thing I’ve learned is that they aren’t necessarily stupid people: they are often accomplished, literate, successful in fields that aren’t science, and entirely capable of following some of the most byzantine threads of logic. And yet, when they are confronted with the logic of evolution, which is relatively simple and clear and also backed by impressive amounts of empirical evidence, they balk and begin to reach desperately for the worst arguments, striving to debunk the truth with dishonesty to an exceptional degree.

It’s one of the reasons I encourage students to listen to the other side. If the student has any knowledge of biology at all, they find the lies they use appalling and horrifying. And I do not hesitate to call them lies: they know better. Anyone who can ferret their way through the chaos of the Bible is smart enough to understand how to read a lucid Charles Darwin for meaning.

MacLeod’s last point about the New Atheists is also valid. Encountering fundamentalism was the trigger that woke me up to the follies and fallacies of creationism, but it also made the conscious blindness of less toxic religions obvious. Over and over again, I have witnessed the silence of the churches. Over and over again, a creationist rides into town, spouts his lies and nonsense, and who rebuts them? Usually, only the atheists. Even the liberal church congregations sit quietly, many of their members even attend these talks with muted assent, and the general attitude even from sects that don’t demand adherence to beliefs in a young earth is…let them abide.

I often hear the argument that not only is creationism bad science, it is bad theology. I don’t accept that argument at all. In part, it’s because all theology is bad, and if we’re going to start winnowing out particular religious beliefs on the basis of their nonsensical nature, we can’t stop with Genesis literalism — Jesus and Mohammed and Vishnu are all going to have to go, no matter how socially progressive their advocates might be. And it’s also because I see all those churches, each with their brand of theology, all almost entirely silent on the theological errors of their neighbors. Bad theology apparently doesn’t matter that much.

I’m pleased to see that the Intelligent Design creationists do actually occasionally challenge themselves — it’s just too bad that they trip and fall flat every time they do. Over at Uncommon Descent, that hotbed of hot air hosted by William Dembski, one poster slipped the leash and asked an uncomfortable question: how do we calculate Dembski’s measure of ‘complexity’, CSI, or Complex Specified Information? She didn’t know. It turns out that almost 300 comments in the subsequent thread are spinning their wheels — they don’t know either.

Doesn’t this sound just like Ontogenetic Depth, the magic metric Paul Nelson invented to describe the history of complexity of life on earth, which he couldn’t define and couldn’t explain how it was calculated? An immeasurable metric is a curious thing to hang a science on, I think.

By the way, we’re coming up on the 7th anniversary of Paul Nelson’s failure to deliver a promised explanation. I’m getting old here. He must be hoping to just outlive me.

The fine folks at Answers in Genesis are working themselves into a good lather over the fact that they were expelled from homeschool conferences for being too obnoxious and intolerant. Recall that the the Christians doing the banning are also young earth creationist/evangelical/fundamentalist crazies when you read this characterization by Nathan Ham, Ken’s son:

Some Christians today are like the hippies of 50 years ago who used the word “love” to justify their fornications and sins against the word of God. The hippie culture is often pictured as a group of drug-addicted, fornicating drunks whose catchphrase “make love, not war” gave their movement a false sense of piety.

Sir, I have known many hippies in my life, and I have greatly admired them. I resent the fact that you have such a grossly muddled idea of what being a hippie is all about to the point where you think the puckered-sphinctered, pursed-lipped, suit-wearing, dogmatic, jebus-lovin’ dingleberries of the Great Homeschool Convention’s Advisory Board are anything like hippies.

Mother Jones recently interviewed Texas legislator Bill Zedler, the fellow who has authored a bill that would outlaw discrimination against creationists. I read the whole thing, and now my head hurts (partly due to the fact that I was up to the wee hours last night and I’m already functioning on a pool of fatigued neurons). Zedler really is an idiot; the entire interview is a series of non sequiturs as Zedler blindly recites from the creationist script. Here’s an example:

Mother Jones: Are you a creationist?

Bill Zedler: Evolutionists will go “Oh, it just happened by chance.” Today we know that’s false. Today we know that even a single-celled organism is hugely complex. When was the last time we’ve seen someone go into a windstorm or a tornado or any other kind of natural disaster, and say “Guess what? That windstorm just created a watch.”

First sentence: No credible scientist claims evolution is a theory solely of chance. It wouldn’t be a very interesting theory if it were, now would it?

Second sentence: I know it’s false that Bill Zedler has sex with chicken corpses.

Third sentence: Yes, cells are complex. So? Complexity can be produced by chance, so announcing an irrelevant fact does not challenge his strawman version of evolution, anyway.

Fourth sentence: Job 38:1. “Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind”. So the last time anyone claimed a windstorm created a watch, it was their god. Scientists aren’t the ones claiming that purely chance forces assemble functional complexes.

I have to say that ol’ Bill Paley was a smart guy for his time, a persuasive writer, and extremely influential…but every time some clueless creationist drags out a watch analogy, I want to build a time machine, go back to 1743, and strangle him in his crib.

Of course, then someone else would invent some catchy but irrelevant parallel, and creationists would be endlessly recycling the same tired metaphor, whatever it was. It’s been over 200 years; can they please come up with something original now?

Something nasty seems to get passed on with the name “Hovind”, anyway. Eric Hovind’s latest stunt: He’s ‘taking back’ Earth Day with a silly, misguided campaign to replace tree-planting with Christian evangelism, and with selling t-shirts to benefit his lunatic ministry. There’s nothing in his plans about conservation or protecting endangered habitats or species — he’s only hijacking the holiday as a pretext for more god-babbling.

His father, Kent Hovind, gets out of prison in 2015. Then there will be two of these scumbags fleecing the public and lying in the name of their god.

Amazingly, a gang of ignorant young-earth creationist crazies who are running fundamentalist home-schooling conferences decided that Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis were just too crazy even for them, and they have formally banned AiG from appearing at any of their conferences. This wasn’t a dictate from irate scientists or atheists, either: this decree has come down from his own people, fellow creationists who also believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old and that God shuffled every kind of animal on the planet into a big boat before drowning everyone else. Here’s the official letter they sent to AiG:

After much prayer and deliberation over the weekend, Great Homeschool Convention’s Advisory Board has unanimously decided to disinvite Ken and AIG from all future conventions, including the Cincinnati convention next week. The Board believes this to be the Lord’s will for our convention and searched the Scriptures for the mind of the Lord and the leadership of the Holy Spirit before arriving at this decision. The Board believes that Ken’s public criticism of the convention itself and other speakers at our convention require him to surrender the spiritual privilege of addressing our homeschool audience.Please know that our Board is 100% young earth and we largely share AIG’s perspective from a scientific standpoint. That is why Ken was originally invited and treated so graciously and extremely generously in Memphis and Greenville (far beyond what we do for other speakers or their ministries). Our expression of sacrifice and extraordinary kindness towards Ken and AIG has been returned to us and our attendees with Ken publicly attacking our conventions and other speakers. Our Board believes Ken’s comments to be unnecessary, ungodly, and mean-spirited statements that are divisive at best and defamatory at worst.

One of the core values of our convention is that we believe that good people can disagree and still be good people. We believe that Christians do not need to personally question the integrity, the intelligence, or the salvation of other Christians when debating Biblical issues. Ken has obviously felt led to publicly attack our conventions and a number of our speakers. We believe that what Ken has said and done is unChristian and sinful. A number of attendees are demanding explanations from our board and we must respond to them.

We believe that Dr. Ham is very intelligent and deliberate and that he decided that publicly slandering our conventions and defaming a number of our speakers is what he wanted to do. Whereas Ken chooses to conduct himself in a way that we believe to be unscriptural, we cannot countenance that spirit as we believe it would not honor the Savior whom we serve.

A public statement will be prepared for distribution at the convention explaining our Board’s decision. Anyone who inquires regarding Dr. Ham or AIG will be referred to that statement. We have no intention to defame or publicly slander Dr. Ham, the Creation Museum, or the work of AIG. Our Board would respectfully request that Dr. Ham and AIG prayerfully consider doing the same. Our Board takes seriously the admonition of Jesus in John 13:35, “By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another.”

Sincerely,

Brennan Dean
Great Homeschool Conventions, Inc.

Ooooh, burn. These people are deranged, but there they are, chastising Ken Ham for being beyond the pale. It’s got to sting when all the other inmates in the asylum shun you.

I really should stop linking to these bozos, since they don’t ever bother to link to any sites outside their incestuous coterie of jebus-wanking apologetics sites, but I cannot resist. Ken Ham is bragging about his web traffic, and it’s rather pathetic.

• In 2010, the Answers in Genesis main website had more than 10 million visits for the first time (10,225,465 visits, previously 8,726,503–a 17% growth) from more than 5 million unique visitors (5,445,617 unique visitors, previously 4,650,206–a 17% growth).

• The Creation Museum website had more than 1 million visits for the first time (1,079,290 visits, previously 899,890–a 19.9% growth).

• The Answers Vacation Bible School (VBS) website had more than 100,000 visits for the first time (110,767 visits, previously 34,231–a 223% growth), with almost half a million page views (476,551 page views, previously 122,301–a 289% growth).

Oooh. Millions are big numbers. But just to put it all into perspective, some random low-ranking non-entity of a godless college professor in the most rural part of Minnesota gets about 25-30 million visits per year, and yeah, it’s growing every year. And his site links regularly to AiG, meaning a lot of the visitors to Ham’s precious empire are there to laugh at him.

And I’m not bragging — I know I’m dwarfed by the really big players, and that web hits are not instruments of self-validation. You can get lots of traffic by being one of the dumbest punching bags for national stupidity on the web, after all, just like Answers in Genesis. That his traffic isn’t even close to a mere blog tells you that biblical literalism possibly isn’t all that popular a draw.

Creationists make some crazy claims about fossils — Ken Ham, for instance, is adamant that T. rex was a vegetarian before the Fall. So let’s all laugh together.