It’s Paul Nelson Day, the yearly event in which we make ludicrous pseudo-scientific claims and promise to back them up tomorrow, as celebrated last year.

Nelson, some of you may recall, is a creationist who made up this wacky claim of “Ontogenetic Depth”, saying he had a way of objectively measuring the complexity of the developmental process in organisms with a number that described the distance from egg to adult. Unfortunately, he forgot to tell us how one calculated this number, or how it actually accounted for the complexity of a network, or even how we’d get a number that was different for a sponge and a cat. But he did say he’d get back to us with the details tomorrow…six years ago.

We’ll keep waiting. We’ll also keep making accurate predictions. Last year I predicted that we’d still be waiting in 2010, and look! We are!

I’ve put on a turban, closed my eyes, and am waving my hands over a crystal ball, and predict…we’ll still be waiting in 2011. Check back next year and let’s see if I’m right!

I hope I didn’t catch something in the Antipodes. There seems to be something awful going around down there: Ken Ham, Ray Comfort, and now…Gary Ablett, Sr. He’s an Australian rules footballer with a few seedy drug-related incidents in his past — he’s also a world-class moron. He’s just written a long and mostly incoherent complaint about atheists for the Herald Sun, a cheesy tabloid in Australia.

Maybe it’s the football — they play without the heavy armor American footballers wear, so maybe he’s got brain damage. After all, Jason Ball wrote a nice rebuttal, and he’s Australian, too, so it’s obviously not a Southern Hemisphere epidemic.

Given that Jason has addressed most of the silly claims of this poor pious twit, I’ll just mention one thing that caught my eye: the recycled fatuity so common to creationists. Ablett makes an old argument against evolution.

Let’s take another example. Evolution teaches that matter plus energy (light or heat) plus time equals biogenesis, the cause of new life.

Yet our entire food industry relies on the fact that the evolutionary formula doesn’t work. For example, if you take a jar of peanut butter (matter), expose it to light and heat (energy) and add time you will never get new life (biogenesis) in that jar. And are we grateful about that! Why is new life impossible in a sealed jar? Because we are missing the most important aspect: information.

The very reason food is sealed is to keep information out, it’s only if and when the seal is broken that a contamination can occur because information has got inside the jar! We need to take this fact very seriously because in the food industry this experiment is conducted over a billion times a year collectively, and has been doing so for more than a hundred years, which proves that the absence of information renders life impossible.

Does that sound familiar? It should. It’s practically verbatim from this quaint exhibition of stupidity by Chuck Missler (also, not from Australia or New Zealand — he’s an Idahoan).

No scientist gives much credibility to the ancient Peanut Butter Earth hypothesis. We suspect that life arose in a chemically active watery environment, not a big brown glop of concentrated fats and proteins in a jar in the Archaean. We’re also not surprised that life doesn’t spontaneously arise everywhere anymore: conditions on Earth are very different from those in the abiotic/early biotic period, and what’s more, any new life that arose now, improbable as that is, would face a world populated by bacteria with 4 billion years of evolutionary refinement behind them. So it’s a very, very stupid argument.

The rest of Ablett’s arguments are just as inane, and are similarly ripped off almost literally from common creationist canards. There’s nothing original and nothing intelligent anywhere in it — it’s just sad how feeble these guys are getting.

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Interestingly and entirely unsurprisingly, big chunks of Ablett’s article were plagiarized. It seems like most of their stuff can be traced back to a small population of ur-creationists in the 1960s, and there brains have been locked up solid ever since.

Man, I must have smacked Michael Ruse really hard. Over and over, he repeats one simple, common phrase that I applied to him — it must have been painfully memorable.

I have been called many things in my time, but I truly believe that “clueless gobshite” is a first. In a way, I am almost proud of this. After all, if you are in your seventieth year and someone feels so strongly about your ideas that they refer to you in this way, then you must be doing something right. Or if not exactly right, you must have ideas that others want to challenge so strongly that they pull out this kind of language.

It’s a very peculiar phenomenon. Here is the post in which I casually referred to Ruse as a “clueless gobshite”; I criticized him and Andrew Brown much more strongly than that one remark would imply, yet it is all that stuck in his head. He repeatedly agonizes over the cruelty of my remark, and acts as if all I had to say about him was one vicious, cutting cliche, and he encapsulates every criticism in that one insult. Further, he hangs himself on a cross and tries to claim he didn’t deserve even that, that his crime was of being too reasonable, of being generous and charitable.

And yet, I am excoriated at every turn. Why? Simply, because I am an “Accommodationist.” I think that some kind of intellectual meeting is possible with religious believers, including Christian religious believers.

Oh, poor Michael Ruse, that gentle-souled and open-minded fellow who merely wants to reach out to his fellow human beings with sympathy—how could he deserve such unkind criticism? I clutch my pearls with one hand, place the other on my brow, and gaze skyward with eyes welling tearfully, and then swoon upon the fainting couch installed handily near my desk. Michael, Michael, Michael…how could we abuse you so?

Actually, with good reason, and my attacks on his flawed character have been even stronger than you’d guess from his limited quoting. What prompted my rudeness wasn’t his pious apologetics for the common man, but that Ruse visited the Creation “Museum”, ignored the lunacy on display (except to express his sympathy with it), and went on to identify the real culprit in this anti-intellectual abomination.

Michael Ruse went to Ken Ham’s house, twirled about among the exhibits showing dinosaurs with saddles, Noah’s ark being built to carry off members of every species on earth, exhortations to accept Biblical literalism, and accusations of malice and dishonesty against every sensible biologists, and what do he and Andrew Brown do? Why, blame the atheists, of course.

That is insane.

What the hell is wrong with Ruse? How can he stand among the lies, with little children being told abominable fabrications, and think then that the pressing problem is people who demand evidence for their beliefs? I was unimpressed with his momentary show of self-serving “open-mindedness”; but I was disgusted with his completely inappropriate neglect of a genuine problem to fling blame at the people who have consistently opposed every facet of that monument to ignorance.

Michael Ruse really needs to carefully read my original complaint, because I’m not giving him a rhetorical slap because he’s too open-minded. I’m kicking him to the curb because ideas matter (something I would think a philosopher would care about), and he espouses a kind of waffling relativism that acts as if young earth creationism and science are equivalently deserving of respect, and that if atheists would just shut up we’d all be living in a happy, loving relationship with Ken Ham.

He’s not just a clueless gobshite. He’s a traitor to reason.

Kent Hovind’s infamous alma mater has put together a collection of responses because they are “under attack!” Only they aren’t—they’re being laughed at. And whoa, these pages are even more hilarious. (Warning: all of the links below go to pages that fire up some tedious piano music on autoplay…that you can’t turn off.)

The first one is offended at the falsehoods their critics promulgate. For instance, people have passed around this photo, claiming it is a picture of the Patriot University facilities:

It is a filthy lie! That is the minister’s house. To show how wrong this portrayal is, the staff at Patriot Bible University have released an official photograph of the wonderfully elegant, high-tech but traditional campus:

Well. I guess we can’t make fun of that anymore.

The second page can be summarized as “Don’t trust the internet, trust us!” They explain what is wrong with the internet:

Should you trust someone’s ‘factual’ information about morals when they post pornography, promote homosexuality, post curse words, and claim evolution as fact?

Whoa, somebody pass that along to the Intersection! I’m sure it will fit with their sentiment perfectly. Patriot University also has a simple test for evaluating the worth of a web page.

Would Jesus agree with the values and the message of the source of advice?

For some reason, this instantly stirred up an image of introducing Jesus to Dan Savage. My vision of Jesus is of an unkempt Jewish zealot with a madman’s fire in his eye and a dedication to those old testament laws, and no, I don’t think he’d get along with Dan at all — there’d probably be an impromptu stoning on the spot. But Christians always tell me that their version of Jesus is gentle, loving, understanding, and thoughtful — that Jesus would probably give Dan a big hug and thank him for his work. Which Jesus are we supposed to use in this exercise from PU? And isn’t this an admission that you’re just supposed to go along with stuff you like, assisted by the crutch of an imaginary cheerleader?

They also list the virtues of PU.

I. Patriot bases all teachings on the Bible and God’s absolute truth.
II. Patriot has been teaching God’s absolute truth for nearly 30 years.
III. Jesus said “He is the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6). Patriot believes this and follows Jesus, only.

Oh, yeah. I’m reassured.

Finally, they get around to discussing Kent Hovind.

Patriot does not retain ownership to student thesis’ or dissertations, as is commonly practiced by many schools. Instead, Patriot grants each student full control over the circulation of his/her work. Therefore, Patriot cannot release student work to the public. Patriot issues Bible degrees for the purpose of equipping students for ministry; Patriot is not a research institution.

Hovind’s dissertation was part of a graduate “project”. Thus, the paper being posted online was only a portion of Hovind’s initial research notes for his dissertation requirements. It is obviously not a finished product.

Hovind has been a prolific publisher of videos and books on topics involving Biblical Creation. He has participated in numerous video-taped debates. His work since 1991 has been widely distributed and stands on it’s own and supercedes an earlier written dissertation. There is no need to attack it and ignore what he has produced since then.

So that thesis that was posted on Wikileaks wasn’t actually Kent Hovind’s thesis. PU does not keep copies of theses, they are not submitted to any official archive, so basically, it doesn’t exist. Huh. Well, that certainly sounds professional.

That ragbag collection of noise that begins, “Hi, my name is Kent Hovind” was part of a “project”. What project could benefit from such haphazard trash, I don’t know. It clearly wasn’t a finished product. Where is the finished product? Don’t ask the degree-granting institution!

Yeah, Kent Hovind’s work since 1991 does stand on its own as rank raving idiocy. We laugh at that, too.

Strangely, this defense of Kent Hovind doesn’t mention his current residency in a penitentiary, convicted of tax evasion.