Is this for real?

It probably is: it has just the right amount of ingrown festering obsessiveness. We’ve all heard of old earth creationism (creationists who agree the Earth is billions of years old, and make arguments about the “days” of the bible representing long ages) and young earth creationism (the bible is strictly and literally true, and the earth is only 6000 years old and was created in precisely 6 24-hour days). Here’s a new one called Biblical Reality:

This "Old Earth" brand of creationism puts forth the view that combines a seven 24-hr day week of original creation (Exodus 20:11), with a separate “six 12-hr days of revelation” given to Moses (Genesis 1:2 – 2:3). The pseudo discrepancy between the “sixth day” in Genesis chapter one and in chapter two is explained as chapter two being the beginning of modern mankind (Adam & Eve), and chapter one as being an earlier species of prehistoric mankind in an earlier restoration period, more than 60 million years ago.

Got that? There are two creation accounts in the bible, so he’s going to reconcile them by saying there were two literal creation events, each about a week long, separated by a 60 million year gap. So it’s a kind of hybrid YEC/OEC contrivance.

I don’t think we should worry about it too much. It probably has a following of one.

Let’s give a little creationist a thrill

Here, everyone, go have fun with this brand new creationist blog that has a grand total of one post so far … but that post is ripe with hilarious promise. This one is an atheist science denialist (someone was wondering if there were any atheist ID proponents a while back, so here’s one). He’s got the air of an affronted conspiracy theorist — scientists are all shallow-minded Darwinists — and he also dislikes the taint of religion behind all the arguments of the Intelligent Design creationists.

Nobody is going to like him. Boo hoo.

Now why would someone who doesn’t believe in god(s) like the idea of ID? He’s got a different kind of evidence.

I’m talking about the evidence for extraterrestrial design in our planet. Like the pyramids, Stonehenge, Nazca lines. We have been visited, and designed by aliens. Of course people like Myers suppress this evidence in favor of their own puny experiments in order to get funding for their “research” that never finds anything new…other than evidence against evolution, which they conceal very quickly.

Bwahahahahaha! He’s a Dänikenite! This could be fun.

Not D. James Kennedy again …

Lots of people have been sending me email to let me know that Coral Ridge Ministry is airing a program linking Darwin to Hitler. In case you missed it, this show, Darwin’s Deadly Legacy, was first aired last year, and I reviewed it then, Wilkins eviscerated its premises, and even the Anti-Defamation League got in the act. It’s a horrible piece of dishonest dreck, and now I guess it’s going to be a yearly television event, like a demented evil version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

This has me thinking — the Christianists will re-air their lies and stinking garbage over and over again, but have you ever noticed that the great science programs, the ones that inspired many of us, seem to be allowed one appearance and then … nevermore. Why doesn’t PBS have a yearly rebroadcast of, say, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos or Jacob Bronowski’s Ascent of Man? Those were great programs; I’ve seen bits and pieces of both now and then, and I think they’ve also aged reasonably well.

But no, we can find that droning mackerel’s lies for Jesus on a regular basis, but the beautiful and honest science shows get to rot in storage somewhere, with occasional fragmentary bits appearing on youtube.

Don’t miss Hector Avalos’ contribution to the debate on the relative morality of atheists and Christians!

I think I know what’s going to be featured in Expelled

I’ve been trying to recollect what horrible thing I said in that interview with that film crew … what juicy, ghastly, evil comment I might have made that will be plucked out and impaled on a stick and waved to the audience to inflame them. It’s a waste of time, of course — I tend to be far too mellow in person, despite occasional brief declamations that religion is crap, and they’re going to have to strain a bit to find anything sufficiently inciteful.

And then I remembered — the interviewer was mildly obsessed with one thing that he brought up several times. It was a quote from this interview, otherwise most memorable for the way that kook John A. Davison turned the comment thread into a maelstrom of inanity.

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Another year, another collection of dreck from AiG

Last year, Answers in Genesis ran an essay contest for young creationists — the prize was a $50,000 scholarship to Liberty University (second prize must have been a $100,000 scholarship). Well, they ran it again this year, and the ‘winners’ have been announced, and a sorry lot of recitations of bogus creationist talking points they are. Evolution turns people into immoral killers! Darwinism leads people to abortion and Hitler! Cells are full of little machines created by Jesus! It’s really sad to see young people led down the path of stupidity like that.

If you really must read them, you can … but Zeno has read and summarized them so you don’t have to. Maybe I should read them more myself — since a new semester is beginning next week, they’d recalibrate my brain to have lower expectations, and all of my freshmen students will be brilliant, literate geniuses by comparison.

Nah, I don’t have to. They already are, and I know it.

I’m gonna be a ☆ MOVIE STAR ☆

Last April, I received this nice letter from Mark Mathis.

Hello Mr. Myers,

My name is Mark Mathis. I am a Producer for Rampant Films. We are
currently in production of the documentary film, “Crossroads: The
Intersection of Science and Religion.”

At your convenience I would like to discuss our project with you and to see
if we might be able to schedule an interview with you for the film. The
interview would take no more than 90 minutes total, including set up and
break down of our equipment.

We are interested in asking you a number of questions about the
disconnect/controversy that exists in America between Evolution,
Creationism and the Intelligent Design movement.

Please let me know what time would be convenient for me to reach you at your
office. Also, could you please let me know if you charge a fee for
interviews and if so, what that fee would be for 90 minutes of your time.

I look forward to speaking with you soon.

Sincerely,

Mark Mathis
Rampant Films
4414 Woodman Ave. #203
Sherman Oaks, CA 91423
www.rampantfilms.com

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You have got to be kidding me

Come February, we are going to be privileged to see a brand new movie that stars Ben Stein and portrays Intelligent Design creationism as the cool rebel oppressed by the stodgy old Darwinist bullies. Did you know that “scientists are not allowed to even think thoughts that involve an intelligent creator”? I didn’t either. I think a lot of scientists have thought about it and noticed that there is no evidence for such a hypothesis, and have therefore rejected it.

This movie fits with the intelligent design strategy of declaring itself the victim of an unfair exclusion (which isn’t true, of course: they haven’t ponied up the science that would legitimize them), but interestingly, its central theme seems to be that Big Science has excluded god from the classroom and the lab … it’s a raw demand for a violation of the separation of church and state and for the inclusion of superstitious dogma in science. That’s very convenient. It’ll make it easier to use the courts to keep their religious propaganda out of the classroom.

Oh, and putting Ben Stein in short pants and playing “Bad to the Bone” does not make him a rebel. He’s a Republican apologist, and he’s not “cool” at all.

Greetings, fellow Slime-Snake-Monkey-Mutants!

There is this fellow, Robert Bowie Johnson Jr., who claims that the tales of the Bible are verified by ancient Greek art — ho-hum, the usual confirmation bias and failure to recognize that the existence of common motifs in Western mythology does not imply the reality of a supernatural interpretation — who has gone further and urges the use of shaming insults against “Darwinists”:

To shock the Darwinists out of their denial of the overwhelming evidence in Greek art for the reality of Genesis events, the author urges Creationists to refer to evolutionists as what they imagine they are–“Slime-Snake-Monkey-People.” Mr. Johnson, who holds a general science degree from West Point, also suggests that since Slime-Snake-Monkey-People insist they evolved over millions of years through a countless series of random mutations, Christians should also refer to them as “mutants.”

To which I have to reply … please do. We are mutants, every one of us; the replication of 3 billion base pairs is a process that, by pure chemical necessity, will have a number of errors. There’s no shame in that at all.

I’m also not at all embarrassed by recitations of my proud lineage, although I’d be a bit miffed at the inaccuracy of the characterization. There are no snakes in our ancestry, monkeys aren’t involved either (as a colloquial term for small primates, I might let it pass), although it might be fair to describe early protocells and bacteria as forming a kind of slime. I’m going to have to recommend Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) to Mr Johnson. It’ll give him many more epithets that he can apply accurately to our ancestors, but he’ll still be surprised — we love our predecessors.

I hope somebody does call me a Slime-Snake-Monkey-Mutant. It’ll make me laugh.

Wait until the creationists try to wrap their little minds around artificial life … oops, too late

Here’s some exciting news: Artificial life likely in 3 to 10 years. It is exciting but not surprising at all — but of course we’re going to be able to assemble entirely artificial life forms soon. It’s just a particularly complicated kind of chemistry, and it’s more of a deep technical problem than anything else. I wouldn’t be quite so specific about the date — there are also all kinds of surprises that could pop up — but I’m optimistic, and I think the overall assertion is supported by the increasing rate of accomplishment in the field.

But of course, in addition to the usual suggestions from interested followers of science that I should mention this cool article on the blog, I’ve gotten a few from creationist complainers (Already! See what my email is like?) Expect to hear more outrage from the religious right as this story develops in the coming years, which might be a good thing … they’re going to have to spread themselves thin to fight all the interesting work coming out of biology, and evolution won’t be the only target anymore. Anyway, here’s one of my creationists, expressing his unhappiness in odd directions.

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