If you’ve ever been curious about the intelligent design of language, here’s a new one for you: Edenics.
Here you will discover that ALL human words contain forms of the Edenic roots within them. These proto-Semitic or early Biblical Hebrew words were programmed into our common ancestors, Adam and Eve, before the language dispersion, or babble at the Tower of Babel — which kickstarted multi-national human history.
Oh, joy. They’re after all of our sciences.
A weird anti-evolution crank seems to be ramping up his efforts around the blogosphere recently: C. David Parsons has been leaving comments at Florida Citizens for Science, and Wesley Elsberry directly addresses his “conflict driven” views. Parsons has apparently been trying to raise his profile because he has a new book out, and he wants creationists to buy it.
It’s being put out by Tate Publishing, which seems to be a vanity press dedicated specifically to bilking Christian authors. If you have $40 and a complete lack of sense, you too can be the proud owner of The Quest for Right: The Adventure of a Lifetime, although I think you can tell from the title that it’s not going to be well-written. If you need a further clue, the author lists his qualifications on the cover: “Biblical Scholar and Scientist Extraordinaire.” I wonder if that’s anything like a super-scientist?
Anyway, you can browse through the table of contents and a sample excerpt. It’s bizarre. C. David Parsons is a young-earth creationist and biblical literalist; he doesn’t like those Christians who try to shoe-horn dinosaurs into the bible. I suspect he’s alienated a lot of his potential audience right there. He also has some peculiar notions about the origins of the earth.
Unveils the fundamental truth, based on the scientific record of creation, that the earth accreted from a watery nebula; the great surging mass of water and chemicals had no particular shape and covered thousands of square miles of interstellar space.
The “watery nebula” is probably an invention to rationalize the flood myth, but I’m afraid I don’t have any of the details. I also suspect some profound innumeracy: shouldn’t we be concerned about cubic miles in a volume of space, and “thousands of square miles” doesn’t sound like much—the earth formed out of a sheet of water a hundred miles on a side?
The book looks to be full of ranting against a conspiracy out to bury the truth, variously called a “scientific council” and the “league of scientists”. I wish. Wouldn’t it be cool to be a Super-Scientist in the League of Scientists?
I’m afraid, though, that most of his book isn’t for me. He doesn’t seem to say much about biology or evolution, but instead focuses the bulk of his complaints on — and this will thrill some of the readers here — physics. He doesn’t like quantum mechanics. He dedicates a whole chapter to debunking the photoelectric effect — photons aren’t real. Heck, this guy is going right down to the basics: he rejects Rutherford and Bohr, wants nothing to do with electrons, and wants us to know that God is doing it all.
The backbone of obstructionism is electronic interpretation, the tenet that all physical, chemical, and biological processes result from a change in the electronic structure of the atom which, in turn, can be deciphered through the orderly application of mathematics as outlined in quantum mechanics. The philosophy rejects any divine intervention. Scientific obstructionism is judged on these specifics: electronic interpretation and quantum mechanics. Conversely, the view of separatists that God is both responsible for and rules all the phenomena of the universe will stand or fall when the facts are applied. The view, however, is not tested by the definition of science, as determined by the court, but by the weightier principle of verifiable truths.
You’ve got to appreciate an honest kook. He knows that, in order to support biblical creationism, it’s not enough to critique biology — you’ve got to get right down to the roots and revise all of physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy to take down the perfidious lies of the League of Scientists.
Yikes. More Florida school boards — in St Lucie, Palm Beach, and Martin counties — are infested with creationists. Florida Citizens for Science is maintaining a watch list.
So…have you checked your local school board? Do you have creationists biding their time, waiting to corrupt your schools?
It’s those poor creation scientists.
That friend to the Discovery Institute and creationist advisor to the Vatican, Cardinal Schönborn, has a new book out, titled Chance or Purpose?. I haven’t read it, but Michael Behe has, and Zeno finds a particularly delicious Behe blurb:
Science cannot speak of ultimate purpose, and scientists who do so are outside of their authority. In Chance or Purpose? Cardinal Schöborn shows that the data of biology, when properly examined by reason and philosophy, strongly point to a purposeful world.
Why should science be incapable of addressing the questions of an ultimate purpose? I hear this all the time: science can’t give us meaning, science can’t explain love, science can’t do this or that. It’s usually said by some clueless git who has his own ideological axe to grind, and wants everyone to line up in support of his or her own dictated decrees about the truth, which are usually obtained by revelation (i.e., whim) or dogma, and which are challenged by a process that actually tries to examine reality in search of a truth. And those ideologies, such as Catholicism, have no legitimate claim for better understanding than any other traditional nonsense.
I say otherwise. We have no other, better tool. If we’re going to discover an ultimate purpose, it will be through the process of studying our universe — through science. The only thing these putative other ways of knowing affect our reach is by impeding us.
As Zeno notes, Behe’s quote is beautifully self-contradicting. He starts by declaring that science can’t tell us anything about our purpose, and then he goes on to immediately declare that the data of biology lead to an understanding of purpose. Behe is an incredibly muddled thinker — he’s got the background that values science, but at the same time he’s bogged down in these peculiar presuppositions that make a mess of his brain.
The data of biology do not point to purpose, but to a history of accidents shaped by short-term utility to replicators. Schönborn is unqualified to assess it — he’s a blithering theologian — and both Schönborn and Behe are blinded to the overwhelming dominance of chance in our biology by their ideological predispositions.
From Cectic:
Quote of the week: “Either the theory is wrong, or I’m just incredibly stupid.” -Todd Friel on Evolution, from The Way of the Master Radio for 24 Dec. The first true utterance I’ve heard on that show since I started listening to the podcast.
Denyse O’Leary is a very silly person, but you all knew that. One of her latest entries on her silly Design of Life blog, which purports to be promoting Dembski’s silly book of the same name, is treading old ground. She’s claiming that convergence is common, and that marsupial lions and wolves and squirrels are evidence of some kind of natural destiny. She’s getting all of this from Michael Denton, but the similarities are in ecological niches (sometimes, not even that) and in the names, and contrary to Denton, the similarities are only superficial.
Laelaps has the details on those convergent marsupials. The differences are very easy to spot, especially when you’ve got an expert guide with a battery of photos.
Scarcely do I mention Ann Coulter and my challenge to her fans, than one such fan shows up in the comments. You will not be surprised that this person didn’t even try to meet the challenge, which is to cite some specific paragraph in Coulter’s drecky book, Godless, that they considered to be making a solid scientific point. Here’s all he could cough up.
For all of you that buy into the evolution answer for where we come from, I have the following question; How is it that science cannot demonstrate or replicate species change yet we have so many species. Please dont mention finches either. Inspite of all the documented changes, every one of them is still a bird. Chromosomes are still the same number. Although a dog could possibly mate with a cat, science knows that it is not possible for conception to occur. So I am at a loss as to how we have so many different species.
So much of the evolution evidence has been proven to be a fraud. Admittedly, some of it is not….but one can hardly adopt evolution as fact on evidence that is merely suggestive.
All documented cases that I am privvy to fail to even demonstrate how an observed change in a species appearance was an improvement on its previous form. Based on that, I feel that mutations are freak events that always produce an inferior model. Mutation don’t ever produce a new species.
I am not ready to embrace evolution as science. If you do accept it as fact, then you do so on faith. Its safe to say that your religeon is evolution.
An unwillingness to even consider intelligent design is not sufficient reason to promote a theory to the level of factual science.
He’s almost as ignorant as Ann Coulter.
Let’s take it apart piece by piece, shall we?
Peter Irons has again been having way too much fun with creationist shenanigans. Irons, you may recall, is a hot shot west coast lawyer who had a grand time with the Pivar situation, and has lately been nudging Dembski on the case of his misuse of the Harvard/XVIVO animation. Would you believe that Bill Dembski went crying to his lawyer because Irons was making him miserable?
The email exchange is below the fold. John Gilmore is the St Paul lawyer who defended Dembski in the recent Baylor flap, and he does seem to have rather more sense than his client.
I gave a Nelson laugh to England a while back, for the creationist theme park that was going to be built there. I may have to take it back. It looks like the backers are a gang of confused prevaricators with no concrete plans, just a lot of wishful thinking on their part.
I propose that they crawl into their churches and pray real hard. That’s probably as viable a business plan as what they’ve got right now.
