Give Ham the Scalzi treatment

John Scalzi lives right near the Creation “Museum,” and he refuses to go. Good for him, I say — we’re going to have to start starving Ken Ham soon. On the other hand, if anyone could mock Ham’s Folly effectively, it’s Scalzi … it’s also so much fun to torment him. So his readers are teaming up to compel him to go.

Here’s the deal: Scalzi has a price. If people send him at least $250, which he will turn around and donate to Americans United for Separation of Church and State, he’ll suffer through the cheesy dinosaurs and silly lies, and also write an amusingly snarky summary of the visit. If he gets a thousand dollars or more, he’ll reward everyone a bonus prize or two.

This is brilliant. Rather than sending a scientist to that joke of an exhibit, send a comedian. Laughing at these clowns is the best way to expose them. So go ahead, get on over there and chip in a few bucks, and let’s get an appropriate commentator to review the show.

The fruits of war (creationist branch)

Duae Quartunciae (will he ever settle on a name?) has an excellent historical summary of the Answers in Genesis civil war. There’s loads of fun stuff there, including an account of a prior split that involved accusations of witchcraft and “demonic infiltration”, Ken Ham’s pitiful claim that he is currently under “spiritual attack”, and bizarre sleazy shenanigans, largely driven by the nastily ambitious American group led by Ken Ham.

In October of 2005, there was a fateful meeting between AiG-USA and members of the board of the Australian group [now called Creation Ministries Internation, CMI] — but not the management of the Australia group. The Australian board signed a rather startling agreement, in which they give AiG-USA a license to use and modify all the articles on the website, while at the same time holding AiG-Australia liable for any damages that might be claimed arising from such changes. Basically, they handed over complete control of the articles to AiG-USA, took full responsibility for ensuring authors would also consent to this, and accepted full liability for any damages should the original authors object!

It’s got lots of links to the documentation published by both the Australian and American creationist groups. One of the wonderful benefits of this kind of internecine battle, besides the fact that they are eating their own, is that all kinds of useful internal information spills out of the wounds. And now it’s all nicely organized in one place.

I didn’t even have to get my hands dirty

That Egnor fellow believes that if minds are material, than “all of humanity’s notions of moral value and culpability are nonsense”—like most creationists, his arguments collapse into a rather pointless fallacy, the argument from consequences. It’s enough for me to just say that if I’m correct, then Egnor is the one who believes his morality is gone, not me. It’s a theme running through his latest bloviation, that truth is irrelevant if ideas are a product of the brain, to which I have to say, “so what?”

Anyway, I’m pleased to say that I don’t need to waste time with the babbling Egnor, since ck at Arbitrary Marks has taken him down for me, in a
three
part
series on “iron spikes and materialism.”

Now I want the rest of you to get cracking and slay a few creationists for me. I like this business of sitting back with a kind of imperial hauteur while the knights go out and skewer the dragons.

Adam was naked!

Wesley has the story, and you can get more details from Toledo TV news story and a Cincinnati Enquirer article — but the silly news is that one of the models for the Creation “Museum’s” Adam was a fellow named Eric Linden, who was associated with a site called the Bedroom Acrobat. The “Museum’s” video with Linden has been yanked, and Linden himself seems to be rushing to dissociate himself from the naughty web site, claiming now that he only bought the domain name.

I say there is nothing wrong with running a site about sexual activities; Linden should not be ashamed of it; it is disgraceful that Answers in Genesis should be so puritanical and sex negative that they don’t even want to use a short clip of someone merely known to have had sex; and if Adam had been real rather than a fictitious, mythical character, he probably would have been quite the bedroom acrobat himself, since he would have had to have fathered the entire human race.

I think the Creation “Museum” should bring back the video and increase the coverage of the Adam and Eve story. If they want to keep their visitorship up, I have a suggestion: more full frontal nudity, with an unabashed and open display of the importance of sexual activity in God’s fertile creation. And if attendance starts to flag, I have a two-word term for a bold plan that would grab the media’s attention again: animatronic genitalia. When Adam first meets Eve, a roar and a <sproingggg!> would be perfectly appropriate.

It would be OK, since it’s all in the Bible. I mean, if “dinosaur” is in there, I’m sure “erection” is too.

Behe’s The Edge of Evolution, part II

Behe has written a very bad book, so poorly supported that I don’t want to waste a lot of time taking apart every sentence, but I did want to say a few words about chapter 9, where he takes on evo-devo. I waited a bit because I knew that Sean Carroll was writing a review of the book for Science, and I expected he’d go gunning for chapter 9, too—but no, he didn’t. I guess he felt as I do, that since Behe’s fatally flawed premise was exposed in the first few chapters, there was little point to addressing his incompetent nit-picks later in the book. After all, when the construction crew has built a foundation of tissue paper in a pool of quicksand, by the time you get around to criticizing the roofers for using graham crackers for shingles, you’re about out of outrage.

I’ll briefly note the best parts of Carroll’s review, though, and I’ll try to gather up a few tired shreds of indignation and exasperation to critique some of the more ridiculous canards of Behe’s evo-devo chapter.

[Read more…]

Can we hope the poll is just wrong?

The latest USA Today/Gallup poll probably is valid, unfortunately — it’s not far off from my impressions. 44% of Americans think evolution is probably or definitely false, and two thirds think a god created human beings in the last ten thousand years. Those two numbers don’t quite fit together well — those who think a god created humans recently should also consider evolution false — but we can safely say that about half the country is ignorant or deluded about science, anyway.

We will now, of course, all close our eyes and pretend that religion has nothing at all to do with this catastrophic epidemic of stupidity.

Scott Hatfield hits the big time

I’m rather peeved and disappointed, too. The Discovery Institute Media Complaints Division posts a rebuke of bad bloggers and scientists who are mean to their shills, and there’s a link in there to Pharyngula…and I thought for sure it would be whining about something I said.

But no. The link is directly to one of Scott’s comments.

Poor guy. Now he’s going to have Casey Luskin squeaking at him. The rest of you are going to have to work at catching up by hurting the DI’s feelings badly enough that they point at you and cry. (You’re going to have to really work to beat me out, though—they have invoked my unholy, fearful name in their fundraising literature.)