The Brunswick school district in North Carolina was hurtling towards a lot of pain…and it’s all thanks to the intransigent arrogance of the ignorant. There are some signs that they’re going to see the light of reason, but there are holdouts, and as is usual in these cases, it’s a few uninformed individuals possessing only a furious conviction and the certitude of religion who are causing the problems. Joel Fanti seems to be one of the instigators of this stupidity, and he’s surprised that so many have been opposing him.

“It just amazes me some of those responses, how venomous they have been,” said Fanti, who sparked the debate by proposing at the board’s Sept. 16 meeting that the teaching of creationism share classroom time with evolution. “I don’t even know what their definition of religion is. I can argue their views on evolution are a religion, too, because it can’t be proven.”

The Rev. Brad Ferguson, Fanti’s pastor at New Beginnings Community Church in Shallotte, said he supports Fanti’s views.

“There is some scientific evidence supporting creationism,” the Southern Baptist minister said. “Kids should be presented both sides. … You can’t isolate disciplines. Science and faith – they go together.”

Fanti is clueless. Then everything is a religion: I can’t prove right this instant that my cats are at my house, but because I saw them there this morning and closed the door so they can’t get out, they almost certainly are…and if I saw one prowling around outside my office window, I’d quickly revise my opinion. But to Fanti’s mind, my expert, empirical, well-supported ideas about my cats ought to be considered a religion, obviously. Similarly, I’ve got some expert, empirical, well-supported ideas about evolution that I can back up with evidence — it is not a view held in the same way as a religion.

Ferguson is equally inane. There is no scientific evidence for creationism — go ahead, show me some. If he really believed that kids should see “both” sides of an issue, no matter how weak or fringy or patently absurd they are, then I hope his Baptist church sunday school is being taught by a cadre of Muslims, Scientologists, and Wiccans.

Science and faith are in opposition. Somehow, his faith is supporting the idea that the earth is 6000 years old, against all the scientific evidence that it is 4.5 billion years old — I think that renders his claim inoperative.

But here’s the good news. These two nitwits seem to be losing, and the school board is backing down, despite the sympathies of a few. And of course, the new strategem is to throw around the Discovery Institute’s favorite empty slogan, “strengths and weaknesses”. What weaknesses? Let’s hear specifics. If they’re willing to teach the strengths, how come they don’t seem to understand them?

After reading e-mails by people disgruntled about the idea of teaching creationism, hearing about the state’s point of view and consulting with attorney Kathleen Tanner, Babson said she thinks the board will not try to go against the law to teach creationism, although she would like to see it in the classroom one day.

Fanti said he learned about the court cases after addressing the board and now thinks the idea of teaching creationism as part of the curriculum will be crushed. But he plans to ask the school board to encourage “evolutionists” in the schools to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of their theory.

“Instead of making it a religious issue, let’s make it a scientific issue,” said Fanti, who identifies himself as a chemical engineer.

A religious engineer…somehow, I am not surprised at all.

No, that’s not right. It would be selfish for us as individuals to take advantage of this incredible windfall.

A controversial creationist who successfully campaigned for Richard Dawkins’ official website to be banned in Turkey has offered a multitrillion- pound challenge to scientists.

Adnan Oktar said that he has “issued a call to all evolutionists” that he will give “10 trillion Turkish lira to anyone who produces a single intermediate-form fossil demonstrating evolution” – a sum roughly equal to £4.4trn.

I had to look up the exchange rate. That’s $8,010,890,000,000. Eight trillion, ten billion, eight hundred and ninety million dollars. I could live reasonably comfortably on that.

Instead, though, I’m going to suggest something that will help out the entire country. The US government should immediately send a plane to pick up Mr Oktar, bring him to our country, and take him on a guided tour of the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History, accompanied by Niles Eldredge, Kevin Padian, Jerry Coyne, Sean Carroll, and the entire scientific staff of those museums. Afterwards, they can accept the check from Mr Oktar, run down to the local bank and cash it, and use one trillion dollars to resolve the current financial crisis, seven trillion can be sunk immediately into the American educational system, and they can send the change left over to me as a reward for coming up with this brilliant plan.

Unless…

You don’t think…

Adnan Oktar couldn’t possibly be lying about how much money he has, could he? And he couldn’t possibly by planning to weasel out of accepting any honest evidence, could he?

A reader just informed me that he saw that the Institute for Creation Research is advertising on Fox News. This is not at all surprising — all it takes is money, and these groups are always buying up ad space anywhere they can get it. There is some amusement in the ad, though: I didn’t realize that you could subscribe to ICR’s quarterly Acts & Facts magazine for free; I’m tempted, because it is always a source for hilarity. They also have a distance learning program in which you can get an Official Creationist Worldview Professional Certificate. I would love to have one of those certificates to hang on my wall, but it looks like that costs money…and I don’t care how little it is, it’s too much.

The Discovery Institute has been gearing up to pollute classrooms across the country with a new ‘textbook’ called Explore Evolution, which is to replace their old propaganda of choice, Of Pandas and People (which had its sorry creationist origins exposed in a little trial in Dover, Pennsylvania). John Timmer of Ars Technica has now reviewed the DI’s masterwork and…well, I hate to give the ending away, but he didn’t like it.

But the book doesn’t only promote stupidity, it demands it. In every way except its use of the actual term, this is a creationist book, but its authors are expecting that legislators and the courts will be too stupid to notice that, or to remember that the Supreme Court has declared teaching creationism an unconstitutional imposition of religion. As laws similar to Louisiana’s resurface in other states next year, we can only hope that legislators choose not to live down to the low expectations of EE’s authors.

I’ve read it, too, and it is as awful as Timmer says. Don’t buy this book. Watch your local school board, and make sure they don’t buy it either. Some will be trying to do so.

I linked to that interview with Adnan Oktar in Spiegel Online the other day, but I linked to the original German text — I should have known that Spiegel has its own English edition with a complete translation.

Roger Ebert has revealed the purpose behind the peculiar creationist Q&A he posted the other day. I had suggested it was either poorly done satire or his site had been hacked. Ebert has now confessed that it was poorly done satire.

He didn’t say it was poorly done, of course. He says he was trying to show that people have lost their ability to detect satire, that we’re unable to sense the ‘invisible quotation marks’ that surround such exercises, in the absence of overt declarations that it is satirical.

To sense the irony, you have to sense the invisible quotation marks. I suspect quotation marks may be growing imperceptible to us. We may be leaving an age of irony and entering an age of credulity. In a time of shortened attention spans and instant gratification, trained by web surfing and movies with an average shot length of seconds, we absorb rather than contemplate. We want to gobble all the food on the plate, instead of considering each bite. We accept rather than select.

There is a little truth to that — one of the things I really deplore about internet communications, for instance, is the use of those ghastly little smilies. It’s an admission of an inability to communicate — the words are insufficient, so crude labels are required. It’s a symptom of a lack of trust in the readers perceptivity.

But I also think Ebert is fundamentally wrong. He’s trying to place the fault on the reader, and I think there’s a serious flaw in his thinking there. One indicator of his error is that he compares what he had done to Swift’s A Modest Proposal.

Were there invisible quotation marks about my Creationism article? Of course there were. How could you be expected to see them? In a sense, I didn’t want you to. I wrote it straight. The quotation marks would have been supplied by the instincts of the ironic reader. The classic model is Jonathan Swift’s famous essay, “A Modest Proposal.” I remember Miss Seward at Urbana High School, telling us to read it in class and note the exact word at which Swift’s actual purpose became clear. None of us had ever heard of it, and she didn’t use a giveaway word like “satire.” Yet not a single person in the class concluded that Swift was seriously proposing that the starving Irish eat their babies. We all got it.

Correct. We got it, because no one anywhere else was seriously proposing cannibalism. It was shocking, unbelievable, and there were plenty of clues, as Ebert explains, that the proponent of such an odious plan could not be serious.

But Ebert is no Jonathan Swift. Imagine if, in 1729, there had been a number of letters to the editor by various authors proposing that Irish children be exterminated and eaten. Imagine that laws of that nature were being seriously debated in Parliament, and that one of the parties had made it a part of their platform. While the laws were being regularly defeated, opponents still had to stand up and seriously debate why it was unethical to eat babies. Imagine that a candidate for prime minister actually solemnly suggested that we ought to at least consider the merits of eating Irish children.

In that context, Swift’s essay would have fallen flat as a cowflop dropped from the Tower of London. His efforts to use straight-faced absurdity and hyperbole and satire to expose the lesser injustices of the time would not have succeeded at all. The invisible quotation marks would be undetectable, because there would have been a substantial background of equivalent proposals given in absolute seriousness.

That’s Ebert’s mistake. He presented a plain statement of creationist beliefs with satirical intent, but that intent cannot possibly be seen in a world where millions say exactly the same things with sincerity. Does Ken Ham have invisible quotation marks around the AiG Statement of Faith? No. Was the Wedge Document an amusing practical joke by the Discovery Institute? No. Is Sarah Palin pulling the entire nation’s leg when she attends her speaking-in-tongues, young-earth-creationist, End-Times-worshipping church? I wish.

Irony is dying, but it’s not because evolutionists have lost their ability to sense it, or have become too shallow and unwilling to think deeply. It’s because we’re dealing every day with other people who proffer ‘modest proposals’ that are ludicrous and absurd and unbelievable, yet people do believe in them. I knew enough about Roger Ebert to trust that he hadn’t written it in seriousness, but I’m afraid it was still poorly done. He seems not to have noticed that there are elements of the culture at large that have surpassed the obvious inanity of his essay, and that tossing out one more modest proposal among a multitude would have nothing to make it stand out as illustrative and noticeable.

Ebert is clearly smart enough to understand the correct scientific idea of evolution. His exercise, though, reveals that he’s really out of touch on the nature of creationist belief — he seems to think it is sufficient to state it to see the fallacies, without recognizing that creationists say these same things every day, and accept them as a matter of fact. He tries to credit creationists with being more canny than evolutionists, when they simply could not see anything exceptional about Ebert’s statements at all.

Maybe we need to rename Poe’s Law to Ebert’s Fallacy.

There’s goofy stuff coming out of the lunatics following Ian Paisley—the chair of the Education Committee is a creationist, apparently, that wacky party is trying to get creationism taught in the schools, claiming “it can stand scientific scrutiny”, and what’s this about trying to label the Giant’s Causeway with a creationist explanation? The Pagan Prattle has the links. This is not a good path for Northern Ireland to be taking.

Adnan Oktar/Harun Yahya has been interviewed in Spiegel Online (that’s in German; you might want to read this short paraphrase in English). He says a number of, umm, interesting things.

• He dislikes Intelligent Design intensely, and sees it as a dishonest form of creationism.

• The Islamic terrorists aren’t actually Muslim—they are all foreign-educated Darwinist atheists. That includes Osama bin Laden.

• In the 2009 Darwin year, he plans to celebrate the collapse of Darwinism. I don’t think so.

• He claims that he can finance sending out free copies of the Atlas of Creation because he doesn’t accept royalties, so the publisher profits heavily. Uh, wait — how does the publisher profit off books that are given away?

As is commonly discovered, arch-creationists are very wacky people.

I mentioned before that Richard Dawkins’ site was banned in Turkey, by the legal actions of Harun Yahya/Adnan Oktar, the Muslim creationist. Now you can learn a little more: a spokesperson for Turkish creationism called up the editors of the New Humanist to explain their side of the story. As you might guess, they aren’t very convincing — it boils down to the fact that they were offended by the mean things said about professional con man, liar, and religious kook Adnan Oktar, so they had to shut down access to the site.

And then they have the gall to sweetly ask the New Humanist if they’d like to come to Istanbul and interview Oktar. They want the rich nectar of publicity, but only if it favors their agenda, of course.

So the New Humanist has a poll: Should we bother talking to creationists? They only offer two choices, though: “Yes – debate is good” and “No – we should just ignore them”. I don’t care for either alternative.

How about “Yes – we should slam them down hard at every opportunity, but not on their ground and not with any unwarranted deference to their bogus beliefs”?