People don’t realize how insane the literal interpretation of the Bible can get. There is no room for ambiguity or error in the book of Genesis, so when God tells Noah to put at least a pair of every living thing on the big boat, he didn’t offer any exceptions — therefore, every living thing had a representative aboard.

And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.
Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive.

What this means to the Ken Hams of the world is that they can definitively say that every ‘kind’ of creature was on the Ark, so if an animal exists or is mentioned in the Bible, it had an ancestor there. So yes, they claim that dinosaurs had to be on the Ark. The Bible says so!

Which leads to some interesting conclusions. You know what else had to be on the boat? Dragons and unicorns. We have it straight from Answers in Genesis.

Some people claim the Bible is a book of fairy tales because it mentions unicorns. However, the biblical unicorn was a real animal, not an imaginary creature.

Modern readers have trouble with the Bible’s unicorns because we forget that a single-horned feature is not uncommon on God’s menu for animal design. (Consider the rhinoceros and narwhal.) The Bible describes unicorns skipping like calves (Psalm 29:6), traveling like bullocks, and bleeding when they die (Isaiah 34:7). The presence of a very strong horn on this powerful, independent-minded creature is intended to make readers think of strength.

The absence of a unicorn in the modern world should not cause us to doubt its past existence. (Think of the dodo bird. It does not exist today, but we do not doubt that it existed in the past.). Eighteenth century reports from southern Africa described rock drawings and eyewitness accounts of fierce, single-horned, equine-like animals. One such report describes “a single horn, directly in front, about as long as one’s arm, and at the base about as thick . . . . [It] had a sharp point; it was not attached to the bone of the forehead, but fixed only in the skin.”

To think of the biblical unicorn as a fantasy animal is to demean God’s Word, which is true in every detail.

The Unicorn Museum was a joke idea, created to mock the Creation “Museum”, but, ha ha ha, it’s really hard to be more ridiculous than Ken Ham.

Oh, and yes, firebreathing dragons. In a “museum”. To do otherwise would be to demean God’s Word, don’t you know.

And the state of Kentucky is throwing away $40 million in tax breaks on this kitschy exercise in fantasy. Don’t forget the hidden costs, either, or the effect on the state’s reputation.

Joe wrote me a letter because he doesn’t think my arguments against creationism are very good. Unfortunately, his arguments are…well, pretty much the standard inconsistent and incoherent tripe I always get from creationists. But at least Joe has an excuse: he’s only 12.

By the way, his email actually was in Comic Sans. Part of it, anyway: a large random chunk in the middle was set in good ol’ Comic Sans.

Hello. This is not Spam. I would like to have a discussion on your post ‘The five best arguments for creationism ever.’ (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/09/the_five_best_arguments_for_cr.php) Where you try to disprove theory’s made by creationists on a news paper article I left a comment but I feel that your points are not strong and I (being a twelve year old kid) would like to argue them further the other way. Here is the comment that I left (well i changed it a bit from my original comment).
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1. We have lots of evidence between evolution with in a species BUT NOT BETWEEN SPECIES its called the missing link!

The “missing link” is copy from tabloid journalism. There is no “missing link”, scientists are not looking for one, and it’s silly to argue that we have to find something that evolution does not predict.

It’s populations that evolve, and we have plenty of examples of transitional forms. Look up ring species, or Tiktaalik, or whale fossils, or any of the hominid fossils. What you are calling the “missing links” are out there, and closing your eyes won’t make them go away.

2.Just because the earth is obviously old doesn’t mean that this point is incorrect as got could have easy created a pre-aged earth (god dint create Adam and eave as babies, he created them pre-aged.

OK, that’s fine; you’ve just invoked a major magic trick by a deceiver god. That is a possibility that would account for the existence of all that evidence for evolution, but then you don’t get to deny the existence of “missing links”; that’s part of the evidence for an old earth that your trickster deity salted in the ground.

3. The compound eye is an example of irreducible complexity so complex that it cannot be any less complex its ether an eye or it isn’t there is no evolution in the middle. Another example of irreducible complexity is blood clotting.

Irreducible complexity is a dead issue, I’m afraid. It’s no obstacle to evolution, the examples of IC that creationists frequently trot out, like the clotting cascade, are explainable by natural processes.

4. It is true that some creationists think that ‘the bible uses allegory to explain the creation of the earth. It is a story, so employs figures of speech and other literary devices to tell the story of how God created man e.g. Genesis “days” could also be read as “ages”.’ but I don’t see what the newspapers point is there.

The newspaper tried to suggest that there were reasonable scientific arguments in favor of a young earth, that is, an earth less than ten thousand years old. It was wrong; there are none.

By the way, you haven’t presented an argument here. Have you run out?

5. Evolutionists have not, cannot ant will not prove evolution… mainly because they have not cannot and will not find the missing link.

This is the same as your first argument. I guess you really are done.

So you’ve managed to come up with a grand total of three arguments: the first is built on a misconception and denial of the evidence; the second simply argues that it was all magic; and the third simply regurgitates an intelligent design creationism buzz phrase. That’s a rather poor performance.

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I have a problem with many science teachers teaching evolution. If you are going to teach students evolution you need to teach students all the opposing theories. I

however Evolution and Creation may not be opposite and it may be that they merge together as the book of genesis is taken by many to be a story of figures of speech and literary devices and therefore can mean that evolution may merge into that. And personally given better evidence I may be able to accept that idea however I refuse to believe that man evolved from any other species because man is created in gods image and any other species are not.

Your refusal to believe in the evidence because you don’t like the conclusions is fairly typical creationist thinking, and it’s also illogical and wrong. There is no reason to accept the book of Genesis as a legitimate source of scientific information, and your refusal to consider the possibility that it isn’t a science text and gets all the science wrong puts you out of the realm of scientific thinking.

Via Sandwalk, this is a clip of Paul Nelson praising Jonathan Wells and his godawful gemisch of bad scholarship and lies, Icons of Evolution. They were making a big to-do over the ten-year anniversary of publication of this ghastly hackwork, and here Nelson is piously praising the premise.

It’s infuriatingly dishonest. Notice what he repeats over and over: the textbooks “diverge from the actual evidence,” they’re “out of touch with the actual evidence,” we “need to take these standard stories back to the evidence.” This, from the Discovery Institute, a propaganda mill with no evidence for their fantasies about design at all. There is such an egregious disconnect between what Nelson says and what he and his cronies do that I half-expected his sanctimonious head to explode. If you’re an intelligent design creationists, you do not have the privilege of hectoring others about evidence.

Furthermore, he’s spewing this nonsense in praise of Icons of Evolution, a book to which honesty and evidence are words in a strange foreign language…yet Nelson claims the message of that book is that textbook authors need to be “scrupulous about accuracy” — and yet those scruples are never applied to Wells, and further, Nelson is more than a little self-serving here: he is co-author on another awful DI production, Explore Evolution, which is little more than a warmed-over edition of Icons, and which has also been panned in reviews.

And then Nelson says the “response was much more hostile than I would have guessed.” He claims the hostility was because they were airing “dirty laundry,” which is simply wrong. The hostility derived from the fact that it was an appallingly bad work of misrepresentation and misleading innuendo, all on the service of an intellectually bankrupt theology.

On top of Icons of Evolution and Explore Evolution, Wells rehashed the same lies again in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. It’s become obvious that the Wells has gone dry: he’s simply repeating the same errors and phony arguments over and over again. This is not a man or work that warrants praise, but only condemnation and contempt.

In the past, I’ve focused on one specific issue that Wells repeatedly brings up, the idea that Haeckel’s embryos are some kind of ongoing problem for evolution. There are a lot of articles on Pharyngula on this subject, but I’ll just point to this one omnibus summary of links to articles on Haeckel and Wells, and briefly explain the nature of this ‘controversy’. There is a 19th century observation, made by multiple scientists and easily replicated today, that embryos go through a period called the phylotypic stage (and in vertebrates, called the pharyngula stage), in which species within a phylum exhibit a remarkable degree of similarity to one another. This is simply a fact: stop by my lab and I can pull out a series of slides of birds and mammals and reptiles and fish and show you how they all exhibit a set of characters, the presence of a tailbud and pharyngeal arches and somites and so forth, that are the hallmark of this relatively well-conserved stage. Now in the 19th century, Haeckel over-interpreted them to postulate a recapitulation of evolution within the development of an embryo, an idea now known to be false; Wells strategy has always been to point to an obsolete and falsified explanation for the similarities to argue that the evolutionary relationships are untenable. It’s a sleazy sleight of hand. Recapitulation theory is not in any way endorsed any more, but the similarities at the phylotopic stage are undeniable…yet Wells condemns any textbook that even shows photos of embryonic similarities.

That’s the central problem here. We have a phenomenon, the similarities between embryos at one stage of development, for which the creationists have no explanation, so they’re reduced to frantically denying the phenomenon. This isn’t the way science should work. The phenomenon is real; that these common similarities between embryos is better explained by common descent than by design may make creationists uncomfortable, but what a scientist should do is find an answer, not try to wave the problem away (or worse, accuse everyone who has seen these similarities as guilty of fraud).

I’d go further than to argue that the creationists are trying to hide data that defies their ideology. They’re trying to bury something that is almost paradigmatic of juicy, exciting science. There are a couple of properties of significant scientific questions that I consider emblematic of exactly the kind of work that is of great value.

1. It has to address a universal phenomenon. The problem of phylotypy isn’t representative of all of life by any means, but it seems to be a near-universal within the animal kingdom. Why do organisms as diverse as insects and mammals exhibit this morphological bottleneck in their development? It’s a great question; it doesn’t deserve to be swept under the rug as the creationists would like to do.

2. It has to be a non-trivial problem. Trying to figure out exactly what is going on in phylotypy isn’t easy, because the current best hypotheses all involve interactions within complex gene networks, not the most tractable problem, and solving it will require both comparative and computational tools. It’s the complexity of the subject that makes it both challenging and rewarding to solve.

3. One thing guaranteed to spur interest if the postulated mechanisms are controversial. Proposed mechanisms for phylotypy are non-Darwinian: they involve selection for intrinsic properties of networks of developmental genes that establish large scale properties of embryonic patterning. Notice that it isn’t anti-Darwinian, or the creationists would be happy with it; the mechanism fits within the context of our understanding of evolution, but extends it somewhat to include conservation of a kind of sophisticated, modular array of genes that work together to build the body plan. It’s not just the alleles that matter, but the connections between them.

4. Maybe I should have mentioned this one first. A key quality of good science is that it is doable — we have to be able to sit down and do measurements and experiments. Truth be told, a lot of ordinary science doesn’t engage the first three principles I listed above as much as it permits the rapid and routine collection of data. The phylotypy hasn’t been quite so tractable, and to move beyond a kind of morphological phenomenology that has characterized much of the work so far, requires comparative analysis of large dataset of developmental gene expression data. Until recently, that kind of information simply hasn’t been available.

I used the past tense there: that data hasn’t been available. But that’s changing fast now with new techniques in molecular and developmental biology, and later today I’ll summarize a couple of beautiful recent articles that have revealed some of the underpinnings of the phylotypic stage. The creationists weren’t just wrong, they’re on the wrong side of history, and day by day they are bing shown to be increasingly far off base.

In their invisible feasibility study, proponents of the very silly Ark theme park in Kentucky claimed it would create 900 jobs. Now a mysterious consultant claims it will be even more effective:

The ripple effect of the first year in job creation will be over 14,000 new jobs.

But wait! That’s not big enough! Here comes Ken Ham to fluff the statistics a little more.

A lot of left-wing media and bloggers have reacted very negatively, writing a lot of false information. They only represent a minority of the people in this nation. The majority of people in this area and across the nation are supportive. The statistics show about 200 million people would want to come if the ark were rebuilt. Locally, the majority of people are really thrilled because it’s family-friendly and it would bring hundreds of jobs to the region.

The current US population is a bit over 300 million…so Ken Ham is waving around two thirds of the population of the country as prospective customers, if only the state will give him some support? Does anyone believe this guy?

Imagine you’re a tourist visiting the Cincinnati area. You’ve got the choice of taking the family to Kings Island, a major recreational park nearby, or the equivalent of Heritage USA, an evangelical Christian park with no rides, presided over by a creepy Australian dude who demands that you obey his ‘literal’ interpretation of the Bible or burn in hell.

Do you think the creepy dude actually has a realistic business plan?

This is a remarkable bit of news about the magical Ark Encounter in Kentucky. You know that feasibility study, the one written by Ken Ham’s good buddy and co-author, the one that justified the them park because it would bring in 900 good jobs and swarms of tourists? The governor never saw it. Nobody in the Kentucky government has seen it. The state never received a copy to file. They refuse to show it to the press, even. The report is reportedly 10,000 pages long, with just the executive summary being 200 pages long, and apparently the only people who have seen it are Ham and his cronies, and Beemer, Ham’s pal who wrote it, and they aren’t letting anyone else review it.

The state of Kentucky is buying a pig in a poke.

The deal was rotten from the very beginning, with the state handing out money to a religious organization that would use it to miseducate children, but it’s really beginning to stink now. Maybe Kentuckians won’t rise up to oppose Christian inanity, but let’s hope they’ll cast a skeptical, even a conservative eye, on a deal that reeks of corruption and cronyism.

(via Barefoot and Progressive)

There is some faint concern from the Kentucky governor that the Ark theme park will discriminate in hiring — I doubt that it will become a major sticking point. But still, it’s true, they will be selective in their hiring based on religious belief. They say that isn’t true, but one thing we know about creationists is that they lie.

“There will be positions that will require Bible knowledge because…we have certain things in there that are requiring biblical knowledge,” he explains. “That doesn’t mean, though, if you don’t have that you can’t work over in the restaurant or some other part of the facility.”

Oh. Since atheists tend to know more about religion and the Bible than Christians, can we expect a larger proportion of them to show up in those jobs requiring biblical knowledge? No. Because they have a requirement that people sign a testimonial of their faith, which means they’re actually going to discriminate on the basis of whether you agree with them or not.

Liars. Like I said.

There’s also an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (something intelligent on the WSJ opinion page? Amazing in itself) that waffles unfortunately over the conflict with the principle of separation of church and state that giving privileges to the Hamites brings about — there really is a problem here, it’s just that the professional liars of creationism have gotten very good about making excuses for themselves. But what I agree with is the recognition that modern creationists are a bit cleverer and better at exploiting the modern world than many give them credit for.

What is more interesting about Ark Encounter is what it tells us about the paradoxes of American evangelicalism, a non-worldly belief system with a restlessly entrepreneurial and commercial spirit. The term “fundamentalism” generally denotes a comprehensively anti-modern movement. But this is only partly true. Far from being a counter to modernity, American fundamentalism often embraces it with far greater enthusiasm and finesse than its mainline competition.

Look at the effectiveness with which conservative evangelicalism has made use of television, radio and the Internet. Or consider the eagerness of “creationism” to claim the mantle of science, which is quite a different matter from rejecting modernity altogether. In commercial enterprises like the Christian music industry, or Ark Encounter, the packaging of products is the same as it is in the most successful secular businesses; only the content is different. Evangelicals assume that all such modern techniques can be redeemed through certain proper uses. The medium, in this view, is not the message.

That’s the striking thing about the Creation “Museum”: it is not a reverent place. It does not exhibit any of the serious religious solemnity of the so-called sacred: it is a place dedicated to making money, and to aping the trappings (but not the substance!) of modern science. It’s as if a church opened a gift shop, and the shop was so successful that it grew and grew, and people stopped coming for the church and instead came for the sales, and eventually the church part was quietly demolished and nobody noticed.

When you go through it, too, the way it slickly copies the façade of a real museum — a rather cheesy and commercialized children’s museum — is weird and disturbing. They will put on a display of some detail of the construction of the ark, for instance, and present it as a real museum would a collection of ancient tools, but it’s all fake, completely made up, a model of an imaginary effort. As the op-ed states, this is a capitalist enterprise that has fully embraced modern packaging and marketing.

I suggest a compromise. If the state wants to recognize the Ark Encounter as a commercial effort to bring money into the state, fine; but then Answers in Genesis should be stripped of its tax exempt status and recognized as a beard for a profit-making enterprise. Alternatively, if they get to keep their status as a church-like entity, yank any attempt by the state to prop up their shell game with government support.

And anyone ought to recognize their phony legal games as a sham. They’ve set up multiple entities, some that are claiming religious status, others that are the admitted for-profit commercial arm, but all of them are funneling money in to support the promotion of a religion.